The History of the Times

by Graham Stewart

  There were voices untamed by Received Pronunciation, too, in the fashion world. John Galliano was building his reputation, as was Alexander McQueen, an East End ‘bad boy’ with a Penchant for buttock baring. Their extravagant and colourful designs caused a sensation and helped to push fashion journalism into the news pages of the paper. That British designers were conquering the fashion world but that London was still not its capital was evident when both men went off to Paris to work for Dior and Givenchy. British designers, like British actors and directors, appeared to have internationally recognized talents but lacked a home industry of sufficient scale and investment to sustain them. Instead, their creativity was applauded in foreign currencies.

  This was nonetheless an exciting period in the fashion world and The Times was particularly fortunate in 1998 to attract the fashion features director of Vogue, Lisa Armstrong, to assume command over its coverage. ‘It is entirely to the point,’ Nigella Lawson had written three years earlier, ‘that the Princess of Wales once appeared, in model pose, on the front of Vogue: where once covergirls wanted to be princesses, now princesses want to be covergirls.’67 By the time of Lisa Armstrong’s arrival at The Times the age of the supermodel was giving way to a fresh inter-relationship between fashion, film stars and the cult of celebrity. Designers could get as much exposure from seeing their creations worn by an actress attending the Oscars or a premiere – especially in terms of front- or news-page coverage – than from the catwalk recognition of a leading fashion show. Likewise, sporting the work of an acclaimed designer could vastly improve the public profile of an actress, as Liz Hurley discovered when she wore what became popularly referred to as ‘that dress’ by Gianni Versace. If any event demonstrated the democratization of fashion it was the media reaction to Versace’s murder in July 1997. It was on the front page of The Times and was the subject of no fewer than thirteen articles in the paper that and the following day. The violent nature of his death played some part in the extent of the exposure, but the response from the tabloids – for whom the life and work of expensive fashion designers had not traditionally been considered close to readers’ hearts – was more extraordinary. The Sun devoted nine pages of coverage on the first day alone. High fashion had moved beyond the preserve of the chic, the wealthy and the cultivated.

  The reasons for this democratizing process were, in part, economic. Clothes had become cheaper. What was more, within days of a top fashion designer’s new collection appearing on the catwalk and in photo spreads across the newspapers, low-cost derivatives were available in the high streets for those with more modest budgets. It was even possible to purchase skirts or handbags that were closely influenced by leading designs in supermarkets. Buying into a ‘label’ became particularly important for those whose interest was primarily in making a social statement. Fashion houses like Gucci invested large sums in promoting their brand names. For some, there was a danger that brand advertisement was supplanting attention to design. The process through which the smaller fashion companies continued to be swallowed up by the larger ones helped foster these commercial empires. A phenomenon developed in which high-quality brands were devalued precisely because they were adopted as the badges of the masses. A more general trend was that the clothes to bare flesh ratio swung increasingly towards the latter with fewer and skimpier fabrics predominating as the decade wore on. By the century’s end, The Times’s coverage had never been better or its reputation higher, with Lisa Armstrong and her team at the forefront of the effort to make it a paper of broader interest to women. The glossy monthly fashion magazines continued to have the pictorial advantage, but because they were tied to production schedules that necessitated feature planning weeks or even months in advance, they lacked the daily newspapers’ versatility. The Times’s Saturday magazine was able to respond with glossy space for photo shoots as well, but it remained in the newspaper section, especially after the launch of the T2 tabloid in 2000, that the higher quality in writing was put to best effect. There was no shortage of material. As Armstrong pointed out, ‘ultimately, fashion is about expression’.68

  Attractiveness was not the only form this articulation took. Given the breadth of its embrace and the money involved, the fashion world continued to have a dark side that gobbled up and spat out those it manipulated. In the early nineties, the preference for unhealthily thin waif-like models was blamed for an upsurge in anorexia and eating disorders among young girls. Particularly noxious was the so-called ‘heroin chic’ look that used etiolated models who appeared listless and dazed on drugs – often because they were. This destructive look was featured not only in British magazines like i-D and The Face but was even read as a possible subtext for Corinne Day’s pictures of Kate Moss that appeared in Vogue. It soon went transatlantic and entered the advertising mainstream with companies like Calvin Klein using models who, to put it mildly, conveyed neither health nor happiness. If, in this respect, The Times was not at the forefront of a fashion movement then that was a point in its favour. Fearing that elements within the fashion world were effectively promoting drugs in order to sell their product and exploiting young girls, the trend was much criticized in works like Michael Gross’s Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women and in a 1997 speech (after the fad had largely passed) by President Clinton. It was certainly not a look that The Times actively promoted although, as Lisa Armstrong subsequently attested, ‘after the sublime vacuousness of 1980s fashion photography, with its cartoon notions of glamour’ the approach of the early nineties was more an attempt at social commentary and as revolutionary as punk had been in the 1970s at ‘peeling back traditional layers of fashion artifice’.69

  Health scares and symptoms of illness were the preserve of the former Norfolk Tory MP, Dr Tom Stuttaford. The Times’s medical correspondent since 1982 and expert columnist since 1991, he was one of the most prolific, knowledgeable and popular writers on the paper. His briefings provided valuable diagnosis, delivered with authority and accessibility. They were also particularly strong in advice on preventative medicine. The issues of dieting and healthy eating were also regularly examined by Nigel Hawkes, the science editor. Hawkes was a natural sceptic and as such saw it as a scientific duty to probe rather than give unquestioning credence to each new theory, fad or headline-grabbing scare. He questioned the nutritionists’ craze for portraying fats, salt and sugar as dangerous health risks. Indeed, as he subsequently observed, obesity increased during a decade in which fatty foods were trimmed from the national diet. The French, meanwhile, ate more fat and more cholesterol than either the British or the Americans but suffered only half as many heart disease-related deaths.70 He was similarly alarmed at what he believed were scare stories demonizing gene-modified crops as dangerous ‘franken foods’. Always he wanted to examine more closely the scientific evidence for such claims. In Britain, at least, he was battling against a tide. Environmentalism proved to be one of the most potent ideologies of the post-Communist era. Depressing stories of pollution and species depletion dominated the ever-increasing workload of successive environment editors, Michael McCarthy and Nick Nuttall.

  No environmental issue attracted so much alarm as the belief that the planet was being wrecked by man-induced global warming. No sooner had the fear of nuclear annihilation been diminished by the Cold War’s thaw than this new threat to life on earth rose to become almost an accepted wisdom. One who begged to differ was Hawkes. An Oxford metallurgy graduate who had worked for Nature and subsequently the Observer before joining The Times, he had in the 1970s reported the contentions of leading scientists that the earth was destined for a second Ice Age. He suspected the new global warming claims were alarmist and based on unreliable computer predictions drawn from too little real information. He wanted to know, if the equation was so simple, why temperatures had decreased when carbon emissions had multiplied in the previous decades of the century. ‘Global warning has turned into an inverted pyramid of implications resting on a handful of facts,’ he wrote when c
hiding Margaret Thatcher for her claim that the world had to act decisively to curb carbon emissions. ‘Fortunately, the human appetite for sacrifices is limited and its attention-span is short,’ Hawkes prophesied. ‘A couple of cold winters will take the froth off the debate, and allow us the time we need to discover whether or not the earth is really warming up.’71 The cold weather, however, did not come to Hawkes’s rescue, and as the accumulation of information improved during the decade, he tempered his scepticism on the subject. Nonetheless, it disturbed him that it was always the worst-case scenarios that attracted the headlines while research that suggested temperature change might be less severe, or even had some countervailing benefits, was largely ignored by the media. At heart, he believed environmentalism was an ideology that cherry picked the facts to support its case and disregarded those that challenged it. It was, he thought, not a very scientific approach.

  On 1 January 1996, The Times was launched on the internet. In April a new supplement, Interface, edited by Keith Blackmore, was started and ran weekly for the next five years. It kept readers abreast of developments in cyberspace and explored the expanding horizons of information technology during a period in which there was much excited talk about how such developments were creating a ‘new paradigm’ in world economics. Stothard recognized the website’s importance, but did not allow himself to be diverted by some of the hyperbolic claims being made about how the print edition would recede into history. He not only believed that the paper edition had a future but that it should remain the centre of his attention. In Stothard’s opinion, the online edition reproduced the paper’s content rather than provided an alternative or enhanced service.

  Stothard’s measured approach contrasted with the competition. The Daily Telegraph and the Guardian had both launched websites the year before The Times. In particular, the Guardian’s editor, Alan Rusbridger, channelled considerable resources into Guardian Unlimited, which offered readers far more material than was available in the print edition. This was an expensive investment but one that it was hoped would eventually produce a return once increasing proportions of the world turned first to their computers, pocket screens and even mobile telephones for information rather than to newsprint. When the dot.com bubble burst in 2000, Stothard’s attitude looked more sagacious than those who had got caught up in a modern equivalent of tulipmania and other past speculative catastrophes. Wild expectations that the Internet would ensure exponential growth as a virtual poster site for advertisers withered almost overnight. Unfortunately, News Corp. had begun to invest heavily and was among those financially damaged when the collapse occurred. Development programmes for The Times’s online edition had to be curtailed. The future, it seemed, was not on the world wide web after all.

  It was at this moment, when expansion gave way to retrenchment, that a new online business development officer arrived at Wapping. The Dutch-born Annelies Van Den Belt had experience of the necessity for a cool head in a crisis, having previously run operations for the St Petersburg Times and the Moscow Times in the midst of Russia’s economic turmoil. Collapsing online advertising revenue disabused any who retained the notion that Times Online would generate vast returns. Yet, while finding ways of cutting costs, Van Den Belt rolled out a strategy for generating fresh sources of subscriber revenue. An online version of the paper, instantly available around the globe, was particularly valuable to British expats and others with an interest in Britain who lived in parts of the world where the paper edition was obtainable a day late, if at all. This market would later, in 2004, be offered a full subscription-only digital edition, or e-paper, that reproduced the paper edition exactly on the screen, allowing the viewer all the casual browse and page-turning navigation that the headline-driven online edition lacked. This was a service that was withheld from the British market. For that home market, the strategy was one of introducing rolling charges rather than full upfront subscription. Charging for accessing home or breaking news was not sensible when online users could surf rival news sites for information of broadly comparable quality freely. In this respect, there was competition not only from the other online broadsheets but also from the BBC’s news website, which, being licence-fee funded, had vast resources at its disposal and was likely to remain free as part of the Corporation’s public service remit. Instead, The Times’s task was to identify which parts of the paper represented a unique product for which online users would be prepared to pay a charge. Thus, basic access would be free but there would be a charge for specialist content. The first area identified in this way was the crossword. Times Online’s ‘crossword club’ succeeded in attracting enough subscribers to more than cover its costs. Other areas followed. A large proportion of internet use concerned business research and Times Online was able to generate money by charging for access to its archive and to law reports. Improved palm-size technology offered other downloading opportunities. Sport and business alerts could be sent to mobile phones for a charge. By 2002, subscription revenue was accounting for 20 per cent of the site’s overall revenue. All the classified advertisements for jobs, holidays and promotions that appeared in the print edition became available in the online format. Display advertising provided additional revenue. While the reckless enthusiasm of the late 1990s had subsided, there was every reason to assume that the sums generated in this way would accumulate substantially in the years ahead.

  Halfway through the twenty-first century’s first decade, it was too early to make a judgment on whether The Times’s cautious approach was the right one. Times Online employed less than a third of the staff engaged in producing Guardian Unlimited. While the British broadsheets continued to make most of their content free to home users, the Financial Times had decided to make most of its content available only to subscribers. In the short term at least, this proved expensive. FT.com consumed a large share of its owner Pearson’s £184 million investment in internet services in 2000 alone.72 Such figures dwarfed what Times Online consumed. The Guardian and FT were laying down enormous investments in the hope of establishing a secure grip on a potentially lucrative future market. One early consequence was that the Guardian, with a strong American following, was the most popular British broadsheet on the web. Whether this market share could be sustained once subscription fees were eventually hiked up remained to be seen. The Times had opted for a middle way and in doing so moved into second position in the number of hits its website recorded, behind the Guardian. There were advantages in having a reduced outlay of expense. By 2004, Times Online had even broken into profit. The death of the paper edition certainly did not appear remotely imminent, but the electronic edition had nonetheless established its place as a fundamental component of The Times’s future.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THE HEART OF EUROPE

  Losing Faith in the Tories; Euro-Scepticism; Blair

  I

  Peter Stothard was four days into his editorship when sterling was forced out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism. Having been in the United States for almost all of Major’s administration up until that point, he had returned at the very moment the Government’s credibility collapsed. The result, Stothard later maintained, was that ‘I never saw a good day of the Major government.’1

  Sterling exited the ERM on Black Wednesday, 16 September 1992. It was a humiliation for Norman Lamont, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, yet it was understandable that John Major believed sterling’s exit from the ERM was not a resigning matter. Joining the system had, after all, been Major’s principal act while Lamont’s predecessor at the Treasury. Despite advice to the contrary, he had even insisted on the high sterling to Deutschmark parity. If it was a resigning matter, then there would be fingers pointing at the Prime Minister.

  As a discipline that drove out inflation, ERM membership had already succeeded in its task, yet the Government had remained committed to it nonetheless partly because it had no alternative economic strategy and also because a free-floating currency was incompatible with the Maastricht cri
teria for joining the euro. By March 1992, 1200 businesses a week were folding. There were 40 million square feet of unwanted commercial property in London alone. As Britain prepared for autumn, unemployment reached 2.8 million. The Conservatives’ reputation for economic competence was in tatters. Regardless, the Government persevered with a policy that necessitated raising interest rates to defend sterling’s overvalued parity at a time when British business, deep in recession, needed a reduction in the cost of borrowing and a cheaper currency with which to trade. Repeatedly, the leading columns of The Times advised Major to renegotiate the terms while there was still a chance.2 The Prime Minister, however, was nothing if not a man of his word. In the last days, despite all the signs that sterling’s rate within the ERM was unsustainable, the Government wasted £3.3 billion and the Bank of England parted with £25 billion of its reserves in a forlorn attempt to stop the currency falling through the floor of its fixed trading bands.

  ‘With one bound we are free,’ whooped Anatole Kaletsky, whose financial analysis had been promoted to the front page during the crisis. While others, engulfed by the sense of national defeat, prophesied further bad economic news, he argued that letting sterling float and cutting interest rates would ensure an economic recovery. He did not disguise his disdain for the incompetence of ‘the political and business establishment, the prime minister, the captains of industry, the City bankers and above all, the Treasury knights’ whose abrogation of financial sovereignty to the Bundesbank had ensured ‘a million people have lost their jobs. Hundreds of thousands have been made homeless and bankrupt.’ Kaletsky, indeed, was one of a select few who had warned of the dangers from the moment Major had – to the acclaim of informed opinion – first taken Britain into the ERM nearly two years earlier.