The History of the Times: The Murdoch Years

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Evans now had to face a barrage of jabs and cuts from several directions. Some colleagues, who might have helped absorb the blows, were absent. Emery was hurtling down black runs. The other acting editor over the festive period, Brian MacArthur, had impressed Murdoch and been rewarded with the deputy editorship of the Sunday Times. This was The Times’s loss. Nor did Evans enjoy the loyalty of many who remained. Louis Heren all but denounced him on BBC television. Equally unhappy about the situation over which Evans was presiding, John Grant, the managing editor, threatened to resign. This spurred Douglas-Home to call on Murdoch to tell him that, if Grant left, he too would go. The prospect of losing both the deputy editor and the managing editor spurred Murdoch to depose Evans more quickly than he had intended. The fact that Granada television’s What The Papers Say had just awarded him the title of Editor of the Year was a mere inconvenience.

Donoughue had repeatedly challenged Douglas-Home to prove his loyalty to Evans, and the protestations of allegiance were wearing thin.[281] Evans was to paint an unflattering picture of his deputy’s behaviour during this period, implying that he was motivated by a self-serving desire to seize the editorship for himself. On the other hand, Evans’s critics thought that when it came to being self-serving, Evans still had questions to answer about his own role in accepting the editorship from someone he had made such concerted attempts to prevent owning the paper.[282] But Douglas-Home’s motives were less clear-cut than the Evans loyalists assumed. Far from being a sycophant towards the proprietor, he was distinctly wary of him. It was what he regarded as Evans’s weakness in the face of Murdoch’s ill temper that disheartened him.[283] There was more than a whiff of snobbery from some of the staff who lined up behind the Eton and Royal Scots Greys Douglas-Home over the northerner and his posse of meritocratic henchmen but a principal belief was that ‘Charlie’ was the man who would stand up to Murdoch, which ‘Harry’ had supposedly failed to do. It was Evans’s misfortune that Murdoch himself now wanted a dose of Douglas-Home as well.

But did Douglas-Home want to work with Murdoch? Far from pulling out all the stops to supplant Evans, he had entered into negotiations to leave The Times for the Daily Telegraph. Notified of this, Evans had begun to look around for a new deputy and had even approached Colin Welch.[284] Welch, who had resigned as the deputy editor of the Telegraph in 1980, was a noted Tory journalist of the intellectual right. If Evans felt Murdoch’s pressure to adopt a more right-wing tone in the paper, then he could not have appeased the proprietor more than by contemplating a prominent role for Welch. Having told Evans of his decision to resign, Douglas-Home proposed postponing his actual leaving until the immediate crisis was over (financially it also made sense to wait until the new tax year in April). In the meantime, he received information that would make him pause further – for a well-placed source assured him that Evans was losing his grip on the situation and would soon be leaving Gray’s Inn Road himself. The source was Evans’s own secretary, Liz Seeber. Given her job description, Seeber was hardly displaying the customary loyalty to her boss, but she had come to the conclusion Evans was presiding over the paper’s collapse and that the only way of saving it was to help Douglas-Home stay in the game. ‘The atmosphere was so unpleasant, it was a dreadful environment to work in’ was how she defended her actions. ‘You had people like Bernard Donoughue permanently in and out of Harry’s office and you just wanted it to be over; it was no longer running a newspaper, it was Machiavellian goings-on.’[285] Douglas-Home later repaid her efforts by giving a book written by her husband a noticeably glowing review.[286] But even with this flow of information about what Evans was up to, Douglas-Home still wavered. On the anniversary of Evans’s appointment, Murdoch telephoned Marmaduke Hussey to tell him, ‘I’ve ballsed it up. Harry is going so I’m putting in Charlie.’ Hussey later wrote, ‘I knew that already because Charlie had come to see me the night before and was doubtful whether to accept the job. “For heaven’s sake,” I told him. “I’ve spent five years trying to secure you the editorship – if you want out now I’ll never speak to you again.”’[287]

There were certainly some dirty tricks played. Evans loyalists were maintaining that the editor was in a life or death battle to save The Times’s editorial independence from a proprietor bent on imposing his own (increasingly right-wing) views on the paper. This claim was undermined by the leader writer, Geoffrey Smith, who walked into a BBC studio and read out a memo Evans had sent to Murdoch asking for the latter’s view on how the Chancellor’s forthcoming Budget should be presented in the paper. The letter was dynamite but it was between the editor and the proprietor, so why was it being read out for broadcast by a Times leader writer? It was a typed letter and the answer appeared to rest with the holder of the carbon copy. Whether it had touched the intermediary hands of the deputy editor remained a matter for speculation. But one thing was clear: that members of the staff were cheerfully appearing on radio and television alternately to stab or slap the back of their editor was an intolerable situation. For a week, the chaos at The Times dominated the news. Times journalists would gather round the television for the lunchtime news, one half of them cheering Geraldine Norman who would be broadcast condemning Evans, the other half cheering Anthony Holden’s championing of him. Then they would all return to their desks and get on with the job of producing Evans’s newspaper.

Because of their well-placed mole, Evans’s critics had access to more than one incriminating piece of evidence. In a first-year progress report of 21 February, Evans had adopted an excessively ingratiating tone towards Murdoch. ‘Thank you again for the opportunity and the ideas,’ he purred. ‘We are all one hundred per cent behind you in the great battle and I’m glad we’re having it now.’ Evans’s upbeat assessment appeared to offer Murdoch what it could be assumed he wanted. Evans announced that he had approached the right-wing Colin Welch about joining The Times, adding a line that seemed designed to appeal to the Australian’s sociopolitical assumptions, ‘I did talk to Alexander Chancellor but came to the conclusion he represents part of the effete old tired England.’ However, ‘there would be mileage I think in your idea of having some international names (like Dahrendorf, Kissinger, Kristol)’. Regrettably, Evans proceeded to speak ill of past or present colleagues: ‘You’ll perhaps have seen the attack on me in the Spectator for getting rid of “stars” but believe me Hennessy, Berthoud and Berlins they mention were all bone idle. So are many of the others who have gone or are going. It is another part of the old-Times brigade not wanting to work, Louis Heren stirring it up a bit.’[288] The unfortunate tone of this letter tended to support Douglas-Home’s contention that Evans was not always the bulwark for liberty and defender of his staff that his supporters protested him to be.

In fact, if Evans’s tone had been intended to please his proprietor, he was to be sorely disappointed. Two days later, ‘Dear Chairman’ was how he began a huffy note that objected to the ‘cursory comment on the detailed report of our first year which I volunteered to you’. To Murdoch’s criticism that the editorial line had lacked consistency, Evans shot back, ‘You have not, as it happens, made this criticism on several occasions to me but only once (7 January 1982) though I have been made aware of what you have said to other members of the staff when I have not been present.’[289] When it came to the embattled editor, the proprietor’s heart had turned to stone.

Tuesday 9 March marked the first anniversary of Harold Evans’s appointment as editor. It was hardly a soft news day appropriate for distracting him. It was Budget Day and Evans ensured that The Times covered, reported, reproduced and analysed Sir Geoffrey Howe’s measures in an impressive level of detail. ‘The Chancellor of the Exchequer,’ Evans crooned justifiably to Murdoch afterwards, ‘has gone out of his way to say that the Budget coverage of The Times had restored The Times as a newspaper of record for the first time for many years.’[290] Written by Donoughue, the leader took a measured view although the front page headline ‘Howe heartens Tories: a little for everyone’ was certainly more positive than the previous year’s assessment. Rab Butler’s death was also front-page news and together with the obituary was accompanied by an article by his one-time acolyte, Enoch Powell. Powell was as insightful as he was admiring of the man thrice denied the opportunity to become Prime Minister. It ‘was mere chance’, he noted, that Butler’s childhood injuries prevented him from serving in either war, ‘but to some of us it was a chance that seemed to match an aspect of his character. He was not the kind of man for whom any cause – not even his own – was worth fighting to the death, worth risking everything.’[291]

Having only recently returned from his own father’s funeral, Evans was back at Gray’s Inn Road and was just preparing to listen to the Budget speech when he was summoned upstairs to see Murdoch. The proprietor announced he wanted his immediate resignation. He had already asked Douglas-Home to succeed him and Douglas-Home had accepted. According to Evans’s account of the conversation, Murdoch had the grace to look emotional about the situation. Nonetheless he stated his reasons – ‘the place is in chaos’ and Evans had lost the support of senior staff. Evans shot back that it was management’s decisions that had created the chaos and reeled off a list of the senior staff that remained loyal to him. He had no intention of accepting this summary dismissal. Instead he left, refusing to resign, with Murdoch threatening to summon the independent national directors to enforce his departure.[292]

The independent national directors were supposed to ensure that the proprietor did not put inappropriate pressure on his editor. Instead, Murdoch was threatening to use them as an ultimate force to ensure the editor was removed from the building. Evans had taken the drafting of the editorial safeguards extremely seriously. The following morning he went to seek the advice of one of the independent directors, Lord Robens. The two men met in the Reform Club, Evans confiding his predicament to the ageing Labour peer above the din of a vacuum cleaner engaged in a very thorough once over of their meeting place. Robens considered the matter and suggested that, rather than staying on for six more months of this torture, Evans should go away on holiday. According to Evans’s account, Robens advised, ‘Don’t talk to Murdoch. Leave everything to your lawyer. Relax. We’ll stand by you.’[293] The meeting concluded, Evans strode out from the Reform’s confident classicism into St James’s Park, continually circling the gardens like a yacht with a jammed rudder while he tried to decide whether to fight for his job and the paper’s integrity or to go quietly. Eventually he compromised. He would go noisily.