The History of the Times

by Graham Stewart

  With or without the help of the yuppies, the Tories could point to some favourable statistics. Unemployment had fallen continuously for seventeen months (the figure was tantalizingly close to dipping below three million, which it did on the week after the election), there was a public-spending surplus and manufacturing output had struggled back to where it had been in 1979. According to taste, these statistics were either evidence of policies that were working or of how many years they had failed to bear much fruit. Whatever the debate, the Tories went into the month of campaigning with a twelve-point lead in the opinion polls.

  With Kinnock at the helm, Labour would not repeat the catastrophe of the 1983 manifesto that was famously dubbed ‘the longest suicide note in history’. But Labour went into the 1987 contest as the tax and spend party nonetheless. There were commitments to reverse Nigel Lawson’s tax cuts (at a time when the upper rate of income tax had still not been reduced below 60 per cent) and to introduce a wealth tax. The party was also still committed to the dismantling of private education (though it was debatable whether outright abolition would be achieved during the life of the next Parliament). The machinery of State planning would also be re-erected with a pledge to reduce unemployment by one million within two years and to create a National Economic Summit to identify what action Government, employees and unions needed to take to plan for future investment and price control. Unhelpfully, Christopher Walker, reporting from Moscow, pointed out that Denis Healey, the Shadow Foreign Secretary, had emerged from a Soviet briefing to announce that his atheist hosts were ‘praying’ for a Labour victory.28

  As the campaign progressed, the Tories proved vulnerable on health issues as did Labour on defence policy and the behaviour of the so-called ‘loony left’. With two leaders, David Steel and David Owen (the latter experiencing tense relations with his senior SDP colleagues), the Alliance’s greatest problem concerned how to give the misleading impression of unity. Yet, with the exception of one rogue blip, the opinion polls continued to show the Conservatives remained within the electoral comfort zone of above 40 per cent of the popular vote. From a news perspective, the apparent predictability of the result risked diminishing the drama. George Hill subsequently described it as ‘a dull campaign, where the main rivalry was between promotional agencies out to win fame and fortune’.29 As part of the marketing exercise, the pages of The Times were bombarded with full-page adverts promoting the Tories’ negative campaign slogan ‘Britain’s Booming, Don’t Let Labour Wreck It’. Labour won the artistic plaudits with an election broadcast dubbed ‘Kinnock the Movie’, although some thought it too presidential. After Michael Foot’s amateurish style of electioneering in 1983, the party had certainly improved its media presentation. The handiwork of Peter Mandelson, two years into his post as director of communications, was beginning to show itself.

  Nonetheless, when it came to cajoling the press, there was still much to be learned from the Tories. Having secured interviews with the other party leaders, Oakley was alarmed when Conservative Central Office suddenly decided his interview with Mrs Thatcher could not be squeezed in. This was an extraordinary slap in the face to the newspaper. ‘I cashed every outstanding cheque I had at the top of the Tory Party in my efforts to secure the interview’, Oakley subsequently wrote. Lord Young eventually managed to get him a twenty-minute slot with the Prime Minister on Monday 8 June. But that very morning Downing Street took umbrage at The Times’s front page which featured a photograph of Neil and Glenys Kinnock waving at crowds and a variety of (to Tory eyes) doom and gloom headlines. Young telephoned Oakley and Wilson to say The Times was doing Labour’s propaganda for it and the interview was cancelled. As attempts went to bully and manipulate the press, this was pretty unsophisticated. A heated exchange on the telephone ended with the interview being reinstated. Yet, if Mrs Thatcher’s heavies hoped The Times would atone for its apostasy they were to be disappointed. When Oakley eventually got to sit down with the Prime Minister, he risked her wrath by following one of her long-winded answers with a demand that, given the short time available, she should keep her answers brief and to the point.30 The resulting dialogue appeared in The Times on election day.

  Besides the reporting of Robin Oakley and Philip Webster, The Times’s electoral coverage was enlivened by Craig Brown’s sketch writing and lengthier pieces by Barbara Amiel who forwarded her dispatches from Mrs Thatcher’s battle bus. As on previous occasions, the focus was not just on policies but also about what was happening in the swing marginal constituencies. Whether Shirley Williams would take Cambridge for the Alliance became a source of intense interest. Few were in any doubt for which party The Times’s leading column would declare the paper’s allegiance, but its Op-Ed could not be faulted for the spectrum of regular columnists: starting with Ben Pimlott on the left and moving through Jo Grimond, Conor Cruise O’Brien and John Grigg towards T. E Utley and Woodrow Wyatt on the right. As with 1983, The Times was fortunate to make use of the doyen of academic psephologists, David Butler of Nuffield College, Oxford. Professor Butler advised on statistical analysis, providing Op-Ed articles and writing short features as well as assisting with the resulting Times House of Commons guidebook to the new Parliament.

  How much effect the reporting of The Times and its rivals had on shaping the electorate’s minds was hard to gauge. Television news certainly claimed the limelight. In 1983, only 8 per cent of the public had stated they believed the press provided the most unbiased and complete election coverage. In contrast, 54 per cent thought television provided the most unbiased and 60 per cent the most complete reporting. Although the trend was scarcely new, there was little doubt that newspapers were failing to set the news agenda. Another cerebral pundit hired by The Times for the election, Dennis Kavanagh, Professor of Politics at Nottingham University, pointed out that the campaign agenda was largely set on The Jimmy Young Show and Election Call. By comparison, the 9.30 a.m. press conferences succeeded only in producing what was stale news by the time it was regurgitated on newspaper front pages the following morning.

  As far as Labour was concerned, the prioritizing of television and radio over the print media was understandable given the level of savagery meted out by many of the tabloids and mid-market papers. The Times was one of the eleven national newspapers that endorsed the Conservatives. Seven opposed Thatcher. The FT and the Independent opted not to endorse any party. The FT’s stance was perhaps the most surprising – especially given that research by MORI suggested that it was the paper with the highest proportion of Tory voters (78 per cent). MORI’s polling suggested that 69 per cent of Daily Telegraph readers had gone on to vote Conservative, as had 59 per cent of Times readers and only just half of Sun readers. The Alliance’s support among Times readers had slipped from 33 per cent in 1983 to 28 per cent. Meanwhile, Today, which argued the Alliance’s cause, had convinced only a third of its readers of the two Davids’ charms – a proportion comparable to the Thatcher-cheerleading Daily Mail (and also the agnostic Independent whose readers were split almost equally between the three main parties).31 These figures certainly suggested readers were governed first by their own perceptions and not those of the editorial conference.

  On election night, The Times was able to speed its reporting with technology that had been denied it in 1983. Back then, NGA members had rekeyed in the results from each constituency from the details provided from the PA. For the 1987 election, the paper was free to use a computerized system that processed the statistics automatically as they came in and was able to provide instant extrapolations on swings and turn them into bar and pie charts. The Saturday Times contained a sixteen-page guide to the results in full with short profiles of all the MPs elected. Supporting commentary and analysis were provided by David Butler and Bob Worcester of MORI.

  The Conservatives were returned to office with a majority of 101. The Times’s headline declared it ‘Thatcher’s historic victory’.32 No previous Prime Minister had won three general elections in succession. It was a
lso the first time the Conservatives had gained a majority of working class votes. This was particularly impressive since economic change was shrinking the working class back to its traditional manual-labouring core. The 2 per cent swing towards Labour in England was remarkably mild given the post-Falklands conditions in which the previous election had been fought. However, the 7.5 per cent swing in Scotland portended trouble ahead north of the border. Oakley concluded sagaciously, ‘Ministers will be anxious to know how much that has to do with the introduction of the “community charge” poll tax in Scotland which they have pledged to introduce in England and Wales too.’33

  The 1987 general election was a disaster for the Alliance and for the SDP in particular. They had entered the year with hope; in February their candidate Rosie Barnes had won a much-publicized by-election that ended a half-century Labour Party tenancy in Greenwich. But the general election was another matter. With defeats for Bill Rodgers at Milton Keynes, Shirley Williams in Cambridge and Roy Jenkins to the left-wing firebrand George Galloway in Glasgow Hillhead, the Gang of Four was now, in parliamentary terms, a gang of one – David Owen. Only four other junior SDP members joined him on the Commons benches. Kinnock’s attempts to isolate the hard left had at least succeeded in undermining the point of the ‘soft-left’ SDP. The Liberals had made no headway and continued to be the party of the rural West Country and the Celtic fringe, although with seventeen MPs they were clearly the senior party in the Alliance. Unlike David Steel, the Liberal leader, David Owen opposed the post-battle prognosis for merger between the two parties. His own members disagreed, and when in August they voted for a merger, Owen resigned and took with him an SDP rump. The divisions within the centre ground were laid bare. From his column in The Times, Ben Pimlott described an ‘Alliance self-mutilation more pathological than anything witnessed in the Labour Party at the start of the decade’. It was not a pretty spectacle, particularly since it involved those who had so frequently condemned the ‘adversarial politics’ of the old two party system.34 After a succession of votes and confusions over what the new name would be (LSD was ruled out for obvious reasons while SLD was soon found to be – in the words of the comedian Rory Bremner – ‘not so much a party, more a poor hand at Scrabble’) Paddy Ashdown became leader of what was eventually decided would be called the Liberal Democrats. The change of name and leader did not work any spellbinding magic. The opinion polls during 1988 and 1990 suggested the party was struggling to attract 10 per cent support. Owen, meanwhile, stumbled on with his own SDP rump, the once bright hope of democratic socialism reduced to the sidelines of British politics. He finally wound up his SDP group in June 1990 after it won fewer votes than the Monster Raving Loony Party at a by-election in Bootle.

  IV

  A third term of office and a booming economy gave the Conservatives considerable latitude to enact their programme. Charles Wilson considered his relations with the Prime Minister were ‘very good’ but they were hardly close and he was a less frequent visitor to Chequers than Douglas-Home had been. In all the period of his editorship, Wilson only spoke to Mrs Thatcher once on the telephone and, although he saw her at some stage most months, this was invariably at a public function in which lengthy private conversation was difficult.35 Murdoch, his journeys to Britain becoming increasingly infrequent due to the demands of his growing American empire, found he saw Mrs Thatcher little more than once a year.36 If Britain was being run, as many hostile commentators alleged, by a Thatcher – Murdoch axis then it could only have been coordinated through telepathy.

  The interrelation between Downing Street and the press that did exist was primarily conducted between the Prime Minister’s press secretary, Bernard Ingham, and Fleet Street’s principal reporters. As political editor, Robin Oakley was The Times man who saw most of Mrs Thatcher. Not only did he stalk Westminster’s corridors, he and the rest of the press pack followed the Prime Minister around the world in the back of her RAF VC-10. It was often a punishing schedule, although it rarely appeared to take much out of Mrs Thatcher who always rose to the occasion for those straining for a glimpse of the Iron Lady. On one occasion in March 1987 on a trip for talks with Gorbachev, she had first gone to light a candle for peace at the Zagorsk monastery near Moscow. Stopping first to visit a Moscow supermarket she bought bread and pilchards. Huge crowds of sturdy Russians pressed around her. Oakley overheard one British diplomat murmuring, ‘loaves and little fishes … surely not?’.

  Back at home, the general election victory in 1987 had revitalized the Government’s reforming agenda. Improving choice in public-sector provision was the theme of the modernizers in the Cabinet and health and education were the main targets. The 1988 Education Act transformed Britain’s schools. It created a national curriculum. With the establishment of a funding per capita formula, headmasters and governors gained control of school budgets. Local governments’ powers to determine or restrict the size of schools diminished. Preventing local authorities from placing pupils in specified schools widened the scope for parental choice. Schools were permitted to opt out of local authority altogether and become grant-maintained schools funded directly from Whitehall. The widely derided Inner London Education Authority (ILEA) was abolished. New specialist academies, to be called City Technology Colleges, were established. These measures were guided by two principles. The first was that power and funding should be shifted away from local authorities and towards schools and parental choice. The second was that central government should play an enhanced role, not only in ensuring a unified curriculum but also as schools’ direct financer. In practice, far fewer schools opted out than the Government had hoped and the elite City Technology Colleges, although successful, proved also to be few in number. The Government’s centralizing tendency was widely deplored by those who continued to put their faith in town hall democracy. But the measures had also devolved power to the schools and to parents who now found they had far greater flexibility in choosing their child’s education. For this choice to be an informed one, it was necessary to provide them with statistics that demonstrated the varying performances of the institutions in the area. The Times’s attempts to provide parents with the information was at first slow and public school-orientated, with the serializing of the Harper & Queen’s Good Schools Guide. However on 22 June 1987, the education correspondent, John Clare, launched The Times Good University Guide, commencing a process that would eventually include schools as well, once more reliable information was made available upon which to base the evidence.

  These reforms came amidst what briefly looked like an economic miracle. Britain was experiencing the ‘Lawson Boom’. Unemployment had finally fallen below three million and continued to plunge. House prices were soaring. Yet the strict monetarism deployed by Sir Geoffrey Howe, Lawson’s predecessor at the Treasury, had been quietly jettisoned now that inflation was under control. The Medium Term Financial Strategy (MTFS) that Howe (and Lawson, who was then Financial Secretary) had originally devised had made M3, the broad measure of the money supply, rather than the exchange rate, the key indicator in the control of inflation. However, M3 targets were easier to set than to adhere to and financial deregulation made it, in any case, a spurious measurement. In the autumn of 1986, the Treasury effectively abandoned M3 targeting in favour of concentrating on a new exchange rate policy based upon shadowing the Deutschmark. Interest rates went down in the 1988 Budget, encouraging the credit boom further and, ominously, inflationary pressures began to re-emerge. Had the dragon of rising prices not been slain after all? Interest rates had to be hiked up again and Lawson became convinced that the Exchange Rate Mechanism of the European Monetary System was a viable option and hoped to lock sterling into it. The Prime Minister was not so sure and opted for a ‘when the time is right’ approach to Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) membership. The problem was that Lawson did not regard this as a euphemism for never joining.

  In the pages of The Times, Lawson found a critic in the monetarism economist Tim Congdon. Congdon
argued that, far from having failed, targeting M3 ‘was the key to the government’s principal achievement, the reduction in inflation to under five per cent’. Since abandoning this, ‘Britain has had the strongest surge in private sector credit in its history and the annual rate of money supply growth has increased from about twelve per cent to over twenty per cent’. This was reminiscent of the 25 per cent supply growth rate of the Heath – Barber boom. Britain was returning to a stop – go cycle. Boom, Congdon claimed, would be followed by bust.38