The History of the Times

by Graham Stewart

  Major had an opportunity, if he wished to take it, to set a new course that put a positive spin on a floating currency and low interest rates and turned its back on immediate aspirations to join a single European currency. His failure to do so crushed any lingering Euro-sceptics’ hope that he was secretly on their side but had merely been playing a long game for tactical reasons. In consequence, he had to contend with the virulent enmity of daily denouncements from Euro-sceptics, either, if they were his own backbenchers, to the television cameras on College Green, or, if they were writers, in the pages of papers like The Times.

  The official HMSO version of the Maastricht Treaty was not published until May 1992, more than six months after it was signed. Constitutional lawyers pored over its implications. At the time of its signing, The Times, like all other British media organizations, had no means of knowing its exact content and had to rely on the interpretation Major and his press office put on it. Once fuller details became available, The Times’s ardour cooled substantially. Simon Jenkins, who had applauded Major’s efforts in December 1991 from the editor’s chair, was among those who felt duped. In his new role as a Times columnist, he denounced Maastricht as ‘the worst treaty since Versailles’.3 Be that as it may, it was now clear to both Jenkins and Peter Stothard that the Prime Minister so believed his own propaganda about winning ‘game, set and match’ at Maastricht that no argument or event would disabuse him of the notion. Even before Black Wednesday, the Danes, on 2 June, had stunned all Europe by daring to reject the Treaty in a national referendum. Their veto invalidated it. Twenty-four hours after the verdict of Copenhagen, nearly one hundred Tory MPs had signed an early-day motion calling for a ‘fresh start’ and a change in Europe’s direction. They were dumfounded when their Prime Minister reacted to the news by suggesting that it was the Danes – rather than the EU – who needed to think again.

  Over a very short period of time, Euro-scepticism had gone from being perceived as a modern variant on flat earth-ism to a respectable analysis of the disengagement between politicians and public. Four days after sterling fell through the ERM trapdoor, the French referendum called by President Mitterrand to demonstrate the strength of his country’s pro-Europeanism recorded a ‘yes’ majority to Maastricht of just over 1 per cent. If support for the European project had waned so much in the country that had led it for the past thirty-five years, it was hardly surprising that the Danes had – by an equally narrow margin – voted against it. Nor were they the only ones. Despite the adherence of the German political elite and the constitutional bar on referenda, opinion polls suggested most Germans were opposed to scraping the Deutschmark. In Britain, there could have been no more personalized example of how the intellectual mood had changed among Tory-minded journalists than in the case of William Rees-Mogg. During his editorship of The Times between 1967 and 1981, he had been a strong advocate of Europeanism and regarded his paper’s support for British membership of the EEC (as it then was) as among the greatest legacies of his years in the chair. Although he remained a supporter of that decision, his enthusiasm for integration had waned considerably. Not content to assault Maastricht repeatedly from his perch on the Op-Ed page, he mounted a High Court challenge to its becoming law.

  Major was adamant that there would be no referendum in Britain. Spades were handed out for what promised to be a lengthy bout of parliamentary trench warfare. The Tory Party conference in October descended into a shouting match and a Commons revolt in November reduced the Government’s majority to three. When, in the new year, the bill to approve the Maastricht Treaty entered its committee stage, five hundred amendments and one hundred new clauses were proposed by Euro-sceptics content to wear the Government down in this war of attrition. The old contemptibles who had opposed Heath’s original entry made up the core of the Tory rebellion in the Commons but they had been joined by a younger generation of dogged sceptics that included Bill Cash and Michael Spicer. It was these two MPs who led what became effectively a party within a party, complete with London HQs, separate financing and a back room full of eager young men down from Oxbridge whose youthful idealism to liberate Britain from Brussels echoed a previous generation’s zeal to free Spain from Fascism. Although Stothard had always resisted getting too close to any one politician or interest, he had enjoyed gatherings of the Conservative Philosophy Group and other Thatcherite think tanks during the 1980s and found himself similarly drawn to the cabals and coteries that formed around the Euro-sceptic banner. Brushing aside those who thought Bill Cash was too driven on the subject, Stothard enjoyed Cash’s company, noting, ‘at least he had some strong arguments’.4

  Rees-Mogg’s legal challenge failed on 30 July 1993 and three days later Maastricht was formally ratified. The Danes, too, had been persuaded to reconsider their objection while Austria, Finland and Sweden were poised to join an EU increased from twelve to fifteen member states. Yet, at Westminster and Wapping, the Euro-sceptics appeared unwilling to concede defeat and their hounding of the Prime Minister continued. On 28 November 1994 (the night Norway rejected joining the EU in a referendum), Major only won a Commons division on increasing Britain’s contribution to the EU budget by threatening to resign if the vote was lost. Given the unpopularity of his party this was leadership through suicide pact. Even still, eight Tory MPs rebelled. When the whip was withdrawn from them another MP opted to join them. The Government no longer had a Commons majority. In December, the vote on imposing VAT on domestic fuel was lost. In the words of Norman Lamont (who Major had finally got round to replacing with the pro-European Ken Clarke), the Government appeared to be in office but not in power.

  II

  Unlike Margaret Thatcher, John Major was an assiduous reader of the press. Given his thin-skinned reaction to criticism, this was perhaps a mistake. Across Fleet Street he could count on very few allies. Stewart Steven at the Evening Standard and Bruce Anderson, the Spectator’s political editor, argued his corner but elsewhere the collapse in support for the Tory Government from once-friendly newspapers was astonishing. Among the senior journalists at The Times, Stothard, Daniel Johnson and Martin Ivens all took great exception, in particular, to Major’s failure to steer a more Euro-sceptic course. Anatole Kaletsky shared their contempt and Mary Ann Sieghart represented for him the worst of both worlds – a Euro-sceptic and New Labour supporter. The Times, though, was not governed by a party line. In their columns, Woodrow Wyatt and Matthew Parris bravely gave the Prime Minister the benefit of the doubt while Peter Riddell, the political editor, was a committed supporter of his attempts to keep Britain positively engaged in the process of European integration. Riddell, indeed, took a completely different line from that emanating from the editorial conferences and argued that Maastricht would ‘in time, be seen as the start of a new, more diverse EC’.5 Thus, Major retained the support of some of the most widely read columnists in the paper. He had one other advocate. The deputy editor, John Bryant, shared his love of sport and believed The Times was not giving him a fair chance. Indeed, he suspected that many of those who despised him so vehemently were motivated by a deep-seated social and educational condescension towards the Prime Minister whose degree came from the university of life. ‘They had pretty much decided that they didn’t like him because he was too downmarket’ was Bryant’s assessment of his colleagues’ attitude.6

  Neither Major nor his private office made much attempt to court The Times. Stothard thought Major’s reticence was perhaps to his credit. Major did occasionally provide Stothard with warm gin and tonic around the Cabinet table, but he received far less attention from the Prime Minister than he had from his predecessor, even though he had then held far more junior rank at the paper. Even Sarah Hogg, head of the Downing Street Policy Unit, did not attempt to call in old favours despite having worked with Stothard at The Times prior to the move to Wapping. She did, however, express surprise that Major and Stothard did not get on given that, as far as she could see, they came from similar backgrounds – an observation t
hat caused the Oxford Classicist’s eyebrow to rise.7

  It was Simon Jenkins who launched the articles in The Times that caused particular upset in Downing Street. He was the first journalist to refer (in an otherwise supportive article) to an alleged Prime Ministerial breakdown. ‘Certainly he wobbled inside Admiralty House on Black Wednesday, by some accounts wobbled alarmingly,’ Jenkins wrote. This fired the starting gun for others to repeat rumours that were circulating throughout Westminster. On 21 October 1992, Graham Paterson and Andrew Pierce wrote a lengthy article entitled ‘Can Major Take the Strain?’ Using unnamed ‘friends’ of the Prime Minister as its sources, it stated that Major was not eating properly and was lonely in the evenings because his wife preferred to live in Huntingdon. A professor of organizational psychology was quoted stating that such unstable eating patterns ‘indicate a man in the second phase of a stress disorder’. There was certainly more supposition in the article than was consistent with being the journal of record. The worst slur, however, concerned the events of Black Wednesday. ‘There is a deep reluctance from Mr Major’s close colleagues and civil servants to divulge anything about the prime minister’s bearing during that day,’ Paterson and Pierce winked. ‘But for five weeks one question has been asked again and again in Westminster and Fleet Street: did he crack up?’ One man who had spent time with Major during that day was Norman Fowler, the party chairman (and a former Times journalist). He immediately took the unusual step of denouncing the article as ‘nasty and malicious’. A wellbriefed Daily Mail was particularly vociferous in attacking The Times’s efforts, providing its readers with a point-by-point refutation of the claims made by Paterson and Pierce.8 Stothard remained convinced that his source was ‘impeccable’.9 In his autobiography, Major described the rumours as a ‘malicious invention’.10

  The attacks intensified. At the Daily Telegraph, Max Hastings had spiked a commissioned article by Paul Johnson that argued in fine polemical style that Major was not fit to be Prime Minister.11 Stothard published it in The Times instead. Rees-Mogg soon came to share Johnson’s contempt for Major, writing:

  He seems to be the most over-promoted of the seven [post-war Tory Prime Ministers]. He is not a natural leader; he cannot speak; he has a weak Cabinet which he has chosen; he lacks self confidence; he has no sense of strategy or direction. Even on Europe he does not stand for any great issue … His ideal level of political competence would be deputy chief whip, or something of that standing.12

  The dislike for Major, for his European policy and for his failure to come to grips with the sleaze allegations that were engulfing so many of his colleagues tended to diminish his Tory critics’ appreciation for those parts of his agenda that took Thatcherism forward. Yet plans to privatize British Rail, deregulate London buses, reduce the Post Office’s monopoly and produce Audit Commission league tables on councils’ performance were drawn up nonetheless. John Major had launched his Citizen’s Charter back in July 1991. It aimed to apply the language of rights and expectations to consumers’ use of public sector services. The intention was to increase choice, quality, value for money and accountability. Patients and parents would be permitted to see league tables of how their local health and education authorities were performing. NHS patients who had waited over two years for an operation would be entitled to treatment within the next three months or have the health authority pay for them to be treated privately. For the first time, there would be a legal requirement for schools to be independently inspected regularly. Public utilities would be forced to give compensation for poor service. Passengers would receive refunds if their trains were cancelled or subject to unreasonable delays and the emergency services would be subject to new 999 response target times.

  There was, however, a downside. The granting of contractual rights to users of public services and the separation of powers between providers and scrutinizers necessitated the creation of a new army of inspectors and regulators to monitor and enforce standards. Some of these, like the ‘Cones Hotline’ (a service that allowed drivers to report delayed road works) quickly became the butt of jokes and condescension. More importantly, a new level of bureaucracy was created that proved expensive and a time-consuming distraction to the public sector employees it was trying to hold to account but was sometimes frustrating their professional judgment. This regulatory burden continued to impose itself when some of the utilities, like the railways, were privatized. For those that remained within the public sector, it was all part of a wider Tory strategy to create internal markets in areas of the economy that could not be privatized and, in doing so, to make them more responsive to consumer rather than producer interests. The policy had started in the 1980s, when local authorities were forced to offer out some of their services to ‘competitive tender’. During the summer of 1991, the programme was rolled out in what became a central feature of the Government’s domestic legislation. School and hospital league tables became popular measures by which the public could gain information on the provision of services in their area. Slowly, the number of patients waiting very long periods for NHS treatment was reduced. Before the new standards and inspections were enforced, some schools did not even trouble themselves to provide parents with annual reports on their child’s progress. Chris Woodhead, appointed the Chief Inspector of Schools, became a familiar scourge of the so-called ‘trendy teacher’. When his Office of Standards in Education (Ofsted) compiled evidence that illuminated low standards in many schools, the Association of Teachers and Lecturers union responded by calling for Ofsted to be abolished. The Times, though, saluted Woodhead’s efforts and the drive to make the performance of schools as well as hospitals more transparent.13 In November 1992, The Times was able to publish an official table of national school GSCE and A-level performances for the first time.

  Accompanying the new world of Charter Marks and regulatory bodies, the Tories turned their attention once again to higher education. Having expressed his determination to make Britain a classless society, Major declared that ‘at the heart of our reforms is the determination to break down the artificial barrier which has for too long divided an academic education from a vocational one’.14 Polytechnics would be allowed to call themselves universities. Indeed, the Government, with Ken Clarke as its Education Secretary bringing the changes onto the statute book, wanted to see a third of young people receiving higher education degrees by the end of the decade. Although The Times later became a great critic of expanding entrance to higher education beyond what it regarded as the limitations of its applicants and the grade inflation that accompanied it, the paper did not rush to criticize the move. Taking a free-market approach to the issue, it hoped that the transformation from polytechnics into universities would enhance competition for students and resources – a process that need not mean a dilution in standards.15 Certainly, the polytechnics leapt at the opportunity to upgrade their status. Within a very short space of time, a higher education system with almost one hundred universities was created. For The Times, one consequence was the decision taken following the 1992 graduation ceremonies to end the practice of printing degree results. In one sense, this abandonment marked yet another retreat from the paper’s pretensions to be the journal of record (albeit that until 1986 it had only bothered to print non-Oxbridge degrees if they were first-class honours). However, the increasing number of degree-awarding institutions meant either causing offence by only persisting with publishing the results from the traditional universities or giving the paper during the summer months the appearance of a metropolitan telephone directory.

  The greater consequence of the expanding number of universities concerned how potential students could differentiate between what they offered. In a phrase that doubtless made degree holders from the likes of Imperial, UCL, Bristol and Edinburgh wince, The Times declared that ‘until now, Britain has been different: outside Oxford and Cambridge, a university degree has carried much the same weight, whatever its source’.16 This was a gross exaggeration and a glib insul
t, but the expansion of degree-awarding bodies certainly made the claim that all universities were equal far less tenable. To differentiate, in 1992 The Times Good Universities Guide led the way with the first ranking of them according to various criteria that ranged from the qualifications of the staff, the amount of library spending per head and the quality of student accommodation. It was a major undertaking, beset with problems of comparing potentially non-compatible statistics and deciding what weighting should be attributed to which measurements. The task was entrusted to Tom Cannon, a former director of the Manchester Business School. His efforts were made yet more difficult by the deliberate obstruction of some of the institutions concerned. Indeed, many vice-chancellors (and not just those of the worst-performing universities) vehemently denounced the attempt to create a ranking system even though something similar had existed in the United States for more than a decade. The chairman of the Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals and his equivalent on the Committee of Directors of Polytechnics responded with an open letter that stated, ‘We believe the tables are wrong in principle, flawed in execution and constructed upon data which are not uniform, are ill-defined, and in places demonstrably false.’17 They had a point: raw statistics were a most imprecise science and no guarantee of the ‘value added’ strengths of what was on offer. Nonetheless, they were more useful to the consumer who, able for the first time to compare so much information in one place, no longer had to rely on the only real alternative guide – hearsay and snobbery, real or inverted. The first Times ranking placed Cambridge ahead of Oxford by only a fraction of a point and the two ancient institutions continued this closely contested pre-eminence, followed by the science-only Imperial College London, throughout the ensuing decade. At the other end of the scale, the universities propping up the ranking, all former polytechnics, continued to protest that the points system took insufficient account of the problems they laboured with and, indeed, by branding them failures, only added to the divisiveness of higher education. In response to this, The Times stood firm: having opted to join the league of universities, ‘they must expect to be judged against the best’.18