The History of the Times: The Murdoch Years

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

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

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

V

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

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

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

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

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

There was very poor morale. There was a notable lack of what I would call professional selling skills and those people – and there were very few of them – who did have any ability, had been suffocated. Drastic action had to be undertaken fairly quickly to get rid of the dead wood.[208]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VI

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

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

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