The History of the Times

by Graham Stewart

  What remained unclear was whether the Taleban had been removed permanently from Afghanistan or whether it was merely lying low, waiting for its chance to return when the Americans became bored of the hassles of peacekeeping and departed. On his arrival in Kabul, Loyd had entered a barber shop and asked for a clean shave. ‘This may hurt a little, I’m afraid,’ replied the barber, flicking open a cut-throat razor. ‘Until today it’s been five years since I’ve done a clean shave.’ The Taleban’s prohibition of male beardlessness had been brutally enforced. Loyd discovered, though, that not many customers were rushing to exercise entirely their new freedom. Most wanted a trim rather than a clean shave. One barber explained why: ‘People here are not sure that the Taleban will not return.’72

  Chaos in the future on the scale of that which had blighted the past was always going to offer the Taleban its best opportunity to make a comeback. The first signs, though, could not have been encouraging to them. In Kabul, Hamid Karzai became interim leader of a shattered nation. By 2004, he became the democratically elected President of Afghanistan. Bush and Blair had brought about regime change in Kabul. In the first months of 2002, the process had yet to come to Baghdad.

  VI

  The war on terror coincided with a collapse in the advertising market. Over the short space of a few months, the revenue pouring into The Times dried up. Like its rivals, the paper could not survive unsupported for a long period on the proceeds of its cover price alone. What was more, if this was to be rapidly hiked up to make good some of the sudden advertising shortfall, all the gains of the 1990s price war would be swiftly reversed. The downturn was particularly ill timed given the fresh expenses involved in covering the war on terror. Rightly, this was given priority, ensuring that other projects had to be curtailed. The most severe budget freeze was imposed since the drastic economies forced upon Simon Jenkins in 1990. Worryingly, the disintegration of the advertising market was not just a British phenomenon. It hit the United States, too, ensuring that the paper could not look to plug the gap from a fresh display of News Corp.’s financial indulgence. Given how quickly the brakes were slammed on, The Times managed to maintain a surprisingly unchanged face to its public.

  Indeed, it was during this period that the structural problems created in 2000 by the change of formats were put right. To considerable relief, The Times was returned to a two section broadsheet format (one for news and comment, the other for business and sport) with T2 continuing to provide arts and features in an additional and distinctive daily tabloid booklet. Stothard’s illness had removed from the scene one of T2’s principal architects just at the moment it had been launched. It had taken considerable work by its editor, Sandra Parsons, to mould the tabloid section into an established and popular formula. Yet, by 2002, the task had been largely achieved. Meanwhile, the reintroduction of the business and sport broadsheet section had other implications. The configurations of the printing presses demanded that the two broadsheet sections had to be of equal pagination. Yet, with comment, obituaries and Court & Social all in the first section, this would have meant there was more business and sports reporting than pages of news. It was Ben Preston who devised the solution of shunting Op-Ed and the leader page to the end of the news section and moving obits and Court & Social to the new business and sport second section. There was a minor outcry among some traditional readers who believed that commemorating the passing of the great and the good and reporting the fate of Accrington Stanley made for uneasy bedfellows. But, on the whole, the decision was beneficial and offered traditional readers more, rather than less, of the ‘paper of record’ formula. In calling the new expanded section ‘The Register,’ a conscious nod was made to The Times’s original 1785 title, the Daily Universal Register, and the distinctive masthead heraldry that had accompanied the old name was also resurrected. Three pages for obituaries could now be provided, restoring to The Times a clear lead in column inches over its rivals in this area. A ‘Lives Remembered’ column was also expanded to allow those who had known the deceased to add their own reminiscences.

  With ‘The Register’ launched, sport and business reunited and T2 beginning to assert itself, Stothard could claim to have presided over both innovation and restoration. The financial clouds created by the advertising recession were the immediate worry but it was unclear, in early 2002, how long the inclemency would prevail. In all other respects, the paper had every reason to be confident. The job done, it was a favourable moment for Stothard to step aside. His tenth anniversary in the chair – by far the longest of any Times editor under Murdoch’s ownership – was approaching and he intimated to the proprietor that he would not want to remain much beyond that date. Murdoch accepted Stothard’s decision. He had met the managing editor of the US edition of the FT, Australian Robert Thomson (who had saved Jonathan Mirsky’s life in Beijing in 1993) who was credited with transforming the paper’s increasing global appeal in its fight to challenge the supremacy of the Wall Street Journal. Believing that The Times had only a short opportunity to attract someone of Thomson’s calibre before a rival did so, Murdoch decided to act. When Thomson accepted, Stothard was informed that the succession was assured and that he could safely step down. It was the end of an era and an appropriate moment for this volume of the paper’s history to close. Great changes lay ahead, including the decision of the paper to scrap its broadsheet size in favour of a tabloid format it preferred to describe as ‘compact’. There would be other changes: more foreign correspondents were appointed (more, indeed, than at any time in The Times’s history) and the paper continued to expand its coverage in other areas as well. It is too early to write with detachment on these and other dramas that will, eventually, shape the opening chapters of a future volume of the history of The Times. On 21 February 2002, Peter Stothard announced he was stepping down to the full complement of his editorial staff assembled around him in the newsroom. He retired amid the sort of scenes of emotion and goodwill from his colleagues that few editors had come to expect, let alone experience. There was genuine pleasure when it was announced that, as the new editor of the Times Literary Supplement, he was not moving so far away after all. Colleagues had found much in him to admire personally. His dignified struggle with cancer and the manner of his recovery had naturally attracted respect. He had been a guiding presence at the paper for twenty years and an editor for almost ten of them. Yet, he had been more than just an emblem of continuity during years of change and strain. He had worked hard to expand The Times’s range and been rewarded with a doubling of its circulation. He had been fortunate in some respects as well. Charlie Wilson had been dogged by a rival, the Independent, that was closing fast on The Times’s heels. This threat quickly receded during Stothard’s editorship, in part because of the hirings made by his predecessor, Simon Jenkins, and by business decisions made by the Independent’s management. This was not the only good fortune. Unlike Harold Evans or Simon Jenkins, Stothard’s period in the chair had coincided with the parent company’s preparedness to invest heavily in the paper rather than cut its budget back. The price war had been a major factor in the paper’s upward ascent. Only when the cover price was raised significantly higher would it be clear how many readers had been truly hooked to its contents. However, in attracting a younger but affluent readership, the demographic trends were moving steadily in The Times’s favour and many media forecasters believed that Murdoch’s long cherished hope that it would supplant the Telegraph as the market leader still looked attainable in the longer term. Time would tell.

  The paper had expanded its coverage in almost all directions. Sport had made large gains, as had features. Perhaps Stothard’s two most important appointments were William Rees-Mogg and Patience Wheatcroft. The return of Rees-Mogg as a columnist sent out a strong signal that, despite the changes being made, the paper had not lost touch with its traditions and fundamental decency. Wheatcroft began a quiet revolution on the business pages, bringing the FT under intensive challenge in the home market for th
e first time in two decades. Nonetheless, the successes of The Times during the Stothard years were down to many people of whom only a small number were familiar to the readership. Rosemary Righter had maintained the intellectual rigour of the anonymous leading articles without succumbing to the self-doubting prevarication that had occasionally made balanced debate appear a higher priority than reasoned argument. David Ruddock had been an able master of the backbench, producing night after night a newspaper that was sharp and unpredictable. Two successive deputy editors, John Bryant and Ben Preston, and managing editors, Peter Roberts and George Brock, had also been the hidden hands tailoring the garment to measure. From his chief revise editor’s desk, Tim Austin had quietly turned many a journalistic sow’s ear into a silk purse.

  The paper had certainly not shirked from controversy and had not always escaped from the fray unbloodied. It campaigned against Greg Dyke becoming the BBC’s director-general. Dyke was appointed nevertheless. A lengthier campaign had been launched that questioned Michael Ashcroft’s suitability as Treasurer of the Conservative Party. Ashcroft too had survived. The long affair with the ‘natural party of government’ had been ended although the flirtation with the new claimant to that title appeared of uncertain duration and highly conditional. The great ideological battle over joining the euro was deferred, although, if the opinion polls were accurate, The Times’s opposition resonated with much of the population at large. Responding to the vacuum and new alarms created by the Cold War’s end, the paper endorsed military intervention in foreign wars.

  Naturally there were those who maintained, as they and their great-grandfathers always had, that the paper was a pale shadow if its former self. Those who believed the cost charged for doubling the circulation was the vulgarization of the paper’s content claimed that this was the true legacy of Peter Stothard’s editorship. It is a contention that will be analysed in the concluding chapter. Among those who knew him personally, it was hard to equate the charge with the man. One of his favourite poems was New Year Letter, written by W. H. Auden in 1940 from the United States as he contemplated the coming fall of Europe. Mourning the lack of leadership, the poem professed the need for a ‘voice within the labyrinth of choice’. Providing the voice had been Stothard’s achievement in expanding The Times.

  * * *

  *Later renamed the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  DUMBING DOWN?

  An Overview of the Paper’s Performance, 1981–2002

  I

  For whose benefit has all this effort been directed? Throughout the first twenty-one years in which The Times was owned by Rupert Murdoch, it was dogged by two particularly unrelenting criticisms. The first claim was that the paper dumbed down. In other words, it stepped back from its historic position as the journal of record by reducing the quantity and quality of its serious news analysis in favour of more populist, less political, material. The second criticism was related to this first line of attack. It is that, by dumbing down, The Times has ceased to be distinct from its competition. Instead of catering for a small but well-informed audience – a ‘ruling few’ – it is just another newspaper, appealing to the same market as the rest of the quality press. In this interpretation, gaining more readers has been at the expense of providing more elevated journalism.

  In assessing the validity of these complaints it is perhaps best to start with the question of the paper’s audience. Part of the problem has always been in defining what a typical Times reader looked and behaved like. With whatever level of fairness, the other newspapers attracted recognizable stereotypes among their readers – the public sector employee, wearing his corduroy jacket and CND badge, who read the Guardian; the Tory-voting Labrador owner and WI volunteer who stood loyally by the Daily Telegraph. In contrast, The Times never stirred quite the same partisan passions. It appeared to see its own role as that of a moderating counsel to all those in positions of authority. A problem with this was that The Times’s supposed stereotype, a civil servant wandering purposefully down Whitehall in a bowler hat and striped trousers, was a sight that had not been seen in public since the early 1960s. At any rate, his descendants – if they had not switched to the FT – could hardly be sufficiently numerous to swell The Times’s circulation from 280,000 when Murdoch bought the paper in 1981 to nearly 700,000 in 2002. Indeed, Murdoch was hardly the newspaper owner to make courting the British Establishment his life’s ambition. He regarded with distaste the notion that the paper existed merely to entertain and inform the ‘ruling few’. Matthew Parris, who as a Times columnist throughout the 1990s received between twenty and a hundred letters a week from readers, was certainly of the view that there was nothing predictable about them. Some were wealthy but:

  most strike me as neither rich nor poor, and a notable group are of above average education and below average income: young people and old (especially elderly ladies), who in material terms have quite a struggle and for whom an intelligent newspaper represents a vantage point from which to survey the world of ideas, research and the arts. Perhaps my correspondents are untypical, but I am struck by how unmaterialistic most who write to me are: life to them is about more than money.1

  Throughout the twentieth century, such readers had been attracted to The Times, albeit in smaller numbers in total than were reading it by the end of the century. In his study of the paper during the late 1960s and 1970s John Grigg defined them as the ‘cultivated and idiosyncratic, but obscure, people’.2 If the paper was attracting them in increasing quantities – as the raw evidence suggested – then, far from being a point of criticism, it was a positive sign. They may not have been the most commercially attractive stratum of society, but they were some of the most discerning people in the country.

  In any case, such readers did not replace the ‘ruling few’ that were the historic core of The Times’s market. They supplemented them. During the years of the Major Government, a higher proportion of MPs still read The Times than any other paper.3 When the smug advertising slogan ‘Top People Take The Times’ was first plastered across billboards in 1957, the ‘top people’ in question were those classified as social grade ‘A’. ‘A’ grade readers came from households where the chief income earner’s occupation could be categorized as higher managerial, administrative or professional. Bishops, board directors and senior managers of large companies with more than two hundred employees, established doctors and barristers and the highest officer ranks (colonel to field marshal) within the armed forces were all, for example, in this category. When Murdoch bought The Times, only 3 per cent of the population could be so described, yet more than a fifth of The Times’s readers were among them. Although nothing could dislodge the Telegraph’s sheer weight of numbers, The Times had the highest proportion of any broadsheet newspaper. By 2002, the percentage of Britons who were in the ‘A’ social grade still only comprised 3 per cent of the population. Yet The Times – while broadening its appeal to other social groups – remained the broadsheet newspaper with the highest proportion of ‘A’ grade readers. While the largest growth in new readers had come from the other social categories, the total number of ‘A’ grade readers had increased over the period from 186,000 to 273,000. The consequence of twenty-one years of Rupert Murdoch’s ownership was that more ‘top people’ were taking The Times than had ever done so before, even compared to when it had been owned by such gentleman proprietors as the Astor family. Indeed, their increasing numbers (up almost 47 per cent) between 1982 and 2002 was far more significant than the growing numbers of ‘A’ grade households in the country at large (whose numbers had risen 21 per cent).

  What was especially noteworthy was that the number of these so-called ‘top’ readers contracted during the 1980s. The paper had twelve thousand fewer of them in 1992 than in 1982. The dramatic increase came thereafter. Thus the era of the ‘price war’ not only – as might be expected – attracted poorer or less loftily employed readers to The Times, but al
so increased in absolute terms the number of ‘top people’ readers attracted to it as well. Whether or not Peter Stothard dumbed down the paper’s content during the period of his editorship, the allegation that he dumbed down the readership cannot be sustained. To retain a higher social profile than the Financial Times, while simultaneously appealing to a far broader swathe of the public, was no small achievement.

  The reality was thus different from the appearance. It was in this latter respect that the dumbing down allegation had superficial appeal. At a cosmetic level, The Times of 2002 certainly looked less high minded than it had done twenty or thirty years before. Where once the printed word had been crammed into every available inch of the page (as if wartime paper rationing was still in place), the newspaper belatedly evolved and adapted to the challenge of television by becoming more visually appealing and less cluttered in its appearance. Technological advance allowed for larger pictures (with better definition) and for colour printing. Some readers considered the latter a vulgarity when it first appeared in 1991 but, by any objective criteria, it was a significant step forward. Visually, the paper certainly had moved towards a format closer to that favoured by glossy magazines and tabloids. Headlines got bigger. Banner headlines were appropriate for stories of national importance or for a breaking crisis, but the overuse of large text smacked of sensationalism and devalued the journalistic coinage. Furthermore, large font sizes for headlines forced the subeditors to describe the article’s message in fewer words. Inevitably, this encouraged inexactitude and exaggeration. Perfectly well-balanced articles became controversial because of the prejudicial and inaccurate headline with which they were lumbered. Another dumbing-down trait was the use of puns in headlines. Although often entertaining, overuse undermined the gravity of the page – especially when more serious news items were cohabiting there.