The History of the Times: The Murdoch Years

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This is a sad day for Fleet Street, which is to see the greatest concentration of newspaper monopoly in its history. It is a sad day for the Conservative Party, which appeared this afternoon to have abandoned its traditional role of the opponent of large monopolies whenever possible.[82 - Hansard, 27 January 1981.]

Aitken was one of five Conservative MPs (the others were Peter Bottomley, Hugh Fraser, Barry Porter and Delwyn Williams) who defied a three-line whip and voted with the Opposition. It was in vain, and the Commons divided 281 to 239 against referring the sale. Murdoch had won a major battle. Securing the job cuts with the unions remained the only hurdle before Times Newspapers would be in his hands.

But while he had won the vote, not everyone was convinced his case had won the argument. Although he would soon accept Murdoch’s shilling, Harold Evans wrote Aitken a letter congratulating him on his speech.[83 - Jonathan Aitken to the author, interview, 27 May 2003.] There was a widespread belief that it had all been a stitch-up. Aitken had alleged that Thomson had suspiciously ignored several serious bids because it had already decided upon Murdoch. But were the names Aitken reeled off superior bidders? Rees-Mogg himself thought Murdoch a better option than his own consortium. Atlantic Richfield was about to move out of British newspaper ownership. Associated Newspapers could not guarantee The Times’s future. The idea that the editorial independence of the paper would be in safer hands with Lonhro’s Tiny Rowland was, as the Observer would later discover, highly contestable. If Brunton had pre-judged Murdoch’s suitability over these alternatives, might it not have been on the basis of an honest assessment of who offered the best future – perhaps the only future – for The Times? And if Lord Roll was a ‘banker of fees’ would he not have urged acceptance of the far higher bid from Rothermere’s Associated Newspapers?

The controversy was kept alive when, only a month after Biffen had made his statement in the Commons, the American oil company Atlantic Richfield sold the troubled Observer to Outrams, a subsidiary of Tiny Rowland’s Lonhro Group. Given that the Glasgow Herald was the closest Outrams/Lonhro could claim to owning a national newspaper, Biffen’s decision to refer the bid to the Monopolies Commission appeared perverse. Memorably dubbed by Edward Heath the ‘unacceptable face of capitalism’, Rowland had made himself objectionable to conservatives, socialists and liberals in equal measure and could find fewer defenders than Murdoch. The manner in which the Observer had been sold to him created unease, for the first that any of the editor-in-chief, the editor or the board of directors knew of it was after the deal had been done. There was also a more clearly defined question of public interest, in particular whether there was a conflict between the Observer’s extensive coverage of African affairs and Rowland’s business interests there. The Monopolies Commission could find no evidence to assume that it would and permitted the deal to go ahead subject to the installation of independent directors on a model similar to that adopted at Times Newspapers.[84 - The Times, 26 February 1981; Alan Watkins, A Short Walk Down Fleet Street, pp. 178–9; Jenkins, Market for Glory, pp. 169–70.] The experience was not to prove a happy one. But in February 1981 there remained many who could not see the consistency in the Government’s handling of newspaper takeovers.

Whatever the political symmetry between the Thatcher Government and Rupert Murdoch, the decision not to refer the TNL purchase was only legally possible on the grounds of the papers’ unprofitability. The Thomson submission to Biffen had claimed, ‘neither The Times nor the Sunday Times are economical as going concerns and as separate newspapers under current circumstances’.[85 - Thomson submission to the Department of Trade and Industry.] That The Times was in dire straits was not in doubt. But could that really be said of the Sunday Times, whose problems were hoped to be but temporary?

The TNL statistics sent out by Warburgs to prospective buyers had shown that the Sunday Times had actually scraped into the black in 1980 and by 1983 would be making projected profits of £13 million. John Smith immediately challenged Biffen on these figures since they appeared at odds with the statement he had given to the Commons. Biffen had to concede that he had based the paper’s loss on an estimate of the first nine months of 1980 and not, as MPs had been led to assume, the first eleven.[86 - John Biffen to John Smith, 3 February 1981, letter reprinted in The Times, 4 February 1981.] Harold Evans was not alone in resenting the way in which those seeking to avoid a referral had treated his paper. He found that many of his journalists ‘objected to being swept into what they saw as a large, alien publishing group on the sole grounds that it was necessary to save The Times’.[87 - Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, p. 143.] This now became a problem. The NUJ chapel of the Sunday Times decided to challenge Biffen’s non-referral in court. The action could cost £60,000 – a sum that was far beyond the chapel’s reach. Negotiations were opened with Rothermere’s Associated Newspapers to see if they would underwrite the expense. The intermediary was Jonathan Aitken. But Associated were hesitant and, with only thirty-six hours to go before the court hearing, the chapel called off the action following Murdoch’s promise that two working journalists would be appointed to the TNL Holdings board.[88 - Ibid., pp. 151–3; Sunday Times, 18 February 1981.]

Murdoch could now turn his attention to jumping the final hurdle: agreement with the unions. Historically, he had not been one of the unions’ principal bogeymen. In 1969, they had emphatically preferred his bid for the Sun to that of Robert Maxwell who promised under his ownership a paper that ‘shall give clear and loyal support at all times to the Labour movement’ but who wanted to cut the number employed printing the paper.[89 - Jenkins, Market for Glory, p. 58.] Compared to Rothermere who might close The Times, or the Rees-Mogg consortium that wanted to move printing to the provinces, Murdoch seemed the best bet for keeping jobs at Gray’s Inn Road. Because of this, Bill Keys (SOGAT), Joe Wade (NGA) and Owen O’Brien (NATSOPA) had written on the day after Thomson had accepted Murdoch’s provisional bid to Michael Foot, Labour’s Deputy Leader, urging him not to press for a referral to the Monopolies Commission.[90 - The Times, 13 February 1981.] The appeal fell upon deaf ears, but it was a positive sign of how they regarded Murdoch.

News International and the unions had until 12 February to agree a deal. A 30 per cent cut in the four thousand jobs at TNL was demanded. If enough voluntary redundancies could not be agreed, compulsory ones would make up the shortfall. There would also have to be a wage freeze until October 1982. Murdoch put two of his most doughty negotiators in charge of the talks. One was John Collier. Collier had been a NATSOPA official, working for the Guardian back in the days when it still retained Manchester in its title. He had joined Murdoch’s News Group Newspapers following its purchase of the Sun, becoming general manager in 1974. He knew how Fleet Street negotiations worked. In contrast, his accomplice had not even set foot in Britain before. But Murdoch had every confidence in the ex-secretary of the Sydney Ten-pin Bowling Association, Bill O’Neill. He had started as a fifteen-year-old apprentice in the composing room of the Sydney Daily Mirror. Like Collier, he had been active in the print union although disgust at the outlook of its pro-Communist officials led him to seek out union responsibilities that were less overtly political. He was still at the Sydney Mirror when its owners, Fairfax, sold it to Murdoch. The new proprietor promptly set about reinvigorating the run-down title in a manner similar to his later strategy at the Sun. By the mid-seventies, O’Neill had switched to the management side. When, in early 1981, Murdoch asked him what he thought of the intention to buy The Times, O’Neill mumbled something about barge poles. Murdoch shot back, ‘it’s obvious you’ve been talking to the wrong people’, and told him that he should expect to be in London for only as long as it took to finalize the deal with the unions there – which he estimated at two weeks. This was one of Murdoch’s less accurate predictions.[91 - O’Neill, Copy Out.]

In truth, the scope for trimming departments stretched far beyond what was discussed. When a thirty-year old Iowan named Bill Bryson arrived as a subeditor on The Times’s company news desk in the dying days of the Thomson ownership he was astonished by the work culture he encountered. His colleagues wandered in to the office at about 2.30 in the afternoon, proceeded to take a tea break until 5.30 p.m. after which they would ‘engage in a little light subbing for an hour or so’ before calling it a day. On top of this, they got six weeks’ holiday, three weeks’ paternity leave and a month’s sabbatical every four years. Bryson was equally taken aback by the inventive approach to filing expense claims and the casual attitude of the reporters in his section, many of whom stumbled back to the office after a lengthy liquid lunch to make ‘whispered phone calls to their brokers’. ‘What a wonderful world Fleet Street then was,’ Bryson concluded twelve years later when he wrote the episode up with only mild exaggerations for comic effect in his best-selling book on his adopted Britain, Notes from a Small Island, adding wistfully, ‘nothing that good can ever last’. Suddenly, Murdoch’s men – ‘mysterious tanned Australians in white short-sleeved shirts’ – began roaming around the building armed with clipboards and looking as if ‘they were measuring people for coffins’. Soon company news got subsumed into the business news department and Bryson found himself working nights and ‘something more closely approximating eight-hour days’.[92 - Bill Bryson, Notes from a Small Island, pp 46–7.]

Despite the extent of the options for where cuts could be made, Collier and O’Neill were faced with a massive task to reach agreement with all fifty-four separate chapels in the twenty-one days between Murdoch’s deal being agreed in principle with Thomson and the 12 February deadline. Invariably brinkmanship played its part but on the final day a compromise was reached. The TNL payroll was cut by 563 job losses, a reduction of around 20 per cent. This was achieved by voluntary redundancy at a cost of around £6 million to News International. It was telling that removing a fifth of the workforce did not appreciably lower the quality of the product. Importantly, agreement was reached to print the supplements (the Times Literary, Times Educational and Times Higher Education) outside London. This probably saved the life of the loss-making TLS. But the proposed wage freeze would only last for three months, there were no compulsory redundancies and no movement from the unions towards allowing journalists direct input. ‘Double-key stroking’ would remain. Harold Evans later concluded that the negotiations were ‘an opportunity forgone’: of the 130 jobs cut from the 800-strong NATSOPA clerical chapel, 110 were actually unfilled vacancies (in itself an extraordinary statistic at a time of soaring unemployment) and the most militant union fathers kept their jobs. But the truth of the matter was that there was little prospect of the newspapers being printed had News International tried to sack the unions’ spokesmen. At about this time, Len Murray, the general secretary of the TUC, confided to Murdoch his long-held belief that the Fleet Street proprietors had got the trade unions they deserved. With just a hint of menace, Murdoch replied, ‘well, now perhaps the unions have got the proprietor they deserve’. He appeared to mean it. Asked how he would respond to any new bout of industrial action at Gray’s Inn Road, Murdoch told the press, ‘I will close the place down’.[93 - O’Neill, Copy Out, p. 15; Sunday Times, 15 February 1981; Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, p. 182; Grigg, The Thomson Years, p. 576; The Times, 13 February 1981.] It was an unequivocal response from the man who was being interviewed because he had just officially become The Times’s owner.

V

Richard Searby believed Rupert Murdoch’s desire to own The Times was deep-seated and stretched back to the splendid engraved inkwell that the paper’s owner, Lord Northcliffe, had presented to his father.[94 - Richard Searby to the author, interview, 11 June 2002.] At Geelong Grammar, a boarding school labouring under the tag ‘the Eton of Australia’, the boys mocked the young Rupert with his father’s nickname, ‘Lord Southcliffe’. In fact it was his first name, Keith, that Rupert shared with his father.

The friendship between Northcliffe and Keith Murdoch had been forged during the First World War. In 1915 while employed by one of the news agencies, Keith Murdoch had been sent out to cover the Dardanelles campaign where Australian and New Zealand (Anzac) soldiers were suffering heavy casualties. He quickly surmised that the senior command was incompetent and that heroic Anzac troops were being let down by their British counterparts. In fact, he was not on the front line and much of his information came from a dissatisfied reporter from the London Daily Telegraph. But if his sources were weak his readership was focused. His report landed on the desk of the Australian Prime Minister and, on reaching London, Keith Murdoch went to The Times with his account. Northcliffe, the paper’s editorially interfering proprietor, read it and told the driven Australian journalist to pass it to the Prime Minister. Asquith promptly circulated it to his Cabinet.

The commanding officer, General Sir Ian Hamilton, blamed his subsequent removal on Murdoch’s coloured account. The Anzacs’ withdrawal from the campaign also came to be seen as stemming from what had been written. Keith Murdoch’s version would eventually be summarized by his admiring son: ‘it may not have been fair, but it changed history’.[95 - Quoted in William Shawcross, Murdoch, p. 38.] In the year the son bought The Times, he co-financed a film, Gallipoli, starring Mel Gibson, in which effete British commanders casually sacrificed the lives of courageous anti-Establishment Australians. Given a choice between truth and legend, the son continued to promote the legend.

From the moment of Keith Murdoch’s Dardanelles scoop, he had the attention and support of Lord Northcliffe. The owner of The Times became a mentor for the motivated Australian, inspiring him and including him in his influential social circle. And Murdoch learned a good deal from the man who had done so much to create the mass-appeal ‘new journalism’, launching new titles and rejuvenating old ones like The Times. When Murdoch struck out on his own, taking up the editorship of Australia’s Melbourne Herald, Northcliffe even went over there to sing his praises. The Herald’s directors soon had cause to join in: circulation rose dramatically and its editor joined its management board, buying other papers and a new medium of enormous potential – a radio station. Growth would be fuelled by acquisition, creating a business empire in a country in which the print media was entirely localized. It was also a route to making enemies who believed Keith (from 1933, Sir Keith) Murdoch’s expansionist strategy not only gave the Herald and Weekly Times Group too much financial clout but also made its managing director a kingmaker in Australian politics as well. The Herald Group’s competitors were especially dismayed when with the outbreak of the Second World War he was appointed Australia’s director-general of information. The role of state censor was certainly not in keeping with the role he had played in the previous conflict. But when, in 1941, ten-year-old Keith Rupert Murdoch arrived at boarding school, it was to discover to his surprise that it was his father’s crusade to bolster the power of the press that was often looked at with mistrust and apprehension.

Though he showed little interest in Geelong’s emphasis on team sports, Rupert Murdoch’s childhood had been predominately spent outdoors with his three sisters riding and snaring (Rupert persuaded his sisters to skin the unfortunate rodents for a modest fee while he sold on the pelts at a larger mark-up). Home was his parents’ ninety-acre estate, Cruden Farm, thirty miles south of Melbourne. The house itself was extended over the years and by the time Rupert was growing up there it resembled the sort of colonnaded colonial residence more generally associated with Virginian old money. But rather than be overexposed to its creature comforts, Rupert spent his evenings between the ages of eight and sixteen in a hut in the grounds. His mother thought it would be good for him.[96 - Shawcross, Murdoch, pp. 47–9; Rupert Murdoch to the author, interview, 4 August 2003.]

Cruden was named after the small Aberdeenshire fishing village from which Rupert Murdoch’s grandfather, the Revd Patrick Murdoch, had lived and preached. A Minister in the principled and unyielding Calvinism of the Free Church of Scotland, the Revd Murdoch had in 1884 transferred his mission to the fast-expanding metropolis of Melbourne. Widely admired, by 1905 he had risen to the church’s highest position in the country – moderator of the General Assembly of Australia. The grandfather on his mother’s side provided young Rupert with a contrasting influence: Rupert Greene was an affable half-Irish, free-spirited gambling man. Not surprisingly, commentators came to see Rupert Murdoch as, in some ways, a composite of the two.

In 1950 Murdoch went up to Oxford University. For the most part he enjoyed student life there and later became a generous benefactor of his college, Worcester. But at the time, and despite the efforts of such eminent tutors as Asa Briggs, it was not his Philosophy, Politics and Economics degree course that held his attention. At the Geelong school debating society, he had espoused radical and frequently socialist views. He maintained this stance at Oxford, often attending Union debates where bestrode confidently the young Tory matador, Rees-Mogg of Balliol. Murdoch, however, chose to stand for office in the university Labour Club. The club’s president, the young Gerald Kaufman, had other ideas, and had him disqualified for illegally soliciting votes (canvassing being – technically – forbidden). Some thought it was Murdoch who was indulging in gesture politics. He kept a bust of Lenin in his rooms, but they were among the finest in college. He was also one of the few students committed to the triumph of the proletariat to own, in his final year, a car in early 1950s Oxford. He had an eclectic circle of friends in a whimsical philosophical society he joined named after Voltaire. Cherwell described him as ‘turbulent, travelled and twenty-one, he is known … as a brilliant betting man with that individual Billingsgate touch. He manages Cherwell publicity in his spare time.’[97 - Quoted in Shawcross, Murdoch, p. 61.] Relegated to even sparer time were his studies and in 1953 he went down with a third-class degree.

On coming down, he got his first taste of Fleet Street as a junior sub at the Daily Express. The pride of Beaverbrook’s titles, the Express was at that time close to the summit of its prestige and popularity. Edward Pickering found time to keep a paternal eye on Sir Keith’s son as he toiled away on the subs desk. Indeed, Pickering assumed the mentor’s role for Rupert Murdoch that Northcliffe had played for his father. And the young journalist appreciated the training, retaining throughout his career the highest regard for the man he would ultimately make executive vice-chairman of Times Newspapers.

In September 1953, Murdoch returned to Australia. But it was not the homecoming of which he had once dreamed. Sir Keith had died the previous year while his son was still up at Oxford. It was a terrible blow. ‘My father was always a model for me,’ Murdoch later said. ‘He died when I was twenty-one, but I had idolized him.’[98 - Murdoch quoted in Chief Executive magazine; quoted in TNL News, November 1982.] And the son had learned something else from his father’s experience: Sir Keith had built up a newspaper empire, but as a manager, not an owner. After death duties had taken a sizeable claim, the money left for his widow Lady (later Dame) Elisabeth, son and three daughters was held in the family holding company, Cruden Investments. The Herald Group persuaded Lady Elisabeth to sell them the Murdoch half-share in the Brisbane Courier-Mail on terms that proved highly favourable to the Herald Group. Thus the only proprietorship left for Rupert Murdoch to inherit was a controlling interest in News Limited, owner of a single by no means secure daily, the Adelaide News – which was not even the biggest paper in Adelaide – and its sister title, the Sunday Mail. The immediate response of the Herald Group was to try and strip him of it. On failing to persuade Lady Elisabeth to sell them the Murdoch stake in News Limited, they announced their intention to drive the Adelaide News out of business. Sir Keith had helped make the Herald Group the most important media company in Australia. Its treatment of his family on the morrow of his death caused tremendous acrimony. And it instilled in the son an important lesson about where power lay. He would follow in his father’s footsteps, but with one crucial difference – he was determined to own the papers he built up.

The first objective was to see off the Herald Group’s assault on the Adelaide News and Sunday Mail. The attack was repulsed and News Limited became the basis of Rupert Murdoch’s acquisitions fund. Within two years of taking the helm he saw its net assets double. After purchasing a Melbourne women’s magazine, the loss-making Perth Sunday Times became his first newspaper acquisition in 1956, when he was still only twenty-four. He transformed its sales but kept its sensationalist reporting. The purchase of other small local papers followed. Then he bid successfully for one of the two licences for Adelaide’s first television channels. His Channel 9 beat the rival Channel 7 to be first on the air and started generating enough revenue to finance far grander dreams of expansion. Sydney’s newspaper market was a virtual duopoly of the Fairfax and Packer families but in 1960 Murdoch got a foot in the door when Fairfax sold him the Mirror, a downmarket paper which had become something of an embarrassment to the company and which when sold, it was imagined, would be less of a threat if owned by an outsider like Murdoch than by a more direct rival. Instead, the result was a no-holes-barred circulation war in which Sydney’s tradition of sensationalist reporting was surpassed.

In 1964 Murdoch launched his first new title. Based in the capital, Canberra, The Australian became the country’s only truly national newspaper. It was also a serious-minded broadsheet, committed to political analysis and in-depth reporting. In other words, it was a departure from its owner’s previous projects. Maxwell Newton, The Australian’s editor, recalled that on its first night Murdoch told him, ‘“Well, I’ve got where I am by some pretty tough and pretty larrikin methods … but I’ve got there. And now,” he said, “what I want to do – I want to be able to produce a newspaper that my father would have been proud of.”’[99 - Maxwell Newton in ‘Six Australians: Profiles of Power’, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 1 January 1966, quoted in Neil Chenoweth, Virtual Murdoch, p. 32.] He stuck with the paper ever after, despite its inability to return a profit.

In 1969, Murdoch made the great leap, breaking into the British market with a newspaper far removed from his product in Canberra. He had originally wanted to take control of the Daily Mirror, but purchasing sufficient shares proved impossible. The News of the World was a popular Sunday institution, long known as the ‘News of the Screws’ because of its stories about defrocked vicars and low goings-on in high places (or just low places if it was a slow news day). With six million copies sold each Sunday (down from a peak of over eight million in 1950), the raucous and right-wing publication had the largest circulation of any newspaper in Britain. But by 1968 its Carr family proprietors, giving the outward impression of ennui, found themselves fragmented and receiving the unwelcome attention of Robert Maxwell. In order to prevent Maxwell buying a third of their company’s shares, the Carrs opted to sell a 40 per cent stake to Murdoch. This seemed the best policy since, although the thirty-eight-year-old Australian would become managing director, he had promised that he would not seek to increase further his share and that Sir William Carr – or, in time, another member of his family – would continue to be chairman of the company. Within six months of the deal going through, Murdoch duly increased his share, entrenched his control of the paper and forced Sir William, incapacitated by illness, to resign. Murdoch then put himself forward as chairman. He regarded this as a matter of business sense. Others called it sharp practice.

It was the trade unions that provided Murdoch with his greatest coup. Maxwell, having been thwarted in his attempt to acquire the News of the World, hoped to buy the ailing Sun from the Daily Mirror’s owners, IPC. He would maintain the Sun’s left-leaning politics and would not let it challenge the Mirror directly for dominance. Delighted, IPC agreed generous terms of sale. But Maxwell also made it clear that in taking on a loss-making paper he would have to cut jobs and costs. The unions objected to this, and Hugh Cudlipp, IPC’s chairman, feared it might trigger a wave of union militancy that would disrupt production of the company’s highly profitable Mirror. Cudlipp had fathered the Sun in 1964 as a middle-market broadsheet (it replaced the defunct trade union-backed Daily Herald bought by IPC three years earlier) and did not want to contemplate infanticide. So he sold it for the trivial sum of £500,000 (of which only £50,000 was a down payment) to Murdoch, a man who – compared to Maxwell or the alternative of certain death – had the unions’ blessing. Over the next three years, the circulation of Murdoch’s Sun rose from under one million to over three million. The paper’s mix of sauce and sensationalism earned its new owner the sobriquet ‘Dirty Digger’. But more to the point, he now had his cash cow and could plan for expansion accordingly.

Yet Murdoch’s next forays into Fleet Street were unsuccessful. It seemed The Times would never come up for sale – Roy Thomson had pledged as much and was not in apparent need of ready cash. But the future of another illustrious title, the Observer, edited by Gavin Astor’s cousin David, appeared far less certain. In 1976, however, it preferred to sell itself for a mere £1 million to Atlantic Richfield rather than to the downmarket tabloid owner of the Sun and the News of the World. Like Thomson with Times Newspapers, Atlantic Richfield was a company making large profits from oil exploration that talked the language of moral obligation rather than business opportunity (at least until 1981 when it sold the loss-making paper to Tiny Rowland). In 1977, Murdoch’s was one of the raised hands in the crowded bidding for the fallen Beaverbrook empire. The prospect of breathing new life into the once mighty Daily Express, where nearly a quarter of a century earlier he had learned the subeditors’ craft from Edward Pickering, was naturally appealing. But he lost to a higher bid from Trafalgar House who placed a building contractor, Victor Matthews, behind the chairman’s desk of the newly named Express Newspapers.

But by this stage, Murdoch’s News Limited had spread to three continents. His first American acquisitions came in Texas when in 1973 he bought the San Antonio Express and its News sister paper. After a slow start the titles became increasingly profitable. An attempt to launch a rival to the National Enquirer proved unsuccessful but he was not to be put off by temporary reverses (he merely transformed his product into Star, a women’s magazine that by the early eighties returned a $12 million annual profit). The great test of his mettle came in 1976 when Dorothy Schiff sold him the liberal leaning New York Post. He paid $10 million for a paper that was haemorrhaging money, but rather than taking time to regroup he immediately pressed ahead, spending a further $10 million to buy New York magazine and Village Voice.

In the twenty-eight years between his father’s death and his acquisition of The Times, Murdoch had progressed from owning one newspaper in Adelaide to becoming a major presence across the English-speaking world with annual sales of over A$ 1 billion (£485 million). His News Corporation was valued on the Sydney stock exchange at £100 million. It owned half the shares in its British subsidiary, News International (owner of Times Newspapers and the tabloids of News Group Newspapers). The other half of News International’s shares was quoted on the London stock exchange with a value of £35 million. Yet the perceived imperative of keeping personal control had not been squandered in the midst of this expansion. The Murdoch family’s holding company, Cruden Investments, still owned 43 per cent of the parent company.[100 - Sunday Times, 15 February 1981; Daily Telegraph, 30 September 1981.]

Murdoch was able to pursue a policy of aggressive expansion because of the profitability of his London tabloids and by pointing to a proven track record in turning around under-performing titles. It was enough to secure credit from the banks. But his growing band of critics had come to credit him only with debasing the profession of journalism. Aside from his patronage of The Australian (and even here there had been evidence of his interference in editorial policy), he was now held in contempt by those who believed he had built success upon a heap of trash. His titles sensationalized events, trivialized serious issues (when indeed they bothered to report serious issues at all) and frequently allowed their zeal in getting a scoop to overcome questions of taste, fairness and honesty. More than any other, it was Murdoch’s name that had become associated with ‘tabloid journalism’ as a pejorative term.

From November 1970, the Sun sported topless women on its page three. Feminists and arbiters of decency loudly condemned this popular move. In fact, it was not exactly a Fleet Street first: as long ago as 1937 the high-minded Hugh Cudlipp, then editor of the Mirror’s Sunday sister paper, had reproduced a topless damsel chaperoned by the obtuse picture caption ‘a charming springtime study of an apple-tree in full blossom’. Even newspapers owned by such respectable figures as Lord Thomson and edited by William Rees-Mogg were not immune. Five months after the Sun launched its topless page three girls, The Times pictured one of them nude in a full-page advertisement for Fisons’ slimming biscuits (one reader asked whether the paper’s self-regarding 1950s advertising slogan ‘Top People Take The Times’ should be replaced with ‘Topless People Take The Times’; another wrote, ‘I hope this delightful picture has the same effect on The Times’s circulation as it does on mine.’). Although it proved a sell-out issue, it did not, however, start a broadsheet trend. In contrast, page three nudity became synonymous with the Sun. Those who did not believe masscirculation newspapers were the place for entertainment or triviality hated Murdoch’s winning formula every bit as much as a previous generation had chastised Northcliffe for giving the people what they wanted in place of what was thought good for them. In the case of the Sun and the New York Post, Murdoch had indeed taken serious-minded newspapers downmarket. But many of his offending newspapers (in particular the News of the World, the Perth Sunday Times and the Sydney Daily Mirror) had been peddling titillation, half-truth and questionable journalistic standards long before his arrival on the scene. But the increasing size not only of headlines – now often involving a comic pun – but also graphic photographs certainly made their wares more pervasive and intrusive.

Murdoch was not interested in the critics of his tabloids. In his eyes they were cultural snobs, seeking to enforce their own tastes on millions of people whose lives were lived in conditions about which the arbiters of taste demonstrated scant concern or understanding. Papers like the Sun and the New York Post were responding to a need, reflecting what their readers wanted to unwind with in the course of what was otherwise a day of toil. But Murdoch went further in the defence of his titles. They were not just a form of cheap entertainment; they were genuine upholders of a fearless fourth estate. What the cultural establishment branded scandal-mongering was, more often, an attempt to hold to account those in public life for their actions – public and private. While the self-righteous broadsheets lazily reported ‘official’ news after it had happened, the popular press regularly created the news in the first place, by uncovering what was actually going on behind the veneer of authorized pronouncement. It was, Murdoch asserted:

not the serious press in America but the muck-rakers, led by Lincoln Steffens and his New York World, who became the permanent opposition and challenged the American trinity of power: big business, big labour and big government. It was not the serious press which first campaigned for the Negro in America. It was the small, obscure newspapers of the Deep South.[101 - Rupert Murdoch, speech at Melbourne University, 15 November 1972.]

Nor was this a phenomenon of the New World. Having sympathized with the Confederates in the Civil War, zealously advocated the appeasement of Hitler in the 1930s and adopted an understanding attitude towards Stalin in the 1940s, The Times had, in its high-minded way, not always walked with angels.

Yet, it was the social and political comment in Murdoch’s tabloids that many of his critics found the most pernicious aspect of his influence. The proprietor had long since mislaid his bust of Lenin, but not his dislike of the class system, and in the first three general elections of his ownership, the Sun endorsed the Labour Party. But when it came out in support of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives for the 1979 election, left and liberal commentators perceived they were now up against a formidable foe that was hooking millions of innocent readers to right-wing policies by pandering to their fears and sugaring the poison with smut and light entertainment. It was as if the Sun had become the opiate of the people. Two headlines in the paper in the months leading up to the 1979 election became legendary: ‘Crisis? What crisis?’ misquoted what the Labour Prime Minister, James Callaghan, had said on returning from a summit in Guadeloupe (although it caught accurately the mood he conveyed) while ‘Winter of Discontent’ soon became the recognized description of the period of industrial strife.[102 - Sun, headlines, 11 January and 30 April 1979.] In fact the Richard III reference had actually been made by Callaghan in a television interview two months earlier, but it was the Sun’s usage that gave it wider currency. Despite the evidence – as Callaghan acknowledged – that there was a cultural sea change underway among the electorate in favour of Mrs Thatcher, discontented figures on the left began to believe that their arguments had been defeated not in a reasoned debate but by the cheap headlines of Murdoch’s newspapers and their equivalents on the advertising hoardings hired by Saatchi & Saatchi. Given that Murdoch was known to interfere in the line his newspapers took, it was reasonable to assume the right-wing slant was all his doing. In fact, the extent of the Sun’s partisan support for Mrs Thatcher was far more a case of its editor, Larry Lamb, dictating the paper’s politics to the proprietor. Murdoch’s instincts had been far more cautious. But editors were easily dispensable and it was Murdoch who gained the opprobrium, one that got worse the more he came to believe Lamb had made the correct call.

This was the background to Harold Evans’s determination to have legally watertight safeguards against Murdoch’s exercising any editorial interference in The Times and Sunday Times. And there were plenty of journalists on the payroll determined to assert their independent judgment from the first. The profile of Rupert Murdoch that appeared in The Times upon his gaining control of the paper was certainly not effusive. Dan van der Vat described a ‘ruthless entrepreneur … and pioneer of female nudity’ pursuing a strategy of taking his papers ‘down-market to raise circulation’. Murdoch was the owner in the United States of ‘the downmarket Star’ who ‘transformed in the familiar down-market manner’ the New York Post. Scraping the barrel to try and find something positive to say, van der Vat’s profile concluded that The Times and Sunday Times ‘each have the most demanding readership in Britain, and it is a well-known tenet of Mr Murdoch’s philosophy to give the readers what they want’. The leader article, written by Rees-Mogg and entitled ‘The Fifth Proprietorship’, was less keen to find fault. Sketching the previous four owners of the paper, it noted, ‘neither Northcliffe nor Roy Thomson … managed to solve its commercial problems. If Mr Murdoch does resolve those problems he will have achieved something which has defied the masters of his craft.’ In Rees-Mogg’s opinion, the new owner stood ‘somewhere between’ Northcliffe’s ‘editorial genius’ and Thomson’s outlook as ‘a business man’. Murdoch was ‘a newspaper romantic’.[103 - Leading article, ‘The Fifth Proprietorship’, The Times, 13 February 1981.]

Less happy with this affair of the heart was the new owner’s wife, Anna. Looking forward to bringing up a young family in New York, she did not want to be uprooted and moved to London, a city in which she had previously had bad experiences (in particular the murder of a friend by kidnappers who mistook the woman for their actual ransom target – Anna herself). The Times, she conceded, was ‘not something that I really want, but if Rupert wants it and it makes him happy I’m sure we’ll sort it out’.[104 - Quoted in Leapman, Barefaced Cheek, p. 174.] Nonetheless, for her husband’s fiftieth birthday on 11 March 1981, she presented him with a cake iced with a mock front page of The Times – into which he excitedly plunged the knife.

CHAPTER TWO

‘THE GREATEST EDITOR IN THE WORLD’

The Rise and Fall of Harold Evans

I

After fourteen years in the chair, William Rees-Mogg had made it clear he would relinquish the editorship once the transferral of The Times’s ownership was complete. Thus, the first question facing Rupert Murdoch was whether the new editor should be appointed from inside or outside the paper. It was recognized that existing staff would be happier with ‘one of their own’ taking the helm rather than an outsider who might sport alienating ideas about improving the product. But it was not the journalists who were footing the losses for a paper that, on current performance, was failing commercially. In making his recommendation to The Times’s board of independent national directors, the proprietor had to consider the signal he would be sending out both to the journalists and to the market outside about what sort of paper he wanted by how far he looked beyond the environs of Gray’s Inn Road.

There were three credible internal candidates. As early as 12 February, Hugh Stephenson, the long-serving editor of The Times business news section, had written to Murdoch asking to be considered for the top job.[105 - Hugh Stephenson to Denis Hamilton, 13 February 1981, Hamilton Papers 9383/12.] A left-leaning Wykehamist who had been president of the Oxford Union prior to six years in the Foreign Office, Stephenson had been with The Times since 1968. This was an impressive résumé, but not one especially appealing to the new proprietor who was, in any case, not an admirer of the paper’s business content. Even quicker off the blocks was Louis Heren, who had made his intentions known to Sir Denis Hamilton the previous day. He was probably the candidate who wanted the editorship most and his success would certainly have been something of a Fleet Street fairy tale. The son of a Times print worker who had died when his boy was only four, Louis Heren had been born in 1919 and grown up in the poverty of the East End before getting a job as a Times messenger boy. His lucky break had come when an assistant editor noticed him in a corner, quietly reading Conrad’s Nostromo. Subsequently, he was taken on as a reporter and, after war service, he developed into one of the paper’s leading foreign correspondents, sending back dispatches from Middle Eastern battlefronts where the new state of Israel was struggling for its survival, and from the Korean War and later becoming chief Washington correspondent. If not a tale of rags to riches, it was certainly rags to respectability and, as Rees-Mogg’s deputy, he was entitled to expect to be considered seriously. But the fact that he had been, to all intents and purposes, educated by The Times posed questions as to whether he was best able to see the paper’s problems from an outside perspective. He was also sixty-two years old. When he sent the new owner a list of suggested improvements to the paper, Murdoch replied, without much sensitivity, that he wanted an editor ‘who will last at least ten years’ and that another rival for the post, Charles Douglas-Home, ‘is more popular than you’.[106 - Quoted in Michael Leapman, Barefaced Cheek, p. 203.]

On this last point, Murdoch was well informed. Charles Cospatrick Douglas-Home (‘Charlie’ to his friends) was the popular choice, certainly among the senior staff. He was the man Rees-Mogg wanted as his successor and when the outgoing editor asked six of the assistant editors whom they wanted, five of them had opted for Douglas-Home. The chief leader writer, Owen Hickey, had even taken it upon himself to write to Denis Hamilton assuring him that Douglas-Home was the man to pick.[107 - Owen Hickey to Denis Hamilton, 11 February 1981, Hamilton Papers 9383/12.] At forty-four, he was the right age and since joining The Times from the Daily Express in 1965 he had held many of the important positions within the paper: defence correspondent, features editor, home editor and foreign editor. He had been educated at Eton and served in the Royal Scots Greys. He was the nephew of the former Conservative Prime Minister, Alec Douglas-Home, and his cousin, a childminder at the All England Kindergarten, had recently become engaged to the heir to the throne. So he certainly had highly placed ‘connections’ (a disadvantage in the eyes of those who believed having friends in high places compromised fearless journalism). But ‘Charlie’ was no society cyphen. He took his profession seriously and had well-formed ‘hawkish’ views, especially on defence and foreign policy – all likely to endear him to the new, increasingly right-wing proprietor. He was also something of a contradictory figure: a former army officer who no longer drank, a fearless foxhunter who did not eat meat and a gentleman who, like an ambitious new boy in the Whips’ Office, had once been caught keeping a secret dossier on the private foibles of his colleagues.[108 - John Grigg, The History of The Times, vol. VI: The Thomson Years, p. 376; Leapman, Barefaced Cheek, p. 201.]

Murdoch interviewed the three ‘internal’ candidates on 16 February although, since he already had a preferred candidate in mind, he was essentially going through the motions. The man he wanted was not an old hand of The Times. Having made such a success steering the Sun, Larry Lamb anticipated the call up and was deeply hurt when it did not come. ‘I would never have dreamt of it,’ Murdoch later made clear, ‘he would have been a disaster.’[109 - Rupert Murdoch to the author, interview, 4 August 2003.] Yet Murdoch’s critics, incredulous that he meant what he said about guaranteeing editorial independence, were still waiting to see which other stooge he would appoint. In an article entitled ‘Into the arms of Count Dracula’, the editor of the New Statesman, Bruce Page, informed his readers, ‘it is believed in the highest reaches of Times Newspapers that the candidate which [sic] he has in mind is Mr Bruce Rothwell. Rothwell can reasonably be described as a trusted Murdoch aide …’[110 - Bruce Page, ‘Into the arms of Count Dracula’, New Statesman, 30 January 1981.] But, whatever was now the practice at the New Statesman, The Times was not ready to be run by a man named Bruce. Murdoch had fixed upon someone very different – a hero in liberal media circles.

Even before the deal to buy Times Newspapers was done, Murdoch had invited Harold Evans round to his flat in Eaton Place and asked him whether he would like to edit The Times. It was a probing, perhaps mischievous, question since Evans was at the time still trying to prevent the Murdoch bid for TNL so that his own Sunday Times consortium could succeed. But Murdoch could have been forgiven for regarding the avoidance of saying ‘no’ as a conditional ‘yes’.

Harold Evans was the most celebrated editor in Fleet Street. At a time when standards were said to be falling all over the ‘Street of Shame’, Evans appeared to exemplify all that was best about the public utility of journalism. By 1981, he had been editor of the Sunday Times for fourteen years – thereby shadowing exactly the service record of his opposite number, Rees-Mogg, in the adjoining building at Gray’s Inn Road. The two editors were the same age but their backgrounds could not have been more different. Two years older than Murdoch, Harold Evans was born in 1928, the son of an engine driver. His grandfather was illiterate. Leaving the local school in Manchester at the age of sixteen, he had got his first job towards the end of the Second World War as a £1-a-week reporter on a newspaper in Ashton-under-Lyme. The interruption of national service with the RAF in 1946 led to opportunity: the chance to study at Durham University (where he met his Liverpudlian first wife, Enid) and later Commonwealth Fund Journalism fellowships at the universities of Chicago and Stanford. By 1961 he had become editor of the Northern Echo. Driven by its new editor, the Echo started to take its investigative journalism beyond its Darlington readership. Its campaign to prove the innocence of a Londoner wrongly convicted of murder gained it national prominence. One of those who took notice was the editor of the Sunday Times, Sir Denis Hamilton, who brought Evans down to London to work alongside him. The following year, 1967, he succeeded Hamilton as editor of the paper. It was a meteoric rise from provincial semi-obscurity. Evans immediately proved himself at Gray’s Inn Road. In his new role as editor-in-chief, Sir Denis’s patronage and guidance were useful and some of the paper’s success was the consequence of his own formula: the paper’s colour magazine (a honey pot for advertising) and major book serializations. But Evans built on these strong foundations and, assisted by Bruce Page, Don Berry and others, he entrenched the position of the Sunday Times as Britain’s principal campaigning and investigative newspaper.

In 1972, Evans drove the campaign with which his name, and that of the Sunday Times, will always be associated: the battle to force Distillers Ltd to compensate adequately the victims of its drug, Thalidomide. The immediate reaction – as he well anticipated – was Distillers’ withdrawal of £600,000 worth of advertising in the paper. The other equally swift response was an injunction silencing the Sunday Times’s attempts to reveal the history of the drug’s development and marketing. With great tenacity (and an understanding proprietor in Roy Thomson), Evans continued the fight through the courts and to Strasbourg. Distillers was eventually forced into a £27 million payout to its product’s victims. And at last, in 1977, the Sunday Times got to print the details of its story (although the print unions decided to call a stoppage that day, ensuring few got to read about it).

Under Evans, the Sunday Times was a paper with a liberal conscience. The paper appeared at ease with the more permissive and meritocratic legacy of the 1960s. The cynic within Murdoch may well have thought that he could silence the howls of protest about his being allowed to buy The Times by putting such a respected, independent and liberal-minded editor in charge of it. Indeed, to appoint the man who had spent the previous months trying to wreck the News International bid with his own consortium (and who had privately applauded Aitken’s attack on it in the Commons) appeared to show a spirit of open-minded forgiveness that few had previously associated with Murdoch’s public conduct. Surely the new owner could not be all that right wing or controlling if he put in charge a man who had wanted the Sunday Times to be part owned by that tribune of democratic socialism, the Guardian? This would certainly be a calming message to convey.

But there was genuine admiration as well. Back in 1972, Murdoch had played his part in the Thalidomide controversy. He had been behind the anonymous posters that suddenly appeared across the country ridiculing Distillers, hoping (unsuccessfuly) that by this means his papers could discuss the company’s role at a time when its legal proceedings made doing so contempt of court. Unusually for Fleet Street proprietors, Murdoch understood every aspect of the newspaper business – not just the accounts. Thanks to the efforts of his father and Edward Pickering at the Express, Murdoch could sub articles with effortless aplomb. In this respect, he had something in common with Evans – comprehensive mastery of the journalistic craft. For Evans was the author of such tomes as The Active Newsroom and Editing and Design (in five volumes) which covered almost every aspect of putting together the written (and pictorial) page. The two men also appeared to have a common outlook. They admired American spirit and drive (both later became American citizens) and neither wished to be considered for membership of the traditional British Establishment. Despite his migration to London, Evans still wanted to be considered something of an outsider and this attracted Murdoch. The American academic Martin Wiener had just written his influential book, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit 1850–1980. Its message appealed to Murdoch who told a luncheon at the Savoy: ‘It is the very simple fact that politicians, bureaucrats, the gentlemanly professionals at the top of the civil service, churchmen, professional men, publicists, Oxbridge and the whole establishment just don’t like commerce.’ Apart from the reference to ‘publicists’, he had basically reeled off a list of the core Times readership. But he was not finished with his castigation: ‘They have produced a defensive and conservative outlook in business which has coalesced with a defensive and conservative trades union structure imposing on Britain a check in industrial growth, a pattern of industrial behaviour suspicious of change – energetic only in keeping things as they are.’[111 - Rupert Murdoch to the annual lunch of the Advertising Association, quoted in TNL News, April 1981.]

With this attitude, it is easy to see why Murdoch hoped for great things from a restless and meritocratic figure like Harold Evans. That he could be given a pulpit in the housemagazine of the Establishment while being sufficiently intelligent to prevent accusations of being a downmarket influence made him, in Murdoch’s view, the ideal candidate.

It was up to the independent national directors, sitting on the holdings board of Times Newspapers, to make the final decision. The board consisted of four peers of the realm, Lords Roll, Dacre, Greene and Robens who, before ennoblement, had been Eric Roll, civil servant and banker; Hugh Trevor-Roper, historian; Sid Greene of the National Union of Railwaymen; and Alf Robens of the National Coal Board. Two new directors nominated by Murdoch now joined them: Sir Denis Hamilton and Sir Edward Pickering. Hamilton’s appointment was uncontroversial but Dacre objected to Murdoch assuming Pickering would be acceptable without the directors first voting on it. There was an embarrassing delay at the start of the meeting while this was done although it was not entirely to the directors’ credit that they appeared to know little about one of Fleet Street’s most successful editors and longest serving figures.[112 - Richard Searby to the author, interview, 11 June 2002; Leapman, Barefaced Cheek, pp. 204–5.] It had been under Pickering’s editorship that the Daily Express had achieved its highest ever circulation. Suitably acquainted with his qualifications, the directors hastily assented to Pickering joining them and proceeded on to the main business – the appointment of the new editor. Under the articles of association, the proprietor had the power of putting forward his preference for editor. The directors had the right of veto but not necessarily the option of discussing who they actually wanted. Had they the right of proposition, the editorship would most likely have gone to Charles Douglas-Home. But it was Harold Evans’s name that Murdoch put before them.

Not everyone shared his enthusiasm. Marmaduke Hussey, the executive vice-chairman of TNL who had overseen the failed shutdown strategy with the unions in 1979–80, had already assured Murdoch that the intention to make Evans editor of The Times and to move his old deputy, Frank Giles, into his vacated chair at the Sunday Times was ‘the quickest way to wreck two marvellous newspapers I can think of!’. To no avail, Hussey pleaded with him to make Douglas-Home the new editor.[113 - Marmaduke Hussey, Chance Governs All, p. 179.] Having brought Evans to the Sunday Times in the first place and watched over him as group editor-in-chief and TNL chairman, Denis Hamilton was, in principle, well placed to offer his assessment. And it was not entirely favourable. Certainly, Evans had his flashes of inspiration, even genius, but he was temperamental and liable to change his mind. In the course of producing a once weekly product this could be managed, but in editing a daily it could be disastrous. Yet, at the meeting of national directors, Hamilton chose to pull his punches and the opposition to Evans’s appointment was instead led by the forthright historian Lord Dacre, who articulated his objections with a pointed vehemence that bordered upon the abusive. But Dacre’s blackball was not enough and following his departure to deliver a lecture at Oxford, Murdoch’s insistence that The Times needed the best and Evans was the best convinced the rest of the board.[114 - Sir Edward Pickering to the author and Richard Searby to the author, 11 June 2002; Rupert Murdoch to the author, 4 August 2003; Denis Hamilton, Editor-in-Chief, p. 181; Leapman, Barefaced Cheek, p. 205.] So it was that Harold Evans became only the eleventh man to edit The Times since Thomas Barnes established the modern concept of the office in 1816, the year after Waterloo.

Evans’s appointment caused a buzz throughout Fleet Street. Those with a liking for archaic usage may still have referred to the paper as ‘The Thunderer’ but as a noun, not a verb. If anything, critics, particularly those who did not read it, thought of it as The (behind the) Times. Murdoch hoped that the new editor would instil some of the Sunday paper’s drive and contemporary feel into the all too respectable daily.

Those happy with the paper as it was greeted this prospect with disquiet. Louis Heren was of the view that ‘we were not a daily version of the Sunday Times’. But he conceded that the niche was a small one, being ‘boxed in by the Guardian on our left and the Daily Telegraph on our right’ while ‘the FT stood between us and all that lovely advertising in the City of London’.[115 - Louis Heren, February 1981, Quarterly of the Commonwealth Press Union.] The fact that the paper’s readers were sufficiently loyal to return to it after it had been off the streets for almost a year was not, in itself, proof that all was well. In retrospect, Hugh Stephenson took the view that the 1979–80 shutdown ‘served to make people realize that the things they really missed about The Times were its quirky features – letters, law reports, obits, crossword. They didn’t miss its news, which wasn’t particularly good. In most respects the Daily Telegraph, the Guardian and the Financial Times were better newspapers.’[116 - Hugh Stephenson, ‘Not the age of The Times’, New Statesman, 11 January 1985.] This was an assessment broadly shared by the new editor.[117 - Harold Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, pp. 188–9.] In 1981, The Times was normally four pages longer than the Guardian and four pages shorter than the Telegraph. But the gap was wider in the statistics that mattered. In daily sales, the Guardian had overtaken The Times in 1974. Almost since the day of its launch in 1855, the Telegraph had given The Times a pasting. When Evans took over, The Times averaged 282,000 daily sales to the Telegraph’s 1.4 million.

Now the drive was on at least to catch up with the Guardian again. There would be no repeat of the famous 1957 advertising campaign – ‘Top People Take The Times’ a preposterously exclusive slogan for a campaign supposedly intended to widen circulation. Murdoch believed The Times could aim for a half-million readership. Under Hamilton and Evans the Sunday Times, with its book serializations and glossy colour magazine, had promoted the new elite of the photogenic. It was as glamorous and of the moment as The Times was monochrome and old-fashioned. Evans’s Sunday Times promoted celebrities and ‘big names’ while the Times old guard were still lamenting the loss of the anonymous non-de-plume ‘By Our Special Correspondent’. Sunday Times reporters having occasion to cross the Gray’s Inn Road connecting bridge that took them into The Times claimed to feel they were crossing into East Berlin.

The Times old guard – those horrified by the connotations of the word ‘promotion’ and ill at ease with the world of the colour supplement – hated the prospect of their paper being turned into a daily Sunday Times or a mark two Telegraph. They and their spiritual forebears had blocked a 1958 report by the accountants Coopers with its outlandish idea about putting news on the front page (as the Guardian had done since 1952), their objections only finally overcome in 1966. Nor did they see what was wrong with a relatively low circulation so long as it was sufficiently upmarket to cover its costs through advertising (as the FT did). There was certainly no obvious link between a broadsheet’s influence and its sales figures: by the late 1930s, the Telegraph had opened up a half-million lead on The Times, but it was Geoffrey Dawson who was the politically influential editor, not the Telegraph’s Arthur Watson.

Those apprehensive about the forthcoming Evans – Murdoch strategy of going for growth could also point to precedent. Fortified by Thomson’s cash injection, Rees-Mogg’s editorship had started with radical attempts to modernize the paper by introducing a separate business news section, a roving ‘News Team’ acting like a rapid reaction force under Michael Cudlipp’s direction, bigger headlines and shorter sentences. Circulation had improved dramatically from 280,000 in 1966 to 430,000 in 1969. Meeting in the White Swan pub, twenty-nine members of staff, including the young Charles Douglas-Home and Brian MacArthur, had signed a declaration condemning what they believed was the accompanying cheapening of the paper’s authority. But the most telling argument was that the paper was still not making a profit – the boosted revenue from sales being outstripped by the cost of the expansion programme necessary to sustain it. So the expansion policy was abandoned; circulation slipped back towards 300,000 and, by the mid-seventies the paper even – fleetingly – returned a profit.

Now the introduction of a Sunday Times man at the helm suggested The Times would retrace its steps and repeat the failed 1967–9 growth strategy, but Harold Evans saw his task as editor in less primarily commercial terms. ‘At the Sunday Times before Hamilton and Thomson,’ he later recalled, ‘it was a sackable offence to provoke a solicitor’s letter,’ but after he became editor ‘we were in the Law Courts so many times I felt they owed me an honorary wig.’ Evans maintained that this became necessary ‘because real reporting ran into extensions of corporate and executive power that had gone undetected, hence unchallenged, and the courts, uninhibited by a Bill of Rights, had given property rights priority over personal rights.’[118 - Evans in British Journalism Review, vol. 13, no. 4, 2002.] This had not been how The Times had generally seen its role during the same period. Indeed, when in 1969 the paper caught out Metropolitan policemen in a bribery sting some old Times hands were deeply uneasy about their paper going in for the sort of exposé that subverted the good name of the forces of law and order. Others agreed. Three days after the story broke, the paper reported on its front page a meeting of Edward Heath’s Shadow Cabinet in which ‘it was considered deeply disturbing that to trial by television … there might now be added trial by newspaper, with The Times leading the way … It was agreed that The Times appeared to have put the printing of allegations against the police above the national interest.’[119 - Michael Leapman, Treacherous Estate, 1992, p. 51.]

With Evans’s arrival, it seemed The Times would become a disruptive influence again. The new editor proposed what he called ‘vertical journalism’ as opposed to the ‘horizontal school of journalism’ with which the paper had become too comfy, whereby ‘speeches, reports and ceremonials occur and they are rendered into words in print along a straight assemblyline. Scandal and injustice go unremarked unless someone else discovers them.’ Evans believed he was the true inheritor of an older Times tradition, ‘The Thunderer’ of Thomas Barnes, in which ‘the effort to get to the bottom of things, which is the aspiration of the vertical school of journalism, cannot be indiscriminate. Judgments have to be made about what is important; they are moral judgments. The vertical school is active. It sets its own agenda; it is not afraid of the word “campaign”.’[120 - Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, p. 340.]

Evans’s style of leadership was markedly different from that of Rees-Mogg. The outgoing editor had always given the impression that it was the paper’s commentary on events that was his prime interest. The leader articles written, he was quite content to leave the office shortly after 7 p.m. in order to spend the evening with his family or at official functions and dinners, confident that the team on the ‘backbench’ could be entrusted with presenting the breaking news stories. Evans could not have been more different. On his first day as editor, he told his staff that he would be on the backbench every night. ‘It is called,’ he said proudly, ‘the editing theory of maximum irritation.’[121 - TNL News, April 1981.] And he was not wrong. As if to make his point, he took off his jacket – a sight unseen during Rees-Mogg’s fourteen years in the chair (unfortunately Evans’s unattended jacket was promptly stolen).[122 - Spectator, 20 June 1981.]

One who lamented the passing of the baton from Rees-Mogg to Evans was Auberon Waugh. He foresaw what might be in store:

If, in the months that follow, footling diagrams or ‘graphics’ begin to appear illustrating how the hostages walked off their aeroplane into a reception centre; profiles of leading hairdressers suddenly break on page 12; inquiries into the safety of some patent medicine replace Philip Howard’s ruminations on the English language; if a cheap, flip radicalism replaces Mr Rees-Mogg’s carefully argued honourable conservatism and nasty, gritty English creeps into the leader columns where once his sonorous phrases basked and played in the sun; if it begins to seem that one more beleaguered outpost has fallen to the barbarians, we should reflect that there never really was an England which spoke in this language of good nature, of friendliness, of fair dealing, of balance. It was all a product of Mr Rees-Mogg’s beautiful mind.[123 - Ibid., 28 February 1981.]

II

In 1967, William Rees-Mogg had left the Sunday Times to edit The Times and brought only three journalists with him from his old paper. But Harold Evans intended a far more dramatic exodus. His first thought was to bring Hugo Young across the bridge to replace the disappointed Louis Heren as deputy editor of The Times. Young, a serious-minded Balliol liberal, was the political editor of the Sunday Times and Evans thought him a suitable successor when, in seven years or so, he would want to stand down from editing The Times. But Frank Giles, the very embodiment of a Foreign Office mandarin whom Murdoch had – to much surprise – appointed as Evans’s successor, did not want to lose so capable a lieutenant and dug in his heels, appealing to Murdoch for protection. To Evans’s annoyance Murdoch backed his new Sunday Times editor. That Evans did not initially want a Times man as his deputy was resented and only after Murdoch, Hamilton and Rees-Mogg all advised him strongly did he agree to elevating Charles Douglas-Home into the position. It was a decision Evans would have cause to regret, but having someone the paper’s staff respected as deputy editor did much – at first – to calm the feeling that the new editor intended to surround himself with his own clique of non-Times men.

The turf war between Evans and Frank Giles continued for several days, the latter resenting what he regarded as his predecessor’s aggressive attempt to poach so many of his old paper’s best staff. Giles tried to hold on to Peter Stothard but Evans was adamant that his young protégé should join him. Despite another appeal from Giles to Murdoch, Evans got his way and Stothard became deputy features editor.[124 - Harold Evans to Frank Giles, 27 and 29 April 1981, Evans files.] Features was one of the areas Evans wanted to see given more emphasis and it promised to be a key role in the new paper. Assisted by Nicholas Wapshott, Stothard would work with the new features editor, the thirty-two-year-old Washington correspondent of the Observer, Anthony Holden. After persuading Holden – a renaissance man whose interests ranged from poker to writing libretti for opera – to join The Times, Evans held out to him the prospect that he would succeed him as editor … in good time.

Other senior changes were also made. Fred Emery, who had been reporting from the world’s various trouble spots for The Times since 1958, became home news editor. In Douglas-Home’s place as foreign editor, Evans put the former editor-in-chief of Reuters, Brian Horton. Sir Denis Hamilton’s son, Adrian (who had been at the Observer), was brought in to run business news in succession to Hugh Stephenson who decided it was time to cut his losses and leave. The following year he became editor of the New Statesman. The other disappointed candidate for the editorship, Louis Heren, was given a ‘roving brief’ as an associate editor. This soon proved – to Heren’s distress – to be something of a non-job.

In the event of both Evans and Douglas-Home being out of the office, the acting editor was to be Brian MacArthur. Responsible for news content and its subediting, he was to be the bridge between the day planning and the night editing. MacArthur was already an immensely experienced journalist. Before Evans brought him over from the Sunday Times, he had worked at the Yorkshire Post, The Times (as news editor) and the Evening Standard. He had also been the founding editor of the Times Higher Education Supplement. These were precocious achievements that Evans admired in a man he thought vaguely resembled ‘one of those eighteenth century portraits of a well-fed Cardinal’.[125 - Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, p. 253.]

Another key addition to Evans’s kitchen cabinet was Bernard Donoughue. The son of a metal polisher in a car factory, Donoughue had gone on to be a policy adviser to Harold Wilson and James Callaghan and was part of the new meritocracy with which Evans felt most at home. Evans wanted Peter Riddell to join the political team under Donoughue’s direction. This would have been a powerful infusion of talent, but not even a generous salary could at that stage tempt Riddell away from the Financial Times.[126 - Evans Day File, 29 April 1981.] However, ballast was added when David Watt, director of the Royal Institute of International Affairs and a former political editor and Washington correspondent of the FT, was hired to write a weekly column on political and foreign affairs.

It was also necessary to tickle the public. Evans brought in Miles Kington to write what he suggested should be a ‘Beachcomber-Way of the World’ column.[127 - Evans Day File, 6 April 1981.] Located on the Court & Social page, the column, entitled ‘Moreover …’, began its Monday to Saturday run in June. Although only 450 words long, it was a tall order for Kington to maintain a daily output of whimsy and a tribute to his skills that he so frequently carried it off week in, week out, for the next five and a half years. It immediately attracted a devoted following, except among its targets. The Welsh trade unionist Clive Jenkins was not amused about a Kington joke that appeared to encourage Welsh Nationalists to burn his house down. Jenkins was furious, demanded an apology on the Court page and assured Evans, ‘My lawyers and the police do not think it is “a joke” and as a result we now have surveillance of my home and office.’ Evans advised him to stop drawing so much attention to the supposed incitement. But to Anthony Holden Jenkins fumed, ‘Who edits Miles Kington?… There are some jokes which are so off that they should never be published.’[128 - Clive Jenkins to Harold Evans, 3 July 1981 and Evans to Jenkins 12 July 1981; Jenkins to Anthony Holden, 3 July 1981, Evans Day File, 3 July 1981.] Meanwhile, Mel Calman continued to raise a smile with his distinctive front-page pocket cartoons, as he had four days a week since 1979. But the editor was deluged with complaints when he put caricatures drawn by Charles Griffin at the head of the day’s prominent person’s birthday column. For some, a cartoon on the Court & Social page was further proof of The Times’s apostasy although many of those featured were delighted and asked if they could purchase the original.

The introduction of a resident political cartoonist caused more prolonged debate. Ranan Lurie was an Israeli born US citizen who had trained with the French Foreign Legion and been dropped behind enemy lines in the Six Day War. Having worked for Life, Newsweek, Die Welt and Bild, he was the world’s most widely syndicated political cartoonist. Like Vicky in Beaverbrook’s Express newspapers, Lurie’s cartoons often created a dynamic tension by taking a different angle on politics from that being proposed elsewhere in the paper. His draughtsmanship was excellent, his small, rotund figures especially suited to depicting ‘hard hats’ enjoying a bit of military brinkmanship. But inevitably he was not to everyone’s taste, particularly those who believed his art trivialized the news pages on which they were carried. Evans had far more consistent success with the appointment that also gave him the greatest satisfaction. This was the arrival of the relentlessly droll Frank Johnson as parliamentary sketch writer. When it came to material, the House of Commons of the early eighties was to provide Johnson with an embarrassment of riches.

Amid these arrivals came a major departure. Bernard Levin was the most famous columnist on the paper. One of the enfant terribles of the sixties satire boom (he was the subject of a famous attempted physical assault while presenting That Was The Week That Was, his assailant seeking revenge for a supposedly cruel review of his wife’s acting talents), Levin combined a sharp intellect, high-culture sensibilities and a talent for upsetting the full range of vested interests, be they union barons or barristers. Scarcely a week went by without Levin ‘going too far this time’. But he had the support of the one person who mattered – the editor. Rees-Mogg had persuaded him to become a Times columnist in 1971, ultimately taking the view that ‘he alone has the ability to resist the gentle English equity which sometimes drifts like desert sand from one column to the next’.[129 - The Times, 23 October 1980.] He was not really, therefore, a Times man in the established sense of the term and various of the offended vested interests got their revenge by blackballing him from the Garrick Club, where Rees-Mogg was a member.

Evans admired Levin’s vituperative prose, if not his ability to punctuate it. Comparing the length of his sentences to ‘the corridors of a Venetian palace’ Evans failed to persuade him to make more concessions to readers’ mental stamina.[130 - Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, p. 263.] But the greatest exertion fell upon Levin himself whose column appeared on Tuesdays, Wednesday and Thursdays (he also wrote for the Sunday Times). He needed a rest, or at least a lightening of the load. His decision to take a break suited Evans’s new features editor, Anthony Holden, who was keen to introduce new blood.[131 - Anthony Holden to the author, interview, 9 April 2003.] Nonetheless, in his final column, Levin helpfully reassured his readers:

My decision is in no way based on any disquiet on my part at the change of editor or proprietor, nor on any lack of confidence in the paper’s future, and anyone saying or writing anything to the contrary is, and for all material purposes should be treated as, a liar.

It would not be long before Evans would be pleading with Levin to return. But by then the trickle of famous names from the Rees-Mogg era departing the paper had turned into a flood.

III

On his twenty-first day in the chair, Evans got his first major test on how to handle a major breaking story for The Times. During the evening of 30 March 1981 news came through that the American President, Ronald Reagan, had been shot. Evans raced back to Gray’s Inn Road and immediately assumed control. His direction proved masterful.

The front page was given over to the story in its entirety (previously even the most momentous news was mixed with other front-page lead stories and continued elsewhere inside the paper). Three sequential picture strips caught like a cine-freeze frame effect, Reagan turning to face his assailant and then going down as he was hit. The headline was itself a cliffhanger: ‘President Reagan shot: bullet still in lung’. The subheading quoted Reagan’s plucky comment to his wife; ‘Honey, I forgot to duck … don’t worry about me I’ll make it.’

Evans’s dramatic cover was certainly different from the front page of The Times on 23 November 1963 which – with classified adverts still on the front page – merely carried a small three-word ‘President Kennedy Assassinated’ note at the top right of the paper’s masthead. Predictably, some traditionalist readers wrote to complain at what they regarded as Evans’s sensationalist, almost tabloid, front page. But had they to hand a Times copy of the death of Kennedy they might have been surprised. Although the news of the Kennedy assassination had appeared on page eight (because that was where foreign news was then to be found, regardless of its importance) the actual page layout was surprisingly similar, complete with an action photograph of a security guard leaping on the back of the dying President’s car with Mrs Kennedy tending to the slumped figure of her husband. Another photograph showed, closeup, the look of shock on New Yorkers’ faces as they learned the news from a tele-type machine in a news agency office window.[132 - The Times, 23 November 1963.] It was true that Evans ran the headline across the width of the page, whereas in 1963 it had followed the separate column spaces, but this was the only major cosmetic difference. The story’s treatment – narrative of the shooting, history of past presidential assassinations, the reaction of world leaders, the next in line – was remarkably similar between 1963 and 1981. Evans merely had the advantage – denied his predecessor – of being able to splash it across a front page.

Unlike Kennedy, Reagan did not die and, by the night’s last edition, the headline had been amended to the more hopeful if less dramatic ‘Bullet removed from lung’. Nor would the story spawn an industry of conspiracy theories. By 2 April, the paper was in a position to report that the would-be assassin, John Hinckley, was a troubled obsessive, intent on killing the President as a means of proving his (unsolicited) love for the eighteen-year-old-actress Jodie Foster.[133 - Ibid., 2 April 1981.] But if the shooting proved, by a matter of centimetres, not to be a turning point in world politics, it provided the first example of Evans’s ability to capture the drama of breaking news and present it in an effective manner. It was commonly agreed across Fleet Street that The Times had excelled.

For an editor with an eye for presentation on the page, improving the paper’s layout was an immediate priority. Frequently, readers had turned the front page to find a full-page advertisement greeting them on page three. Although this was a prime commercial site, it did not convey the impression that the paper was serious about conveying hard news. When, in 1966, classified ads had finally been taken off the front page, they were moved to the back page. They had remained there ever since. Evans questioned whether such a prominent part of the paper should be given over to small ads for budget travel brochures, secretarial courses and personal announcements. With Murdoch’s support, page three was henceforth given over to news while Evans proposed something new for the back page. It was important that the crossword stayed in the bottom left-hand corner where, with paper folded, it could be easily attempted by those lunching on park benches or being jiggled about in congested train compartments. But besides retaining this, the back page was now to be divided in two. The top half would continue main stories carried over from the front page (again, this was easier for tightly packed commuters) alongside the column designed most to sparkle and entertain – Frank Johnson’s parliamentary sketch. In the bottom half, Evans introduced what was christened ‘The Times Information Service’. This was a daily almanac of eclectic information: weather forecasts, a brief digest of what other newspapers were saying, opening hours for historic houses, even, for some reason, London restaurants offering al fresco dining facilities (there appeared not to be very many of these). ‘There is nothing like it in the British press,’ Evans boasted, ‘it is, indeed, another example of The Times, as so often in its history, being the first.’[134 - Evans to Rupert Davenport-Hines (and others), 14 June 1981, Evans Day File.]

But there was not a stampede to follow. The quirkiness of the Information Service was both its attraction and, sometimes, the reason for its impracticality. Private Eye, the satirical magazine with a mission to persecute Evans whenever opportunity presented itself, tried to sabotage it by encouraging its readers to enter a ‘Useless Information Competition’. The Eye would pay £10 for each attempt to mislead The Times with bogus submissions and add a £5 bonus if the paper actually printed it. On more than one occasion, this childish exercise succeeded, very much to Evans’s exasperation.[135 - Private Eye, 28 August 1981; Evans to Anthony Whitaker, 23 October 1981, Evans Day File, A327/3692.]

In overall charge of the redesign was Edwin Taylor, previously Evans’s design director at the Sunday Times (for which he had won the 1980 Newspaper Design Award). Another recruit from the Sunday Times, Oscar Turnill, joined him in the task with Brian MacArthur and Tim Austin, the home news subeditor, assigned to help in the section reorganization. Predictably, there were letters of complaint from readers who regarded any alteration to be, by its very nature, for the worse. Evans found what he called ‘this outcry from the more settled members of the community’ rather tedious, not least because many of the layout alterations were, if anything, taking the paper back to the ‘light face’ traditions of Stanley Morison who had established the classic look of the paper in 1932 and invented the world’s most popular typeface, Times New Roman.[136 - Evans Day File, 22 May 1981.] Evans delighted in writing back to the small legion of detractors in order to point out their foolishness with a brittleness that suggested sensitivity to criticism. ‘I suspect that if we changed to printing on gold leaf paper there would be murmurs of disapproval in the clubs,’ he told one complainer.[137 - Evans to N. P. L. Price, 27 May 1981, Evans Day File.] On occasion, he even took to telephoning his assailants. One of these turned out to be a dentist who was in mid-operation when his receptionist interrupted him with the news there was an urgent call for him on the phone. The patient was then left, mouth stuffed with cotton wool, while his dentist discussed the principles of newspaper layout with the editor of The Times.[138 - Anthony Holden to the author, interview, 9 April 2003.]

The next innovation was the introduction of a Friday tabloid section entitled Preview. Given the accolades later heaped upon the Guardian’s G2 (which The Times eventually copied with T2) tabloid section, Preview was ahead of its time. Covering forthcoming arts and entertainments, it was geared, in particular, to the younger end of the market and was perfectly launched in June 1981 to coincide with a strike at Time Out magazine. While falling within Anthony Holden’s empire, its driving force was a former Time Out journalist, Richard Williams. Evans was delighted with Williams’s work and marvelled that Murdoch had given the project financial backing after only a single brief meeting, a speed of decision making that Evans contrasted favourably with the months it took to approve innovations from the Thomson Organisation.[139 - Ibid.]

In the month that Preview was launched The Times axed its least successful section. Europa was a monthly journal, largely comprising economic stories and ‘business profiles’ that was produced jointly with Le Monde, La Stampa and Die Welt on the first Tuesday of every month. The Times had got involved in 1973. Britain had joined the EEC and Rees-Mogg was at that stage a firm enthusiast for the process of European integration in which political institutions were not enough – The Times proclaiming that ‘Europe need a European press’. The fact that Europa proved to be a patchwork of almost hypnotic dullness did not disqualify it from winning the 1978 Zaccari prize for spreading EEC ideals. But idealism and economics were not compatible partners and it brought Gray’s Inn Road nothing but losses. The plug was pulled in June (July was the final issue) 1981 after the previous issue had managed to carry no advertising whatsoever. The jilted European papers then approached the Guardian as a replacement for The Times. When the Guardian politely declined the whole project was wound up.[140 - Gerald Long to Herbert Kremp (joint editor-in-chief Die Welt), 15 June 1981, Evans file 1, A153–658; TNL News.]

The demise of Europa went largely unnoticed, evidence, if any were needed, that it should have been wound up years before. More successful – at least at generating revenue – were the sections produced by the Special Reports team. These usually appeared (especially throughout the winter months) twice a week. Around one hundred appeared a year, totalling 650 pages. Most related to holiday or investment opportunities in foreign climes and had a function in attracting advertising that would not otherwise have reached The Times.[141 - John Grieg to Harold Evans, 9 March 1981 Evans box 1.]

There was one major news occurrence for which the newspaper had ample time to prepare. The wedding of Charles, Prince of Wales, to Lady Diana Spencer was to be the event of the year in Britain, a moment of romance and glamour in which momentarily to forget the country’s deepening recession. It would be the first marriage of a Prince of Wales for more than a century and only the seventh in almost six hundred years. Evans was determined that The Times’s coverage would outclass the competition. In this he had an ally in the proprietor. Putting aside his republican inclinations, it was Murdoch who came up with the idea of having a fullcolour front page for the paper’s royal wedding edition and to publish a souvenir magazine.[142 - Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, pp. 271, 274.]

The result was a sixty-four-page glossy ‘royal wedding’ magazine. This was not as profligate as might seem since it attracted twenty-five pages of advertising suitably tailored to the occasion: the new video recording machines, the Vauxhall Royale (available in saloon or hatchback), jewellers, Harrods and a back page emblazoned with the bright livery of Benson & Hedges. It was the first time The Times had produced a colour magazine and, once again, when looking to innovate Evans had turned to his previous paper for the personnel to achieve it. George Darby, associate editor of the Sunday Times Colour Magazine, had led the nine-strong production team. Given away free with the paper the day before the wedding, all half a million copies were snatched up. ‘If we had printed a million,’ Evans declared, ‘we’d have sold the lot.’[143 - Evans, press release, 30 July 1981.] But it was not the first time The Times had given away a royal souvenir: in 1897 it had marked Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee with a commemorative plate – colour-printed in Germany.

It was on the day of the wedding that the paper achieved its real coup. All newspapers then printed in black and white since none of the Fleet Street machine rooms could handle full-colour reproduction on standard newspaper runs. But The Times had an alternative plan to dish its monochrome competitors. The photographer, Peter Trievnor, was engaged to catch the bride and groom as they emerged from the great west door of St Paul’s Cathedral. With the precision planning of a crack assassin, he lay in wait for them from a seventh floor window in Juxon House, one of the ugly sixties office blocks then rudely jostling the Cathedral. It was calculated that he would only have a few seconds during which the royal couple would be in range. He had previously had two trial runs from the same vantage point on previous days in order to get it right. Even still, the margin for error was considerable especially given the happy couple’s unerring ability to wave in a way that obscured one or the other’s face. In the event, he managed to get eight shots in the few seconds in which the Prince and Princess passed the chosen spot.

Having taken what he hoped would be the photograph at 12.10 p.m., Trievnor raced to the foot of the building where a motorbike was waiting to collect the film. Once processed, it was hurried to Gray’s Inn Road where Evans and the design director, Edwin Taylor, selected the image they wanted. The transparency was then biked to where the colour separations were done and from there – by now coming up against heavy post-wedding traffic – to Battersea Heliport. It was mid-afternoon and Reg Evans, the paper’s head of editorial services, took it by helicopter to Peterborough where East Midlands Allied Press pre-printed the colour pictures onto reels. These reached Gray’s Inn Road at 10.18 p.m. Feverishly the reels were fitted. But they did not work. The registration was terrible and there was static on the newsprint. Anxious moments passed until eventually the quality improved. In time, it was running perfectly and at 1.30 a.m. the first colour front page of The Times – indeed, of any national broadsheet – rolled off the press.

The result caused a sensation. The paper was a sell-out. A telegram arrived at Gray’s Inn Road – ‘Congratulations on a great technical achievement and a beautiful paper this morning. Gavin.’[144 - Lord Astor to Gerald Long, 30 July 1981, A153–655.] It was from Lord Astor whose newspaper The Times had been until 1966. Actually, the revenue from higher sales was cancelled out by the cost of printing in colour, but it might prove merely a loss leader if it gained permanent converts to the paper. The circulation figures for August (which included the royal wedding edition) showed the paper’s circulation had leapt to 303,000, up from 268,797 the same time the previous year.[145 - TNL News, August 1981.] What remained to be seen was whether this was a one-off wedding bonanza or a movement that could be sustained.

One change that the wedding brought that did stay was on the paper’s masthead. From the first edition in 1785 until 1966 The Times’s masthead had borne the royal coat of arms, but this had fallen victim to ‘modernization’ when the paper was redesigned to carry news on the front page. The presence of the royal arms had accentuated the uneven lengths of ‘The’ and ‘Times’ and made the masthead appear off-centre at the top of the page. Stanley Morison had wanted to remove it in 1932 but was dissuaded by the strong opposition of John Walter, scion of the paper’s founder, who still held shares in the company.[146 - Jack Lonsdale, letter in TNL News, October 1981.] But the eventual exclusion of the device was a doubtful improvement since it made the paper’s masthead excessively austere and bare. Evans had intended to revive the royal arms for the paper’s two hundredth anniversary in 1985 (he had little doubt he would still be in the chair for it) but the huge acclaim from staff and readers to his inclusion of it on the royal wedding edition convinced him that it should stay there forthwith.

In fact, The Times had no more right – and never had – to carry the royal arms than any other newspaper. It did not have the necessary royal warrant, a point the College of Arms had, with ineffectual menaces, periodically brought to the editor’s attention. Although there was some inconsistency over the years, the paper had tended to use the royal arms of the day, but Evans decided to go back to the original coat of arms of King George III. It is this set of arms – complete with the white horse of Hanover in the bottom right quarter – that has graced each edition of the paper since 1981.

With Gray’s Inn Road awash with self-congratulation and the royal couple sailing away on Britannia for their honeymoon, Evans chose his moment to slip out of the country for a three-week holiday. He had scarcely rested since his appointment and most impartial observers could only conclude his opening months had been a success, speckled with moments of triumph. In fact, he too was off to get married.

A fifty-two-year-old father of three, Evans had been divorced from his schoolteacher wife, Enid, after twenty-five years of marriage in 1978 and for the past six years had been seen in the company of his fiancée, the up-and-coming twenty-seven-year-old editor of Tatler, Tina Brown. The couple married on 19 August at the Long Island home of Evans’s friend, the renowned Washington Post editor, Ben Bradlee. Bradlee was Evans’s best man and, with the bride’s parents in Spain, Anthony Holden stepped in to give the bride away. Anna Blundy, daughter of the Sunday Times’s fearless foreign correspondent, David Blundy, was maid of honour. However far from Fleet Street, it was still a journalists’ wedding. Some months later, Evans dropped a memo to Colin Watson, the obituaries editor, telling him to advise his contributors to ‘introduce the subject’s marriage(s) if any, at the appropriate chronological moment. A marriage and the support of a wife is often an important point in a person’s life and we have come to the conclusion that it is wrong merely to tack on a sentence to say that so and so is survived by various people.’[147 - Evans to Colin Watson, 10 January 1982, Evans Day File A759/9329.]

IV

Mr and Mrs Harold Evans spent part of their honeymoon staying with Henry Kissinger. Evans wanted Kissinger to write a weekly column for The Times and, after consultations with Murdoch, promised a financial inducement the scale of which would have been unprecedented in the paper’s history.[148 - Evans to Henry Kissinger, 21 May 1981, Evan Day File.] In the meantime, he had been reading the drafts for the second volume of Kissinger’s memoirs, Years of Upheaval 1973–77, even helping to rewrite certain passages. This was not a role he would have easily taken upon himself with regard to a senior British political figure. In London, Evans was anxious to avoid compromising entanglement between press and politicians, but he enjoyed a more relaxed perspective across the Atlantic and, in later years, he and his wife would happily mix their journalistic careers with the society of, in particular, leading Democrats.

It was a verdict on the past four years rather than a discovery of latent Toryism that had encouraged Evans to vote Conservative in the 1979 general election. Observing him in the morning conferences, Frank Johnson came to the conclusion that Evans, while an enthusiastic campaigner, did not have a considered political position or particular insight into the Westminster village. He had grown up assuming that the welfare state had improved opportunity immeasurably. The arguments propounded by Keith Joseph and the Institute for Economic Affairs, then gripping the radical right of the Conservative Party, had made little impact upon him.

But they had not escaped Frank Johnson, the lone Thatcherite in the editor’s trusted circle (Evans used to tease him in the morning conference by summoning his contribution with the cry, ‘I call upon the Leader of the Opposition’). Evans and Johnson shared a non-middle class background. Johnson was the son of a pastry chef. Working his way up from local reporting to the Sun, he had been a parliamentary sketchwriter for the Daily Telegraph before joining James Goldsmith’s short-lived Now! magazine (fortuitously leaving it for The Times only days before that journal’s demise). While Evans was a proud Durham University graduate, Johnson was an autodidact with strong interests in opera and history who had been cultivated by the Telegraph’s coven of in-house Tory philosophers. ‘I believed Britain was in a life or death struggle,’ he later reflected, ‘and that if Thatcher lost, it was all over for Britain.’ He did not sense that Evans, admiring the achievements of the welfare state and sixties progressivism, shared the same sense of urgency. What was more, Evans had placed the paper’s political direction in the hands of Bernard Donoughue who, fresh from advising James Callaghan, was opposed to the line Johnson wanted The Times to take.[149 - Frank Johnson to the author, interview, 15 January 2003.]

That line was set almost from the first day of Evans’s editorship by the paper’s analysis of Geoffrey Howe’s 1981 Budget. The headline, ‘Harsh Budget for workers but more for business’, was, according to Paul Johnson in the Spectator, ‘the headline which we all thought was the copyright of the Morning Star and kept in permanent type there’. The subheading, which claimed ‘unexpectedly harsh tax increases’, did not seem to follow the accurate predictions that the paper had been making on this very subject over the previous days. Meanwhile, the assertion that the Budget was pro-business was contradicted in the business news section where both the City and industry were stated as being distinctly cool about the measures. The Times’s handling was, according to Paul Johnson, ‘a disaster’. He also detected hyperbole in the headlines of succeeding days such as ‘Chancellor under savage attack from all quarters’ and a headline on higher education cuts ‘Fears of university system collapsing from loss of income’.[150 - Paul Johnson, Spectator, 11 March and 21 March 1981.] This was the sensitivity of a Thatcheritie convert, but ‘all quarters’ and ‘collapsing’ left little margin for error.

It was certainly difficult to read the front page without concluding a disaster had befallen the country. Fred Emery’s report made the most of ‘this muddle of severity against consumers with no clear thrust of benefits to business that worries a number of senior Conservatives’.[151 - Fred Emery, The Times, 11 March 1981.] By contrast, the summary of the Treasury’s forecasts by the economics editor, David Blake, was in the older, straight-reporting tradition of the principal news page. The leader column was where opinion was supposed to be located. This Evans wrote himself. He rejected both ‘the primitive compass of monetary aggregates’ and ‘crude expansion’. Instead he argued that the country was locked in a vicious circle where rising unemployment was pushing up current expenditure while capital expenditure, a fifth of all public spending as recently as 1974, had fallen to one tenth. The consequence of this for the country’s infrastructure was harming business, thereby pushing up social security payments. It was not entirely clear where the editorial thought the balance should be, although Evans’s belief that ‘prudent control of the money supply’ was ‘no longer an adequate prescription for policy’ implied he was backsliding from Rees-Mogg’s commitment to sound money.[152 - The Times, leading article (by Harold Evans), 11 March 1981; Evans Good Times, Bad Times, p. 214.] As Evans assured Michael Foot with a slight sideswipe at one of Rees-Mogg’s more distinctive obsessions, ‘I cannot promise much but at least there will be no more articles calling for the return of the gold standard.’[153 - Evans to Michael Foot, 26 March 1981, Evans Day File A327/3626.]

The Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, believed the Budget’s critics had got it wrong. Far from being deflationary, reducing Government borrowing would precipitate a fall in interest rates and a reduction in sterling’s overvalued exchange rate.[154 - Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years, pp. 137–8.] In the short term this proved accurate, with interest rates falling 2 per cent, to 12 per cent, the day after the Budget. By October, though, it was a run on the pound that caused nervousness, and interest rates were hiked back up to a crippling 16 per cent.