Kitabı oku: «The History of the Times: The Murdoch Years»

Volume VII 1981–2002

The Murdoch Years

PREFACE

This is an official history. It has access to private correspondence and business documents that have not been made generally available to other writers or historians. Some may consider this a mixed blessing and assume that the consequence must necessarily – in the words of the accusation that used to be labelled at The Times’s obituaries – ‘sniff of an inside job’. It should therefore be stated from the first that at no stage has anyone altered anything I have written or pressured me into adopting a position or opinion that was not my own. It is an official history but not a formally approved or authorized version of events.

Indeed, Rupert Murdoch’s relaxed attitude while I probed around in an important part of his business empire contrasted favourably with past precedent in this series. Those commissioned to write the six previous volumes of the official history of The Times were closely involved in the paper’s life, a conflict of interest that certainly hindered the appearance of objectivity. The first four volumes, covering the period between its foundation in 1785 and the Second World War, were compiled between 1935 and 1952 by a team under the command of Stanley Morison. Morison was the inventor of the world’s most popular typeface, Times New Roman. He was also a close friend of the paper’s then owner, John Astor, and its editor, Robin Barrington-Ward, who went so far as to describe Morison as ‘the Conscience of The Times’. Iverach McDonald, who was an assistant editor and managing editor of the paper during the period he described, wrote volume five in 1984. Volume six, covering the years 1966 to 1981, was written in 1993 by John Grigg. He had been the paper’s obituaries editor between 1986 and 1987 and was a regular columnist. Grigg, at least, was not directly involved in the events about which he wrote. Instead, he brought the insight and flair of the independent historian of note, attributes for which he will be fondly remembered. For my own part, I cannot claim much personal involvement with the paper during the years covered in this volume. My only first hand experience was garnered during the year 2000, when I was a leader writer. As a historian, my specialist area is British politics in the 1930s.

The Times is not, first and foremost, a national institution. It is a business. Yet I have avoided the temptation to treat it purely as a corporate entity, as if its journalistic and literary output had no more cultural significance than the manufacturing of the paper on which it was printed. Consequently, I have described its journalism within the context of the world events that were its stimulation. The book, therefore, is part business history, part work of reference, part anthology. It is intended to appeal both to those interested in the paper in particular or journalism in general who want to know how The Times conducted itself during the period 1981 to 2002.

The book would not have been possible without the knowledge and assistance of The Times’s archivist, Eamon Dyas, and his assistant, Nick Mays, at News International’s impressively organized Archive Centre and Record Office. Elaine Grant and Karen Colognese were unceasingly helpful in providing assistance from the chairman’s office. Journalists too numerous to mention here have accepted my invitations to share what they know over some light refreshment. Their recollections and observations have made this book a pleasure to write. It has also been a relief to discover that the traditions of the Fleet Street lunch are not entirely a thing of the past. It is not the place of an official history to indulge the sort of convoluted tales of uncertain provenance that enliven many a hack’s memoir of the Street of Shame’s alleged glory days. Nonetheless, despite my preference for primary evidence, I have not omitted gossip where I have been able to cross reference the story and establish its basis in fact. Any errors or misrepresentations remain, of course, entirely my own.

Among the many individuals that have helped me, I should like in particular to thank Richard Spink and Tasha Browning for their indefatigable generosity of spirit. At HarperCollins, Annabel Wright has been a stalwart aid. I have profited enormously from the valuable suggestions made by Andrew Knight and Brian MacArthur whose experience of the newspaper world is exceptional. Rupert Murdoch gave me a considerable amount of his time and I appreciate the unconditional assistance he has given me. I should especially like to thank Les Hinton, executive chairman of News International, who has been a great friend of the project and unfailing in his support and enthusiasm. It is my regret that Sir Edward Pickering, grand old man of Fleet Street and executive vice-chairman of Times Newspapers, did not live to see the completion of the book he commissioned and for which he provided such sagacious advice. I dedicate it to his memory.

Graham Stewart, February 2005

CHAPTER ONE
A LICENCE TO LOSE MONEY

The Problems of Owning The Times; the Thomson Sale and the Murdoch Purchase

I

On 22 October 1980, in its one hundred and ninety-sixth year, The Times was put up for sale. It would be closed down if no suitable buyer secured a deal before 15 March – the Ides of March. Staff received notice that their contracts were being terminated.

Superficially The Times was a prize, but few who had studied the accounts would have thought so. It resembled the sort of Palladian mansion still occasionally offered for sale through the pages of Country Life. Despite the odd seedling protruding from the cornicing, the exterior still looked magnificent and the asking price seemed preposterously low. But those enquiring beyond the inventory of rare and exotic contents (to be auctioned separately) soon discovered why the previous owners no longer felt able to comply with the conditions of this national treasure’s preservation order. The lead had come away from the roof, the attic floorboards had collapsed and damp enveloped what had once been a ballroom. The costs of upkeep would be punishing and, with little prospect of a change of usage permit, the likely revenue insufficient. On hearing the news that The Times was for sale, the reaction of Rupert Murdoch, the owner of the Sun and the News of the World, was reported in the press: ‘I doubt whether there will be any buyers.’¹

It was certainly a bad sign that the share price of the Thomson Organisation, The Times’s owner, soared by £40 million on the announcement that it was offloading its flagship paper. This was particularly alarming since for sale was not only The Times and its three smaller circulation supplements but also the Sunday Times, a paper that had been profitable for seventeen out of the past twenty years. But the Sunday market leader had lost 300,000 copies through industrial action the weekend before Thomson’s announcement that it was for sale. It had lost 800,000 the weekend before that. No newspaper that lost five million copies in a year as a result of the action of those employed to print it could realize its potential.² Together, the papers – The Times, the Times Literary Supplement, the Times Educational Supplement, the Times Higher Education Supplement and the Sunday Times – that comprised Times Newspapers Limited (TNL) had made after-tax losses of £18.8 million in 1979 and £14.5 million in 1980.³ In the same interview in which he declared little interest in picking up the bill, Rupert Murdoch was quoted as describing TNL as a ‘snake-pit’.

It was hard to see what hard-headed businessman would leap at the opportunity to enter this environment. Certainly, there would be bidders with an interest in either asset stripping or wanting to turn The Times into a private toy. Middle Eastern backers expressed interest but, as Sir Richard Marsh, chairman of the Newspaper Publishers’ Association (NPA), indelicately put it: ‘I think [the idea of] The Times being owned by somebody in the Lebanon would be a joke.’⁴ Nearer home, there were some circling sharks, among them Robert Maxwell, James Goldsmith and Tiny Rowland, to whom the Thomson board were simply not prepared to sell the paper at any price.⁵

In Westminster there was cross-party alarm. Michael Foot, the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, who had once been one of Beaverbrook’s sharpest pens, declared ‘every journalist in the country, I would think, would be deeply shocked at hearing the news’ that The Times was for sale or closure, adding: ‘undoubtedly this has created a crisis of major proportions for the free press in Britain’.⁶

The mood in the non-parliamentary wing of the Labour Movement was also glum. Meeting the members of the Thomson board two days after the announcement of the sale, Joe Wade, general secretary of the National Graphical Association (NGA) print union, whose members made up much of the skilled print labour force at TNL, said that the news ‘had wonderfully concentrated people’s minds’ and that in the last forty-eight hours he had been able to obtain a number of guarantees of continuous production. This was surprising. During 1978–9, his union had preferred to witness TNL’s papers being taken off the streets for eleven months rather than make concessions to its management. The shutdown of the papers had cost Thomson £40 million and ended only when management crumbled at the first sight of union guarantees that subsequently proved worthless. But now that his supposed antagonists appeared to be quitting the field, Wade changed his tune: ‘the Unions would prefer the Times titles to remain with The Thomson Organisation – better the devil you know’. The thirteenth-hour loyal protestation, if that is what it was, had come too late. The decision to sell was irrevocable. Wade unhelpfully commented to the press: ‘the unions frankly had grave doubts whether a realistic proposition would emerge for the transfer of the titles to a new owner’.⁷

In a rare moment of unity, the editor of The Times agreed. William Rees-Mogg had been in the chair since 1967, having been appointed shortly after Roy Thomson’s purchase of the paper from the Astor family. His father was a Somerset squire, but he was brought up in the Roman Catholic faith of his American mother, a former actress who in her day had performed alongside Sarah Bernhardt. Sent to school at Charterhouse, his precocious abilities won him a Brackenbury scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford, where he was at ease with the college’s temporal traditions; he was elected president of the Oxford Union. On going down, he worked first for the Financial Times and then at the Sunday Times as its deputy editor. He was still only thirty-eight when he became editor of The Times. Under his editorship the paper had continued to play to its strengths – in particular the authority of its comment and reflection on world events – while continuing to lag behind the Daily Telegraph in the breadth and immediacy of its home news coverage. In particular, Rees-Mogg had maintained the high standard of Times leader articles, the most memorable of which were his own work. As a seasoned commentator of the period put it with regard to Rees-Mogg’s paper: ‘One found oneself every morning in the company of a civilized, slightly barmy, humorous, usually gentle, intelligence, whose most stimulating characteristic was its unpredictability.’⁸ This last facet was now to make itself evident as Rees-Mogg decided that it had fallen to him – with the journalists around him – to save The Times.

No sooner had the news of the sale broken than Rees-Mogg summoned his editorial staff. As many of the 330 full complement as could crowded around. His deputy, Louis Heren, described the occasion as ‘almost like a revolutionary commune’.⁹ If a ‘person of good character and quality’ wanted to buy the papers then that would be acceptable, Rees-Mogg declared. But merely switching ownership from one press baron to another should not be the ‘plan to save our future’. Thomson was offering The Times and Sunday Times for sale together as a package. This, Rees-Mogg argued, was a mistake. If anything was now clear it was that the two papers were ‘by their natures so different that neither paper is good for the other’. Not only did they have incompatible audiences, ‘the industrial logic which put the Sunday Times and The Times together was mistaken industrial logic’. In any case, ‘if the Thomson family were not able to master this business why should any other individual be any more successful?’. With the example of Le Monde, which was run by a journalists’ cooperative, the editor proposed bringing the already-formed staff group known as Journalists of The Times (JOTT), together with managers, as minority shareholders in a consortium supported by a variety of financial backers. Together they would buy the paper.¹⁰

It was a bold idea. Some found the editor’s newfound conversion to worker participation perplexing, but others were enthusiastic. The paper’s Whitehall correspondent, Peter Hennessy, stood up to say, ‘I am very pleased about the powerful lead you intend to give us in our struggle and unwillingness to accept any Northcliffe-type buyer.’ Northcliffe had bought The Times from its original Walter family owners in 1908, popularizing it but interfering in its cherished editorial independence. He had also saved the paper from certain death. Within six years of Northcliffe’s acquisition of the paper, its circulation had risen from a mere 40,000 to 314,000 copies a day. It was a sign of what had happened under the two subsequent owners that, despite the massively expanding market during the twentieth century, this 1914 figure was higher than the 298,000 The Times was averaging between July and December 1980.

The Times of 23 October 1980 carried as its front-page lead story its own perilous position. Rees-Mogg wrote a signed article on the Op-Ed page (the page for columnists opposite the leaders and letters page) elaborating on his ideas in his speech to the staff. ‘Now The Times is going to fight for herself,’ proclaimed a new agenda: ‘the lesson of the Thomson years is that subsidy destroys the commercial operation of newspapers’ and that ‘I no longer believe in the virtue of a newspaper proprietorship which does not include the people who make the paper as shareholders in the ownership.’ ‘From now on,’ he announced, ‘the main thrust of my work will be to try with like-minded colleagues to develop a partnership – commercial not charitable – which can keep The Times in being.’¹¹

The paper’s letter page soon filled with exhortations from readers, often pledging the length of their active service to the paper’s circulation by way of qualification, in support of Rees-Mogg’s idea of a journalist-capitalist syndicate.¹² Barings became the project’s merchant bankers and Sir Michael Swann, Provost of Oriel College, Oxford, and a former chairman of the BBC, chaired the consortium. Lord Weinstock, managing director of GEC and a personal friend of Rees-Mogg, sat on its steering committee. If £10 million of working capital could be raised, fortified by £30 million a year revenue, it was certainly feasible that The Times could balance its books if it could cut its expenses by printing outside London’s notorious high labour costs. Lord Barnetson, the chairman of the Observer, had suggested to Rees-Mogg that printing The Times at a provincial ‘greenfield’ site could be done for £7 million a year. This was a third of the cost of doing it with the current TNL print workers at the paper’s London headquarters in Gray’s Inn Road.¹³

Of course, it was not that simple. Even if an existing provincial print works, for example the United Newspapers’ plant in Northampton, could be engaged, there would be a period of disruption – conservatively estimated at six weeks – before The Times could roll out from its new site. Readers’ loyalty had already been seriously tested by the eleven-month shutdown the previous year and another lengthy period in which the paper was off the streets was clearly something to be avoided. More importantly, the strategy assumed that the London print unions would sit back while their jobs were transferred to ‘brothers’ in the provinces. This was not in the spirit of union solidarity. Even if their fellow members in the provinces did decide to handle The Times, the print unions could then hold hostage the Sunday Times by going on strike at Gray’s Inn Road. With this, the whole Thomson strategy of selling the papers together would unwind. Even without these problems, the Rees-Mogg consortium had to convince long-term investors that it could gain access to sufficient and sustainable capital and that a syndicate in which journalists played a part would have the necessary unity of purpose to take hard decisions.¹⁴

The consortium’s best hope was to step in following the Thomson board’s failure to attract a serious bid from one of the major media magnates. This Rees-Mogg came to accept, ultimately viewing his plan as a fall-back position,¹⁵ but at the time the Thomson board watched with mounting alarm as the extent of his desire to promote his rescue plan manifested itself. The Times’s editor had a journalist’s eye for finding ways to maximize publicity (some supposed that this must have had something to do with the early influence of a theatrical mother). Gathering a television crew about him, Rees-Mogg now set off across the Atlantic. There, he hoped, he might find white knights, ready to take a share in his mission to save ‘this strange English institution’.

Having arrived in the United States, Rees-Mogg had lunch with Katharine Graham, the proprietor of the Washington Post. Despite her liberal politics, she had shown the determination to break a debilitating print workers’ strike that threatened to strangle the Post in 1975, defeating those besieging her printing plant by flying newsprint into it over their heads. Unlike Times Newspapers’ management, she had taken on her industrial tormentors and won. But, joined for lunch by her senior management, even she could not see how The Times could get out of its dire situation. Having listened to Rees-Mogg’s presentation, the verdict was to the point: ‘The Washington Post saw The Times as a potential disaster area which they didn’t want anything to do with,’ Rees-Mogg recalled, ‘although they were very polite and friendly.’¹⁶

Rees-Mogg had considered Kay Graham the sort of acceptably independent-minded proprietor The Times should be trying to attract. He had not yet spoken of Rupert Murdoch in that light. Indeed, in 1977 he had told the Royal Commission on the Press: ‘Mr Murdoch’s writ does run in his own building and, much as I respect his energy and vigour, because of his views on the proprietorial function, I would never myself be willing to work for him.’¹⁷ Less than a month before it was announced The Times was being put up for sale, Rees-Mogg had encouraged his New York correspondent, Michael Leapman, to write an attack on Murdoch’s methods at his New York Post. The article, illustrated with a Post front-page headline ‘PREGNANT MOM IN 911 TERROR’ was equally punchy:

It is nearly four years since Mr Murdoch gave the United States its first true sampling of the journalism of the lowest common denominator. That was when he bought the struggling New York Post and filled its senior editorial positions with British and Australian newspapermen, expert in plumbing the depths of bad taste which Americans had scarcely guessed at.¹⁸

Yet now Rees-Mogg made the trip to the top of the New York Post building overlooking the Brooklyn Bridge to discover whether Rupert Murdoch, owner of eighty-four newspapers including the Sun and the News of the World, was interested in helping to save The Times.

The meeting, Rees-Mogg reflected, went well. Murdoch was friendly, courteous and drank not from a mug but from an elegant china tea service. He did not let himself be drawn on exactly what his intentions were but by the time Rees-Mogg returned to Manhattan street level he had gained the impression that Murdoch was sizing up the possibility of a bid for the Sunday Times. This was good, for the whole point of Rees-Mogg’s consortium plan was that there should be a divorce in the Times family. Furthermore, Murdoch appeared to be keen to help the consortium in any practical way, perhaps even printing it at his plant in Worcester. Indeed, ‘he was sympathetic to anything that would keep The Times alive’.¹⁹

It was only the third time Murdoch and Rees-Mogg had properly met one another. Previously they had found themselves seated together at a table with the Queen at a celebratory gathering of the Press Club during which Rees-Mogg had noticed the Australian’s ability to make the Queen laugh. But their first meeting, in the summer of 1951, had been more prescient. The young Rees-Mogg, already at the age of twenty-three bearing the assumed gravitas of an elder statesman, had been walking up The Turl in Oxford when he was stopped by a ‘brash young member of the Labour Club’ who wanted to cut him in on a business venture. The Antipodean undergraduate said he was thinking of buying the ailing student newspaper Cherwell, and wondered whether Rees-Mogg wanted to invest in his scheme. Venerable title or not, Rees-Mogg replied that Cherwell was staid and boring and would never attract sufficient advertising to be an attractive business proposition. The young Murdoch countered that with drive and initiative it could be made attractive by changing the editorial content, bringing it up to date and transforming the finances. ‘You’ll never make any money out of Cherwell’ was the young Rees-Mogg’s cheerful reply. And with that mistaken prophecy, the two undergraduates went their separate ways.²⁰

Twenty-nine years later, two men were determined to put Murdoch’s profit-making expertise back in touch with a venerable, occasionally staid, loss maker. The first was one of Fleet Street’s most respected figures – Sir Denis Hamilton, editor-in-chief of Times Newspapers Limited. The other was Sir Gordon Brunton, managing director of TNL’s parent company, Thomson British Holdings Limited. Both men thought Rees-Mogg’s consortium idea was suicidal, but when they had discussed the disposal of Times Newspapers in a secretly convened meeting with Thomson’s chairman, Lord Thomson of Fleet, on 18 September 1980, Hamilton had reported the opinion that ‘Rupert Murdoch is probably not interested’.²¹ One look at the other likely bidders was enough to convince those seated around the table that it was a matter of urgency to get him interested.

Sir Gordon Brunton had got to know Murdoch through the Newspaper Publishers’ Association. The two men shared a similar attitude towards dealing with the print unions and, unlike so many of the other Fleet Street proprietors who attended NPA meetings, Brunton believed that if Murdoch gave his word on a particular action he would keep it.²² Murdoch considered Brunton ‘clear-headed and strong-willed’.²³ Besides his godfather role at Times Newspapers, Sir Denis Hamilton was also chairman of Reuters, the board meetings of which Murdoch regularly attended. It was on a flight to Bahrain for one of these meetings that the two found themselves sitting together in the aeroplane. This was a seating coincidence that Hamilton – assuming Murdoch would be taking the same flight – had carefully engineered. The long flight was an unrivalled opportunity to get Murdoch alone and Hamilton did his best to, as he later put it, ‘plant as much of a seed as possible – for my fellow directors felt that only a really strong owner who would be prepared to take savage measures, and of whose determination the unions could have no doubt, had any hope’.²⁴

In fact, Murdoch had already scented blood. Back in September, he had bumped into Lord Thomson in the Concorde departure lounge at JFK and gained from him, however obliquely, the impression that TNL would not remain within the Thomson empire for much longer. Murdoch, indeed, had greater forewarning that The Times would be up for sale than had its editor. But whether the owner of predominately tabloid titles, a man who gave little impression of wanting to join the British Establishment, could be persuaded to take the bait and rescue The Times still remained far from clear.

Whichever projection was favoured, The Times was not on any rapid course to profitability. Although it had edged into the black during the early 1950s and for one tantalizing moment in 1977, it had been losing money for the vast majority of the twentieth century. A paper with such a track record would have been shut down long ago had it not been for its reputation and the manner in which being the proprietor of The Times conveyed a position in public life that had a value of its own. Gavin Astor, who became (alongside his father) proprietor in 1964, described the newspaper as ‘a peculiar property in that service to what it believes are the best interests of the nation is placed before the personal and financial gains of its Proprietors’.²⁵ But a proprietor’s belief in his role as a national custodian was not necessarily appreciated by less sentimentally minded shareholders. When Roy Thomson bought The Times in 1966 he recognized that it would not be a cash cow and, in order not to trouble shareholders’ consciences with it, opted to fund it out of his own exceptionally deep pocket. In 1974 this decision was reversed when the Thomson Organisation’s portfolio diversified further into other interests, including North Sea oil, whose profitability dwarfed TNL’s losses. The only commercial argument for retaining The Times was that as a globally recognized quality brand, it (at least psychologically) added value as the glittering flagship of the Thomson Line. Unfortunately, in becoming a byword for unseaworthiness, it risked very publicly bringing down Thomson’s reputation for business savvy and managerial skill. From that moment on, it became a matter of floating it out into the ocean and abandoning ship.

When it came to the announcement of sale, the Thomson board maintained that although they had failed, a new management team might be able to turn the paper around. This was a predictable statement – The Times could not easily be sold by asserting it had no viable future whoever owned it. But no serious forecaster believed it could be turned around quickly. Could supposedly ‘short-termist’ shareholders be expected to understand a new owner’s perseverance? In this respect Murdoch offered more hope than some potential bidders because he and his family owned a controlling share of his company, News International Limited. Thus, so long as Murdoch saw a future for the paper, News International could carry The Times through a long period of disappointing revenue without its survival in the company being frequently challenged by angry shareholders. And given the profitability of the other stallions in the stable, the Sun and the News of the World, there was every reason to expect that the banks would continue to regard News International as creditworthy.

On the other hand, appearing to have an excess of available money also threatened The Times. Journalists and print workers who regarded their paper as a rich man’s toy could be expected to want to joy ride with it. This had been part of the problem with the Thomson ownership of TNL. Roy Thomson was the son of a Toronto barber who described purchasing The Times when he was aged seventy-two as ‘the summit of a lifetime’s work’. An Anglophile, he renounced his Canadian citizenship in order to accept a British peerage (as the future Canadian proprietor of the Daily Telegraph, Conrad Black, would later do). He took as his title Lord Thomson of Fleet – the closest a peerage could decorously go towards being named after a busy street. Not only did he describe owning The Times as ‘the greatest privilege of my life’ he announced that in acquiring it, the paper’s ‘special position in the world will now be safeguarded for all time’.²⁶ This was a hostage to fortune. Owning STV (Scottish Television) had provided much of the financial base for his British acquisitions and he had once famously described owning a British commercial television station as ‘like having your own licence to print money’. He appeared to accept that owning The Times was a licence to lose it.

II

Fleet Street, whose pundits were paid daily to indict others for failing to put the world to rights, was noticeably incompetent in managing its own backyard. For those proprietors already ensconced, there was at least the compensation that this created a cartel-like environment. The huge costs of producing national newspapers caused by print unions’ ability to retain superfluous jobs and resist cost-saving innovation acted to ward off all but the most determined and rich competitors from cracking into the market. Competition from foreign newspapers was, for obvious reasons, all but nonexistent. The attempts through the Newspaper Publishers’ Association to act collectively against union demands were frequently half-hearted. No sooner had the respective managements returned to their papers’ headquarters than new and deadline-threatening disputes would lead them to cobble together individual peace deals that cut across the whole strategy of collective resistance. During the 1970s, it was widely understood that one of the major newspaper groups had resorted to paying sweeteners to specific union officials who might otherwise disrupt the evening print run.

By 1980, Fleet Street’s newspapers were the only manufacturing industry left in the heart of London. The print workers came predominantly from the East End, passing on their jobs from father to son (never to daughter) with a degree of reverence for the hereditary principle rarely seen outside Burke’s Peerage or a Newmarket stud farm. They were members of one of two types of union. The craft unions, of which the National Graphical Association (NGA) was to the fore, operated the museum-worthy Linotype machines that produced the type in hot metal and set the paper. The non-craft unions, in particular NATSOPA (later amalgamated into SOGAT), did what were considered the less skilful parts of the operation and included clerical workers, cleaners and other ancillary staff. Almost any suggested change to the working practice or the evening shift would result in a complicated negotiation procedure in which management was not only at loggerheads with union officials but the officials were equally anxious to maintain or enhance whatever differential existed with their rival union prior to any change. The balance of power was summed up in a revealing and justly famous exchange. Once Roy Thomson, visiting the Sunday Times, got into a lift at Gray’s Inn Road and introduced himself to a sun-tanned employee standing next to him. ‘Hello, I’m Roy Thomson, I own this paper,’ the proprietor good-naturedly announced. The Sunday Times NATSOPA machine room official replied, ‘I’m Reg Brady and I run this paper.’²⁷ In 1978, the company’s management discovered that this was true.

The print unions operating at Times Newspapers, as at other Fleet Street titles, were subdivided into chapels, individual bargaining units intent on maintaining their restrictive advantage. The union shop steward at the head of each chapel was known as the father. He, rather than anyone in middle management, had far more direct involvement in print workers’ daily routines. The father was effectively their commanding officer in the field. The military metaphor was a pertinent one for, although the position of father was an ancient one, the Second World War had certainly helped to adapt a new generation to its requirements. Non-commissioned officers who, on returning to civvy street, were not taken into management positions often found the parallel chain of command in the chapel system to their liking.

At Times Newspapers there were fifty-four chapels in existence, almost any one of which was capable of calling a halt to the evening’s print run. TNL management’s attempt to enforce a system in which a disruption by one chapel would cause the loss of pay to all others consequently left idle had been quashed. And chapels often had equally scant regard for the diktats of their national union officials. When in 1976 the unions’ national executives got together with Fleet Street’s senior management to thrash out a ‘Programme for Action’ in which a change in work practices would be accepted so long as there were no compulsory redundancies, the chapels – accepting the latter but not the former – scuppered the deal.²⁸

It was not only those paying the bills who despaired of this state of affairs. Many journalists, by no means right wing by political inclination, became resentful. Skilled Linotype operators earned salaries far in excess of some of the most seasoned and respected journalists upstairs. As Tim Austin, who worked at The Times continuously between 1968 and 2003 put it, ‘We couldn’t stand the print unions. They’d been screwing the paper for years. You didn’t know if the paper was going to come out at night. You would work on it for ten hours and then they would pull the plug and you had wasted ten hours of your life.’ The composing room was certainly not a forum of enlightened values. When Cathy James once popped her head round to check that a detail had been rendered correctly she was flatly told where a woman could go.²⁹

Relations had not always been this bad. The Times had been printed for 170 years before it was silenced by industrial action, the month-long dispute of March to April 1955 ensuring a break in the paper’s production (and thereby missing Churchill’s resignation as Prime Minister) that even a direct hit on its offices from the Luftwaffe during the Blitz had failed to achieve. But the 1965 strike had affected all Fleet Street’s national titles. Times print workers had not enjoyed a reputation for militancy until the summer of 1975 when the paper’s historic Blackfriars site in Printing House Square was put up for sale and the paper, printers and journalists alike transferred to Gray’s Inn Road as the next-door neighbours of Thomson’s other major title, the Sunday Times. The decision to move had been taken as a cost-cutting measure – although the savings proved to be largely illusory. The consequence of bringing Times print workers into the orbit of those producing the Sunday Times was far more easily discernable. Even in the context of Fleet Street, Sunday Times printers had a reputation for truculence. Partly this was attributed to the fact that they were largely casuals who worked for other newspapers (or had different jobs like taxi driving) during the week and were not burdened by any sense of loyalty to the Sunday Times. Industrial muscle was flexed not merely through strike action but by a myriad minor acts designed to demonstrate whose hand was on the stop button. Paper jams occurred with a regularity that management found suspicious. Such jams could take forty minutes to sort out and result in the newspaper missing the trains upon which its provincial circulation depended. But from the print workers point of view, paper jams meant extra overtime pay. Newsagents began referring to the newspaper as the Sunday Some Times.³⁰

More important than industrial action or sabotage was the effect the print union chapels had on blocking innovation. Muirhead Data Communications had developed a system of transmitting pages by facsimile for the Guardian back in 1953 but, because of union hostility, no national newspaper had dared use the technique until the Financial Times gritted its teeth and pressed ahead in 1979.³¹ By then, The Times – in common with all other national newspapers – was still being set on Linotype machines (a technology that dated from 1889). Molten metal was dripped into the Linotype machine, a hefty piece of equipment that resembled a Heath Robinson contraption. As it passed through, the operator seated by it typed the text on an attached keyboard. Out the other end appeared a ‘slug’ of metal text which, once it had cooled, was fitted into a grid. It would then be copy checked for mistakes. If errors were spotted, a new ‘slug’ would be typed. Once the copy was finally approved, it would proceed to ‘the stone’. There, it would be encased in a metal frame. This was the page layout stage, from which it was ready to be taken to the printing machines. It was an antiquated and occasionally dangerous (the hot metal could spatter the operator) method of producing a newspaper, not least because most of the rest of the world – including the Third World – had long since abandoned Linotype machines for computers. Thomson had purchased the computer equipment but had to store it unused in Gray’s Inn Road pending union agreement to operate it. Using computer word processors to create the newspaper text for setting out was a far less skilled task than operating the old linotype machines. In 1980, journalists were still using typewriters. Their typed pages were then taken to the Linotype operator who would retype in hot metal. But with computerized input, journalists could type their own stories directly into the system, negating the need for NGA members to retype anything. This was part of the problem – it would make redundant most of the Linotype operators and, if followed up by other Fleet Street newspapers, would soon threaten the very existence of a skilled craft union like the NGA. Thus the union officials at TNL refused to allow the journalists to type into a computerized system unless their own union members typed the final version of it. In other words, if journalists and advertising staff typed up their text on their own computer screens, NGA members would have to type it up all over again on computer screens for their exclusive use. This was known as ‘double-key stroking’ and negated any real saving in introducing computer technology.

Management’s attempt to break the NGA’s monopoly on keying in text in favour of journalists having the powers of direct input was one of the causes of the shutdown of The Times for just short of a year between November 1978 and November 1979. Led into battle by TNL’s chief executive, Marmaduke Hussey, management attempted to force the print unions to conclude new deals that would pave the way for the computer technology’s introduction. When no comprehensive deal emerged, management shut down the papers in the hope of bringing the unions back to the negotiating table. As a strategy it proved a miserable failure. It cost Thomson £1 million a week to keep its printing machines idle and to have a nonexistent revenue from sales or advertising. The fear that The Times’s best journalists would be poached by rival newspapers ensured that all the journalists were kept on on full pay to do nothing. This was a clear signal to the print unions that there was no intention to shut down The Times permanently. Furthermore, they could also see that, buckling under the costs, the management were increasingly desperate to resume publication. By sitting it out, the printers could drive a harder bargain.

Management did attempt one daring breakout. It was often alleged that it would be cheaper to print the newspaper abroad and airfreight it into Britain than print it under the restrictive practices of Fleet Street. What was certainly the case was that 36 per cent of advertising revenue in The Times came from overseas. So it was decided to print a Europe-only edition that would at least show that the paper was alive and could feasibly be produced elsewhere. A newspaper plant in Frankfurt agreed to undertake the task. This proved most illuminating. In Fleet Street, NGA compositors doing ‘piece work’ managed to type around 3500 characters an hour. They defended their high salaries by pointing to this level of expertise. But the German compositors in Frankfurt – women (all but barred by the Fleet Street compositors) working in a language that was not their own – managed 12,500 characters an hour (in their own language they could set 18,500).³² Such statistics told their own story.

But if a point was proved by the exercise, it was the value of brute force. The British print unions persuaded their German brothers to picket the plant. With ugly scenes outside, the German police discussed tactics with Rees-Mogg who was at the Frankfurt site for the launch. They offered to use water cannon on the crowd in order to clear a path for the lorries to transport the first edition out of the plant but they could not guarantee subsequent nights if the situation deteriorated further. Meanwhile, inside the plant, various sabotage attempts were being detected, including petrol-soaked blankets that had been placed near the compressor – potentially capable of causing a massive explosion, which, as Hussey put it ‘might have blown the whole plant and everyone in it sky high’.³³ Reluctantly, Rees-Mogg gave the order to abandon production. Once again, management’s attempts to circumvent their unions had been humiliatingly defeated.

In November 1979, the TNL management formally climbed down and called off the shutdown. They had failed to secure direct input for journalists or to get the print workers to agree legally binding guarantees of continuous production. The only upside to this humiliation was that management was prevented from installing what would actually have been the wrong typesetting system (a disastrous discovery Hussey made late in the dispute when he visited the offices of The Economist and realized his mistake).³⁴ The shutdown meant that The Times, which had long claimed to be Britain’s journal of record, had reported nothing for almost a year. Among the events it was unable to comment upon was Margaret Thatcher’s coming to power. The total cost to Thomson exceeded £40 million. The unions’ concession was that – already obsolete – computer typesetting would be introduced in stages but that NGA operatives would ‘double-key stroke’ all text.

That The Times returned at all after a stoppage of such duration was impressive. That it returned with circulation figures similar to those it had enjoyed before the shutdown was an extraordinary testament to the quality of the product and the extent to which its readers had mourned its absence. Indeed, such was the economics to which Fleet Street was reduced that the eleven-month shutdown left little enduring advantage to The Times’s competitors. The Times’s absence had increased their market opportunity. The Daily Telegraph, in particular, made gains. But gains involved pushing up production levels and this was only achieved at a cost that met the increase in sales revenue. When The Times returned, its rivals had to scale production down again but, thanks to union muscle, they were unable to cut back the escalating cost that had been forced upon them in the meantime.³⁵

It might have been imagined that the journalists’ frustration at the print workers would have bonded them more closely with management in ensuring that The Times saw off its tormentors, but the failed shutdown strategy made many of them equally critical of TNL executives.³⁶ Indeed, the success of the print workers in defending their corner emboldened some of the more militant Times journalists to see what would happen if they too pushed at a door that was not only ajar but loudly banging back and forth in the wind.

During the 1970s, salaries for Times journalists had lagged behind the spiralling inflationary settlements of the period. But during the shutdown, Thomson had kept faith with its Gray’s Inn Road journalists by continuing to pay their full salaries during the eleven months they were not actually doing anything. Furthermore, they were given a 45 per cent pay increase in 1979 to make up for previous shortfalls.³⁷ Despite this, in August 1980 the journalists went on strike when TNL offered a further 18 per cent pay increase instead of the expected 21 per cent.

Of the 329 members of the paper’s editorial staff, about 280 were members of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ). The union meeting at which the decision to strike was made took place when many were away and – although it represented a majority of those who turned up to the meeting – only eighty-three actually voted for industrial action. They were responding to the call of The Times NUJ’s father of the chapel, Jake Ecclestone, who argued that it was a matter of principle: an independent arbitrator had suggested 21 per cent and in offering only 18 per cent TNL had refused to be bound by independent arbitration. That the NUJ chapel had also refused to be bound by it was glossed over.³⁸

While the independent arbitrator had concentrated upon what he thought was the rate for the job, TNL had to deal with a law of the market: what they could reasonably afford. The difference between the two pay offers amounted to £350 a journalist but, if the knock-on effect of subsequent negotiations with the print workers was factored in, then TNL maintained the difference was £1.2 million. There was certainly collusion between print and journalist union officials in calling the strike. Although many journalists crossed the picket line, the NUJ had taken the precaution of getting the NGA to agree to go on strike too if management attempted to get the paper out.

Management had long come to accept that dealing with those who printed the paper was a war of attrition against a tenacious and well-organized opponent. But the attitude now displayed by some who actually wrote the paper was too much to endure in silence. The strike ended after a week but it destroyed the will of the existing management to persevere. When The Times returned on 30 August, its famous letters page was dominated by readers of long standing who had loyally waited for their paper’s return during the eleven-month shutdown but who now felt utterly betrayed. ‘It is impossible to believe in the sense, judgment or integrity of your journalists any longer’ was one typically bitter accusation. Subscriptions were cancelled, sometimes in sadness but frequently in anger at the fact that ‘you and your staff can have no feeling for your advertisers and readers. Other newspapers do not get into these situations. Your ineptitude beggars belief.’³⁹ But the most important lecture came not from disgusted of Tunbridge Wells but in the day’s leader column, written by Rees-Mogg himself. ‘How to Kill a Newspaper’ ran the length of the page. It washed the paper’s dirty linen in public and some staff disliked the idea that their editor was writing a leader chastising the actions of many of his own colleagues. Jake Ecclestone, ‘gifted but difficult’, was even named in the sermon that laid out before readers exactly the scale of journalists’ pay increases over the previous two years and contrasted it with the extent of the newspaper’s losses. Rees-Mogg pulled no punches, claiming that there could be no such thing as dual loyalty, for a journalist ‘is either a Times man first or an NUJ man first … if the strikers do not give their priority in loyalty to The Times … why should they expect that the readers, or indeed the proprietor, of The Times should continue to be loyal to the paper?’⁴⁰

This was very much to the point, for the Thomson board had been meeting to debate that very question. Although it was denied at the time, it was the NUJ strike that tipped the balance in convincing Thomson executives to dispose of The Times and, with it, the other TNL titles.⁴¹ Sir Gordon Brunton had called senior colleagues to his beautiful country house near Godalming, Surrey, and it was there that the decision was taken. This was then ratified by the Thomson British Holdings board and, over the telephone, confirmed with Lord Thomson of Fleet. Preferring to live most of his time in Canada, Ken Thomson had taken over the family empire on the death of Roy, his father, in 1976. He felt little of his Anglophile father’s obvious pride in owning The Times. In the end, the ultimate proprietor did not take much persuading although, naturally, in the press release he stated, ‘it grieves me greatly’.⁴² It was Harold Evans, editor of the Sunday Times, who put it succinctly: ‘One can’t blame Lord Thomson … the poor sucker has been pouring millions into the company and has been signing agreements which have been torn up in his face.’⁴³ Roy Thomson’s dream of securing The Times’s future forever had ended after only fourteen years and at a cost of £70 million. The Spectator’s media pundit, the historian Paul Johnson, summed up the situation:

The Times … is a femme fatale: it sent Northcliffe off his rocker, proved too expensive even for the Astors and wrecked Thomson’s reputation for business acumen. It could well drag down Murdoch and his entire empire, financially much less solid than Thomson’s, if he is fool enough to saddle himself with it.⁴⁴

And yet, on New Year’s Eve, the last day in which bids for the paper would be accepted, Times Newspapers received an offer from Rupert Murdoch. It was for a mere £1 million, but it was a declaration of intent.

III

In all, there were around fifty bids, although given the criteria Sir Gordon Brunton and Sir Denis Hamilton had drawn up, less than a handful were seriously considered. The Aga Khan and a plethora of Middle Eastern bidders were ruled out by the decision to ensure that a potential owner had to be either British or from the Commonwealth. At a stretch this would be widened to include suitable (North) Americans. Rejected on personal grounds were Robert Maxwell, Sir James Goldsmith and Tiny Rowland.⁴⁵

In so far as any one man could determine who would buy The Times, that man was Sir Gordon Brunton. Lord Thomson fully trusted his chief executive with the task of disposing of his most famous possession. Born in the East End and influenced as a student by Harold Laski, his tutor at the LSE, as well as by his experiences of wartime command in the Royal Artillery and Indian Army in Assam and Burma, Brunton combined formidable business acumen, left-leaning political inclinations and a committed interest in the Turf. He had joined the Thomson Organisation in 1961 and within seven years had risen to become its managing director and chief executive. Given that TNL had ultimately proved to be the one major failing company in Thomson’s British operations, it would have been understandable if Brunton had regarded its disposal as a matter of getting the best price in the fastest time with the minimum of fuss. But this was not at all how he saw his task. Rather, he threw his full weight behind finding a buyer who would ensure the survival of the famous newspaper, even if this meant declining a higher but separate bid for the Sunday Times on its own. By the 31 December deadline, Rees-Mogg’s consortium had proffered a token £1 for The Times. Believing that the paper’s viability was tied to staying within the TNL family, Brunton was fundamentally at odds with the Times consortium’s assumption that the daily could have an independent future. Consequently, he was equally dismissive of the attempts of Harold Evans to form a separate consortium to buy the Sunday Times. Like Rees-Mogg with The Times, Evans had been trying to encourage a range of investors to take a share in the future ownership of the paper he edited. At one stage he had been hopeful that the Guardian would be the paper’s saviour, although the Guardian’s board soon balked at the cost. But even if Evans had succeeded in attracting sufficient support, Brunton was having none of it, making his position clear in a telephone conversation in which Evans recalled the chief executive saying, ‘Consortia cannot deal with unions. And I am not selling single titles. I will not see The Times shut down.’⁴⁶

In the 1960s, The Times’s then owners, the Astor family, concerned by the paper’s inability to make a profit, had also concluded that it could not stand on its own. They sought out the possibility of it merging with the Guardian. The Guardian enjoyed a higher circulation, but there were serious questions over whether the differences in political outlook (and the readership thereby attracted) could be harmonized successfully into one merged paper. When in 1966 the scheme fell through, The Times considered merging with the Financial Times. This would have created a newspaper of perhaps unsurpassable international authority with a readership profile tailored to suit a quality – and thus very lucrative – advertising market. The Times would have formed the main paper with the distinctive pink-papered FT inserted inside as its business section. Owned by Pearson, the FT was profitable and had established itself as the principal daily record of business and finance. But despite his protestations that owning The Times was about preserving the national interest rather than making a profit, Gavin Astor had considered Pearson’s price for buying The Times inadequate to the point of insulting. Meanwhile, Roy Thomson, owner of the Sunday Times, offered over £3 million for The Times. Considering the Astor family had bought it for £1.5 million in 1922, this gave some indication of how poor an investment it had proved. But the Thomson bid was far better than that from the Financial Times.⁴⁷ Thus was given up one of the great opportunities to ensure The Times’s market sector pre-eminence so that it could successfully fund its own expansion. Instead, its future would depend upon subsidy from the wealth of its group owner.

In becoming the one hundred and eighty-third newspaper in the Thomson Organisation, The Times found itself in the same group as the Sunday Times. Despite the coincidence of the same word in the title, there was no shared ancestry between the two papers – both had always had different owners. Roy Thomson had bought the Sunday Times from its then owner, Lord Kemsley, in 1959. Only when Thomson purchased The Times in 1966 did the two papers find themselves, while still editorially independent from one another, sharing a common proprietor. Although his own experience was in guiding the Sunday Times to its extraordinary commercial success, Sir Denis Hamilton prided himself on his role in supporting Brunton’s fusion of these two very different newspapers into one company, Times Newspapers Limited. In fact, it was always cohabitation rather than a marriage and the decision to live together at Gray’s Inn Road, while not obviously affecting The Times’s editorial morality, was widely viewed as corrupting it in other respects. Courteous and highminded, this was not how Sir Denis saw it and he desperately wanted to avoid seeing what he regarded as one of his life’s achievements end in an acrimonious break-up. Thus he shared Sir Gordon Brunton’s view that whoever bought the potentially profitable Sunday Times would have to be equally committed to shoring up the losses of The Times. On no account should their creation, TNL, be broken up. This dovetailed perfectly with Murdoch’s plans since he did not think he could buy either paper separately. In the case of the Sunday Times, he thought the Monopolies Commission would block his purchase. In view of the daunting scale of its losses, he recalled, ‘I would not have had the guts to buy The Times on its own.’⁴⁸ But if both were sold to him as a joint package, so these barriers were removed: the daily paper’s losses could be cancelled out by the Sunday’s revenue potential while the Government might permit him to own the Sunday paper if it meant that in doing so he could save the existence of the daily.

Having skimmed down the list, Brunton and Hamilton were left with what they considered were just two serious offers. One was from Rupert Murdoch, the other from Vere Harmsworth, third Viscount Rothermere. Besides its regional papers, Lord Rothermere’s Associated Newspapers owned the Daily Mail and part-owned the London Evening Standard. His great-uncle, Lord Northcliffe, as well as founding the Daily Mail, had owned The Times between 1908 and 1922, saving it from bankruptcy. But future profit rather than family pietàs appeared to be Rothermere’s motivation now. He offered Thomson £25 million for the Sunday Times but would knock £5 million off if the price of closing the deal meant that he had to buy The Times as well.⁴⁹ This was ominous. Rothermere later stated:

I didn’t want The Times. I wanted the Sunday Times. What we wanted to do was somehow shunt off The Times where it would survive as a parish newspaper of the elite. So it would remain that way at a minimum loss situation because none of us could see how it could ever be made commercially viable.⁵⁰

That he should want the Sunday Times was hardly surprising. If its troubled industrial relations could be sorted out it would quickly return to great profitability. And buying it certainly seemed less risky than Associated’s other plan – launching the Mail on Sunday. But the notion that The Times could survive as some sort of specialist interest publication with a tiny readership and minimal investment was, from a business perspective, without logic. Ultimately it would not even satisfy its core market: if it was starved of the money necessary to retain experts reporting from home and abroad, why would even an elite turn to it as a reliable source of information? When Brunton asked Rothermere if he could guarantee that he would not close down The Times if he bought it, Rothermere admitted he could make no such undertaking.⁵¹

Rothermere was a victim of his own honesty since, once the deal had gone through, he would have got his hands on the prize of the Sunday Times and could have shut The Times down almost immediately, pausing only to transfer its better features and journalists to the Sunday title along the way. That he told the truth may well have been what saved The Times from the scrap heap. Brunton’s insistence that he would not sell TNL to anyone who did not intend to invest in The Times’s future meant that there remained only one other press magnate on the Thomson chief executive’s list. But could Rupert Murdoch’s motives be trusted?

Murdoch had delayed asking for a prospectus until early December. But once he had decided to move he did so with speed. Two key players were brought in. One was his banker friend Lord Catto, chairman of Morgan Grenfell, who organized a meeting at his flat with Brunton to discuss the deal. Educated at Eton and Cambridge, Catto was the son of the Governor of the Bank of England during its ‘nationalization’ by the Attlee Government. He had been on the board of Murdoch’s News International Ltd since 1969, having played a decisive part in securing Murdoch’s first foothold in Fleet Street: ownership of the News of the World (by convincing its owners, the Carr family, that their paper would remain safe in their hands if the young Australian became a major shareholder). Catto now had to convince Brunton that The Times would be safe in the Murdoch grip. Murdoch’s other lieutenant in the operation was his old boarding-school friend, Richard Searby. As boys they had been roommates together at Geelong Grammar School before following one another up to Oxford. A politically well-connected QC in Australia, Searby was sufficiently impressed by Murdoch’s seriousness about purchasing The Times that, over the course of a telephone call, he offered his services and flew in to London in order to be in the closest position to offer legal advice on the deal.⁵²

With Catto and Searby at his side, Murdoch’s clear display of interest contrasted favourably with the more languid approach to negotiation displayed by Rothermere who, cocooned in his Parisian tax haven, left most of the negotiating to Associated Newspapers’ managing director, Mick Shields. But the crucial difference was that Murdoch stated categorically that he was bidding for all of TNL and fully intended to keep The Times as a going concern. He told Harold Evans that Rees-Mogg was mistaken if he had come away from his meeting at the New York Post with the impression that Murdoch’s interest was in the Sunday Times alone.⁵³ Importantly, Murdoch had Sir Denis Hamilton’s support. On 9 January 1981 Hamilton wrote a memo to Brunton giving his views, and those of the national directors of Times Newspapers, that Murdoch was their preferred choice. It was true he had had a ‘deteriorating effect’ on tabloid standards but this had to be balanced by the fact that he had created a quality broadsheet in The Australian. If binding guarantees could be secured regarding editorial independence and quality, then there were no objections to his purchasing Times Newspapers. Hamilton and the directors were much less enthusiastic about Rothermere’s bid, suspecting that ‘property potential is greater motivation than the development of these papers’. Furthermore, the ‘strong and consistent bias towards the Conservative Party’ displayed in Rothermere’s newspapers was ‘incompatible with the independent role of The Times’.⁵⁴ This contrasted with Murdoch who was ‘neither greatly to the left or greatly to the right’.⁵⁵ In this last respect, opponents of the political orientation of Murdoch’s newspapers in the 1980s might be forgiven for delivering a mirthless laugh.

Initially Harold Evans at the Sunday Times had been taken aback by the speed with which Hamilton had come round to seeing Murdoch as a saviour.⁵⁶ Yet, while continuing to press the claims of his own Sunday Times consortium, Evans wrote to Brunton on 20 January passing on the views of Sunday Times staff: ‘between Murdoch and Rothermere, it is Murdoch who is preferred by a wide margin’. Subject to the appropriate safeguards, Evans also conceded, ‘I myself would choose Murdoch’.⁵⁷

Brunton’s task was to keep Murdoch interested without giving him the impression he was the only horse in the race. This was not just because the hint of competition would encourage Murdoch to raise his offer price. Closing down The Times would cost its owner £35 million in redundancy payouts. Thomson would have to foot this bill if the paper’s ownership was not transferred before the 15 March deadline. If Murdoch believed none of his rivals could secure a deal before that date, he could sit it out and wait for The Times to fold, allowing Thomson to pay the costs. After a seemly pause, there was nothing to stop Murdoch then starting a new paper called The Times (after all, in Fleet Street’s history there had been a number of newspapers of varying longevity called the Sun). For this ‘new’ Times he could hire whoever he liked on whatever terms (subject to employment law) fitted in with his own business strategy, including possible adoption of the Rees-Mogg plan of freeing himself from Fleet Street’s costs and militancy by printing from a provincial location.

In fact, there was nothing in Murdoch’s negotiating stance that suggested this ethically doubtful option formed any part of his strategy. Indeed, the more Hamilton and the Times Newspapers directors contemplated the ‘ruthless operator’ the more they believed he had ‘a personality which probably could relate to The Times’.⁵⁸ Rees-Mogg was now firmly of the view that Murdoch, rather than his own consortium, was the newspaper’s saviour-in-waiting. All that remained was for an appropriate price to be agreed together with his assent to a number of safeguards that would stop him interfering in the paper’s editorial content in the way in which he was known to do with the Sun.

The negotiations came to a head on 21 January at the elegant Thomson headquarters in Stratford Place, off Oxford Street. The Thomson team refused Murdoch’s demand that they should give a written guarantee that the company’s assets were worth £17.9 million and that the current losses would be no greater than £14.5 million. There was, Brunton later admitted, ‘some blood on the walls’. Murdoch then went downstairs to face the vetting committee that had been drawn up to assess his personal suitability. ‘These dignified gentlemen probably thought I was quaking with fear,’ he recalled; ‘actually I was shaking with anger’.⁵⁹ Despite this, he made a favourable impression. The vetting committee consisted of Sir Denis Hamilton together with the two editors, Rees-Mogg and Harold Evans, and the national directors, Lords Roll, Dacre, Greene and Astor (Lord Robens, who was in America, kept in touch by telephone). Murdoch made several assurances: that he would abide by the editorial safeguards drawn up and would not seek to direct editors, even when they pursued views contrary to those expressed in his other titles; that he hoped Harold Evans would continue to edit the Sunday Times; that he did not have the resources of Lord Thomson at his disposal. He said that he saw the role of the independent national directors as that of a court of appeal for an editor who felt himself in conflict with his proprietor. Murdoch guaranteed to increase the number of independent directors sitting on the board of Times Newspapers Holdings Ltd. This board alone would have the power to appoint or remove an editor, voting by majority decision. It would also take a majority vote of the directors to approve any subsequent sale of The Times or Sunday Times.⁶⁰

Harold Evans took great care to ensure the wording of the guarantees. Rees-Mogg took a less legalistic view, believing that, once ensconced, the power of a proprietor was such that little could realistically be done to bind him to guarantees he had chosen, for whatever reason, to disobey. Rees-Mogg maintained, ‘I thought therefore a judgment of character had to be made’, and in his opinion Murdoch ‘would in fact honour the agreements’. Thus the precise wording was not really crucial.⁶¹ The Spectator’s press columnist later took a yet more robust view, maintaining that The Times would never have seen the light of day if John Walter, the ex-bankrupt who founded it in 1785 with the intention of making money for himself, had been subjected to the proprietorial guarantees forced upon Murdoch.⁶² In fact, the Australian was in some respects treated with less condescension than had been Roy Thomson. When he had bought The Times in 1966 he had to agree not only to abstain from editorial interference (which was, in any case, never his style) but also that he would not even sit on the newspaper’s board (from where, with de haut en bas condescension and despite having sold the business, Gavin Astor managed to ensure his appointments continued to exercise a guardian role). Murdoch fully intended to sit on the board of his own company into which he would be pouring money.

The vetting committee voted unanimously in favour of Murdoch. The deal was eventually done after the midnight hour had struck. Subject to securing agreement for job cuts with the unions and that the Government would not refer the purchase to the Monopolies and Mergers Commission, The Times and the other TNL titles would become the property of News International. The press releases went out on 22 January. Brunton expressed the hope that the unions would agree with him that Murdoch represented the best hope of keeping TNL together. Murdoch sought to concentrate on the guarantees he had given with regard to independent national directors, to his faith in Harold Evans as ‘one of the world’s great editors’ and to his own intentions:

I am not seeking to acquire these papers in order to change them into something entirely different. I have operated and launched newspapers all over the world. This new undertaking I regard as the most exciting challenge of my life.⁶³

The first major newspaper to carry the news was Rothermere’s London Evening Standard. The banner headline roared out ‘MURDOCH BUYS THE THUNDERER’.⁶⁴

Thomson’s asking price for Times Newspapers was £55 million. Murdoch’s final offer of £12 million was £8 million less than the bid Rothermere had made and £13 million less than Rothermere had proffered for the Sunday Times alone. That Brunton nonetheless favoured Murdoch’s bid was proof that Thomson was philanthropically more interested in the long-term future of The Times than in making money from its sale.

What remained to be seen was whether Murdoch was equally highminded. True, TNL was making a loss, but such losses could be set against the tax payable on the profits of News International’s other press division, News Group Newspapers (the Sun and the News of the World). NGN had recorded a £20.3 million pre-tax profit in the second half of 1980. In return for the £12 million Murdoch had paid for TNL, he had gained the freehold of the Sunday Times building on Gray’s Inn Road (said to be worth at least £8 million) together with other assets such as vehicles and machinery that were roughly computed to be worth nearly £18 million. Of the £12 million paid to Thomson, £8 million was for the Gray’s Inn Road property and only £4 million for the shares in Times Newspapers. By keeping the property assets of TNL separate from the publishing subsidiary, News International could shut down the papers with minimal redundancy payouts to the employees and yet liquidate the property assets separately.⁶⁵ Brunton believed Murdoch was a man of his word. If he was not, Thomson had sold out to someone who could make a quick profit as an asset stripper.

IV

Murdoch’s purchase of Times Newspapers was conditional. If he could not negotiate sufficient job cuts with the unions before 15 March the deal would be off. In this eventuality, the Thomson board would find themselves scrapping around at the last minute for an alternative purchaser in whatever days remained before the official shut-down of the company. In that eventuality it would be a buyer’s market and the papers might have to be sold to a proprietor who fell short of Brunton’s ideals (although he remained adamant that he would rather see The Times put to sleep than handed into the bear hug of Robert Maxwell).⁶⁶ There was also a second hurdle. Newspaper takeovers were subject to referral to the Monopolies and Mergers Commission. Purchasing TNL gave News International more than a quarter of the market share in dailies. The Government might block the purchase on these grounds alone. At any rate, there was no prospect of the Monopolies Commission issuing its report before the 15 March deadline for transferral of ownership.

On 19 January, the Times’s NUJ chapel had carried overwhelmingly (there was only one vote in opposition and four abstentions) a motion stating that ‘any further concentration of ownership of national newspapers in Britain would be against the public interest’ and that a potential purchaser should be referred to the Monopolies Commission.⁶⁷ Since the newspaper’s purchase by either of the major bidders could not do other than concentrated ownership, the union activists appeared to be endangering any future for their paper unless it was from a consortium like that proposed by Rees-Mogg (who was, in any case, now in the pro-Murdoch camp). This stance fortified efforts to block Murdoch’s purchase in the House of Commons. The Labour MP Phillip Whitehead was attracting names for an Early Day Motion as opposition, particularly although not exclusively on the left, mounted to the deal.

On the first Saturday after he had made his provisional agreement with Thomson and the TNL directors, Murdoch was shown around the Sunday Times’s composing room. Stopping to look at the proof of the paper’s leader article on the sale, he spotted a factual omission (the Daily Star had not been added to the list of titles owned by Express Newspapers). Instinctively, Murdoch reached for his pen and marked on the proof where the words ‘Daily Star’ should be inserted. This was his first error. Word soon got around that the proprietor designate had already broken his guarantees and was interfering in the editorial policy of the Sunday Times. Had he not had the gall to change a leader article in the full view of the composing room? Evans sent him a note of rebuke. Murdoch quickly apologized, but the incident was a gift to his detractors.

Given the attitude expressed by the NUJ chapel, reassuring the journalists was an immediate priority. With Rees-Mogg standing supportively at his side, Murdoch addressed the editorial staff of The Times on 26 January. He had ‘great respect’ for the paper and reaffirmed his intention not to alter its essential character. There would be more of interest for women with extra sections to make it ‘of greater value and appeal at home rather than being taken off to work by commuters’ but there would be no sudden attempt to become a mass-market paper. Murdoch repeated that he would stand by his editorial guarantees and that while he would ‘complain if the facts are wrong’ he had ‘no intention of interfering with any opinions in the paper’. He believed that any attempt by him to tear up the guarantees would create ‘a terrible public stink’ that ‘would destroy the paper’. On the paper’s financial future he was resolute. It was ‘unhealthy’ for it to be dependent on a proprietor. Profitability was the best guarantor of independence. But it was the ‘biggest challenge in the world’ to make The Times viable and it would take at least three to four years for it to make a profit. It would not move to his currently idle print works at Wapping. He thought the Guardian and Daily Telegraph were equal rivals. He apologized for previously calling The Times a ‘dead duck’. He had meant to say ‘sick duck’.⁶⁸

Although the union activists in the paper’s NUJ chapel remained sceptical or hostile, opinion was sharply divided and immediately after Murdoch had made his address to them, one hundred journalists on the paper quickly signed a statement supporting his purchase. On the same day, Jake Ecclestone passed on the view of the NUJ meeting to John Biffen, the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, demanding a referral to the Monopolies Commission.⁶⁹

Looked at at face value, the case for referring the Murdoch bid to the Monopolies Commission was overwhelming. In 1966 Harold Wilson’s Government had referred Roy Thomson’s purchase of The Times even although it would give him control of a mere 6.5 per cent of the national and provincial dailies’ circulation. In 1981, The Times had only 1.9 per cent of the market share in national daily newspapers but the Sun enjoyed a 25.3 per cent share. Together this meant that News International’s papers would account for 27.2 per cent. Concentration was yet higher in the Sundays market where the 7.7 per cent share of the Sunday Times, when added to that of the News of the World, gave News International a 31 per cent share.⁷⁰

On the other hand, such was the relative smallness of their sale, the addition of the Times titles made only marginal difference to News International’s total market share, especially in the dailies market. In any case, adding the Sun’s circulation to The Times produced a figure of limited practical meaning since the proportion of readers who regularly bought both a daily tabloid and a broadsheet was tiny. But even if the sales were all added together and treated as one, the company would still not be the market leader. Adding the sales of The Times gave News International 4,120,493 daily sales. The Mirror Group had 4,380,000 sales a day. London would still have less of a monopoly newspaper structure than existed in New York, Paris, Bonn or Frankfurt.⁷¹

Whatever the spin put on the statistics, the 1973 Fair Trade Act stipulated that all major newspaper takeovers should be referred to the Monopolies Commission. But the Secretary of State could overrule this stipulation if the paper concerned was unprofitable and in danger of closing down without a quick transferral of ownership. This section, 58(3) of the Act, was the Thomson-Murdoch ‘get out of jail’ card and one they were determined to play.

Thomson’s submission to the Secretary of State, John Biffen, left little room for ambiguity. On no account would the seller extend the deadline in order to facilitate the Monopolies Commission to undertake its report (which was expected to take a minimum of eight weeks to compile). The proposed agreement with Murdoch rested on consent from the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) being granted by 12 February otherwise the deal was off. A new potential proprietor would then have to be approached in the time remaining. This would not be easy since ‘there is little likelihood that a suitable alternative buyer for TNL as a whole will be identified. There are no signs that any other potential buyer for TNL as a whole has as strong a commitment as NIL [News International Limited] to preserving The Times on a long-term basis.’ Indeed, if a new serious bidder came forward he would probably be another owner of a media empire, necessitating a fresh Monopolies Commission report to be put in motion and causing yet further delay. The process could last for months with each serious bidder eventually being ruled out in turn until someone sufficiently minor could be found to take on the paper’s elephantine problems. Rather than continue losing money while this merry-go-round proceeded at its own leisurely pace, Thomson were not prepared to relent on their decision to close down The Times and its sisters, with or without a sale, by 15 March.⁷² In other words, the Government could agree to the sale and secure the papers future, or it could demand a referral and risk their destruction.

On 26 January, John Biffen was deluged with visitors. Having only just returned from a trip to India, he was heavily dependent upon the briefing provided by his departmental officials who had spent the last few days working on the legal technicalities of whether the TNL sale necessitated a referral. Sally Oppenheim, his junior minister at the DTI, came over to discuss the matter. Their first visitor was Sir Gordon Brunton. Biffen and Oppenheim insisted that he postpone the sale deadline so that the Monopolies Commission could intervene. Brunton refused point-blank.⁷³ The next visitor was Rupert Murdoch. He made clear that he would pull out of the deal if it was referred to the Commission. If some thought this a bluff, they were wrong. Murdoch would have pulled out if the deal had been referred.⁷⁴ Then came Jake Eccelestone (with Eric Jacobs, his Sunday Times counterpart) to put the NUJ case for referral. Finally, Sir Denis Hamilton called, assuring Biffen that Murdoch was the papers’ only hope and that he had made guarantees on editorial freedom that no other Fleet Street proprietor had been prepared to make.

This was not the only influence brought to bear. In 1981, Margaret Thatcher and Rupert Murdoch scarcely knew one another and had no communication whatsoever during the period in which The Times bid and referral was up for discussion.⁷⁵ But, in Woodrow Wyatt, Murdoch and the Prime Minister had a mutual friend. This clearly being the moment to make the most of such a contact, Murdoch got Wyatt to plead his case directly with her.⁷⁶ Subsequently, Murdoch assumed that Biffen was ‘probably told what to do by Margaret.’⁷⁷ In fact the part played by Margaret Thatcher in the decision not to refer the bid was at best a subtle one. Critics of Thatcher and Murdoch have long maintained that there must have been some – even if tacit – understanding in which she used her weight to ensure that he could bypass the Monopolies Commission and buy The Times and in return he ensured his newspapers henceforth banged the Thatcherite drum. There is a problem with this theory. Although John Biffen assumed the Prime Minister wanted the bid to go through, he could recall no occasion when she pressed him on the matter. What was more, when ‘E’ Committee – the Cabinet committee delegated with the task of determining whether to make the referral – convened on 26 January the most outspoken voice in favour of permitting Murdoch’s purchase was the decidedly un-Thatcherite Jim Prior. Prior, who was Employment Secretary, wanted the deal to go ahead not least because the unions wanted Murdoch.⁷⁸

Whether adding 1.9 per cent to News International’s market share of daily sales constituted a threat to the free working of a competitive market was no longer the issue bothering ‘E’ Committee. But there certainly remained a presentational problem if the bid was not referred. Lawyers spent the evening working out how the safeguards Murdoch had made to the TNL vetting committee could be legally incorporated into the conditions giving consent for the transfer of ownership to go ahead. The somewhat arbitrary commitment to editorial quality could not be phrased into a legal obligation, but in other respects the guarantees would be made legally binding. Although a fine was more likely, Murdoch would risk a spell in jail if he flouted them.⁷⁹

Biffen was due to give his statement to the Commons on 27 January. By then ninety-two MPs had signed the Early Day Motion demanding a referral to the Monopolies Commission and the Speaker of the House of Commons permitted the Opposition a three-hour emergency debate on the matter.

As Shadow Secretary of State, Labour’s John Smith opened the case for referring the sale of what he called ‘The Times, perhaps our most prestigious newspaper’. It was, he believed, ‘one of the largest and perhaps the most significant mergers in the history of journalism in the United Kingdom’. He questioned the Sunday Times’s supposed unprofitability and cast doubts on the ability of national directors – of whom ‘there was a faint air of the Athenaeum’ – to keep Murdoch true to his promises. Biffen then made his statement. He conceded the law stipulated that any transferral of a national newspaper must be subject to the scrutiny of the Monopolies Commission but mentioned the let-out clause if, because of the paper’s unprofitability, doing so would endanger the paper’s life. This was such a case. He had asked Thomson to extend their deadline so that the Monopolies Commission could look into the sale. They had refused. He was not prepared to risk the closure of The Times and over four thousand redundancies at TNL by demanding a referral.

Cries of ‘disgraceful’ resounded around the Commons chamber. Jo Grimond, the former leader of the Liberal Party (and a trustee of the Guardian), was outraged: ‘Parliament could not have legislation made a nonsense of because people laid down a timetable.’ Not content with describing it as ‘blackmail’ and ‘an insult to the nation’ the Labour MP (and sometime business associate of Robert Maxwell) Geoffrey Robinson described it as ‘a pay-off’ for the Sun supporting the Conservatives in the general election.⁸⁰ But the most penetrating speech in opposition came from the Conservative benches. Jonathan Aitken was Beaverbrook’s greatnephew. He was concerned about the method with which the Government had approved the bid but, privately, he also feared that Murdoch was looking for fresh springboards to promote his anti-Establishment and republican views.⁸¹ It was clear Aitken had done his homework when he quoted from an interview Murdoch had given to an American magazine, More, in 1977. Murdoch had been quoted as saying it was ‘quite correct and proper’ that the Monopolies Commission would prevent him from acquiring another ‘successful’ British daily. ‘Successful’ was, of course, the key clause, but Aitken had more to add. The guarantees were worthless. Murdoch had ‘strewn assurances and safeguards on newspaper and television ownership like confetti’ both to the Carr family and in Australia. There were plenty of credible owners for The Times – the Rees-Mogg consortium, Lonhro, Associated Newspapers, Atlantic Richfield – which the Thomson board had chosen to ignore because their deal with Murdoch was ‘pre-arranged’. Aitken even cast vague doubts upon one of the TNL directors on the vetting committee, who was also chairman of Warburgs (Thomson’s merchant bankers), asking ‘What is the role of Lord Roll? [laughter on both sides of the House] Is he banker of fees or the bulwark of liberty?’ His conclusions were sweeping:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

V

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER TWO
‘THE GREATEST EDITOR IN THE WORLD’

The Rise and Fall of Harold Evans

I

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now the introduction of a Sunday Times man at the helm suggested The Times would retrace its steps and repeat the failed 1967–9 growth strategy, but Harold Evans saw his task as editor in less primarily commercial terms. ‘At the Sunday Times before Hamilton and Thomson,’ he later recalled, ‘it was a sackable offence to provoke a solicitor’s letter,’ but after he became editor ‘we were in the Law Courts so many times I felt they owed me an honorary wig.’ Evans maintained that this became necessary ‘because real reporting ran into extensions of corporate and executive power that had gone undetected, hence unchallenged, and the courts, uninhibited by a Bill of Rights, had given property rights priority over personal rights.’¹¹⁸ This had not been how The Times had generally seen its role during the same period. Indeed, when in 1969 the paper caught out Metropolitan policemen in a bribery sting some old Times hands were deeply uneasy about their paper going in for the sort of exposé that subverted the good name of the forces of law and order. Others agreed. Three days after the story broke, the paper reported on its front page a meeting of Edward Heath’s Shadow Cabinet in which ‘it was considered deeply disturbing that to trial by television … there might now be added trial by newspaper, with The Times leading the way … It was agreed that The Times appeared to have put the printing of allegations against the police above the national interest.’¹¹⁹

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

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

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

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