The History of the Times

by Graham Stewart

  III

  Everything that the ERM’s supporters claimed would happen if sterling was allowed to float failed to happen. Instead, 1993 began with interest rates falling to 6 per cent (their lowest level since 1977) and inflation to 1.7 per cent (the lowest for a quarter of a century). The ‘feel good’ factor took longer to return. With the housing market remaining stagnant, heavily mortgaged families that had bought during the 1980s boom were locked into negative equity. It was a gloomy portfolio for The Times’s new property correspondent, Rachel Kelly. Dissatisfaction with the Government’s health policies continued. In August 1993, the number on NHS waiting lists passed one million. The Scott Report into arms sales to Iraq and the Nolan Report into standards in public life did little to lift the reputation of senior Tories. Sleaze allegations chipped further at their integrity. The Defence Minister, Michael Mates, had to resign over his links with the fugitive businessman Asil Nadir, while several MPs, most prominently Neil Hamilton, were linked to payments from Mohammed Fayed, Harrods’ owner. The sex scandals caused the greatest titillation, in particular David Mellor’s dalliances with a resting actress and the death while engaged in a sex act of a rising star, Stephen Milligan. Collectively, they reduced to ruins Major’s ‘Back to Basics’ campaign which The Times described as his ‘last despairing stab at a big idea’.19

  The public’s response, towards which no popular newspaper could be indifferent, had become remarkably hostile to the Conservative Party. In the local elections of May 1993, the party was left in control of only one county council. Supposedly safe seats were transformed in by-elections to huge majorities for the Liberal Democrats, further frustrating Major’s ability to retain a Commons majority. A MORI opinion poll in September 1993 suggested that only a third of Times readers supported the Tories. Forty-three per cent of them backed Labour and 20 per cent the Liberal Democrats. The share was not much different in the FT and the Conservatives did not even quite scrape a majority among Telegraph readers. Most alarmingly for Major, his party was down to 22 per cent of Sun readers.20 The constituency that Margaret Thatcher had put together had been lost.

  It was an atmosphere conducive to satire. The television show Spitting Image depicted Major from early on as a grey figure pushing his peas around the plate. It was the Guardian’s Simon Hoggart and its cartoonist, Steve Bell, who established the memorable image of Major with his shirt tucked into a visible pair of Y-fronts. The Times’s cartoonist, Peter Brookes, preferred to depict the Prime Minister as a slightly goofy looking man dominated by a large pair of spectacles. The non-transparent nature of the glasses suggested there was not much of a personality behind them. One who resisted the temptation to kick a man when he was down was the parliamentary sketchwriter, Matthew Parris. Like many ex-Tory MPs, Parris had no love for the Tory Party, although he remained a Conservative by instinct. His sketches were never partisan in the party sense and he got on well with many Labour MPs. Nonetheless, originally a member of the ‘blue chip’ generation of Tory MPs himself, he found it difficult to caricature them with the same ease with which he had got to work with the larger than life figures of the Thatcher years. ‘There I was,’ he later wrote, ‘my gang in power, chronicling their noontide, their late afternoon, their internal mutinies and finally their sunset and night.’ Indeed, Parris was sufficiently close to the Prime Minister to draft a section of his 1994 conference speech, a conflict of journalistic interests that a past editor of The Times, Geoffrey Dawson, had once more controversially performed on behalf of Stanley Baldwin.21 This was, perhaps, one of the benefits of his decision to remain on a freelance contract. Like John Bryant, Parris regarded Major’s treatment by the press as ‘downright nasty … And I think his dignity and politeness in the face of adversity and mockery were heroic.’22 If partisanship made him pull the occasional punch in his sketch, then this was perhaps a necessary relief from the unending attack to which the Major Government was prey from almost every other corner of the newspaper. During 1994, opinion polls suggested it was the most unpopular government since polling began.

  IV

  The Times’s disillusionment with John Major had not been accompanied by any great enthusiasm for John Smith. The leader of the Labour Party and the editor of The Times had little in common. Smith once asked Stothard to join him for a drink in the House of Commons. It was not a success: Stothard was underwhelmed by the Leader of the Opposition ‘pouring half a glass of red wine down his shirt’ at six in the evening.23 On 12 May 1994, Smith died of a heart attack. It was Tony Blair’s ascendancy that made a difference to the relationship between Labour and The Times. Peter and Sally Stothard had got to know Tony and Cherie Blair in the 1980s when the Blairs bought their Islington house. Happily, the relationship survived this transaction.

  Matthew Parris had reacted very differently on his first acquaintance with Blair. Introductions had been arranged in the late 1980s by the Blairs’ new friend, Mary Ann Sieghart, who invited them and Parris for dinner. Parris was less than impressed, finding the MP for Sedgefield strangely hollow, unlike his wife who was the far more substantial personality.24 This assumption had not changed much by the time Tony Blair emerged to run for the leadership. Watching him make his bid during a speech in Bloomsbury, Parris observed:

  Seating in the hall was divided into the three sections eligible to choose the Labour leader: one third BBC, one third print journalists and one third Labour Party … Blair delighted most journalists. His skills would serve in those amusement arcade ‘Grand Prix’ screen games. His own screen, the Autocue screen, and his gaze rigid with concentration, Mr Blair drove at gathering velocity round a track littered with the death-traps of policy commitments, swerving to avoid every one, fuelled by a tank full of abstract nouns.25

  It was nonetheless a strategy that impressed Stothard. In 1995, Labour delegates were persuaded to remove Clause Four, their party’s historic commitment to state ownership of the means of production. Blair assured them, ‘Today a new Labour Party is being born. Our task now is nothing less than the rebirth of our nation.’ A new start was certainly made with News International. That year, Blair travelled to Australia to speak to the News Corp. seminar on Hayman Island. Considering the Labour Party’s boycott campaign during the Wapping dispute, the occasion was seen as a defining moment in which the symbolism of past disagreements was buried. Blair, indeed, had travelled an awfully long way to prove the point.

  Believing in John Major’s depth and Tony Blair’s shallowness, Parris’s view continued to be far more distrustful than the open minded attitude of his editor. His sketch for Blair’s second party conference speech as leader in 1995, noted:

  Blair offered the New Testament. Within moments he was quoting Christ. Near the end he declared (twice): ‘Be strong and of good courage.’ The tone was positively messianic. Mr Blair has yet to declare: ‘As God said and rightly …’ but he will.26

  In May, Parris was called to take tea with Major, who floated the idea of his ‘put up or shut up’ resignation strategy. Parris advised against such an unorthodox move. Unsure whether Major had shared with him the idea in confidence, he chose not to break it in the paper.27 However, Major duly resigned the party leadership and dared any rival to challenge him. Michael Portillo thought about doing so, but drew back. It was John Redwood, the Welsh Secretary, who left the Cabinet to do so.

  Five years earlier, Parris had christened Redwood and Portillo ‘vulcans’ although it was with Redwood that the title stuck, greatly to his personal distress. It was a theme Parris revisited when he turned up for Redwood’s opening press conference only to find himself debarred from entering by organizers who claimed the hall was full. Watching it on television, he reported the scene in his sketch:

  Television viewers yesterday watched the first Tory leadership campaign in history to be launched from the bosom of Teresa Gorman. Viewers were startled by the strange green-clad torso behind John Redwood as he spoke at his press conference yesterday. No head was visible in the frame.
>
  I can reveal that it belonged to Mrs Gorman. We would recognise that bust anywhere. Once, as Redwood parried, a hand could be seen tugging at her lapels, drawing them together like green curtains across the cleavage. We trust the hand belonged to Mrs Gorman.

  As for the candidate, Parris successfully ridiculed him:

  How did he view Wales? ‘It-is-a-beautiful-country,’ said the Vulcan, because that is what Earthlings say about Wales. Instructed by his minders to display humour, Redwood told us he was a ‘jobseeker.’ He followed this with the smile he has now learnt to do very nicely: a triumph of muscular control … What, we wondered, would be his final word?

  ‘No extra charge!’ he declared. Mr Redwood must have seen this in a supermarket, recorded it as a useful idiomatic phrase, and inputted it onto the wrong disk-drive in his logic system.28

  When his colleagues voted on 4 July 1995, Major defeated his challenger by a sufficient although, in the circumstances, hardly crushing manner. Redwood received eighty-nine votes and there were twenty abstentions.

  Meanwhile, Conrad Black replaced Max Hastings with the more firmly anti-Major Charles Moore as editor of the Daily Telegraph. This was followed by a raid on The Times for some of its best staff. Anne McElvoy was inveigled away to the Spectator and Matthew D’Ancona was poached by the Sunday Telegraph. D’Ancona’s departure did not alter The Times’s hostility to the Government, but it did raise the possibility that it would mix a right wing attack on its European policies with a Blairite attack on domestic issues. Mary Ann Sieghart was proving to be an articulate and forceful advocate of Blair’s ‘third way’. As the only senior Times leader writer who knew Tony Blair well, she was able to speak authoritatively on his agenda without risk of contradiction. The chief leader writer, Rosemary Righter, disagreed with her, but because her own speciality was foreign policy she was keen to find a strong intellectual who could shoreup the paper’s defences against falling for Blair’s charms. The answer came in the guise of D’Ancona’s friend and Oxford contemporary, Michael Gove. An Aberdonian, Gove had attended Robert Gordon’s College, a regular feature in the surprisingly intense world of Scottish schools debating contests. Proceeding up to Lady Margaret Hall, he had been elected president of the Oxford Union. To Gove, journalism was the natural means of keeping his formidable debating skills in fine fettle. Like Stothard, another minor independent schoolboy and Oxford graduate, he had worked at the BBC (on the Today and On The Record programmes) and was looking to escape into print journalism. Believing that he had identified the next leader of the Conservative Party, he had also begun writing a biography called Michael Portillo: The Future of the Right. When The Times considered serialization, Gove met and made a favourable impression on Martin Ivens. In January 1996, he was duly appointed a leader writer, at the age of twenty-eight. A few months later, the leader team was strengthened further with the arrival of Tim Hames, an Oxford don of light blue hue who would also come to play a prime role in the paper’s political positioning. Daniel Johnson was moved from the literary editorship over to become comment editor. These changes stalled, at least for the moment, the prospect of The Times falling for the charms of Tony Blair.

  In fact, the dynamics of Stothard’s inner circle were complicated. Michael Gove and Mary Ann Sieghart were both Euro-sceptics and, for the most part, social liberals. Yet the former was a trenchant Tory, committed to maintaining the Act of Union with Scotland and Ulster and man of evangelical convictions, while the latter was an equally strong advocate of New Labour who had a personal rapport with the Blairs. Daniel Johnson provided a more traditional voice of social and religious Conservatism. Like Bernard Levin before him, Anatole Kaletsky had a sparkling mind and prevented leader conferences from proceeding along conventional lines by the elasticity of his thinking. On foreign policy, Rosemary Righter combined an uncompromising neo-conservative world view with a strong belief in the principles of the United Nations (thus ensuring she was often highly critical of the UN in practice). Michael Binyon, on the other hand, was relied upon to represent the unflappable perspective of the Foreign Office and was, alone among the group, noticeably less hostile to the causes of Brussels and the Palestinians. During previous editorships, Stothard had watched ‘a lot of aggression take place in and around the leader department’ yet among his own college of cardinals he recognized that ‘the general spirit was exceptionally good. They were very fine representatives of their causes, all good humoured, good hearted people’ despite the daily ding-dongs that took place between them.29

  The political commentator least amenable to the attractions offered by either of the main parties was, perhaps, the cartoonist, Peter Brookes. Having studied at London’s Central School of Art and Design, Brookes was an expert draughtsman whose rare achievement was an ability to parody his subject matter while still drawing them with great accuracy and attention to detail. He began at The Times in 1981 as an illustrator to the main columnists on the Op-Ed page. After a while, he concluded it would be more satisfying to conjure up his own commentaries rather than, for example, reproduce Bernard Levin’s views in visual form. From 1993, he became the paper’s political cartoonist. His method was to arrive at the office in good time for the morning conference when the main news stories were discussed. He would then spend the rest of the morning and early afternoon toying with ideas in pencil. Once he had decided on his cartoon, usually by about 4.30 p.m., he had a couple of hours to translate it onto paper in pen and ink before the page was ready to go to press. For the Saturday edition, he added his box of watercolours in order to produce ‘Nature Notes’. This was a weekly bestiary that depicted public figures as animals, annotated with informative behavioural notes. Eventually, colour came to the Op-Ed page as well, specifically so that the daily Brookes cartoon could be unveiled in the best of lights. Neither Tory, nor Euro-sceptic, nor taken in by the blandishments of New Labour, his political prejudices were often far removed from those emanating from the editor’s office and this helped create an important ideological counterpoise in the heart of the paper. His real achievement, though, was the piquant wit he brought to contemporary events. While the quality of his artistry was without equal, it was always the idea he was conveying that was the central component of his success.

  As colleagues reassembled at Times House in the New Year – an election year – Stothard was musing about the implications of change. Did this mean he would take The Times where it had never gone before by endorsing the Labour Party? He gathered the leader writers and senior political staff for a private meeting in the Reform Club where the options were laid before them. It was Stothard’s technique in leader conferences to set up opposing views and watch the two antipathetic sides battle it out to a conclusion. The same format was deployed at the Reform Club. Michael Gove made the case for endorsing the Tories and Mary Ann Sieghart did likewise for Labour. Gove maintained that what was at the core of Blair’s programme was constitutional reform and this, unlike issues of funding and provision, was so revolutionary that it could not be undone five years later if The Times did not like the consequences. As a Scottish Unionist, Gove was deeply uneasy about Labour’s plans for devolution within the British Isles but he was especially concerned about the likelihood of being taken into the euro and a far deeper form of integration than even Major was prepared to stomach. Blair’s plans were irreversible and bad. Furthermore, Gove questioned whether the modernizers were really in control? He doubted that a Cabinet containing Frank Dobson and Margaret Beckett in key portfolios was likely to think the unthinkable in reforming the welfare state. Sieghart took a different line. She too was averse to taking Britain into a European single currency, but Blair would hold a referendum on that issue so it was not a defining issue for how people should vote at the general election. The Times, she argued, had set Blair a number of hurdles that he – and more importantly his party – would have to cross on issues like the unions and education before they could be endorsed. These hurdles had been very impressively cleared. Given
how far Labour had come and the distance the Tories had slipped, she maintained that the question of whether the paper endorsed Labour was ‘if not now, then when?’. The meeting broke up with no final decision taken. Unusually for an ambitious and sharp-witted young Tory, Gove was a man of generous spirit and unfailing old-fashioned courtesy. He thought that Sieghart had possibly ‘won on points.’30

  The decision lay with the editor and with him alone. He recognized that the Conservatives had run out of steam. Yet, given the limited practical programme set out by Tony Blair – albeit accompanied by much evangelical rhetoric – the Tories certainly seemed to have as much to offer a new parliamentary term as New Labour in terms of proposals for domestic reform. Instead, it was the issue of Europe that remained at the forefront of Stothard’s mind. He might have been more inclined to overlook Blair’s enthusiasm for Brussels if he had known that once Gordon Brown became Chancellor he would kick the euro issue into touch for the next two parliaments. This, however, was far from clear in the first months of 1997. A Labour victory, it seemed, was the surest way of bringing about a referendum to join the euro within the lifetime of the next parliament. It would be a campaign in which the Government, the most well-known and popular Tory politicians and the Liberal Democrats would all be campaigning for a ‘yes’ vote. The prospect filled him with as much woe as it did Michael Gove. On the other hand, the other principal issue vexing the editor was not one of policy but of personality. With Michael Howard and Peter Lilley he was on good terms, but he had a shortage of respect that bordered on contempt for John Major. Bumping into the Prime Minister in Australia House shortly before Christmas in 1996, Stothard had told him that The Times was about to bring him some good news with an opinion poll that suggested he had gained some ground against Labour. ‘For me personally or for the party?’ was Major’s instant reply.31 Such comments made Stothard despair. He was also staggered when Lady Thatcher assured him that ‘Tony Blair is a man who won’t let Britain down’.32 In any case, having very effectively given the impression he thought the Prime Minister lacked the intellectual rigour to hold the office, he could hardly clear his throat and endorse him for a further five years of political purgatory.