The History of the Times

by Graham Stewart

  On 17 March, Major announced there would be a general election on 1 May. He had put off the date until the last moment, hoping that the improving economic climate would demonstrate the Tories were not economically incompetent after all. Stothard had still given no indication as to which way his mind was made up between Labour and Conservative, yet there was an alternative that gave him a way out of his dilemma. The businessman and millionaire Sir James Goldsmith had founded the Referendum Party. Its specific aim was expressed in its title, but it was unapologetically a party campaigning against Britain being swept up into the integrationist impulses of the European Union. Around Goldsmith, a group of youthful, right-wing enthusiasts had constellated, as had a few more glamorous figures, drawn in part by the leader’s charisma and wealth. For its part, most of the mainstream media regarded Goldsmith with a mixture of fear and loathing. Stothard did not share this aversion and Goldsmith paid a couple of visits to Times House in the run up to polling day. The editor even got Gove to write a profile of Goldsmith, specifically requesting that it should not be the hatchet job that others had done when entrusted with the task. Gove opted to suggest that ‘it would be more dignified for Sir James to claim an intellectual victory now than to endure an electoral massacre this spring’. Gove particularly resented Goldsmith’s intention to field candidates even against MPs with strong Euro-sceptic track records.33 Nobody who knew Stothard imagined that he would do anything as eccentric as committing The Times to the maverick pronouncements of the Anglo-French multimillionaire but it was a sign that he was open to unorthodox thinking as election day drew near. It was Hywell Williams, John Redwood’s adviser, who suggested that since the editor clearly thought Britain’s relations with the EU was the most important issue facing the country, The Times should fight it as a ‘coupon election’ – endorsing those candidates of whatever party had a history of opposing further integration in general and the euro in particular. Meanwhile, Stothard asked the archives to send up all the paper’s twentieth-century general election endorsements. He read them and passed them onto Tim Hames, asking for his historical insight, adding implausibly by way of explanation, ‘the twentieth century is not really my period’.34

  Accompanied by the acclaimed watercolourist Matthew Cook to record the scene, Stothard, Riddell and Kaletsky arrived at 10 Downing Street for their pre-polling day interview with the Prime Minister. In the full-page write-up for the paper by Stothard, Europe appeared to have been the only issue that intruded upon the discussion, save for an almost throwaway sentence, ‘he sees the achievement of low inflation as essentially his own, the top item in the ledger of his achievements’.35 Despite repeated interrogation from Kaletsky, Major nonetheless refused to say what his gut feeling was towards joining the euro, explaining ‘what I will do is what I happen to think is in the best interests of the country. It may not actually be what my innate instincts might be. I don’t know what judgment I am going to reach.’ Major was in a difficult position. If he ruled out joining the euro in the lifetime of the next parliamentary term he would retain – or perhaps regain – the loyalty of two-thirds of his party. Yet, if he pursued this course, he risked losing the support of those Cabinet ministers he actually liked and, in particular, the two most senior members of his government, Michael Heseltine and Kenneth Clarke. It was an unenviable choice, but adopting a wait and see policy gave the impression that the Prime Minister did not have the strength of character to tell his own party whether he actually had an opinion on one of the biggest issues in the economic and political life of the nation – scrapping the national currency and surrendering ultimate budgetary control via the stability pact to the European Union. His equivocation only sharpened the contempt in which his critics at The Times – and elsewhere – held him. It was certainly not a display of leadership and, given the discord it was fuelling, some frankly had come to wonder if it was even an effective course of party management.

  This last point was thrown into focus when Tory MPs started disavowing their leader’s wait and see (it had been rechristened ‘negotiate and decide’) policy. Major responded to demands for clarity with the desperate appeal, ‘don’t bind my hands’. Stothard made up his mind, deciding, in the words of a subsequent leading article drafted by Michael Gove, that, ‘The party machines do not wish to be bound, but the voters should not have to choose blind.’36 With only six days to go before polling day, Stothard told Gove what was afoot, entrusting him with leading a small team to draw up within forty-eight hours a comprehensive list of who the Euro-sceptic candidates were. This was a tall order that involved much delving into reference sources and checking on pressure group affiliations. Among the inducements for pro-Europeans to use vaguely Euro-sceptical language in their campaign literature was the prospect of money from the businessman Paul Sykes to help Euro-sceptic candidates’ campaign expenses. Gove’s team were not prepared to endorse anyone who deployed weasel words like being unable to ‘foresee’ adopting the euro. Discovering Labour candidates’ views on the matter was even more difficult because few cared to deviate from the line of obfuscation being encouraged from their party’s headquarters at Millbank. Nonetheless, on Monday 28 April – four days before election day – The Times published its list of the candidates it endorsed. The two-page spread was framed by a Richard Willson cartoon depicting a Bayeaux tapestry-style montage with the heads of the leading politicians superimposed on the figures. So that the Euro-enthusiasts could be depicted as being under attack and Major subjected to an arrow in his eye, it was the Euro-sceptics who, oddly, were the Norman cavalry.

  The Times decided to list not only those candidates it considered Euro-sceptic but also those with firmly Europhile records, ‘whom sceptical voters should not support’. Where a Europhile Tory was being challenged by a candidate from the pro-euro Liberal Democrats, The Times advocated voting for the latter on the grounds that ‘the Commons will be just as Europhile whether the Tory or Liberal Democrat candidate wins, but if the Tory loses the Tory party as a whole will become more sceptical’.37 There were also some exceptions. The Times refused to endorse Sinn Fein’s Gerry Adams or the Tory Neil Hamilton, who was at the centre of the much-publicized fight over allegations that he took cash for questions. The Europhile Tam Dalyell was endorsed on the grounds that he was opposed to devolution for Scotland. Inevitably there was a flurry of telephone calls from anxious Tory candidates keen to protest their Euro-sceptic credentials in order to be added to the list. ‘If I lose, you’ll have a hand in it,’ warned the candidate for Hampstead and Highgate while another, soon to be former, MP, hollered down the telephone, ‘This is a scandal: you could cost me the election.’38 Some injustices were done, although in other cases it appeared that it was only the prospect of being hanged that concentrated a candidate’s mind.

  Endorsing candidates according to their view on the great issue of the day rather than the party they represented was a complete break from past custom. It did, however, solve Stothard’s problem over feeling unable to endorse the Conservatives but reticent to declare for the untested and euro-friendly Blair. Some thought The Times had made a serious misjudgment. They questioned whether Europe was an issue that trumped all others. The opinion polls certainly suggested it was bread and butter issues that would determine the result. The Times had embarked upon a policy where it found itself endorsing far left Labour candidates like Jeremy Corbyn and Tony Benn with whom it had nothing else in common but an aversion to Brussels. Indeed many of the left-wingers the paper endorsed opposed joining the single currency on the sort of anti-capitalist economic arguments that were anathema to the paper’s general outlook. Furthermore, the leading column was also highlighting the cause of specific candidates – usually in marginal seats – who it felt deserved to be elected on account of their contribution to public life. These included politicians like the Liberal Democrat Simon Hughes who supported the euro. Critics were not shy in pointing out these glaring inconsistencies. It came to overshadow the considerable work the paper
had made to highlight the other aspects of the general election campaign. The Times was the only newspaper to publish the major parties’ manifestos in full. Indeed, Stothard later suggested, ‘Endorsement is not the main point.’ What Labour had been far more interested in was having their policies given ‘a fair crack of the whip’ in the news pages and across the paper generally. This The Times provided.39

  Nonetheless, the decision of The Times to endorse a platform rather than a party took the paper’s journalists by surprise. It was the editor’s decision alone and was not debated at any leader conference. Mary Ann Sieghart was particularly bewildered, having believed Labour was about to be endorsed. She promptly did some moonlighting for the News of the World, helping to write its leader column endorsing Blair.40 On Tuesday 29 April, The Times’s decision ran across the top of the front page and was elaborated upon in a full-page leading article written by the editor. It contained a note of historical self-justification that sought to minimize accusations that the paper was breaking with tradition. In the early years of the twentieth century, the paper had put aside its Liberal instincts in order to defend the causes of the Empire and opposition to Irish Home Rule. It had not taken a hard line in the 1945 election and had been neutral in 1955. Thereafter its Tory endorsements had been accompanied by a plea to shore up the Liberal Party. ‘Our strong support of Lady Thatcher in the 1980s was, in this regard, counter to our traditions, not central to them,’ it assured readers. While the paper had admired strong leaders, ‘John Major, by contrast, has been a true man of his parliamentary machine. His skills are those of the whip. His proudest boasts have been for his powers of negotiation.’ In contrast, there was much to commend Blair who had acted quickly to re-educate his party, ‘but we do not put our name to what is still a tower of dreams’.41

  Murdoch was as much taken by surprise as everybody else. Indeed, the division of opinion within his newspaper empire hardly gave credence to the common orthodoxy that News International’s owner pulled the political strings. The Sunday Times reluctantly endorsed the Conservatives while the Sun, rather more confidently, proclaimed the case for Labour. The line adopted by The Times appeared eccentric or unashamedly individualist, according to taste. Yet, even though Murdoch privately thought the Euro-sceptic endorsement was a mistake,42 he did not attempt to dissuade Stothard nor did he use the broadly unfavourable backlash following the paper’s pronouncement to undermine him. Indeed, it would have been hard to find a more politically ‘hands-off’ proprietor in all Fleet Street. Conrad Black’s Daily Telegraph was the only daily broadsheet to declare for the Tories. The Times’s columnists went their separate ways. Accusing Major of ‘pathetically ineffectual leadership’, Kaletsky described his government as ‘the least electable in 50 years’.43 Rees-Mogg cast around for reasons to vote Conservative, arguing that having been promised a free vote on the euro, a Tory majority would ensure a euro-sceptic parliament.44 Woodrow Wyatt argued that the polls could be wrong, that many old socialists would abstain rather than vote for Blair and that ‘against all the pollsters, and chumps like the pornographic bestseller and disloyal Edwina Currie … I believe that John Major, who has fought brilliantly, is on course for a majority of around 30–40’.45 Eschewing the rancour that so many felt for the collapsing regime, Simon Jenkins wrote a notably fair-minded piece on election eve, noting ‘there is no greater compliment to the Thatcher – Major era than the thinness of today’s Labour manifesto’.46

  On election morning, The Times’s MORI poll suggested Labour would get 48 per cent and the Tories 28 per cent with the Liberal Democrats on 16, suggesting a Labour majority of between 180 and 200. In the event, the respective percentages were 44, 31 and 17 and the majority was 177. ‘Landslide victory for Labour’ ran The Times’s headline once most of the results were in, below an architrave of Tory portraits – Portillo, Lang, Forsyth, Rumbold, Hamilton, Mellor, Waldegrave, Rifkind, Lamont – each looking dejected, each with the caption ‘OUT’ splashed across the top. Five Cabinet ministers and eighteen other ministers lost their seats. The Conservative Party, which had gone into the election committed to preserving the United Kingdom against Blair’s plans for devolution, was left with no MPs outside England.

  What was particularly embarrassing for The Times was that the landslide predominantly swept away Tory Euro-sceptics, leaving Euro-friendly chieftains like Kenneth Clarke and Michael Heseltine untouched. There was little evidence that voters had actively endorsed Europhile candidates, merely that they had treated it as a traditional general election fought on party lines and domestic issues, and not as a surrogate referendum on deeper European integration. In this mood, the vast majority of Times readers simply ignored their paper’s appeal. If the Euro-sceptic voters’ guide had any effect then, perhaps, it assisted some in identifying a like-minded candidate from one of the main parties in their constituency, thereby redirecting some protest votes away from Goldsmith’s Referendum Party or the UK Independence Party (both of which performed below expectations in the ballot). How many – if any – MPs owed success to this assault on the fringe vote may be contested. At any rate, it had no bearing on the overall result. This was a humiliating rebuff to The Times’s editorial stance – not that this consequence was dwelt upon in the leading column whose attention seamlessly switched to the prospects for the new administration. It was a demonstration of how impotent the press could be once the public had already made its mind up on a subject. ‘If I could rewrite the traditions of the paper, I would not endorse’ at general elections was Stothard’s subsequent reflection.47

  V

  The end of eighteen years of Tory rule and the prospects for a new style of government under a young, fresh faced Prime Minister who talked the language of hope and rebirth would now become the focus for The Times. Yet not to be overlooked was the relative success of the third party. With forty-six MPs, the Liberal Democrats had produced their best result since Lloyd George’s Liberal Party went to the polls promising a Keynesian-style New Deal in 1929. The other, more pressing matter concerned how the Conservatives – whose share of the vote had not been so low since they were led by the Duke of Wellington in 1832 – would regroup. Major immediately announced his intention to stand down, sensibly opting to spend his first day of freedom watching cricket at The Oval. It was the cue for a bloody leadership fight to commence. Matthew Parris was perturbed that ‘the party I used to respect’ had been gripped by ‘some sort of fever’ that was turning it away from being led by ‘grown ups’ who challenged Labour for the middle ground, preferring to become a sort of ‘Tory Likud’ that instead aimed at predominance on the fringe. The notion that they might find salvation under John Redwood’s leadership was, Parris wrote, ‘laughable’ although it was clear he saw nothing amusing about the prospect.48 The leading column, however, leapt to pour cold water on Clarke or Heseltine’s claims to the succession, positing that they were ‘deeply associated with the election debacle’.49 Having argued that the issue of Europe was the determining factor in the general election, the paper could hardly demand a Europhile victory in the ensuing leadership contest. Portillo, who Michael Gove had tipped as the next leader, had been removed from the contest by his own electors in Enfield Southgate. On 3 May, Heseltine’s aspirations were felled by a heart scare that dispatched him to hospital. Within days, John Redwood had entered the leadership race with an article in The Times entitled ‘I can’t defend the past; I can unite the party’ in which he maintained that having resigned from the Major Cabinet he was the only candidate who would not have to spend the next few years apologizing for it.50 In fact, it was Redwood’s decision to resign from the Cabinet in 1995 that created an opportunity for a young man of promise, William Hague, to fill Redwood’s shoes at the Welsh Office and, in doing so, enter the 1997 election as a candidate with Cabinet experience. Even on the morning after the general election disaster, Andrew Pierce had written up Hague as the leader the Tories might turn to in order to ‘skip a generation’. This initially improbab
le prospect suddenly took hold. Having originally made a verbal agreement to back Michael Howard by standing as his deputy (and, in effect, heir apparent) Hague soon began to believe he could win under his own steam. Howard’s hopes were dealt a further blow by the outspoken maverick Ann Widdecombe, who attacked him over his sacking of the prison chief, Derek Lewis, and announced to a stunned Commons chamber that there was ‘something of the night’ about the former Home Secretary.

  The scale of the election landslide naturally encouraged some to think the Tories needed a complete reinvention. Coming from a younger generation, Hague’s profile appeared perfect for this role. Yet, in urging the party to elect Ken Clarke as their leader, Simon Jenkins pointed out that there was no need to assume that the Tories would be out of office for a generation. On the contrary, although exaggerated in seats secured by the vagaries of the electoral system, Blair had actually won only 1 per cent more of the popular vote than had Major in 1992. The gap was thus by no means unbridgeable within the space of one parliamentary term of office. Jenkins was baffled by the defeatism of Tory MPs who were ‘behaving as if they lost the argument as well as the election. They did not. They won the argument, which is why they lost the election … New Labour is one of the Tory party’s great achievements.’51 After Howard and Lilley trailed in the first ballot of MPs, Redwood and Clarke agreed to work together to dish Hague. The decision astounded Westminster and its lobby correspondents. References to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact abounded. ‘We can say a sad farewell to John Redwood as a valid figure in Conservative policies,’ wrote Rees-Mogg. ‘He was the Robespierre of the Right, the dark-blue Incorruptible … In the twinkling of an eye he has destroyed himself.’52 ‘Absurd is how the axis between Mr Clarke and Mr Redwood will look to the country and absurd is what it is,’ huffed the leading article.53 Lady Thatcher felt likewise, and endorsed William Hague. The following day, he romped to victory by 92 votes to 70. Aged thirty-six, he was the youngest Tory leader since William Pitt the Younger (of whom he later became a biographer) two hundred years before.