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The History of the Times: The Murdoch Years
Back at the office, Evans was received by the unwelcoming committee of Murdoch, Searby and Long who pressed him to announce his resignation before the stand-off created yet more appalling publicity for The Times. But believing there were higher issues at stake, making an issue was precisely Evans’s purpose. The television cameras massed outside Gray’s Inn Road and Evans’s home. His admirers and detractors organized further public demonstrations of support and disrespect while those inside the building tried to put together the paper, unsure whether to take their orders from Evans or Douglas-Home.
The headline for 12 March ran ‘Murdoch: “Times is secure”.’ His threat to close down the paper had been lifted by the agreement with the print and clerical unions to cut 430 full-time jobs (rather than the six hundred requested) and cut around four hundred shifts. Taken together with the savings from switching to cold composition, the TNL wages bill would shrink by £8 million. There would now be one thousand fewer jobs at Gray’s Inn Road than had existed when Murdoch had moved in. This was an extraordinary indictment on the previous owner’s inability to overcome union-backed overmanning. At the foot of the news story appeared the unadorned statement: ‘Mr Harold Evans, the Editor of The Times, said he had no comment to make on reports circulating about his future as editor. He was on duty last night as usual.’[294]
In the leader article he wrote, entitled ‘The Deeper Issues’ (some felt this referred to his own predicament), Evans surveyed the panorama of the British disease: the human waste of mass unemployment, the crumbling inner cities, ‘idiot union abuse’, the ‘bored insularity’ of Britain’s approach to its international obligations and the failure of any political party to find answers. There was a scarcely repressed anger from the pen of an editor who had just buried his father – an intelligent and encouraging man for whom the limits of opportunity had confined to a job driving trains. But there were also pointed references to Evans’s own finest hour (the Thalidomide victims) and an attack on ‘the monopoly powers of capital or the trade unions, or too great a concentration of power in any one institution: the national press itself, to be fair, is worryingly over-concentrated’.[295] There was no need to name names.
Saturday’s Times gave an accurate picture of the situation at Gray’s Inn Road – the report was utterly incomprehensible. Murdoch was quoted as stating ‘with the unanimous approval of the independent national directors’ that Evans had been replaced by Douglas-Home. Lord Robens described this statement as ‘a bit mixed up’. Evans was quoted claiming he had not resigned and his staying on was ‘not about money, as alleged. It is and has been an argument about principles.’ Gerald Long claimed that the independence of the editor had never been in dispute. Holden said it was. Douglas-Home said it wasn’t, going on the record to state:
There has been to my knowledge, and I have worked closely with the editor, absolutely no instruction or vestige of an instruction to the editor to publish or not to publish any political article. There has been no undue pressure to influence the editor’s policy or decisions.[296]
Times readers could have been forgiven for believing they were looking not at a news report but at a bleeding gash running down the front page of their paper. During the day, the Journalists of The Times (JOTT) group passed a motion that they released to the press calling for Evans to be replaced by Douglas-Home. They found fault with the ‘gradual erosion of editorial standards’ and Evans’s indecision: ‘The way the paper is laid out and run has changed so frequently that stability has been destroyed.’ Geraldine Norman had been to the fore of getting this motion accepted, much to the disquiet of many of the two hundred subscribing JOTT members whose approval she had not canvassed.[297] A pro-Evans counterpetition was circulated and also attracted support. Nobody wanted another week of this madness.
Meanwhile, Fred Emery had telephoned from the slopes in order to find out what was happening in his absence. Douglas-Home asked him to come back immediately, particularly requesting that he be back in time to edit the Sunday for Monday paper. Emery raced back and found the journalists had become even more polarized during his absence. He also discovered the reason Douglas-Home wanted him back to edit the paper on the Sunday evening. The editor-in-waiting was singing in a choir that evening. In the circumstances, this was a high note of insouciance.
The denouement came the following day, Monday, 15 March, in a series of remarkable twists and turns. Nobody seemed to know whether the editor was staying or going. However, he did periodically emerge to give the impression that he was still in charge. Taking inspiration from a photograph of himself playing tennis, he swung a clenched fist in the air and assured Emery, ‘I play to win!’ Half an hour later, he had tendered his resignation in the curtest possible letter addressed ‘To The Chairman’. It read in its entirety:
Dear Sir,
I hearby tender my resignation as editor of The Times.
Yours faithfully,
H. M. Evans
His colleagues found it easier getting accurate news from the far Pacific than from within the building. All they knew was that Evans had overseen a statement in the early editions of the paper reporting that he had not resigned. They were thus surprised when at 9.40 p.m. he curtly announced to the rolling cameras of News at Ten that he had indeed quit. His decision to give advance warning to ITN in order to maximize the publicity but not his own journalists dampened the send-off he might otherwise have been accorded.[298] Instead, when he was sure the cameras were in position, he walked out of the building, stopping only to shake hands with the uniformed guard at the reception desk (unsurprisingly, there was no sign of his secretary). Stopped by a television reporter as he got into the back seat of a waiting car, he refused to make further comment beyond observing, with a weary expression, that it was a tale longer than the Borgias.[299]
VII
Harold Evans came home to a party organized by Tina Brown, his wife. His stalwart supporters came to rally round. Anthony Holden had already created a stir that evening at a function for authors of the year (of which he was one). Seeing Murdoch in the corner of the room he stormed over, almost elbowing the Queen to the ground in the process, and proceeded to harangue the newspaper proprietor. The exchange ended with Murdoch assuring him he would never work on any of his papers again and Holden telling him where he could stick them. Such was the excited gravitation towards this verbal brawl that the Queen found herself momentarily deserted and ignored by the room’s inhabitants.[300] Holden resigned from The Times with immediate effect without taking a penny of compensation. This was a principled stand that impressed Murdoch. Evans, meanwhile, negotiated a pay-off in excess of £250,000. After only one year’s employment, this sum was at the time considered so large that it almost (but not quite) dented Private Eye’s preening glee at his departure in its 26 March edition, unpleasantly entitled and illustrated ‘Dame Harold Evans, Memorial Issue. A Nation Mourns’.[301]
The generous severance terms did not stop Evans writing Good Times, Bad Times, an account of his struggles at Gray’s Inn Road which was published in 1983. Inevitably, not everyone liked and some did not recognize the picture he painted. His successor as editor, Douglas-Home, refused to read it. He did, however, see enough of the extracts in the press to pronounce, ‘that it presented a quite insurmountable question of inaccuracy’.[302] The most damaging charges Evans brought both in his book and in subsequent allegations concerned his relations with the proprietor, especially in matters of editorial independence. Evans believed he had incurred Margaret Thatcher’s displeasure and that, in sacking him, Murdoch was enacting a tacit understanding with the Prime Minister as a result of her pressure to ensure his bid for Times Newspapers was not referred to the Monopolies Commission. Perhaps, as Sir John Junor had prophesied to Tina Brown, Murdoch had always intended to sack Evans after a year as soon as he had been the fall guy for unpopular changes Murdoch wanted forced upon the paper.[303] Such was the regard Evans was held in at the Sunday Times, Murdoch would have had difficulty removing him from that editorship, but switching him next door suited his purposes perfectly.[304] Many of the changes Evans effected were those Murdoch had himself wanted to see brought about: redundancies, the paper redesigned with new layout, sharper reporting, more sport and less donnish prevarication as a cover for laziness. On this interpretation of events, Murdoch had used Evans and then flung him overboard.
In Good Times, Bad Times, Evans stated that early in 1982 Murdoch had visited Mrs Thatcher suggesting that she find for Evans a public post so that he could be levered out of the editorship. According to Evans’s account, the Prime Minister had asked Cecil Parkinson, the Conservative Party chairman, to cast around for a job for him and Parkinson had come up with the post of chairman of the Sports Council. Mrs Thatcher, it seemed, was keen to assist Murdoch in finding an easy way to be rid of his turbulent editor.[305] Evans had caused annoyance by running on his front page a story concerning a letter from Denis Thatcher to the Welsh Secretary written on Downing Street paper (though since this was where he lived, it was not clear what other address he could have given) concerning the slow pace of resolving a planning application made by a subsidiary of a company to which he was a consultant. Most commentators considered undue prominence had been given to a rather minor indiscretion (Mr Thatcher had made clear ‘obviously nothing can be done to advance the hearing’) and even the Times leader on the subject placed it third, where it belonged, below Liberal Party defence policy and political developments in Chad.[306] There was also the question of why Evans had printed a letter that had been stolen from the Welsh Office and touted around by a Welsh news agency. But it hardly necessitated a Thatcher – Murdoch conspiracy to do away with him. Under Evans, The Times had opposed the Government’s obsession with narrow definitions of monetary policy but, as Tony Benn and Michael Foot could attest, it was far from being an outright opponent of the Conservatives. On most issues and in particular on trade union reform, it was supportive. Indeed, had Rees-Mogg continued as editor, it might have been every bit as sympathetic towards the SDP as the measured approach adopted by Evans. And Evans would later make clear both that, had Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands during his watch, The Times would have been stalwart in its support of Britain’s armed liberation of the islands and that the paper would probably have endorsed the Conservatives in the 1983 general election.[307] If the Prime Minister wanted the removal of a Fleet Street editor it is hard to see how Evans of The Times could be top of her list. Murdoch asserted that the conspiracy theory was ludicrous, maintaining that he ‘never ever’ discussed getting rid of Evans with Mrs Thatcher. Asked about it in 2004, Cecil Parkinson stated, ‘I cannot remember this incident. I certainly have no recollections of searching for a job for Harold Evans.’[308] Murdoch doubted that Thatcher and Parkinson had conjured up the Sports Council chairmanship as a way of facilitating Evans’s departure on the grounds that ‘they were not Machiavellian enough’ and adding, ‘I don’t think they cared about The Times. She didn’t.’[309]
Did Murdoch interfere in editorial policy? Donoughue disliked hearing that Murdoch thought his leader articles were too generous towards Tory ‘wets’ or Social Democrats.[310] Evans chose to disregard the proprietor’s expressed hope that The Times would take a critical line on the Civil List.[311] Although he certainly gave vent to uncompromising opinions when the conversation turned to political matters, Murdoch always maintained that he had never instructed Evans to take any line in his paper other than one of consistency – a steady course the proprietor claimed was lacking. Douglas-Home was incredulous that Evans could not tell the difference between Murdoch ‘sounding off’ as opposed to giving orders. In Douglas-Home’s experience, Murdoch ‘didn’t object to anyone standing up to him on policy issues’. Of course it was easier for the more robustly right-wing Douglas-Home to find this to be the case. But he went further, claiming that it was Evans who had endangered his own editorial independence by constantly ringing Murdoch for reassurance.[312] No subsequent Times editor ever claimed undue pressure was applied by Murdoch on editorial policy. Murdoch did not prevent Frank Giles from pursuing a far more ‘wet’ political line at the Sunday Times, also a paper whose direction Mrs Thatcher might have been expected to take a keen interest in. Murdoch did not stop Giles from being sceptical about Britain seeking to retake the Falklands by force or from being overtly sympathetic towards the SDP in the 1983 general election. It was not for his politics that he was eventually replaced by Andrew Neil, an outsider whom Murdoch believed would breathe new energy into the Sunday title as he had once hoped Evans would do with the daily.
Understandably, Evans’s allegations confirmed the suspicions of all those on the political left who believed Murdoch was a malign influence on news reporting. They had seen it with the Sun and its crude caricature of the left. Now they had evidence that it was consuming The Times. Staged at the National Theatre, David Hare’s 1985 play Pravda – A Fleet Street Comedy was widely interpreted as an attack on Murdoch’s style of proprietorship. Co-written with Howard Brenton whose The Romans in Britain had caused outrage because of its overt depictions of Romans sodomizing Ancient Britons (apparently a metaphor for the British presence in Ulster), Pravda depicted the sorry tale of Lambert La Roux, a South African tabloid owner, buying a British Establishment broadsheet only to sack its editor just after he had received an Editor of the Year award. Anna Murdoch went to see the play. After this, her husband’s only comment on it was to suggest, with a wink, that Robert Maxwell might find it actionable.
But more seriously, if Evans felt he had been improperly treated by Murdoch he could have appealed to the independent national directors to adjudicate on the matter. Given the lengths to which he had gone to write these safeguards into the contract by which Murdoch bought the paper it was surprising that he did not avail himself of the opportunity to challenge the proprietor in this way. Perhaps he thought the independent directors would not support his case. Even Lord Robens, who had spoken supportively to him in an alcove of the Reform Club, was not so stalwart behind his back. According to Richard Searby, Robens promptly told Murdoch that he was the proprietor and if he thought Evans should be sacked, he should be sacked.[313] Whatever his reasoning, Evans preferred to make his case in a book instead. The audience was certainly wider.
Deeply involved in the union negotiations and in attempting to overcome the production difficulties during Evans’s year in the chair, Bill O’Neill felt that the problem was not one of politics but of personalities. Evans ‘considered himself a creator, an editorial genius’, O’Neill maintained ‘and not someone who would be burdened with incidentals, like the huge losses the title he edited was running. You could not engage Evans in debate. He would agree with everything you put to him.’[314] In his fourteen years as editor of the Sunday Times, Evans had benefited from supportive allies in Denis Hamilton and a proprietor, Roy Thomson, who was happy to invest heavily into ensuring Evans’s creative talents bore fruit. With his move to The Times, he had difficulty adapting to the culture shock of working for a new proprietor who, after initially encouraging further expansion, suddenly demanded urgent economies in order to keep the title afloat. Hamilton’s disillusion and departure also robbed him of a calming and understanding influence. Evans complained that ‘every single commercial decision of any importance was taken along the corridor in Murdoch’s office, while we went through our charades’ on the TNL board.[315] But what did he expect? Who was writing the cheques? It was as if Evans had confused editing the newspaper with owning it. As Evans proved at the Sunday Times and in his subsequent career in New York (to where he and Tina Brown decamped), he was at his best when he had a generous benefactor prepared to underwrite his initiatives. Especially in the dark economic climate of 1981–2, Murdoch was not in the mood to be a benefactor.
Indeed, if Evans was a victim of Murdoch’s ruthless business sense, he was most of all a victim of the times. The dire situation of TNL’s finances meant Murdoch was frequently in Gray’s Inn Road and was particularly watchful over what was going on there. Furthermore, Murdoch and his senior management could hardly absolve themselves totally of their part in the chaos surrounding Evans’s final months in the chair. Murdoch had told Evans to bring in new blood and frequently suggested expensive serializations to run in the paper. When the costs of these changes reached the accounts department he then blamed Evans for his imprudence.[316] The failure to agree with the editor a proper budget allocation compounded these problems, although Murdoch refuted Evans’s claims that he did not know what the financial situation was, maintaining he ‘got budgets all the time’.[317] The swingeing cuts in TNL clerical staff had to be made, but the brinkmanship necessary to bring them about created a level of tension that clearly had negative effects on morale within the building. Murdoch’s own manner at this time, frequently swearing and being curt to senior staff, contributed to the unease and feeling of wretchedness.[318] As the years rolled by with the financial and industrial problems of News International receding while he developed media interests elsewhere, so Murdoch spent less time living above the Times shop. Therefore, if Evans wanted to be left to his own devices, it was his misfortune to have accepted the paper’s editorship at the worst possible moment. Had he been appointed later, at a time when the paper was no longer enduring a daily fight for survival and justification of every expense was no longer necessary, he might have proved to be a long serving and commercially successful Times editor. This, after all, was what became of his protégé, Peter Stothard.
Rees-Mogg took the view on his successor’s downfall that an editor could fall out with his proprietor or several of his senior staff but not with both at the same time.[319] In the eyes of the old guard, Evans had two principal problems. First, he frequently changed his mind. This had all been part of the creative process when he had edited a Sunday paper, since he had a week to finalize his position, but it made life on a daily basis extremely difficult. The second irritation was that he surrounded himself with his own people who were not, in heart and temperament, ‘Times Men’. For this reason, Donoughue and Holden were disliked in a reaction that overlooked their considerable talents. In the closing months of the drama, Holden would periodically arrive at his office to find childish sentiments scrawled on his door. Invariably they were of an unwelcoming nature.[320] Indeed, the pro-Evans petition circulated in the dying moments of his tenure demonstrated perfectly the essential rift between The Times old guard and Evans’s flying circus of new recruits. Six of the thirteen senior staff members signed the pro-Evans petition (the other seven were either absent or pointedly refused to endorse him). But of Evans’s six senior supporters, five had been recruited by him from outside the paper in the course of the past year. Only one of the seven who did not sign had worked for The Times for less than twelve years.[321] Good Times, Bad Times concentrated on Murdoch as the assassin. But at the moment of impact there were plenty of other bullets flying from a plethora of vantage points.
Tony Norbury, able to speak from the vantage point of over forty years experience on the production side of the paper, believed that although Evans’s demise was inevitable and perhaps necessary, he was nonetheless ‘the Editor who saved The Times’.[322] In the space of a year, he had brought about great changes and many of them were for the better. The layout was much improved. Circulation was up by 19,000 on the comparable period in 1980. The paper was revitalized. It was no longer in retreat. Probably his greatest legacy was those journalists he brought in who stayed with the paper in the years ahead, among whom Peter Stothard, Frank Johnson, Miles Kington and the medical correspondent, Dr Thomas Stuttaford, were to loom large. Indeed, it would be quite wrong to assume that the old guard were necessarily right in opposing Evans’s innovations. Their victory over him in March 1982 was personal and vindictive. It was also temporary. Much of what he attempted to teach the paper about ‘vertical journalism’ would, in time and in a less frenetic environment, eventually be accepted and adopted.
It was Evans’s other concept, the ‘editing theory of maximum irritation’, that did for him. As one of the senior financial journalists snootily put it, ‘What is this silly little man doing running around trying to tell us how to do our jobs?’[323] Evans’s mistake was to make too many radical changes too quickly and in a manner that left old Times journalists feeling excluded. His attempts to make the paper more like its more popular Sunday neighbour were especially disliked. A critic at the Spectator found fault that ‘instead of spending the morning in Sir William [Rees-Mogg’s] musty but absorbing library we should be outside “in the field” with Mr Evans getting down to what a French investigative reporter once termed “the nitty grotty”. It’s all lead poisoning from petrol fumes nowadays, and why not? Only that several other papers tell us about that sort of thing all the time.’[324] While the Sunday Times was a ‘journalists paper with a high-risk dynamic’ to break news, The Times ‘must get its facts and opinions right’ and its editor ‘must possess great steadiness and consistency … He must be patient and move slowly.’[325] Or, as Philip Howard put it, ‘The Sunday Times and The Times are joined by a bridge about ten yards long and somewhere along that bridge Harry fell off.’[326]
One of the few journalists brought in by Evans who did not support him in his time of trial was Frank Johnson. ‘I cannot think of a better thing I did in 1981 than ask you to join The Times,’ Evans wrote to congratulate him when he was named Columnist of the Year at the British Press Awards.[327] But Johnson, who had always admired the old Times, was relieved when Douglas-Home took over. With Murdoch’s threat to close the paper lifted and Evans, Holden and Donoughue seeking alternative employment, the atmosphere at Gray’s Inn Road improved remarkably swiftly. Douglas-Home, the editor most of the senior staff had wanted in the first place (and but for Murdoch would probably have got), was at last in the chair. But what buried the internecine bickering most decisively was a major incident in – of all unlikely places – the South Atlantic. As Britain’s armed forces sailed towards the Falkland Islands and an uncertain fate, office politics suddenly looked self-indulgent and thoughts switched back to the job everyone was paid to do – report the news.[328]
CHAPTER THREE
COLD WARRIOR
I
The journalists of the Buenos Aires Siete Dias had a commendable knowledge not only of their government’s intentions but also of how The Times of London liked to lay out its front page. Forty-eight hours before the invasion began Siete Dias’s readers were presented with an imaginary front page of that morning’s edition of The Times. It was good enough to pass off as the real thing. The masthead and typeface were accurate. Even the headline ‘Argentinian Navy invades the Falkland Islands’ was grouped across the two columns’ width of the lead report rather than stretched across the whole front page. That was a particularly observant touch. The accompanying photograph of advancing Argentine troops was also in exactly the place the page designers of Gray’s Inn Road would have put it – top centre right with a single-column news story hemming it back from the paper’s edge. Someone, at least, had done his homework.
