The History of the Times

by Graham Stewart

  Updating the in-house ‘style guide’ was central to ensuring higher standards were met. Jenkins formed a doctrinal conclave of Philip Howard and Bernard Levin to rule on matters of truth and error. However, frequent log jam between the two – who had different ideas about questions of linguistic discipline – ensured that Jenkins ended up making a lot of the judgments himself at a time when he was already extremely busy on the other daily aspects of the paper. The result was a huge improvement on the old greying handbooks of the 1970s that it superseded. Not only did it lay down good basic ground rules for how journalists should write, it included quirky details and elegant forms of writing. Ultimately, though, its idiosyncrasies proved too great and it was comprehensively rewritten by Tim Austin as soon as Jenkins ceased to be editor. It was, at least, a start. While some resented the lengths to which he went, there could be no doubt that the new editor was right to prioritize an area whose failings had caused disproportionate offence to the paper’s core highly educated readership and left the impression that The Times was indifferent to proper standards and questions of accuracy. True to his word on headline and design sensationalism, Jenkins’s eye for linguistic detail was also matched by his visual awareness. In this, he was an editor in the tradition of Harold Evans. He immediately asked David Driver to redesign the paper to make it look more sober and elegant. Its more populist lapses were de-sensationalized. Headlines were reduced in size. Bylines were put in capitals (supposedly giving the named writers greater authority). To anyone of visual sensitivity, the result was a great improvement. The paper once again looked more authoritative then its competition.

  Unlike his two predecessors who were internal appointments, Jenkins arrived at The Times as its editor. The question thus arose as to how many other outsiders he would bring with him. First of all, he brought in a new managing editor, Peter Roberts. In retrospect, Jenkins believed, ‘Without any shadow of doubt, this was the critical appointment I made.’ Roberts, who had fulfilled the same role at the Sunday Times for the previous twelve years, was by experience and temperament well suited for the job. The position of managing editor was never an easy one since it involved attempting to please the proprietor by finding economies and the editor by providing him with the resources to create the paper he wanted. Roberts was adept at this balancing act, particularly during what would prove in 1990 to be one of the great financial crises to hit the company. ‘He took a huge burden off my shoulders,’ Jenkins believed, and thereby allowed him the time and space to devote his attentions more fully to editing the paper.8

  One reliable assistant Jenkins was sorry to lose was the deputy editor he inherited from Wilson: John Bryant went off to edit the troubled Sunday Correspondent and, after it folded, the European. Jenkins found himself relying heavily on Michael Hamlyn as night editor and brought in David Lipsey who had been a member of James Callaghan’s Downing Street staff and subsequently editor of New Society. Where Jenkins was particularly active in hiring was in the field of ‘specialist’ writers. He believed that this was an area that had been badly hit in the aftermath of the move to Wapping and needed reinforcing. Those who remained had been the bedrock of The Times’s continued claims to incisiveness – Frances Gibbs who had been legal correspondent since 1982, Richard Ford, a political Correspondent who was moved to home affairs, and Stewart Tendler, who had built up an extensive range of police contacts and informants since becoming crime correspondent in 1978. Jenkins recognized the need to appoint more writers with this level of expertise. To write on science, he hired Nigel Hawkes from the Observer. From the BBC came Philip Bassett to write on industrial matters. In October 1990 came the greatest coup of all, when Anatole Kaletsky was hired from the FT to write about economics. The most significant fusion of new blood came to the arts pages, however. Marcus Binney was appointed architectural correspondent with a remit to write – initially on Saturdays – about the built heritage, a subject close to Jenkins’s heart (Binney was the founder of Save Britain’s Heritage) and to many of the paper’s readers too. Despite Richard Morrison’s relative youth, Jenkins was impressed by his enthusiasm and obvious commitment to improving the coverage. Morrison became arts editor. Within six months, many of the critics were replaced. Benedict Nightingale became chief theatre critic, Richard Cork took over reviewing the visual arts, and later, in 1992, Rodney Milnes was hired as one of the country’s foremost authorities on opera. In a crucial area in which the Independent had been making gains, these experts began to turn the tide in The Times’s favour.

  It was not just a question of personnel. Jenkins immediately axed ‘Spectrum’ the daily features page. He sought, instead, to develop specialist sections of the paper. With Wapping’s new presses ready to roll offering added capacity and (sparing) use of colour, advertising-linked supplements for higher education, law, the media, science and technology could be produced. Wilson had increased the amount of material in the paper but – except on Saturdays – had not radically altered the basic structure in which it was presented. With the outsider’s eye, Jenkins’s approach was to redesign the paper afresh and he was lucky that he arrived just as the technology to realize his vision was being installed.

  The other broadsheets had brought out colour magazines on Saturdays. Jenkins believed The Times’s failure to follow suit was retarding its growth on the biggest sales day. In June, Saturday Review magazine was added with Andrew Harvey as its editor. Although not a ‘glossy’, it was an attractive colour-printed tabloid that was elegantly designed and featured well-crafted essays. Its upmarket pitch was evident from the first issue’s front cover, a work by Piero della Francesca – ‘a signature as far as I was concerned,’ Jenkins confessed.9 Within two months, it had helped add twenty thousand new readers at the weekend. A brief foray with a weekend magazine for children, Prime Time, made a hopeful start – almost ten thousand young readers responded to its competitions and offers in its first two weeks alone. Unfortunately, it lasted only twelve issues before falling victim to cost cutting in time for Christmas 1990. Yet, the financial squeeze placed on the company in the midst of the economic recession did not retard the drive for other new supplements. In September 1991, the Saturday offering was again improved when Weekend Times was launched. With fashion moved into Saturday Review and with arts, health and media all getting specialist attention, what remained of general features needed to be reconsidered. Brigid Callaghan came up with a new title Life and Times that focused on people in both the wider and narrow sense – from interviews with the famous or noteworthy to lifestyle features, changes in society and choices in the high street. This new section was duly launched in February 1992.

  Under Charles Wilson, The Times had identified itself closely – some felt too closely – with the Thatcherite cause. Jenkins found disquiet among the leader writers and this was brought to a head within a fortnight of his arrival when one of them, David Walker, penned an article in the Listener criticizing the right-wing stance. Walker believed that ‘The Times, with its rhetoric about reforming the very institutions (the law, universities, professions) on which its own idea of authority in culture and society depends, is left incoherent.’10 It had, effectively, been criticizing the traditional constituencies that Jenkins wanted to wrestle back from the embrace of the Independent. This may have been in line with some of the new editor’s thinking but Walker won no plaudits for washing the paper’s political laundry in public. Jenkins abruptly sacked him for disloyalty. Yet how far he would move towards the Walker worldview and shift the paper’s political opinions back towards the centre ground became one of the first tests of his editorship.

  Mrs Thatcher’s mounting unpopularity certainly made the conditions auspicious for a repositioning, but the new editor’s attempts to be seen as master in his own house and not the placeman of Rupert Murdoch also suggested there would be a change in tone. There would, however, be no return to the ‘on the one hand … and on the other hand’ tradition. Jenkins deplored the sort of leaders that ‘open wit
h a paragraph of abstract waffle as the writer clears his throat, and ends with a similar paragraph of vague bromide’. Leaders, he felt, should state their intentions from the first and repeat them at the end. He was, however, against the forth estate getting above itself. ‘Exhortatory constructions tend to read naively,’ he told his fellow leader writers; ‘try not to use ought, should and must, especially when referring to authority or government.’11 The Op-Ed editor, Mary Ann Sieghart, provided him with her assessment of which journalists could provide the best comment copy. Clifford Longley was head of her (surprisingly short) list.12 Jenkins also thought highly of the religious affairs correspondent and father of the paper’s NUJ chapel: Longley became one of his college of cardinals formulating leader writer policy. Joining him was another devout Roman Catholic (although facing more towards the political right), Daniel Johnson. The son of the multi-faceted historian Paul Johnson, he was a specialist in German history and culture (he had a First in History from Magdalen College, Oxford, before crossing the Fens to Peterhouse, later co-editing German Neo-Liberals and the Social Market Economy) and had worked at the Centre for Policy Studies before joining the Daily Telegraph in 1986, becoming its Bonn and Eastern Europe correspondents. It was a strong team, but none doubted that Jenkins was an editor who would also want to write his own leading articles.

  Jenkins declared that he saw The Times ‘as an independent Conservative paper, which makes up its own mind on policy issues and is open for everyone to put a point of view’.13 In economic matters Jenkins declared himself an ‘enthusiastic Thatcherite’. In social matters he was less supportive while on education policy he considered himself ‘quite left wing’. Generally, though, he wanted to edit ‘a sceptical Tory paper’.14 Certainly, there was a pressing piece of legislation ready to receive a sceptical analysis. Laid before Parliament in December 1987, the poll tax bill was due to be implemented in England and Wales on April Fool’s Day 1990 – just two weeks after Jenkins had first sat down in the editor’s chair. The line he took on the tax would be a marker for how slavishly he would follow the Conservative Government even in its most contentious legislation. It also happened to be fundamental to an issue Jenkins cared passionately about – the reinvigoration of the local government of Britain.

  III

  The centralization of local government provision had deep roots. Poor relief had passed to central government in the 1920s. Government policy directed the council housing boom of the 1950s and 1960s. The denouement came in the early 1980s when the free-spending ways of left-wing councils underlined their defiance of Thatcherite orthodoxy and forced up local rates to punitive levels, driving professionals and capital out of boroughs that were already deprived. The Government reacted by abolishing local government’s setting of supplementary rates in 1982 and introduced rate capping in 1984. The following year, Liverpool City Council had simultaneously demonstrated the irresponsibility of the loony left and the futility of the Government’s rate-capping strategy by failing to set a budget. When there was no more money to pay council employees, taxis were hired to deliver thirty thousand redundancy notices, safe in the knowledge that central government would have to foot the bill. Such antics emboldened Neil Kinnock to confront the Militant Tendency within the Labour Party and made the Government equally determined to reduce local government power further, holding town halls directly accountable for the revenue spending that remained within their remit. This was the path that led to the poll tax.

  The Government’s local government strategy was twofold. Firstly, it was to devolve many of its competences to other bodies. Secondly, it was to make it more responsible towards those who paid for what provisions were left in its gift. At the end of March 1986, the Government dismantled the Greater London Council and England’s Metropolitan councils. The Times was certainly not sorry to see London’s executive functions levered out of the grip of Ken Livingstone, but nor was it enthusiastic that the right policy had been pursued, believing that the GLC’s ‘deliberative and oversight capacities’ should have been retained.15 Yet, while the GLC’s abolition attracted the most attention a far larger revolution was underway. The fate of the inner cities and whether their decline was the fault of central or local government was one of the tests of political opinion in the 1980s. In the 1987 general election Mrs Thatcher had declared it her mission to deal with the problem rather in the way that Gladstone had once put down his tree-cutting hatchet to pronounce that it was his mission to pacify Ireland. Yet, the regeneration – of which London’s Docklands was but the most shining example – was achieved not by re-empowering local democracy but by emasculating it further. Regeneration was entrusted to urban development quangoes (quasi-autonomous government organizations) that cut through layers of town hall bureaucracy and better understood how to attract investment. By the 1990s, unelected local quangoes were responsible for spending more money than elected local government. There was an obvious democratic deficit in this state of affairs.

  The deficit that the Government chose to address, however, was that affecting the elected branch of local government. While thirty-six million Britons were eligible to vote in local elections, only eighteen million paid local rates and only twelve million paid the property-graded tax in full. The all too apparent consequence had been reckless spending by Labour-controlled councils which, in The Times’s opinion, suffered no consequences themselves ‘since the majority of their political supporters, paying little or no rates, have no incentive to call them to account’.16 Rate capping had attempted to prune the worst offenders, but it only encouraged some councils to deliberately set high budgets knowing that any cut could then be blamed on Mrs Thatcher’s bean counters. The answer, or so it seemed to her Environment Secretary, Nicholas Ridley, was a poll tax. When the plans were unveiled in December 1987 the poll tax (to be called ‘a community charge’, although few bothered with the official term) envisaged making almost everyone on the electoral roll pay it. This was far more than the alternative, a local income tax, would have brought into the tax net. For Ridley, this was part of its appeal – it spread responsibility and minimized the poverty trap problem created by high marginal rates for those just within each band. Thus, rather than creating more bands – as even many Tories demanded – the Government preferred a system of rebates for those on low incomes. Even students, pensioners and those of social security would be expected to pay 20 per cent of the poll tax. Whatever effect this would have on reconnecting local government to its community, the more immediate political effect was ably expressed in The Times headline ‘Ridley unveils poll tax bill to Tory fears’.17

  Under Charles Wilson The Times had sympathized with the poll tax’s intention but had worried about its feasibility. Rates had at least had the advantage of being a tax on property that was easy to collect. By comparison, tracking down defaulters that would include students and other peripatetic lodgers would prove a bureaucratic nightmare. The paper had accurately predicted that some might try and dodge payment by removing themselves from the electoral roll, thereby creating a disenfranchized underclass.18 Yet the true position of The Times was one of equivocation. The new system would be ‘at least no more unfair than the old rating system’ was hardly a ringing endorsement but nor was it a thundering denunciation.19 A test run was provided in Scotland, where the poll tax was introduced a year before England. The result was a massive display of discontent and even disobedience. Partly, this was a reflection of the belief among Scots that they were being used as guinea pigs although the truth was rather that they were the tail wagging the dog. It had been Scotland’s imminent rates revaluation (which statutorily had to take place every five years there) that had panicked ministers into bringing forward the poll tax proposals. Given the soaring property prices throughout the United Kingdom, it had been assumed in 1987 that a revaluation in England and Wales would have massively increased the amounts property owners had to pay under the old rating system.

  In fact, the poll tax was introduced on faulty
premises and bad forecasting. It particularly hit Mrs Thatcher’s natural constituency – the lower middle class who would pay the same as the wealthy without the rebates offered to those on low income or benefit. It was introduced at a time when the recession was commencing and the middle class belief that the increasing price of property gave them security was just starting to come unstuck. Furthermore, the Government had underestimated how much the effect of higher spending councils would push up the poll tax, ensuring that introduction of charge capping that undermined the local accountability argument that had recommended the new tax in the first place. Higher local taxes were blamed on the Government, not the councils whose alleged profligacy they supposedly reflected. The tax had, in any case, only further weakened the link between the sums town halls raised and spent. Eighty per cent of local government spending was now provided by central government using a uniform distribution formula.