The History of the Times: The Murdoch Years

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At the end of March, 364 economists sent a letter to The Times denouncing monetarism. The signatories included seventy-six present or past professors and five former chief economic advisers to the Government. It was the idea of two Cambridge professors, Frank Hahn and Robert Nield, and academics at thirty-six universities appended their names. Although it became famous as the ‘Letter to The Times’, the newspaper almost squandered it. David Blake wrote up the story, but its front-page position was anything but prominent and much of it was continued fifteen pages on in the business news section. By the time it attracted a leader article, the following day, it had been downgraded by the altogether more dramatic story of the assassination attempt on President Reagan.

But the letter was important, not only as a counterblast of the learned and eminent against the Government’s economic policy but also as a measure of the culture clash between those now in power and the academic community whose stipends were about to be cut. The letter did give grounds for ambiguity. It claimed there was ‘no basis in economic theory or supporting evidence for the Government’s belief that by deflating demand they will bring inflation permanently under control’ or, as a consequence, bring about an economic recovery. In ignoring the alternatives to monetarism, ‘Present polices will deepen the depression’.[155 - The Times, 30 March 1981.]

When the leading article ‘An Avalanche of Economists’ appeared, it was somewhat more circumspect. It avoided explicitly endorsing the round-robin letter but made clear The Times believed the Treasury’s fixation with Sterling M3 concentrated minds upon too narrow a measure of the money supply. Rather, there was now a need for controlled reflation rather than further deflation.[156 - The Times, leading article, ‘An Avalanche of Economists’, 31 March 1981.] The monetarist response appeared in the business pages in an article by Patrick Minford, Professor of Economics at Liverpool University. His article so pleased the Prime Minister that she wrote to congratulate him.[157 - Thatcher, The Downing Street Years, p. 138.] Suspecting the 364s’ ‘apparently political ends’, Minford claimed they were more Keynesian than Keynes: Keynes had supported reflation in 1932 when there was sub-zero inflation and less than 1 per cent money supply growth. He had thus advocated price stability. But the public sector borrowing requirement for 1980–81 was an inflationary 4 per cent. Consequently, reducing the PSBR would create the structure for the sort of price stability Keynes had in mind. Recent history suggested incomes policies were not an effective alternative. What was more, Minford even maintained ‘there is no evidence that those with sound long-term prospects are going to the wall’ since ‘the stock market is now increasing the capitalization of even the hardest hit sectors’.[158 - Patrick Minford, The Times, 7 April 1981.] Nigel Lawson later wrote of the 364 economists, ‘Their timing was exquisite. The economy embarked on a prolonged phase of vigorous growth almost from the moment the letter was published’.[159 - Nigel Lawson, The View from No. 11, 1992, p. 98.] This may have surprised the still swelling ranks of the unemployed, but it was true, nonetheless. The standard measure of national output, gross domestic product (GDP), reached its bottom in the first quarter of 1981, at the very moment when the massed ranks of academia staked their reputations to the statement ‘present policies will deepen the depression’.

The end of fixed exchange rates in 1972 had freed governments from the necessity of manipulating their balance of payments to stay in check in order to uphold the exchange rate parity. This liberty permitted running up a persistent budget deficit as a means to stimulate demand and fund the welfare benefits of those for whom there remained no demand. But easing discipline in this way quickly drove western governments onto a road to ruin and by the late seventies Whitehall was desperately trying to rein back the PSBR’s share of GDP. The squeeze applied by the Thatcher Government’s high interest rate policy also had the effect of pushing up the exchange rate because high rates of interest made it attractive for ‘forex’ traders to buy sterling. At a time when North Sea oil revenues were already giving the pound the credentials of a petrocurrency, the resulting high exchange rate made exports yet more uncompetitive. During 1981, The Times became increasingly hostile to the notion that the Government, obsessed by its monetary targets, should have no view on what the appropriate exchange rate should be. In July, a leader column, ‘The Price of Floating’, attacked the whole post-1972 free-for-all. Railing against ‘the ideology of do-nothing monetarism’ with its exclusive focus on combating inflation, the editorial maintained that since ‘it is doubtful if a sensible exchange rate policy can be maintained unilaterally’ it was necessary to restore international cooperation.[160 - ‘The Price of Floating’, leading article, The Times, 8 July 1981.]

Supporting calls for new world central banking institutions to curb the supposed excesses of the foreign exchange markets, Evans wrote a leading article claiming, ‘our fortunes and our prospects have been devastated’ by ‘the experiment with floating rates and the stupendous growth of international mobile funds’. There was ‘a currency casino’ in operation when ‘on the world market the average trading volume in currency is now some 70,000 million dollars a day, a volume by which the global trade in goods, services and investment is insignificant’. The leader article mentioned Enoch Powell and Samuel Brittan among the false prophets who had preached floating as a means of ridding the country of its balance of payments problems. In fact, Peter Jay had penned an influential four column Times leader article in September 1976 advocating monetarism and a ‘cleanly’ floating currency only days before he had drafted the speech his father-in-law, James Callaghan, delivered to the Labour Party conference denouncing reflationary politics – a turning point in the country’s affairs. But in July 1981, The Times renounced its own former position with the excuse that ‘the beginning of wisdom is the admission of error’ (unfortunately the ‘i’ was missing from the word ‘is’ when the sentence was printed).[161 - ‘The Ottawa Opportunity’, leading article, The Times, 17 July 1981; see Grigg, The Thomson Years, p. 390; Edmund Dell, The Chancellors, p. 427.]

Margaret Thatcher had told the 198 °Conservative Party conference, ‘You turn if you want; the lady’s not for turning.’ With Evans at the steering wheel, The Times now made clear it was performing a very public U-turn. It marked the 1981 party conference debate on economic policy with a damning analysis of monetarism by James Tobin, the Yale professor who had the previous day been named as the winner of the 1981 Nobel Prize for Economics.[162 - James Tobin, The Times, 14 October 1981.]

‘Three million unemployed and still more to come’ was the front-page headline for Melvyn Westlake’s report that one in eight of the workforce was without a job and that the figure – which excluded a third of a million more on special employment and training schemes – was likely to keep rising at least until 1983. This proved an optimistic forecast. The accompanying leader column concluded that with output below its 1974 level and the national fabric fragmenting:

It is devastatingly clear that Britain needs massive investment, private and public, to restore its competitive strength … The Europeans are valiantly trying to create a pool of lower interest rates to protect their nascent recovery from another surge of American interest rates … we need not be flotsam on the high seas.[163 - ‘Britain’s Economic Legacy’, leading article, The Times, 27 January 1982.]

The paper’s position had suffered from the conundrum that if it thought the exchange rate was so overvalued, why was it wanting to see it locked in at such a rate? But a relatively trouble-free realignment of the major currencies within the European Monetary System encouraged the leader column to adopt the line that it was ‘a good time for Britain to join’.[164 - ‘The Flexible Side of EMS’, leading article, The Times, 6 October 1981.] This allowed the paper to preach currency stability and commitment to the ‘European Vision’ that Rees-Mogg’s paper had encouraged. But it was premature for it to declare, ‘the excuse that the pound is now a petrocurrency is not valid’.[165 - ‘Wanted: European Vision’, leading article, The Times, 2 December 1981.] On currency stability, as on ‘European Vision’, The Times would find consistency as difficult to sustain as did the Treasury.

Indeed, it was across the English Channel that the paper needed to look if it wanted to see alternatives to monetarism in practice rather than theory. A golden opportunity was provided by the victory of François Mitterrand over Válery Giscard d’Estaing. Sixteen years had separated Mitterrand from his first challenge (to de Gaulle in 1965) and his taking possession of the Elysée Palace. More importantly, as Charles Hargrove reported from Paris, it was a ‘turning point’ in French politics. It was the first presidential victory for the left in the twenty-three year life of the Fifth Republic. Indeed, it was the first time the left had been in complete power since Léon Blum’s ill-fated Popular Front in 1936. With the news of Mitterrand’s triumph, Ian Murray reported that French customs officers were given urgent instructions to stop attempts to export money from the country: ‘The officers have been told to watch particularly for large cars not registered in frontier areas.’[166 - Charles Hargrove and Ian Murray, The Times, 11 March 1981.]

While the Conservatives had abandoned exchange controls shortly after coming to power in Britain, Mitterrand tightened the French State’s preventative powers to see capital exported beyond its border. A real socialist experiment was underway. Editorially, The Times was caught between fearing the possibility that a far left resurgence in the coming National Assemby elections could lead to a left – Communist coalition and the satisfaction of seeing the fall of Giscard d’Estaing and ‘his scandalous relations’ with the Central African Empire’s Emperor Bokassa.[167 - ‘The Choice for France’, leading article, The Times, 12 May 1981.] Writing in his column, Ronald Butt suggested Mitterrand’s election might ‘bring greater flexibility and a greater significance to the European voice’ and ‘establish for the first time that the European Community is not simply a vehicle for the centre-right’ as it had been under its Christian Democrat domination (for even Germany’s SPD Chancellor Schmidt ‘makes the kind of leader many a British Tory would be glad to own’). The consequence could be a softening in the anti-EEC attitude of Britain’s Labour Party.[168 - Ronald Butt, The Times, 14 May 1981.]

The British summer of 1981 was one of disorder. From a news reporting perspective, the most graphic examples came on the streets of Ulster and the deprived inner cities of England.

The hunger strikes among Irish Republican prisoners housed in the ‘H-Blocks’ of the Maze prison near Belfast had started in October 1980 with demands to wear their own clothes, to have the restrictions on their movement within the prison lifted and to be exempted from doing any work. The Government made a concession, permitting ‘civilian style’ (but not personal) clothing, but was wary of going further for fear that it was all part of an orchestrated IRA campaign to give their terrorists effective run of the prison and to see them accorded ‘political prisoner’ status. Indeed, a May 1980 report by the European Commission on Human Rights had rejected the bulk of the prisoners’ complaints. A letter was smuggled out from an inmate of Wormwood Scrubs to The Times endorsing the view that Irish terrorists enjoyed a far laxer regime than British individuals convicted of more minor misdemeanours on the mainland.[169 - Letter to the editor, The Times, 30 May 1981.] The hunger strike had been called off in December 1980 when one of the participants lost consciousness. This was followed by a mass ‘dirty protest’ in which cells were deliberately fouled.

In March the dirty protests ended and the hunger strikes recommenced. By the time the campaign ended, seven months later, ten Republican prisoners had starved themselves to death. But it was the first prisoner to die who captured the public imagination and caused the most serious political upset. Bobby Sands was a twenty-seven-year-old Republican who had served five of his fourteen-year sentence for being caught with a gun in a car. His decision to stand for Parliament, in absentia, on an anti-H-Block ticket in the Fermanagh and South Tyrone by-election was given a boost when the Nationalist SDLP opted to stand aside, giving him a direct run against his Unionist opponent. The consequence of uniting the Nationalist and Republican vote was to hand Sands victory by a margin of 1446 votes.

Filing his Times report, Christopher Thomas suggested the result had ‘dealt a severe blow to the stronghold of moderate Roman Catholic opinion, the Social Democratic and Labour Party, from which it may never fully recover. Recriminations over the party’s failure to contest the seat are biting deep.’[170 - Christopher Thomas, The Times, 11 April 1981.]The Times’s leader was in no mood to indulge dangerous games. ‘The House of Commons should move at once, that is before the Easter recess, to unseat him,’ it announced, continuing, ‘that would be an entirely proper thing to do since he is precluded from attending the House for the duration of this parliament.’ The clear extent of polarization precluded pushing ahead with early ‘attempts to introduce provincial institutions acceptable to the leaders of both communities’. Instead, the Government was faced with no option but to concentrate on ‘normalizing’ the ‘administration of the province within the United Kingdom’.[171 - Leading article, The Times, 11 April 1981.]

In May, Sands died. The immediate response was an orgy of rioting in Belfast and protests beyond. But the main legacy was a propaganda coup for Irish Republicanism, attracting the world’s media and drumming up financial support from United States citizens. The Times did not form up behind the long procession of mourners that followed Sands’s IRA-decorated coffin. ‘By refusing to submit to Mr Sands’s blackmail, the British government bears no responsibility whatever for his death,’ the leader column stated. ‘He was not in prison for his beliefs, but for proved serious criminal offences. He was not being oppressed or ill-treated. Indeed the opposite was true. The prison rules applying to Northern Ireland allow for a more comfortable existence than do most English prisons.’ It ended, ‘There is only one killer of Bobby Sands and this is Sands himself.’[172 - Ibid., 5 May 1981.] He did not get an obituary.

The paper’s position continued to be stalwartly supportive of the Thatcher Government’s inflexible approach, maintaining, ‘It has chosen the right ground to stand on – denial of separate political status in name and substance.’ As for the ‘murderous’ IRA leadership, ‘Hope is their oxygen. It must be denied them.’[173 - ‘If Ireland Is To Be United’, leading article, The Times, 2 July 1981.] Mrs Thatcher would later refer to the need to cut off the IRA’s ‘oxygen of publicity’. But far from gulping for air, the Republican movement appeared wholly revived. Indeed, the upsurge of tension in Ulster ensured that The Times had to send its first itinerant news team there for many years, with Tim Jones and John Witherow joining the permanent reporter, Christopher Thomas. ‘Amid mixed scenes of jubilation and despair,’ Thomas reported from Enniskillen the victory of the IRA supporting candidate who retained – with an increased majority – the Fermanagh seat on Sands’s death. The leader column condemned a situation in which ‘the Irish Government and the Roman Catholic Hierarchy of Ireland so conspicuously qualify their condemnation of this extension of terrorist violence by piling the blame on British ministers for allowing it to continue’. In doing so, the hunger strikers were gaining the virtual ‘status of martyrdom’.[174 - ‘Fermanagh Does It Again’, leading article, The Times, 22 August 1981.]

The IRA ensured that the hunger strike ended in October with a bang. They detonated a nail-bomb on a coach in Chelsea Barracks carrying Irish Guards. The following month the Unionist MP for Belfast South was shot dead while he was holding a surgery for his constituents. An Anglo-Irish summit brassed up the existing ministerial and official collaborations under a new name, ‘The Inter-Governmental Council’, but by the following spring, when the proposals of the Northern Ireland Secretary, Jim Prior, for ‘rolling devolution’ of responsibilities held by Whitehall back to Ulster were ready to get underway, they faced opposition from the SDLP and from across the border from the Taoiseach, Charlie Haughey. Sinn Fein made gains in the elections to the Northern Ireland Assembly in October 1982 and the SDLP members refused to take their seats, effectively torpedoing the project. Once again, the Province’s future appeared to be wedged in an impasse. It would take time, and a more emollient attitude in Dublin with the election of Dr Garret Fitzgerald, before the next initiative could be sprung upon the Province.

During 1981, political unrest in Ulster was matched by social disorder in Britain’s inner cities. In April, petrol bombs were thrown for the first time on the streets of the mainland. The Brixton riots injured 279 policemen and forty-five members of the public. Twenty-eight buildings were set on fire while surrounding shops were systematically looted. News of scuffles in Brixton came late and received minor billing in the following day’s paper under the brief headline, ‘Police hurt in scuffles with blacks’. But after a weekend of serious rioting and looting, the events dominated Monday 13 April’s paper, forcing Michael Leapman’s report from Cape Canaveral on the launch of the space shuttle Columbia to take second place on the front page. Inside the edition, Martin Huckerby, who had been jostled by the mob, provided a graphic eyewitness report of the chaos in Brixton:

The only sign of authority was an abandoned fire engine astride the junction, its windows smashed and its wrecked equipment strewn across the road … Red hot debris dripped from a series of burning buildings along both sides of the road. Amid the roaring of the flames and crashing of collapsing buildings there were screams and shouts. Despite the furnace of heat, figures could be seen running through the smoke, hurling missiles at unseen police.[175 - Martin Huckerby, The Times, 13 April 1981.]

Elsewhere on the page the various angles were covered: an interview with a white woman who said she had come to fear the brooding violence of her largely black neighbourhood and ‘a young, sharply dressed Guyanan black’ who approved ‘ “of what’s happened. It’s the only way people can put across their case”.’ The police’s view was also represented and there was an article on Lambeth Council’s attempts to grapple with housing allocation between its white and black areas. The leading article backed the establishment of a broad ranging enquiry – which the Home Secretary, Willie Whitelaw, announced that day would be conducted by Lord Scarman. On 15 April, Op-Ed featured a gripping article by the Indian journalist Sasthi Brata detailing how, blindfolded and threatened, he was taken by a black gang in Brixton to see their amateur bomb-making cottage industry while one of his captors told him: ‘“There’s going to be a lot more, a big lot more, just tell ’em that. We ain’t kidding. We goin’ burn ’em down, everythin’ everywhere.”’[176 - The Times, 13 April 1981; Sasthi Brata, The Times, 15 April 1981.]

Naturally, the immediate aftermath of the riots in Brixton (and those that followed in Southall and the Toxteth area of Liverpool) were dominated by the apportioning of blame. Political activism was pitched against insensitive policing, moral degeneracy against a trinity of overt racism, poor housing and unemployment. The affected areas combined high numbers of immigrants with a level of social deprivation that was all too obvious to see. But to what extent was the Thatcher Government to blame? That The Times stated nothing justified the rioters’ behaviour was to be expected but it went further, conceding that the wider social issues were relevant and that the Scarman Inquiry should have the widest remit to consider them. As for the Government, the leader article chose to pick on its inability to articulate and demonstrate a belief that its policies had a positive social dimension worthy of the same priority as the fight against inflation.[177 - Leading articles, The Times, 14 April, 7 July and 13 July 1981.]

But there was also the question of racism. In a leader entitled ‘The Soiled Coin’, The Times believed racist sentiments ‘will not be resisted by preaching integration. This is a fallacy of the sixties. It is unrealizable, it is questionable if it is desirable, and it raises more fear and animosity than it dissipates with its overtones of inter-racial sex, marriage and a coffee-coloured Britain.’ Social pluralism, it argued, was obtainable without tolerance requiring ‘that every Englishman should have a black man for his neighbour or that every Asian should forget his cultural identity’. Rather, while ‘the Government cannot be expected to resolve such a complex and volatile problem overnight’ it could at least follow the American lead in encouraging the rapid promotion of ‘qualified coloureds to positions of obvious authority – in the army, the police and above all the public service – so that the coloured community can identify with those who take decisions as well as those at the receiving end’.[178 - ‘The Soiled Coin’, leading article, The Times, 10 July 1981.]

When it was published in November, the 150 page Scarman Report denied the existence of ‘institutional racism’ in Britain. Militant activists also disliked the report’s support for the police who ‘stood between our society and a total collapse of law and order on the streets’. But most sides of the community supported the principal recommendations: racist behaviour by police officers to be a sackable offence, better training, greater independent monitoring of the police complaints procedure, new statutory consultative committees with community liaison but no change to the Riot Act. Whitelaw moved immediately to endorse the principles of the report. Much of this was supported by The Times, although not Scarman’s enthusiasm for ‘taking the investigation as well as the adjudication of complaints out of the hands of the police’ which was ‘a minefield of good intentions’. Instead, ombudsmen and better lay scrutiny of the results of investigation would be preferable. The paper also lamented the failure to reform the Riot Act, taking the view that ‘if a riot is in progress the offence is, or ought to be, being in on it. No one should be able to feel that he can join in with impunity provided no further offence can be proved against him.’[179 - ‘The Scarman Report’, leading article, The Times, 26 November 1981.]

But The Times also gave space on the Op-Ed page to Darcus Howe, editor of Race Today, billing him as ‘a militant voice of black dissent’. According to Howe, the fault lay primarily with the way in which the police exercised their powers against the West Indian community. The trigger for the riots, Operation Swamp, had been regarded as a form of licensed harassment by Brixton’s youth. Instead, Howe argued for the ‘immediate abolition of all powers of stop and search’.[180 - Darcus Howe, The Times, 26 November 1981.]

The police countered that without ‘stop and search’ powers they had little chance of containing the violence and drug-related disorder that was prevalent in the inner cities and the areas dominated by blacks in particular. Yet, over the following fifteen years, the issue of racism slowly receded from the forefront of public debate until reignited towards the end of the century by the influx of asylum seekers and by the police’s inadequate handling of the racist murder of a black teenager, Stephen Lawrence. With the resulting Lawrence Inquiry, specific sore points like ‘stop and search’ not only became live issues again, but Scarman’s rejection of ‘institutional racism’ within the police force would be publicly revoked.

The critical tone adopted towards the Thatcher Government’s fixation with setting targets for narrowly defined money supply growth may have given the impression that under Evans The Times believed the State was a font of civic largesse. Certainly, the paper took the view that the Government needed to invest more in capital expenditure, citing the view of one with such impeccable monetarist credentials as Milton Friedman that there was no necessary relation between monetary growth and the size of the public sector borrowing requirement. But the paper took a more parsimonious view with regard to current expenditure. The Treasury’s demand of a 4 per cent public sector pay increase (at a time when inflation was running in double-digit per cent) was welcomed as an essential contribution to combating inflation. Indeed, the leader column argued that public sector workers had no right to expect the same pay parity with those in ‘the risk-taking’ private sector. What was more, those working in the nationalized industries should also see their wage increases pruned, ‘and that includes the wages of the miners and water workers as well as civil servants. If it means a hard winter, so be it.’[181 - ‘Moonshine and Money’ and ‘A Hard Winter’, leading articles, The Times, 17 September and 20 October 1981.] In this respect, The Times seemed ready to take on the miners before Mrs Thatcher, with memories of their defeat of Edward Heath, was prepared to do.

Not many miners read The Times. But on the issue of cuts in higher education, the newspaper was trespassing on the personal finances of a core area of its readership. In March 1980 the Government had announced three-year spending cuts in higher education. By May the following year, it was clear the University Grants Committee had failed to mitigate the full effects and universities braced themselves for falling matriculation rolls and the possibility of whole departments being axed as a consequence of an 8.5 per cent cut being enforced. Their woes were compounded by a fall in the income from foreign students, following the Government’s announcement that it would stop subsidizing fees for foreign students who would, in future, be charged the full cost of their course. Diana Geddes, the education correspondent, analysed the ‘grim future’ facing Britain’s universities. As a consequence of the 1963 Robbins Report, the proportion of eighteen-year-olds in higher education had risen from 3 per cent in the early 1950s to 14 per cent by the 1970s. The Government was now putting this process into reverse, having, as Geddes put it, ‘abandoned once and for all the Robbins principle that all those suitably qualified by ability and attainment should have the right to higher education’.

The universities were now paying the price for becoming the dependent wards of the State: over 90 per cent of their income came from public funds. But even ‘an overdue pruning of dead wood’ would be expensive. Redundancy bills alone could reach £200 million. This would wipe out most of the savings from reducing student numbers. Geddes’s article suggested that the Government might be better achieving its cuts by instead reducing its contribution to local authority-administered colleges and polytechnics – these ‘less respected institutions in the public sector’ – many of whose staff did not enjoy the same academic tenure and who would thus be much cheaper to sack.[182 - Diana Geddes, The Times, 30 March 1981.] In its leader column, the paper was prepared to accept the wrath of its readership in academia by stating that the cuts were necessary in the economic climate in which the country found itself.[183 - ‘Universities Under the Knife’ and ‘The Cost of University Cuts’, leading articles, The Times, 3 July and 10 October 1981.]

The plights of publicly funded professionals certainly provided a fitting moment for the Social Democratic Party (SDP) to launch itself. Departing the editor’s chair in carefree demob spirit, Rees-Mogg had penned one of his last leader articles by endorsing Shirley Williams as the best future hope for 10 Downing Street. The Labour Party’s lurch to the left under James Callaghan’s successor, Michael Foot, had been demonstrated in January 1981 when a special conference held at Wembley voted to elect future leaders through an electoral college made up principally of trade union block votes and of party activists. The Parliamentary Labour Party would be reduced to the status of minority shareholders. The immediate consequence of this was the breakaway of the moderate ‘Gang of Four’ (Shirley Williams, David Owen, Roy Jenkins and Bill Rodgers) to form the Council for Social Democracy. In March, the first twelve Labour MPs resigned the whip and the SDP was born.

The ‘Gang of Four’ were Murdoch’s first guests to lunch at Gray’s Inn Road. The main boardroom’s table was rather long, ensuring a disconcerting distance between each of the quiet revolutionaries. Fearing they might be given short shrift from the proprietor, Evans came away relieved that Murdoch had asked ‘polite, probing questions on policy’.[184 - Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, pp. 218–19.] Indeed, the SDP’s Communications Committee harboured hopes, believing Murdoch was ‘usually open to persuasion, if not to be converted, at least to give us a fair crack’.[185 - Ivor Crewe and Anthony King, SDP: The Birth, Life and Death of the Social Democratic Party, p. 261.] With no established national organization and without the funding of the trade unions or big business, the party’s success was dependent upon achieving maximum publicity in order to attract a mass membership quickly. The party’s birth was the main front page story in every national daily apart from the Sun. The Times reported the party’s opening press conference under the informative if underwhelming headline ‘SDP pleased by initial recruitment response’. Fred Emery and Ian Bradley reported from ‘a crowded news conference in London, staged brilliantly for television, and with a claque of applauding supporters’.

The SDP was launched with twelve policy tasks. Several were phrased in the inclusive language common to the public aspirations of all mainstream politicians. But a few distinctive polices stood out. The party differed from Thatcherism through its belief in a long-term incomes policy and a mixed economy in which ‘public and private firms should flourish side by side without frequent frontier changes’. In other words, it rejected monetarism as the principal means of curbing inflation and it would not role back the frontiers of the State. It was at odds with the Labour left by wanting to stay within the EEC and NATO and in resisting unilateral nuclear disarmament. It upheld traditional Liberal Party interests in constitutional reform, particularly of the House of Lords and the introduction of proportional representation. Yet overall, its bias was summed up from the first by Bill Rodgers who told the assembled press that the SDP was ‘not a new centre party, we are very plainly a left-of-centre party’.[186 - The Times, 27 March 1981.] As The Times put it in its leader, ‘with the exception of proportional representation there is no major policy being propounded by the Social Democrats now which was not at least attempted by the Callaghan Government’.[187 - ‘The Gang Becomes a Party’, leading article, The Times, 27 March 1981.]

It was natural that there should be curiosity and, indeed, excitement at the launch of a major new force in British politics. The SDP’s difficulty was in sustaining it in the months ahead, denied, as it was, the ability of the Government or the official Opposition to set the agenda in Parliament. It needed constant media interest. In this respect, The Times was less helpful than might have been expected. Unless there was a by-election campaign underway, the SDP rarely got more than two front-page mentions a week.[188 - Crewe and King, SDP, p. 257.] This was surprising, given the extent to which the SDP gained the reputation of being the journalists’ party with high-profile supporters like the Guardian’s Polly Toynbee, Anthony Sampson of the Observer and even the Daily Mirror’s agony aunt, Marjorie Proops. Tony Benn was convinced the BBC was an ‘agency of the SDP’.[189 - Ibid., p. 254.] The chronicler of the Guardian would even conclude that the ‘chief reason’ for the paper’s ‘success in the early 1980s was that the Social Democratic Party was founded in its pages and the battle for the soul of the Labour party fought out there’.[190 - Geoffrey Taylor, Changing Faces: History of The Guardian, 1956–1988, p. 213.] No such claim could be entertained by The Times. But the paper’s editorial line might have tilted more obviously towards the SDP if Rees-Mogg had continued as editor. He had made clear his belief that Shirley Williams was a figure around which a new national consensus could be constructed. Back in 1972, when the Labour Party appeared close to self-destruction over the Heath Government’s EEC entry terms, the Rees-Mogg Times had looked favourably on the possible creation of a government of the centre (that is to say, pro-EEC) under the leadership of Roy Jenkins. In the three general elections during which Rees-Mogg was editor (the paper was off the streets in 1979) The Times had expressed the hope of seeing an increase in the Liberal Party’s seats so that they might prove a moderating force on the two principal parties.

But if The Times under Harry Evans did not rush to pledge itself to the SDP’s red, white and blue colours, the atmosphere in Gray’s Inn Road was nonetheless respectful towards the new party. Its initial by-election performance suggested it was being taken seriously by an electorate fearful of Labour’s leftwards lurch and repulsed by the economic and social cost of Thatcher’s medicine. At a by-election in Warrington in July, Roy Jenkins achieved a 23 per cent swing to the SDP, almost unseating Labour in its heartland. The Conservative candidate lost his deposit. In October, following the creation of the ‘Alliance’ with the Liberal Party, a Liberal activist, Bill Pitt, became the first Lib-SDP Alliance candidate to win a seat, taking Croydon North-West from the Conservatives on a 24 per cent swing. Then, in November, Shirley Williams took Crosby from the Conservatives, recording the biggest turnover of votes in any parliamentary by-election. Repeated at a general election on a nationwide scale, it would give the Alliance 533 MPs, Labour 78 and the Conservatives four. The SDP really looked as if it might succeed in its great project, to break the mould of British politics.

By-elections are problematic for newspapers since the lateness of the declaration plays havoc with newspaper production. Nonetheless, Brian MacArthur and his team managed to beat the competition with the speed in which The Times led with Bill Pitt’s capture of Croydon. Unfortunately, the front page went to press with a pre-arranged victory article, ‘Our Credibility Barrier is Broken’ by Shirley Williams, to accompany it. By placing a partisan opinion piece by Williams on the front page, the paper appeared to be not only confusing news with comment but almost endorsing her party. This was a genuine slip. Nonetheless, Evans had to field a call the next day from an irate Gerald Long, the uncompromising new managing director of Times Newspapers, demanding an explanation.[191 - The Times, 23 October 1981; Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, p. 289.]

Whatever the placement on the front page, nobody could be in any doubt what the back page of The Times made of the SDP’s progress. That was where Frank Johnson’s daily parliamentary sketch appeared. To Johnson the ‘Gang of Four’ provided a rich quarry for satire. Roy Jenkins was ‘a Fabergé of an egghead … shining, exquisitely crafted, full of delights, a much loved gracious figure who is to the liberal classes what the Queen Mother is to the rest of us’. The SDP, he would later note in 1986, was ‘a happy party, fit for all factions’, there being:

the Owenites; the Jenkinsites; the Elizabeth Davidites; those who want a successor to Polaris; those who want a successor to their Volvo; militant Saabs; supporters of Tuscany for August as opposed to the Dordogne; members of those car pools by which middle class families share the burden of driving their children to the local prep school; owners of exercise machines; people who have already gone over to compact discs … readers of Guardian leaders; and (a much larger group) writers of Guardian leaders.[192 - Frank Johnson, ‘A Happy Party, Fit for all Factions’, The Times, 16 September 1986.]

But besides the affectionate whimsy, Frank Johnson was also a perceptive judge. He foresaw the strategic weakness in the SDP’s condition. As he noted in September 1982, in lacking ‘the irrational emotions, the cranky zeal, that drives on the rank and file of the other parties’ the SDP’s supporters would eventually become demoralized by any faltering in momentum. And that faltering would come. Johnson had been introduced to Maurice Cowling and the school of Tory historians at Cambridge’s oldest college, Peterhouse, who rejected Whig and Marxist interpretations of historical progress and inevitability in favour of a ‘high politics’ view of men and events. Johnson applied this approach in his own analysis. Try as the SDP might to take a rational or scientific approach, he reminded them ‘politics is not a “subject” or an academic discipline. It is simply the random play of chance on a few ambitious politicians. No one, no matter how great an authority on “politics”, predicted the Falklands war.’[193 - Frank Johnson, The Times, 15 September 1982.]

This was not an approach shared by the theorists of the left, where historical inevitability remained the vogue – especially if it could be given a push with the sort of underhand tactics still employed in the Eastern Bloc or Britain’s student unions. Twenty-four hours after Labour had won control of the Greater London Council (GLC) on 7 May 1981, its group leader, the moderate Andrew McIntosh, was ousted in an internal coup by the left wing Ken Livingstone. The radical left now had the opportunity to show what they could do with – or to – Britain’s capital city. As ‘Red Ken’ put it to Nicholas Wapshott who interviewed him for The Times shortly after the successful putsch, ‘if the left GLC fails, it will be a sad day for the left everywhere’. Wapshott did not paint a favourable background for his subject, stating that, ‘as the housing chief of Camden, Livingstone’s performance was generally considered abysmal’ and ended with Livingstone enthusing about his pet salamanders: ‘I feed them on slugs and woodlice. They just live under a stone, come out at night and are highly poisonous. People say I identify with my pets.’[194 - Nicholas Wapshott’s interview with Ken Livingstone, The Times, 14 May 1981.]

The Times was not impartial in its commentary on the left’s progress within the Labour Movement. The paper thought it iniquitous and was not slow to say so. When the former Labour Cabinet minister Lord George Brown asked if he could pen articles for the paper, Evans replied affirmatively, suggesting ‘we are particularly interested in the Communists making inroads into the Labour Party’.[195 - Evans to Lord George Brown, 2 July 1981, Evans Day File.] During September, the paper ran extracts from a forthcoming book by David and Maurice Kogan on the activities of left-wing activists in Tony Benn’s campaign team, the ‘Campaign for Labour Party Democracy’ and the ‘Rank and File Mobilizing Committee’ who were trying to make the party leadership answerable to the activists rather than the Members of Parliament.[196 - The Times, 23 and 23 September 1981.] Labour was now led by the left wing, nuclear unilateralist, Michael Foot. But in September the battle commenced for the Deputy Leadership. Although this was not a position that involved the wielding of great power itself, the belief that Foot, aged sixty-eight, was a caretaker leader turned it into the struggle for the future of the party, one that was made critical by the possibility of it being won by Tony Benn.

Outside the ranks of his supporters, Tony Benn was perhaps the most feared figure in British politics. For those on the right, it would be more accurate to describe him as a hate figure. He certainly frightened The Times. Having seen Benn at close quarters during his period working with Callaghan, none was keener to save the Labour Party from him than Bernard Donoughue. With the Deputy Leadership election pending, Donoughue suggested the moment had come for a hatchet job on Benn in the form of an investigation into his considerable financial interests.[197 - Bernard Donoughue, 10 September 1981, Evans Day File 1/17.] This would show the great tribune of wealth redistribution to be a multimillionaire who had craftily ring-fenced his own money. The piece appeared on 25 September in a profile of the contenders which described Benn as ‘a wealthy aristocrat who waged a remarkable campaign to shed his peerage and upbringing’. The profile stated that his ‘main assets’ were:

shares in Benn Bros, publishers; large house in Holland Park and farm in Essex; most of the Benn family wealth comes from legacies and trusts connected with his American-born wife, Caroline. The estimated total is several million dollars: city sources confirm the existence of a Stansgate trust in the tax haven of the Bank of Bermuda. No details of amounts or beneficiaries have ever been disclosed.[198 - The Times, 25 September 1981.]

The following day The Times found itself in the embarrassing position of printing an apology attached to Benn’s letter of complaint. Evans also wrote a personal letter to him. Benn’s letter stated, ‘Neither I nor my family have ever owned a farm nor had any assets in any trust in Bermuda or any tax haven in the world … I might add that your account of my wife’s assets is grossly exaggerated.’[199 - Tony Benn, letter to the editor, The Times, 26 September 1981.] So much for ‘city sources’ – the information had been supplied by two outside informants. The editor dictated a memo to Anthony Holden, Fred Emery and Adrian Hamilton, the business editor, concluding that the lesson to be learned was ‘that incidental attacks on someone like this are not worth making. It is only worth attacking or exposing someone, in any event, when we have very high certainty of our evidence.’[200 - Evans to features, home and business editors, 29 October 1981, Evans Day File 1/17.]

The Deputy Leadership result was to be announced at the Labour Party Conference in Brighton. The declaration was expected in the evening so two different leader articles had been pre-prepared depending on the result. The leader assuming a Benn victory concluded that Michael Foot should ‘resign immediately’. ‘Both from personal self-respect,’ it elaborated, ‘and for the good of the Labour Party he should resign instead of providing a fig leaf of shabby respectability for the extremists who have now taken over the Labour Party.’[201 - Evans Day File, A327/3626.]

In the event, The Times was not able to run that night with either leading article: a strike by the NGA print union prevented the paper from coming out. Thus was missed the chance to report on an evening of great drama. John Silkin had been eliminated in the first ballot. Benn’s rival, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, Denis Healey, appeared to have victory in the bag when the Silkin-supporting TGWU announced that it would use its 1.25 million block votes in the electoral college to abstain in the second round. Healey duly arrived in triumph at the conference hall only to discover that the TGWU had decided at the last moment to vote for Benn instead. This suddenly made the result a cliffhanger. When the declaration was made, Benn secured 49.574 per cent of the vote. Healey had squeezed home by a hair’s breadth.

Unrepentant in defeat, Benn claimed the ‘incoming tide’ was with him despite the fact that, ‘The privately-owned Press without exception have done all they possibly could to discredit the Labour party, its electoral mechanism, Socialism and the arguments we were putting forward in the campaign. To have got Fleet Street down to fifty-point-something in the Labour party is quite an achievement.’[202 - Tony Benn, quoted in the Daily Telegraph, 28 September 1981.] At least The Times and the rest of the ‘privately-owned Press’ knew what to expect if ever the great champion of State control ever did surf in on the ‘incoming tide’.

Healey’s victory prevented a potentially fatal defection of Labour MPs and supporters to the SDP. By a fraction of 1 per cent he probably saved his party. In doing so, he dished the SDP. When The Times returned after the strike, its sigh of relief was all but audible. For the contest to be ‘a turning point’ the moderates within the Labour Party would have to regain their lost ground.[203 - ‘Unfinished Business’, leading article, The Times, 1 October 1981.] Over 80 per cent of party activists in the constituencies had voted for Benn in the Deputy Leadership ballot, but his colleagues in the Parliamentary Labour Party held him in less regard and when Foot made clear he wanted rid of his turbulent priest, Benn failed to be elected by the MPs into the Shadow Cabinet. But he had not finished in his assault on the media. In March 1982, Benn chose a conference of Pan-Hellenic socialists in Athens to announce that British democracy was threatened by its military (in its pursuit of the arms race) and by its media. Britain, he said, did not have a free press because he could not point to a single newspaper that reflected his views. Catching the eye of The Times reporter, Mario Modiano, Benn added:

And The Times, dare I say to you, is really disreputable. It does not print truthfully and faithfully what happens and it pretends, because it is printed in small print that it is above argument. But it is a political propaganda instrument like the Sun, but it is printed in rather better print and rather shrewder language.[204 - Tony Benn, quoted in The Times, 13 March 1982.]

Benn had a particular reason for lumping the Sun and The Times together. In January 1982, the Sun had printed allegations of widespread drunkenness, absenteeism, rota tampering and moonlighting by train drivers. In retaliation, the drivers’ ASLEF union called on its members to ‘black’ not only the Sun but – on the grounds it had the same owner – The Times as well. Without access to the trains, the paper could not be distributed. The ‘blacking’ continued even after a promise to revoke it in the High Court had been secured. Ultimately, the dispute kept The Times off the streets for five days. Benn told an NUJ branch meeting that unions were right to black newspapers that printed ‘lies’ about them in a struggle in which ‘day after day Fleet Street conducts its campaign against working people’. He accused journalists who did the bidding of their editors and owners instead of reporting facts accurately as being like ‘Jews in Dachau who herded other Jews into the gas chambers’.[205 - Ibid., 27 January 1982.] But if Benn had come to the conclusion that new laws were needed to – as he phrased it – ensure wider press diversity, News International drew different lessons from the dispute with ASLEF: the sooner the strike-prone British Rail distribution system could be replaced with a non-unionized road freight service, the better.

V

Harold Evans had descended upon The Times like a whirlwind, whisking up copy, tossing forth ideas, upturning traditional – sometimes lazy – ways of doing things; chopping and changing, a centrifugel force pulsating without let-up late into the night. Left in the wake of this force of nature was a fair degree of desolation. To notice this, the editor would have had to look back. And this was not his job. Murdoch had wanted someone who would upturn a few chairs in the cosy atmosphere of the old clubroom and Harry Evans, ably assisted by his young protégé, Tony Holden, succeeded admirably in this rearrangement. It was to be his undoing.

At the time Evans was appointed, Murdoch installed a new managing director at Times Newspapers. While Evans would handle the creative side of the paper, Gerald Long would stabilize its finances. Evans had been able to work his magic at the Sunday Times partly thanks to the millions Thomson let him spend in realizing his ideas. But Murdoch was trying to make The Times’s books balance and this was not going to be achieved by throwing money around. Thus there might well have been tension between Evans and whoever was assigned to keep his paper on an even financial keel. Nonetheless, in choosing Gerald Long, Murdoch found a character whose individual chemistry was never likely to bond with that of the editor.

Long had been born in 1922, the son of a well-read postman. Sent to the ancient but minor public school of St Peter’s, York, he had progressed to Cambridge. During the war, he had been in the Army Intelligence Corps, serving in the Middle East and Europe. After the end of the war he had helped to establish German newspapers in the British-occupied zone of the country. In 1948 he joined Reuters and, after a stint in Paris, became Reuters’ chief representative in Germany between 1956 and 1960. When he became chief executive in 1963, Reuters was a loss-making company. But Long had innovative ideas. Taking advantage of developments in information technology, he introduced ‘Monitor’, a terminal that allowed subscribers to check share prices around the world, thereby creating an electronic dealing floor. ‘Monitor’ became part of the technology that drove the international financial revolution from the 1960s onwards. And in turning its owner into as much a provider of financial as news services, it transformed Reuters’ fortunes. In recognition, Long started to be referred to as the company’s ‘second founder’. He had been chief executive of Reuters for eighteen years and was looking for a fresh challenge when Murdoch asked him to renovate Times Newspapers. He accepted immediately.

It was not one of Murdoch’s more successful transplants. Long had no knowledge of modern newspaper production, editing or advertising. As chairman of Reuters, Sir Denis Hamilton had seen rather more of Long than had Murdoch and did not think the appointment wise. Hamilton accepted that Long had ‘a first-class brain’ but ‘he was not a leader’.[206 - Hamilton, Editor-in-Chief, p. 182.] Evans was intrigued by this man who was ‘something quite special, an intellectual who has seen the world’. Yet he found his irascibility impossible to deal with: ‘His normal manner was so aggressive it provoked reaction. It was derived from reading books rather than observing men.’[207 - Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, p. 324.] It quickly became clear that he did not get on with the editor. This put the proprietor in a position. Should he side with his editor or his managing director? If neither, would he have to waste time as a court of higher authority, perpetually adjudicating on their disputes?

The precarious financial position of Times Newspapers in 1981 provided the context for the tug of war. The recession was hitting advertising. TNL’s cash cow, the Sunday Times Colour Magazine, was finding it hard to generate its former yield and selling display advertising was especially tough for a paper like The Times whose questionable future had been so frequently in the news. The new advertising director, Mike Ruda, did away with the separate Times and Sunday Times advertising display sales departments, combining them together on the fifth floor of The Times building. Ruda, a fifty-year-old former javelin thrower for South London Harriers, had been in newspaper advertising since 1954. He had been advertising director of the joint Sun and News of the World ad sales and Murdoch looked to him to introduce some of that drive into Gray’s Inn Road. Ruda did not like what he found, later commenting:

There was very poor morale. There was a notable lack of what I would call professional selling skills and those people – and there were very few of them – who did have any ability, had been suffocated. Drastic action had to be undertaken fairly quickly to get rid of the dead wood.[208 - Michael Ruda, interview, ‘The Greatest Paper in the World’, Thames Television, broadcast 2 January 1985.]

Ruda set about his task. Among those he brought in to help sell space was Clive Milner, a young advertising rep from the Observer who would end up becoming managing director not only of Times Newspapers but also of the entire News International Group. Evans was uneasy about the changes, telling Murdoch he thought integrating The Times and Sunday Times advertising departments was a questionable idea ‘because selling the two papers seems to require entirely different techniques’.[209 - Evans to Murdoch, 3 December 1981, Evans Day File.] Murdoch, however, believed the merger directly benefited The Times. It had not enough advertising while the Sunday Times attracted more than it had space to print. Integration facilitated diverting some of this surplus to the daily broadsheet.[210 - Rupert Murdoch to the author, interview, 4 August 2003.] The process of integration continued in other areas and in November 1982 the two papers’ circulation offices were brought together. Long was even put in charge of a feasibility study to see what the savings would be if The Times building was relinquished and its staff accommodated next door in the suitably refurbished Sunday Times building.[211 - TNL News, April 1981; Murdoch’s report to the TNL board, 9 June 1981.] The very thought of such a cohabitation horrified many Times stalwarts for whom a set of floorboards seemed to offer insufficient protection for their paper’s editorial independence from the more popular Sunday title. Few in either paper were sorry when the proposal was ditched. It was also a relief to hear Murdoch state that he would not shift the papers to the East End site of Wapping, where he was fitting out a new printing facility for the Sun and the News of the World.[212 - TNL News, April 1981.]

When it came to industrial relations, The Times was done no favours by being within infection range of the Sunday Times. At the end of the first week in June 1981, SOGAT called a strike at the Sunday Times that cost the paper 400,000 copies. The union had acted in breach of its agreement with News International setting out a specific disputes procedure in which production was supposed to continue while negotiations took place. This was no trivial matter, for it threatened to unwind the agreements by which Murdoch had purchased the papers. Consequently, the TNL board voted unanimously to close both papers unless the union chapels agreed to abide by the disputes procedure. Long accompanied the announcement with the explanation, ‘This is not a threat. It is a decision. Anybody who thinks it is a bluff does not know Rupert Murdoch.’[213 - Ibid., July 1981.] This did the trick – for the moment. Talks with SOGAT commenced and a written undertaking to abide by the disputes procedure was procured. It would last all of three months.

When News International bought The Times, the paper was produced on Linotype machines, a nineteenth-century, hot-metal technology. In purchasing Times Newspapers, Murdoch had secured agreement with the print unions to switch production from hot metal to ‘cold composition’ thus doing away with the Linotype machines and molten metal. Henceforth, the Linotype operators would be redeployed to type with computer keyboards, as had long been the norm in the rest of the world. But this did not mean computerized page make-up. Instead the computers were capable only of printing up text galleys that were passed on to a team armed with scalpels, scissors and glue who cut and pasted the lines of text into position on a drawing board. When a full page had been arranged in this way, a negative would be made of it and converted into a photosensitive polymer plate. From this, the newspaper would be run off.

Back in 1974, Marmaduke Hussey had complained that moving to ‘cut and paste’ cold composition would scarcely be worth the trouble given that it still involved having to employ process engravers who produced the pictorial printing plates. He argued that only a move to full computerized page composition made sense.[214 - Marmaduke Hussey, memorandum, 9 December 1974, Grigg Papers.] Eight years later, Murdoch had no more hope than Hussey of getting such a system installed at Gray’s Inn Road in the face of union hostility and – it has to be said – the limitations of the technology then on offer. Getting the halfway house of ‘cut and paste’ accepted was regarded as an achievement in itself even though it had long been the established method throughout the regional presses.

From the first, The Times’s switch to cold composition was beset with teething problems. It was not deemed possible to move the paper overnight from hot to cold composition. Instead the process was gradually expanded and it was not until the following year that the entire paper was produced by photocomposition. The initial results were disappointing. It had taken so long to install the ‘new’ technology that its makers no longer manufactured it. This made finding replacement parts increasingly difficult.[215 - TNL News, September 1984.] Reproduction was so appalling that in October 1981 Evans suggested that the paper should use ‘the Sunday Times hot metal facilities for the front and back for as long as we possibly can. I say this because converting to cold type on the front page will be the worst advertisement for The Times and certainly hinder our sales and our authority.’[216 - Evans to Bill O’Neill, 20 October 1981, Evans Day File.] Rather than employ speed typists, the NGA had insisted Times Newspapers re-employ the old Linotype operators to work the new computer keyboards. Many of them seemed to have inordinate difficulty adjusting to this change. The initial average of fifteen words per minute frankly beggared belief in an industry driven by deadlines. To this was added the introduction of a further stage in the process – the making of a photo polymer pattern plate, compounding delay and minimizing the time available to pick up errors. Readers zealously spotted the resulting mistakes and wrongly attributed them to declining editorial standards. Nor did speed improve much with practice. On one occasion, Evans found himself standing at the paste-up board until half past midnight trying to insert some copy that had been sent two and a half hours earlier. At that time of night, Rees-Mogg, when he was editor, had long since gone home, had dinner and retired safely to bed. Some thought that Evans should have conserved his energies by following his predecessor’s example, leaving the trials of the production process to his night staff. But Evans was too involved to delegate when so much was going wrong, complaining to Gerry Long, ‘It says something for our deadlines and for our production efficiency in this area that a[n El] Salvador story which was on the front page of the New York Herald Tribune, printed in Zurich and flown to Britain, could not be got into the London Times last night.’[217 - Evans to Gerald Long, cc. Bill Gillespie, John Collier, 29 January 1982, Evans Day File.]

In the executive dining room, opinion was divided about the extent to which those ‘mastering’ cold composition were governed by incompetence, laziness or genuine malevolence. Nor were the NGA compositors the only union members treated with suspicion. Denis Hamilton had long been of the view that Reg Brady, the father of the Sunday Times NATSOPA chapel, had natural intelligence and would have been a constructive force if the social circumstances of his background had delivered him into managerial rather than union responsibilities. Instead Hamilton had watched while Brady ‘caused more trouble in the machine room than any other man in the history of the newspaper, discovering all manner of disputes and grievances’.[218 - Hamilton, Editor-in-Chief, pp. 171–2.] Many of Murdoch’s most trusted lieutenants, including John Collier and Bill O’Neill, had started off in print union politics before their potential was spotted and harnessed by News Group’s management. It was decided to make Brady an offer and, to the fury of his union brothers, he accepted the Murdoch shilling and switched sides.

Brady’s fondness for a Soviet fur hat gave him an appropriately Cold War demeanour but, in the event, his defection to the capitalists did not unlock the potential that Hamilton had seen in him. Union officials refused to talk to him, thereby preventing him from playing any constructive role. Indeed, if disarming him prevented Brady from pursuing his previous destructive function, it did not seem to make much difference in the intractable war of attrition at Gray’s Inn Road. The closed shop persisted, preventing management from having a free hand in who was employed. Evans was even unable to fill a secretarial vacancy in his own office because NATSOPA sent a succession of clearly unsuitable candidates from which he had to choose. One secretary he did employ, Liz Seeber, was astonished by the ludicrous demarcation rules prescribing her actions. In the first couple of weeks at her job a typewriter broke but, on lifting it from her desk to remove it, ‘about three people said “Oh my God, don’t do that, you’ll bring SOGAT out on strike.”’ So she had to put it down, ring a SOGAT official and wait until – in their own time – a small deputation arrived armed with a trolley to wheel it away.[219 - Liz Seeber to the author, interview, 18 July 2002.] It was not an environment geared to exercising personal initiative. Furthermore, it provided a cover for laziness and intimidation. In Notes from a Small Island, Bill Bryson recounted the misery he used to experience every night as a subeditor on The Times’s business news desk when he tried to get hold of the Wall Street report from the SOGAT member whose task it was to receive it in the wire room. When each night the employee failed to take it to his desk, Bryson had to go up to the wire-room door and ask for it. He would invariably be told to go away (although in blunter language) because the employee was eating pizza and could not be bothered to look for it. Sometimes the threat of violence would be implied. Instead, the employee would come down with it when he felt like it – even if this meant it would miss the copy deadline. Obedient to the union’s demarcation rules, he would not allow a non-SOGAT member like Bryson to cross the wire room’s threshold to look for the incoming report himself. As Bryson later noted, it was just one of the ways the union exerted control on the newspaper industry ‘by keeping technological secrets to itself, like how to tear paper off a machine’.[220 - Bill Bryson, Notes from a Small Island, pp. 47–8.]

In the Gray’s Inn Road machine room the inter-union demarcation rules had far greater implications. There, NGA members had regarded it as a precondition of their superiority that NATSOPA members employed alongside them were not permitted to earn above 80 per cent of their own rate. In September 1981, NATSOPA members were awarded 87.5 per cent of the NGA’s £106 per night wage in return for improved productivity and a small reduction in their manning levels. Although the NGA was not offering similar concessions, it nonetheless demanded that its members’ wages should rise commensurately in order to restore their 20 per cent advantage. This would have added 28.3 per cent to the NGA payroll and management refused the request. So the NGA went on strike. No Sunday Times appeared on 27 September and The Times ceased production that evening.

Those turning up for work on the Monday had to cross a twenty-six-man picket line. Eight hours of negotiation at ACAS failed to produce a breakthrough. In the meantime, all 1400 Sunday Times employees were suspended without pay, a decision to extend this to The Times being deferred until the following day. Working closely with John Collier, Murdoch threatened the paper with destruction unless the NGA backed down. It was, he said, ‘the most serious situation I have ever seen in Fleet Street’:

We are being held up by a small group of men who never work more than half a shift a week for us. It is a straight attempt at hijacking us. If the company gives in on the dispute we will be rolled over by other unions. Unless the NGA back down, I will close The Times. We have lost money, millions of pounds. We are still being held up and there is no point in going on. We are simply not putting any more money into the company.[221 - Murdoch, quoted in the Financial Times, 30 September, and the Daily Telegraph, 29 September 1981.]

The hopes of putting aside the ghosts of the Thomson years appeared dashed. It was Hussey’s shutdown strategy of 1978–9 all over again. But Murdoch had one advantage. In 1978–9, the unions knew Times Newspapers would sooner or later back down rather than see their titles permanently closed down. With Murdoch, it was not possible to be so sure. Unlike Thomson, he could liquidate the company at minimal cost and with the advantage of having separated ownership of the property assets from the newspapers.

This was brinkmanship of the highest order. Earlier in the month the embattled management of the FT had threatened to shut their loss-making paper unless a similar differentials dispute was resolved. Now Murdoch was following suit and he personally took charge in the negotiations, accepting Len Murray’s invitation to come to the TUC’s headquarters, Congress House. It was there, after hours of torturous exploration, that the NGA finally accepted Murray’s proposals at 2 a.m. on Wednesday morning. There would be a written (but not legally binding) guarantee of future uninterrupted production and acceptance of an agreed disputes procedure. Murdoch thanked Murray who ‘persuaded me not to pull the plug for the last few hours while he worked around the clock to get this together’.[222 - Murdoch, quoted in The Times, 2 October 1981; TNL News, October 1981.] After three days off the streets because of a dispute among those printing its Sunday sibling, The Times was back in business with the essential battlegrounds of management versus union rights and inter-union demarcation disputes unresolved. ‘In recent months, Rupert Murdoch has learnt that he has no special magic in dealing with London print unions,’ concluded the Australian Financial Review. ‘From the point of view of News Corp. shareholders, the danger is that Murdoch will delay closure of The Times beyond the point which commercial sanity dictates.’[223 - Australian Financial Review, reproduced in TNL News, November 1981.]

VI

At best, The Times survived the September crisis with a stay of execution. But there was little cause for celebration. Sales continued to be up on the same month the previous year and, while the royal wedding-fuelled circulation surge of July was always likely to be a one-off, new readers were continuing to outstrip the dead and disaffected. In normal circumstances the improvement would be considered to be excellent but Evans’s reputation had created an unrealistic level of expectation that detracted from the gains that were made. The editor himself was concerned by a disturbing fall in reader subscriptions.[224 - Evans to Ken Beattie (TNL commercial director), 4 November 1981, Evans Day File A327/3626.] But whatever angle was taken on the sales figures, the more important statistic was that, between July and November 1981, the paper was losing between £250,000 and £374,000 every week. None doubted that Richard Williams had done an excellent job with Preview, the new arts listing tabloid section, but it was expensive to run, failing to attract much advertising, and market research showed few signs that it was raising the paper’s circulation. When Ken Beattie, the commercial director, circulated a paper at the TNL board meeting calling for Preview to be scrapped, Evans did not mince words in a note he sent Beattie: ‘I really do think that you have an obligation to consult me as Editor first before the Chairman. You put me in an impossible position if the Chairman is persuaded against the project which is close to my heart and was, I thought, to his. I tell you frankly that I could not continue to edit The Times in circumstances like this.’[225 - Evans to Ken Beattie, 21 October and 29 October 1981, Evans Day File.]

While Evans was determined to defend – seemingly with his professional life – an innovation like Preview, he was less staunch in support of the arts coverage he had inherited in the main section of the paper. He had a succession of disagreements with John Higgins, the arts editor. One battleground was the failure to take television reviewing seriously. Another concerned Higgins’s enthusiasm for giving so much space to opera staged outside Britain. Higgins had greatly improved the arts coverage in the Financial Times but Evans was less impressed by his efforts in Gray’s Inn Road, threatening, ‘I will have to see a marked improvement or consider different ways of covering the Arts.’[226 - Evans to John Higgins, 17 November 1981, Evans Day File A327/3626.] He proceeded to take the Saturday Review section out of Higgins’s hands but mishandled the appointment of Bevis Hillier who, having been half-promised various competences, was left in a semi-employed limbo. Hillier was so dissatisfied with his treatment that when he was finally given the Saturday Review section to edit in January 1982 he resigned a month later with six months’ severance pay.

Hillier was not alone in becoming exasperated by the editor’s swings between drive and indecision. The political commentator Alan Watkins claimed that Evans would offer him a job whenever they ran into one another, the details ‘about which I would hear nothing until we met a few months later, when he would suggest lunch, about which I would likewise hear nothing’.[227 - Alan Watkins, Spectator, 23 July 1983.] But the journalist Evans most wanted in his paper was the star columnist he had allowed to take a sabbatical – Bernard Levin. ‘Not a day goes by,’ he told Levin in September 1981, ‘without the Editor of The Times, in advanced years, being accosted on the streets, in clubs and society dinners, and racecourses and parlours and, in his bedroom before his shaving mirror, about the absence of Mr Bernard Levin from the columns of the newspaper.’[228 - Evans to Bernard Levin, 2 September 1981, Evans Day File.] Evans’s pleading became desperate. He suggested Levin could return as a television critic, a music critic or even a parliamentary sketchwriter (despite the fact that Frank Johnson was winning such acclaim in this role).[229 - Ibid., 6 August 1981, Evans Day File.] Evans even suggested that Levin should pay a visit to Gray’s Inn Road to ‘satisfy yourself that the place is still inhabited by reasonable men’.[230 - Ibid., 12 November 1981, Evans Day File.] Levin kept his distance.

Indeed, the trickle of departures among the editorial staff was turning into a torrent. First out of the door was Hugh Brogan, the respected Washington correspondent, who resigned shortly after Evans’s arrival in protest at what he anticipated would be Murdoch’s certain destruction of the paper’s integrity. But Evans soon found himself at loggerheads with the paper’s New York correspondent, Michael Leapman, as well. Exasperated by the frequency with which Brian Horton, the foreign editor and French restaurant lover, spiked his copy, Leapman assumed the worst and accused Evans of political censorship.[231 - Evans to Michael Leapman, 11 June 1981, telex 125912.] One of Horton’s techniques was to unsettle Leapman by sending him dismissive comments about the quality of his grammar. Not that Horton knew better. He covertly obtained the judgments from the literary editor, Philip Howard, who innocently thought Horton was seeking advice on grammatical matters as a form of self-improvement. [232 - Philip Howard to the author, interview, 5 December 2002.] Leapman, meanwhile, continued to express dissatisfaction and when Evans demanded an assurance of a ‘reasonable’ attitude from him he resigned,[233 - Evans to Michael Leapman, 29 June 1981, Evans Day File.] preferring to become ‘William Hickey’ in the Express instead.

As Evans’s closest colleague, Anthony Holden, the features editor, became the lieutenant most closely associated with the drive to introduce new blood – by which was also meant the determination to sack old favourites. Marcel Berlins took voluntary redundancy.[234 - Anthony Holden to the author, interview, 9 April 2003.] With this, The Times lost a distinguished and authoritative commentator on legal affairs. The leader writer, Roger Berthoud, also packed up and left. Another to seek redundancy was the paper’s Whitehall correspondent, Peter Hennessy. This was a grievous blow for Hennessy was, as Patrick Marnham has pointed out, the first journalist to persuade senior civil servants to talk regularly about what was really going on in the corridors of Government.[235 - Patrick Marnham, Spectator, 20 February 1982.] Evans was sorry to see him go but was unable to dissuade him from doing so.[236 - Evans to Peter Hennessy, 10 January 1092, Evans Day File A759/9329.] In the course of Evans’s opening year as editor, more than fifty members of the editorial staff left with redundancy payouts.

Too much was happening all at once. Familiar faces were leaving, less familiar ones arriving. The paper was riddled with mistakes due to the delays caused by switching to cold composition, a change that was not even improving the print quality of the paper. This was not the best moment to reorder the contents, but the editor did so all the same, deciding that, instead of constantly having to shift around the various news, sport and law sections of the paper in order to keep the centre of the paper fixed, the centre pages should float instead. At one stage he even considered the sacrilege of moving leaders and letters to pages two and three. Even without going that far, floating the paper’s philosophical core a few pages either way succeeded only in giving the impression that editorial policy was adrift. Readers were not impressed. Nor were the leader writers, increasingly airing their doubts about the editor’s variable decisiveness. Owen Hickey, the chief leader writer, tackled Evans directly, assuring him that readers did not want to turn to the centre of their paper and find obituaries on the left and badminton on the right.[237 - Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, p. 293.]

The Times was not used to being in a state of perpetual revolution. But this was now the inevitable tension in a paper stretched on the live wire between the two electricity pylons of Rupert Murdoch and Harold Evans. Recognizing his desire to be closely involved, the backbench would try and track Evans down when news broke during the course of the night. Calls would be made across London to establish his whereabouts. Eventually, he would be discovered subbing a sports report elsewhere in the building. The problem was that, called away from his handiwork, he would then forget to return to it, leaving the subeditors unable to ascertain which bits had been sent. They were left with no option but to unpick his work and start again from scratch. No matter how helpful – how the master of the paper – Evans thought he was being, subs did not always welcome his attempts to steer every boat in the paper’s flotilla from early morning to late at night. The Times had long published the Oxford and Cambridge exam results, but the editor decided to extend the service to all the universities. Compiling these graduation lists involved an enormous amount of extra work done after the London edition had been put to bed. On one occasion, around midnight, Tim Austin was working on them when Evans arrived back from a dinner in his black tie. Seeing it was Durham, his alma mater, Evans volunteered to do the subbing himself. Unfortunately, he got the style wrong and the whole section had to be redone. ‘He just did not know when to stop,’ concluded Austin; ‘he was not the best at delegating.’[238 - Tim Austin to the author, interview, 4 March 2003.]

The editor’s insistence on making his mark in almost every possible part of the paper might have been a tolerable if irritating eccentricity had it only affected his relations with colleagues. The problem was that his interventions were wrecking the paper’s deadlines. The Times was becoming increasingly unobtainable in Scotland because the train at King’s Cross would not wait while Evans held up production in order to make some needless alteration. This was a question of priorities and the editor appeared to have lost sight of the commercial imperatives at work. The leader writers would deliver their copy on time only for Evans to announce that he would run them through his own typewriter. Aware that another deadline was being missed, Fred Emery would race over to the editor’s office to find its occupant kneeling on the floor with a pair of scissors in his hands. He would be cutting up the original copy and trying to insert some extra lines of his own on scraps of paper with glue. Emery did not even believe the editor’s additions improved the sense of the original. ‘Rhythms and disciplines are crucial to a daily newspaper’s morale and professionalism,’ Emery believed. When they were destroyed, ‘things fall apart’.[239 - Fred Emery to the author, interview, 24 January 2005.]

There was a journalistic maxim that ‘you can edit with a typewriter or a calculator, but not both’.[240 - Made famous by Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, quoted in Toby Young, How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, p. 143n.] This was exactly the problem at The Times in the dying days of 1981. The editor led with the typewriter while his managing director and the proprietor attempted to rule with the calculator. Famous names were departing and, as so often with voluntary redundancy, it was those most marketable to an alternative employer who were going while those who feared leaving the life raft clung on. Yet, Evans persisted in hiring new journalists, often at higher salaries than those they replaced. Each appointment became a battleground, particularly since, in the short term, even the redundancy programme was adding to the paper’s costs. One of many disputes concerned finding a replacement for Michael Leapman. Murdoch maintained that The Times could not afford its own correspondent in New York in addition to its office in Washington DC. Instead it should seek a saving by using News Group’s New York bureau instead. Ignoring both this opinion – which he felt was an attempt to see copy in The Times written by employees answerable to Murdoch rather than to himself – and that of Brian Horton, Evans sent out Peter Watson, formally of the Diary column.[241 - Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, pp. 329–31.] Evans simply did not see how he could satisfy the proprietor’s instruction to improve the paper without being left alone to hire whoever he felt could best achieve it.

At the heart of the matter was Evans’s complaint that he was not given a clear budget allocation. A memo from Gerry Long demanding that all company executives seek written authorization for ‘any proposed action’ was understandably resented.[242 - Gerald Long to department heads, 19 June 1981 (reissued 5 January 1982), ref. A751/9253/42.] Evans insisted that this was no way to run a newspaper. ‘I am a little shaken,’ he told Murdoch with restrained anger. ‘I do find it difficult to accept the principle of day-to-day approval for detailed items. I can’t honestly edit the paper properly without having discretion … It makes life difficult and erodes authority if I am not to be the sole channel for your instructions.’[243 - Evans to Murdoch, 16 September 1981, Evans Day File, A327/3626.] It was demeaning for the editor of The Times to have to scurry up and down stairs to the proprietor or managing director every time he wanted to spend money. In May 1981, John Grant, the managing editor, had drawn up a £9.1 million budget on inherited staffing levels for the next eleven months.[244 - Minutes, editorial management meeting, 4 May 1982, ref. 3629/3/4.] The redundancy programme was supposed to cut that budget substantially and when, on 20 January, Evans was presented with a spending limit – £7,723,000 – along with the warning that he had already crossed it, it was clear there would have to be further job cuts. Evans’s defence that ‘in terms of real as distinct from money costs, The Times’s editorial budget is less than at any time in recent years’ fell upon deaf ears.[245 - Evans to Murdoch, undated draft, January 1982, Evans Day File.] Times Newspapers lost £8 million between June and November 1981, wiping out News International’s summer profits. Worse, this came at a time when the finances of News Corp., the parent company, were already being drained through the New York Post’s costly circulation war with the rival Daily News. In these circumstances, The Times really did look like a luxury the increasingly transatlantic Murdoch could ill afford.

There was little by way of Christmas cheer. Evans injured himself putting up decorations and took time off to recover. With Charles Douglas-Home away on sabbatical, the paper was edited by Brian MacArthur and Fred Emery. It was at this moment that Evans committed an act that infuriated Murdoch. The proprietor knew that Evans had taken time off to recover from his spell of concussion but, long after he assumed that the editor was back at his desk, he was aghast to discover that he was, in fact, mysteriously in the United States. Evans had intended to keep his transatlantic mission secret but his secretary had forgotten to tell either MacArthur or Emery that this was the case. Hours before Murdoch was due to fly over to London from New York, he telephoned The Times expecting to speak to Evans, only to discover he was unaccountably in America. The proprietor was furious and perhaps not a little suspicious. When Evans hurried back to the office (having been tracked down by MacArthur and warned to return to London immediately), it was to find a bitter letter from Murdoch waiting for him, berating him for the time he had taken to convalesce. Given how manically hard Evans had worked since his appointment, this was unfair, although, in the circumstances in which the paper found itself, the furtive trip to America certainly looked peculiar. Indeed, the letter read more as if the proprietor was issuing a written warning, putting on record that he was distancing himself from his chosen editor. This was ominous. Evans fired back a six-point rebuttal of Murdoch’s charges, reasserting his acceptance of the necessity for hard work and pleading, ‘I love The Times. We have until now, I thought, had an extremely close liaison.’[246 - Ibid., 11 January 1982, Evans Day File.]

From this moment on, suspicion governed Evans’s attitude to Murdoch. He began to suspect Murdoch was complaining about him behind his back and that one of those listening was Paul Johnson, whose media column in the Spectator was giving Evans critical reviews. Unless he was there in the room to monitor possible interference, Evans was nervous about Murdoch sounding forth on politics to Times journalists. On his return from his Christmastide absence, Evans discovered that Murdoch had expressed a preference for economic sanctions against the USSR while chatting to Owen Hickey. Hickey, who was not likely to compromise his intellectual self-certainty to anyone, did not feel Murdoch was leaning on him. But Evans went out of his way to write a leader condemning the policy as a ‘romantic notion’ and, worse, an ‘apocalyptic strategy’.[247 - Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, pp. 319–23.] Whether this could be considered an overreaction depended upon how narrowly the proprietor’s guarantee not to direct editorial policy could be reasonably defined. To assume he had to take a Trappist vow whenever a conversation touched upon the modern world was clearly ridiculous. The problem was, did all journalists have the strength to put from their mind Murdoch’s stated opinions when they filed copy he might read and note?

Evans’s predicament was that tensions were now running high not only with Murdoch but with Gerry Long as well. Scarcely anyone had missed The Times’s decision to cancel its detailed coverage of the European Parliament but Long also wanted to cut costs by scrapping the paper’s Westminster gallery staff and rely on PA reports instead.[248 - Evans to Charles Douglas-Home, no date, February 1982, Evans Day File.] This would certainly undermine the paper’s claims to be offering something more than its competitors and Evans would have none of it. It was not just Evans who had difficulty relating to Long. Frank Giles, the Sunday Times editor, also felt ‘to describe his nature as complex is about as observant as pointing out that Schubert’s Eighth Symphony is unfinished’.[249 - Frank Giles, Sundry Times, p. 221.] Shortly before he assumed the editorship, Evans had a foretaste of Long’s eccentricity when he went to the latter’s house for dinner. When the discussion turned to how The Times’s reputation should be restored, Long became animated, telling Evans, ‘The man you need for authority is Penning-Rowsell of the Financial Times’ and reached from his bookshelves the proof – a copy of Penning-Rowsell’s The Wines of Bordeaux.[250 - Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, p. 172.] This proved to be a portent of his priorities. Although Long proceeded to demonstrate his readiness to sacrifice good journalists in pursuit of cutting costs, he was never prepared to compromise gastronomic standards at The Times. On one occasion when Sir Geoffrey Howe, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, came to lunch at Gray’s Inn Road, roast lamb was on the menu. When Howe asked for mint sauce, the waitress pulled rank, grandly announcing, ‘Mr Long does not allow mint sauce on the fifth floor.’[251 - Anthony Holden to the author, interview, 9 April 2003.]

Evans could not unseat Murdoch, but he could try and undermine Long. The easiest way of doing this was to provide Long with a public platform for self-immolation. Long had suggested the financially imprudent idea of importing a French and a German food critic to eat their way round Britain’s most famous restaurants as part of a forthcoming Times series of articles on expensive foods.[252 - Evans to Anthony Holden, 23 November 1981, Evans Day File A327/ 3626.] Discovering that the managing director had been in acrimonious correspondence with the leading restaurateur Albert Roux, Evans persuaded Long that publishing the exchange would be a wonderful opening salvo to start the series. Long had dined at Roux’s celebrated Le Gavroche restaurant and had asked for the ‘farmhouse cheeseboard’. But, horror of horrors, he suspected that one of the cheeses, a St Paulin, was industrially produced, a fact confirmed upon consulting his trusty Androuet Guide du Fromage. ‘This met at first with an indignant response from your waiter,’ Long informed Roux. Perhaps unwisely, the waiter retaliated with the flip put-down, ‘if Monsieur knows cheese better than I do, then of course Monsieur is right’. This remark appeared to have straightened the bristles on Long’s Lord Kitchener-style moustache. Roux wrote to assure him that the offending cheese was a product ‘made by craftsmen on the scale of a cottage industry’ thereby generating a fresh debate on Long’s second major hobby – semantics. Long replied at great length, also finding fault with the turbot and making clear he was sending the correspondence to Michelin who had recently given Le Gavroche the only three star rating in England. Despite the provocations, Roux attempted to bring the argument to a close, somewhat incredibly assuring Long, ‘the fact that you have taken so much trouble to write about food leaves me with endless pleasure’, and inviting him and his wife to dine with him. Boorishly, Long declined the offer.

The unintentionally hilarious correspondence appeared in the paper on Saturday 6 February, suitably illustrated with a Calman cartoon of a French waiter intoning, ‘I’m a bit – how to say – cheesed off by these complaints.’ Running into Anthony Holden in the office, Long asked him what he thought of the exchange. When the features editor replied that it was ‘in the great tradition of British eccentrics’, Long was uncomprehending, exclaiming, ‘Eccentric? What’s eccentric about it?’[253 - Leapman, Barefaced Cheek, p. 228.] He would soon find out. When Murdoch toured the Sunday Times on the Saturday afternoon (supposedly its busiest period), he found its journalists, feet on table, laughing with childlike glee at Long’s cheese pantomime. Evans had knowingly published a correspondence that made the managing director appear ridiculous. What was more, he had allowed Long to demonstrate his obsession with expensive dining at exactly the moment he was also calling for six hundred redundancies, mainly among the clerical staff at Times Newspapers. Long may have hoped that his correspondence would lead Michelin to reconsider the three stars awarded to Le Gavroche. But it was Long who was about to find himself downgraded.

Times Newspapers employed 671 clerical workers (excluding managers and juniors). The combined clerical payroll of its daily and Sunday rivals, the Guardian and the Observer, was 250. It was clear that TNL was grossly overmanned; indeed, it was the principal reason why a company capable of generating nearly £100 million a year in revenue was still so monumentally in the red. Murdoch was blunt with the staff: ‘You will say you have heard of Times crises before. I say to you here that if the crisis facing us today is not resolved within days rather than weeks our newspaper will have to be closed.’[254 - Murdoch, personal message to all The Times and Sunday Times staff, 8 February 1982.] Despite intense hostility to this ‘straight forward mugging’ from Barry Fitzpatrick, the father of the Sunday Times clerical chapel, and rumours that those doing management’s bidding by applying for voluntary redundancy would be blacked by their union brothers,[255 - TNL News, March 1982; Evans to Gerald Long, 18 February 1982, Evans Day File.] negotiations to find the job cuts got underway with the more moderate union officials. It was another torturous exercise and, in the midst of it, Gray’s Inn Road was rocked by a second crisis.

A meeting of the TNL board had been convened on 16 December 1981. In Murdoch’s absence, Long had taken the chair and, with Evans and Frank Giles present, won universal – if qualified – approval to remove The Times and Sunday Times titles trademarks from TNL to News International. The stated reason was that September’s NGA dispute had demonstrated that without this change The Times could not be published if the Sunday Times was liquidated. Transfering the titles to News International would give greater flexibility in future industrial disputes.[256 - Minutes of TNL directors’ meeting, 16 December 1981, ref. 6968/1; Evans to Long, 16 February 1982, Evans Day File.] Consent was agreed subject to ‘a reasonable price’ being paid for them. At a rushed TNL directors meeting held two days before Christmas at the Sun’s headquarters in Bouverie Street (with only Long, John Collier, the company’s secretary Peter Ekberg and Farrar’s lawyer, Geoffrey Richards, present) News International’s offer of £1 million for The Times and £2 million for the Sunday Times was accepted.[257 - Minutes of TNL directors’ meeting, 23 December 1981, ref. 6968/1.]

The first Evans and Giles heard of the 23 December meeting and its decision to transfer the titles of the papers they edited was on 16 February 1982 when they were sent a copy of the minutes. They were horrified.[258 - Evans to Long, Frank Giles to Long, 16 February 1982, ref. 6968/1.] Why had they not been informed of the meeting? Why was it held at the Sun’s headquarters? The impression was clear: Murdoch’s henchmen had attempted to ‘pull a fast one’. But what was their motive? If TNL was liquidated while still in possession of its principal assets – the titles – it could be bought by another buyer. Evans approached Jim Sherwood of Sea Containers and encouraged him to buy The Times from Murdoch.[259 - Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, p. 359.] Murdoch promptly rebuffed Sherwood’s offer when it was sent to him on 9 February. Transferring the titles to News International would, wrote one chapel father (Peter Wilby), allow Murdoch to liquidate TNL and restart the papers at a later date with a more favourable set of union (or nonunion) staffing agreements.[260 - Peter Wilby (Father of the Sunday Times NUJ chapel) to Sir Edward Pickering, 20 February 1982.] This, and the rejection of the Sherwood offer, suggested that if Murdoch did not get the mass redundancy package accepted he really did intend to abolish TNL and relaunch the titles on his own terms, in his own time. It also placed a gun to the head of the unions in the negotiations over cutting six hundred jobs.

Transferring the titles to News International ran counter to Sir Denis Hamilton’s strategy of ring-fencing Times Newspapers in the Articles of Association so that, as he put it, ‘in no way could it be mixed up with the operational or financial side of News International’.[261 - Denis Hamilton, Editor-in-Chief, p. 183.] But Evans and Giles could no longer appeal to Hamilton who, seeing the way events were moving, had resigned as chairman of the company’s board of directors. The new chairman was none other than Keith Rupert Murdoch. All of a sudden, it seemed Murdoch was doing to Times Newspapers what he had done to the News of the World chairman, Sir William Carr – arriving in the guise of a financial white knight, only to seize the keys to the castle. Yet, was it not inevitable that the person paying the bills also wanted outright control of the company? The only prop keeping TNL on its feet was the money being pumped into it by News International. As Richard Searby, chairman of the parent News Corporation, bluntly put it, ownership of the titles was the security it needed if it was to continue backrolling this liability.[262 - Richard Searby to Sir Edward Pickering, 17 February 1982.] The City reacted to the news by wiping £4 million from News International’s stock market value.

There were two problems with this strategy. First, if Murdoch attempted to close TNL and relaunch The Times in a manner that displeased the print unions they could strike at Bouverie Street, bringing down the Sun and the News of the World, the two sure cash cows that contributed most to keeping his media empire afloat. Secondly, the titles transfer appeared to be illegal under point 2 (iii) of the terms set out by John Biffen unless the board of independent directors’ gave their approval, a detail overlooked in the hastily convened and inquorate TNL meeting of 23 December. Biffen had stipulated that a fine or two years imprisonment would apply to Murdoch if he broke the conditions upon which his purchase of TNL had been granted. This included changing the Articles of Association without consent. The Times NUJ chapel pressed for the transferral to be disallowed, threatening if necessary to seek a High Court injunction.[263 - TNL News, March 1982.] Rees-Mogg added his voice to the controversy, writing to Biffen and denouncing the attempted titles shift on the BBC’s The World This Weekend. The independent directors also waded in, Lord Dacre describing it as a ‘gross incivility … the Proprietor met the national directors on January 12 and said nothing about it’ while Lord Greene at least struck a supportive note for the newspaper’s reporting of the fracas by claiming ‘All I know about it is what is in The Times.’[264 - The Times, 15 February 1982.] Evans had certainly ensured that his paper could not be faulted when it came to washing its owner’s dirty linen on both front and back pages. Even if Murdoch’s exact motives were unclear, the manner in which Long had acted created a suspicion of shadiness. The Shadow Trade Minister, John Smith, complained that Murdoch was attempting ‘a breathtaking subterfuge, which raises very serious questions about his future intentions for both newspapers’.[265 - Ibid., February 1982.] The Conservative former Cabinet minister Geoffrey Rippon asked Mrs Thatcher to consider establishing an enquiry.

Murdoch, Searby and Long had miscalculated. Talks with Department of Trade officials indicated the transfer was probably illegal. Searby got to work on preparing a dignified retreat. The decision to transfer was reversed pending a meeting of the Times board of independent directors who duly made clear their opposition to the plan, killing it there and then.[266 - Richard Searby to Sir Edward Pickering, 19 February 1982; Minutes of TNHL board meeting, 22 February 1982.] Meanwhile, the deadline for achieving the six hundred redundancies had been reached. But when the requests for voluntary redundancy were counted they numbered scarcely more than one hundred and fifty. Murdoch flew back to London.

For ten hours, the unions and management tried to reach agreement, but the gulf remained too wide. Murdoch announced that 210 clerical workers would be sacked on a last in first out basis if the number of voluntary redundancies did not rise commensurately. The unions replied by issuing a joint statement, making clear they did ‘not accept the mandatory notices’ that were due to be sent out the following morning. The mood at a meeting of NATSOPA clerical workers on 24 February was firmly defiant. In the Spectator, the cartoonist Michael Heath drew an egg timer with the words The Times on it – the sand had almost run out.[267 - Spectator, 27 February 1982.]

At such a moment it would have been helpful if the editor and the proprietor could have managed the pretence of a united front. Evans tried to woo Murdoch by telling him what he wanted to hear but the latter cold-shouldered him.[268 - Evans to Murdoch, 21 and 23 February 1982. Evans Day File.] Back on 10 February, the Guardian had reported rumours that Evans’s future had been discussed at a meeting of Times Newspapers’ board of directors. Had this been true (it was not) it would have narrowed the ‘mole’ down to those seated around the boardroom table. Murdoch was quick to deny the story, issuing a statement decrying the ‘malicious, self-serving and wrong’ rumours and praising his editor, whose ‘outstanding qualities and journalistic skills are recognized throughout the world’. Not everyone was convinced. Private Eye, with its vendetta against ‘Dame Harold Evans’ (supposedly confusing him with Dame Edith Evans, first lady of the English stage), played up the stories, as did the new William Hickey columnist in the Daily Express. Evans was not the sort of Fleet Street editor who took a relaxed view about what rival newspapers wrote about him. He believed in the righteous purpose of the fourth estate and was not prepared to tolerate its failings in regard to himself.

Back in September, Evans had taken such exception to a sloppily researched article about his Times editorship in Harpers & Queen entitled ‘O Tempora! O Mores!’ that he forced the magazine’s editor to publish a blow-by-blow rebuttal of points of error. These corrections ranged from ‘Mr Anthony Holden’s mother-in-law is not the Queen’s gynaecologist’ to ‘Mr Holden’s wife does not play the harpsichord’. Readers of the glossy fashion magazine were also to be alerted to the fact that ‘Mr Peter Watson did not go for a trial for Bristol Rovers’ and ‘Mr Brian MacArthur has never written a headline “It’s a beaut”.’[269 - Evans to Willie Landels, 24 September 1981, Evans Day File A327/3626.] Many thought Evans would have been better letting some of this trivia go. But he was even more incandescent when, on 1 March 1982, the BBC’s Panorama alleged – in a feature on the crisis at The Times – that he had moved an illustration of Libyan hit men from an inside page to the front page on Murdoch’s instructions. Evans demanded the BBC issue a statement at the beginning of the following week’s programme conceding the claim was ‘false in detail and inference’.[270 - Evans to Elwyn Parry Jones (producer, Panorama), 2 March 1982, Evans Day File A759/9329.] The allegation was indeed untrue, but it had come from someone intent on mischief from inside the newspaper. The BBC ignored Evans’s demand. While this was going on, he was also preparing to go to court against Private Eye after it accused him of being a ‘two-faced hypocrite’ who had tried to do a deal with Rothermere’s Associated Newspapers for Times Newspapers even after he had approved Murdoch on the vetting committee (but before Murdoch offered him the Times editorship). Private Eye had a witness, Hugh Stephenson, and its case would have been strengthened had it known that after Evans had approved Murdoch on the vetting committee, he had written to congratulate Jonathan Aitken on his anti-Murdoch speech in the Commons. Nonetheless, Evans was adamant that he had not assisted Associated, and was determined to get legal redress, dismissing Stephenson as ‘a disappointed potential Editor of The Times’.[271 - Evans to Tony Richmond-Watson, 26 February 1982, Evans Day File 1759/9329; also Evans to Long, 9 March 1981, and Evans to Murdoch, draft memo, undated [February] 1982.] Richard Ingrams, the Eye’s editor, remained determined to find fault with Evans, subsequently grumbling, ‘the fellow has a nasty habit of suing for libel, an aspect of the great crusader for press freedom not often noted by his admirers’.[272 - Richard Ingrams, Spectator, 5 November 1983.]

During February, the divisions within Gray’s Inn Road ceased being gossip and became hard news. ‘There were two teams producing one newspaper,’ recalled Tim Austin. One team comprised those loyal to the editor. Primarily there were the two men he had brought in to sharpen features and policy, Anthony Holden and Bernard Donoughue. There were also others like Holden’s deputy, Peter Stothard, who had crossed the bridge from the Sunday Times with its illustrious editor. They were in no doubt that, left to his own devices, Evans was a genius who was transforming The Times for the better. They gave him their total loyalty. It was Evans’s great strength that he inspired such emotions in those he appointed and encouraged. It was his weakness that he could not command such loyalty from many of the entrenched Times staff he inherited. Those in the latter camp were a more diffuse entity, brought together only by their belief that the paper was descending into chaos and needed to be rescued by someone who understood its (supposed) core values. Much of what they disliked about Evans’s editorship were actually decisions driven by Murdoch in his desire to cut costs and modernize the paper. But while they could not get rid of the man whose money was keeping them in employment, they could balance what they saw as his less enlightened traits if there was a new editor who combined a will to stand up to him with a sensibility for stabilizing the atmosphere on the paper. Such a man existed in the deputy editor, Charles Douglas-Home. And it was no secret that he was increasingly disaffected with Harold Evans.

Towards the end of February, just as Fred Emery was poised to go on a skiing holiday, he received a telephone call. ‘I’m sorry you’re going away,’ said the caller, by way of introduction. ‘Who’s speaking?’ demanded Emery, momentarily failing to register the mild Australian accent. The proprietor asked if he could pop in to see him before he went skiing, making clear that it was a matter of some urgency. Intrigued, Emery hurried over, wondering what could possibly be so pressing. Murdoch came straight to the point. ‘I’m thinking of changing the editor,’ he said, adding that he now believed Douglas-Home should succeed. He wanted to know what Emery thought. Emery asked what his reasons for the change might be and was told, ‘Harry is all over the place.’ He was particularly concerned about the influence of Bernard Donoughue and the generous terms upon which he had been hired (while maintaining his City interests). Emery admitted that the paper was indeed in chaos. He also supported Douglas-Home’s candidature, while adding that there might be a problem with some of the home news reporters who had never forgiven him for keeping a secret dossier on their private lives. Although disabusing Murdoch on the issue of Evans’s politics (he was not, as the proprietor suspected, endorsing the SDP), Emery had largely confirmed his suspicions. Emery was thanked and told to proceed with his skiing holiday.[273 - Rupert Murdoch to the author, interview, 4 August 2003.]

There were several theatres of war, but none more important than that over the leader column. Evans recognized that the chief leader writer, Owen Hickey, was an authoritative commentator. On important issues such as the Middle East and Ireland, Hickey shared Evans’s generally pro-Israeli, pro-Ulster Unionist disposition. But Hickey did not contribute much to the leader conferences, preferring to act as if the column was his personal fiefdom where he should be left undisturbed to formulate his own thoughts. Leader writers had long believed themselves to be a higher caste of Times journalist and jealously guarded their right to opine. It was Thomas Barnes (editor, 1817–41), who had introduced the unsigned leader article, prompting William Cobbett to rail against its anonymous pronouncements as if ‘each paragraph appears to be a little sort of order in council; a solemn decision of a species of literary conclave’.[274 - Quoted in Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, p. 222.] Barnes and his team had ‘thundered out’ in the cause of reform, giving the paper its ‘Thunderer’ nickname in the process. But as Evans was aware, the tone had long since become more Delphic. ‘If this was the citadel of The Times,’ he concluded, ‘it was stultified by charm.’ He parodied the style of one of the leader writers, Geoffrey Smith, along the lines of, ‘The crucifixion was not a good thing, but then it was not altogether a bad thing either.’[275 - Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, p. 228.]

The reflective and balanced articles were all very well, but Evans wanted to ‘get into the engine-room of government policy, leading as well as reacting’.[276 - Ibid., p. 229.] He looked to Bernard Donoughue, whom he had brought in to formulate the paper’s political strategy, to provide this. Donoughue succeeded in impressing upon the editor the case for using the paper to attack the Government’s economic policies. This raised problems of personality as well as politics. Donoughue and Hickey did not work effectively together.[277 - Bernard Donoughue, The Heat of the Kitchen, p. 286.] They especially disagreed on Ireland where, despite his Catholicism and his ownership of a farm in the Republic, Hickey remained a conviction Unionist. Nor was Hickey alone in finding Donoughue’s manner that of the bully and there was resentment of him as another Evans import who was indulged by his patron more than the longer serving staff. Certainly he looked ‘like a tough centre forward in professional football’ as Evans put it, gap-toothed and hair sitting ‘tightly on his head in orderly rows of crinkly black like the paper one finds in boxes of chocolates’. But he had every claim to authority as the son of a Northamptonshire car factory worker who had gone down with a First from Oxford and, before his thirties were out, was running the Number Ten Street Policy Unit first for Wilson and later for Callaghan. When Thomson had put Times Newspapers up for sale, Donoughue had been Evans’s lieutenant trying to cobble together the Sunday Times consortium and had briefed MPs to block Biffen’s non-referral of Murdoch’s bid to the Monopolies Commission.

Donoughue was a man of great talents but, unintentionally, he contributed to Evans’s downfall. His role was widely resented by his colleagues who were agreed that he was a disruptive and alien presence at The Times (although they were divided over whether they believed his loyalty was first and foremost to the Labour Party – for whom he was assumed to be informally spying – or to his patron, the editor). Evans was a news-driven editor not a political thinker and consequently felt he needed Donoughue to provide ideological direction. But he was asking for trouble in appointing as his political guru a man who fundamentally opposed the line of the chief leader writer, hated the proprietor, appeared addicted to fuelling conspiracy theories and treated established members of staff with rudeness or suspicion. Rightly or wrongly, most traditional Times journalists took the view that Evans, like a Plantaganet monarch with foreign favourites, relied too heavily on bad counsel. Their desire to be rid of Evans, was, as much, a will to be shot of Donoughue.

When Donoughue arrived, Hickey had already been a leader writer for twenty-six years and the contrast between the two could scarcely have been more marked. Hickey conveyed a shy, donnish and in dress slightly down-at-heel exterior that conflicted with his early days. At Clifton College – the sports-conscious public school to which his Catholic Irish parents had sent him – he had captained both the rugby and cricket teams. During the war he had served with the Third Battalion of the Irish Guards, losing an eye in Normandy. He maintained that he owed his life to his batman who had carried him from the battlefield. After the war he had gone up to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he continued to play cricket and rugby and went down with a First in Greats. In 1949, William Haley had persuaded him to move from the Times Educational Supplement to The Times and he had written the paper’s leaders opposing the 1963 Robbins Report’s call for the rapid expansion of Britain’s universities. He had also drafted much of the 1970 ‘White Swan’ letter against Rees-Mogg’s efforts to broaden The Times’s appeal (which, he believed, meant lowering its standards).[278 - Obituary of Owen Hickey, The Times, 5 December 2000. In the spirit of his anonymous work, Hickey had requested not to be given an obituary. The request was ignored.] But he saved his spiciest writing for the daily round-up he gave each morning to Rees-Mogg on the previous day’s paper, with such acerbic observations as ‘by-line suggests our reporter was at Hammersmith and Covent Garden simultaneously. A reading suggests she was at neither’ and ‘Alan Hamilton has been south of the border long enough not to regard artichokes in cans and sardines as delicacies’.[279 - Owen Hickey to Rees-Mogg, 13 November and 23 December 1980.] He was, in the verdict of the managing editor, John Grant, ‘the conscience of the paper’. Increasingly it was a troubled conscience.

Evans wanted to run a Times campaign against lead in petrol. Des Wilson, chairman of CLEAR (Campaign for Lead-Free Air), had sent Anthony Holden copies of private correspondence from the Government’s Chief Medical Officer to the Government warning of the health dangers – especially to children – of lead in petrol. To Evans there seemed the possibility of a Government cover-up waiting to be exposed, but the reaction of the paper’s old guard was summed up by the home news editor, Rodney Cowton, who asked with an air of distaste if he was being ordered to run ‘a campaign’ on the subject. The increasingly truculent Charles Douglas-Home phrased it even more dismissively, pondering aloud, ‘What is campaigning journalism?’ To his thinking, the concept was suspect, smacking of personal agendas and sensational (unbalanced) reporting. Temporarily out of the office, Evans wanted Holden to make a big issue out of the story, but Douglas-Home pulled rank and used his authority as deputy editor to shunt the story into the obscurity he believed it deserved.[280 - Peter Stothard to the author, interview, 8 November 2004; Anthony Holden to the author, interview, 9 April 2003.] It was a direct challenge to Evans’s authority. The gloves were off.