The History of the Times: The Murdoch Years

Having lost a day’s production due to Geraghty’s action, Fleet Street braced itself for a longer shutdown when the NGA print union threatened to go on strike if Geraghty went to prison for contempt of court. As the law stood there was no debate about the matter. James Prior’s 1980 Employment Act had made secondary action illegal. Geraghty had ignored a High Court injunction to this effect. Yet, the belief by trade unionists that the matter could nonetheless be determined by the effect of industrial action rather than the writ of a court of law was instructive. The Times suspected that the NGA’s motivation was to test the secondary action legislation by creating a martyr ‘like the commotion that attended the jailing of five London dockers who defied the Industrial Relations Court in 1973 and hastened its demise’.[427] In the event, a showdown was avoided. Geraghty was fined £350 and legal costs of £7000.

Yet, this would not prove to be the end of secondary or ‘sympathy’ action. On 22 September, The Times, together with all the other national newspapers, did not appear when the print unions downed tools and joined the TUC’s ‘Day of Action’ in support of health service workers. Douglas-Home was perturbed by the handful of the paper’s journalists who joined the boycott work campaign. He was particularly uneasy with the decision of Pat Healy, the social services correspondent, to be adopted as the Labour candidate for Bedford at the next general election, believing that readers would question the impartiality of her reporting. There was, it has to be said, no shortage of precedent for the conscientious journalist becoming a politician and the matter, perhaps wisely, was allowed to rest.

Industrial action silenced The Times again between 20 December 1982 and 3 January 1983. The dispute was caused by nine EETPU members who refused to operate new equipment until management renegotiated their terms and cost Times Newspapers more than £2 million. They won the support of their fellow electricians. Murdoch again threatened to close down the paper. Being off the streets was not the best omen for the paper’s new year. In the end, management had to abandon its plan to implement a wage freeze on all staff for 1983. Any hope of The Times scraping out of the red was lost. When, on 3 January, the paper returned to the streets, a leader article written by Douglas-Home, entitled ‘All Our Tomorrows’, laid bare the feeling in Gray’s Inn Road. It started on a positive, almost lyrical note:

For many people, life without a newspaper would be like music without time – a blur of inchoate sounds, an endless and incomprehensible cacophony. It is newspapers which puncture the march of time, syncopating their narrative of events with commentary, analysis and entertainment. Newspapers comprehend the sound of history in the making, and give it meaning.

But it questioned how long a newspaper could expect to keep its readers’ loyalty if it could not keep its side of the bargain:

The British press is only too ready fearlessly to expose bad management, bad unions, and bad industrial relations wherever they occur, except in its own backyard. The subterfuge and cynicism which poison industrial relations in Fleet Street remain a close secret. That is a strange kind of conspiracy of silence to maintain when the newspaper houses themselves find any other kind of cooperation almost impossible to achieve.[428]

The response of the unions was to go back on strike and The Times was not published between 27 January and 3 February when SOGAT struck. As part of a pooling of Times and Sunday Times library resources, management had appointed a member from SOGAT’s supervisory branch, but SOGAT insisted that management could only employ someone to a library position from the union’s clerical branch. Amazingly, this was the demarcation issue upon which SOGAT shut down the paper. Twenty-six days after this dispute was settled, The Times was again shut down when members of the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers (AUEW) walked out as part of another TUC-endorsed ‘Day of Action’ – this time in protest at the Government’s efforts to ban union membership among national security and intelligence civil servants at GCHQ in Cheltenham.

V

Those who were preoccupied by Douglas-Home’s aristocratic credentials or the fact that his uncle had been a ‘wet’ Tory Prime Minister, did not, at first, realize that he was of a determinedly Thatcherite frame of mind. No one should have been surprised that he took an uncompromising line on the Falklands’ crisis, the first issue to dominate the news after he assumed the chair. Defence was his special subject and he was an ex-soldier and military historian. But some were surprised when he continued to take a bullish view of Mrs Thatcher’s domestic agenda as well. There were complaints that his leaders were too often uncritical in their support of the Government. The veteran liberal sage Hugo Young believed that, under Douglas-Home, The Times developed ‘the most right-wing world view in the serious press’ in Britain. Young told Douglas-Home that the paper had even come to outdo the Daily Telegraph in this respect, ‘mainly by virtue of so rarely finding President Reagan to the left of you’.[429] When Douglas-Home asked the Labour MP Clare Short why she had stopped reading The Times she told him it had ‘deteriorated into a crudely biased, right-wing paper. Someone else used the phrase “up-market Sun”.’[430] A consequence of this belief was that it was sometimes difficult to coax senior Labour MPs to write for the Op-Ed page, although in Peter Stothard’s experience of trying to commission articles from them this was also partly attributable to their disappointment at being offered the going rate of only £150 per article.[431]

The left’s dissatisfaction with what they saw as an increasingly partisan and hostile paper was balanced by those on the right who had found the bien pensant pieties of the middle ground stale and unchallenging. In an article ‘Welcome Back Thunderer’ for the Wall Street Journal, Seth Lipsky commended the paper’s new sense of purpose, supporting the US intervention in Grenada, agreeing that the USSR was ‘an evil empire indeed’ and condemning the hypocrisy of those who wanted to place sanctions on South Africa.[432] Others agreed that it was time ‘The Thunderer’ got some fire back in its belly after a long period in which, according to the leader page of the Spectator, it had ‘tended to support a government only when it was taking an easy way out’.[433]

The appointment of Roger Scruton as a regular columnist in 1983 began a four-year run in which the Tory philosopher and enthusiastic foxhunter succeeded in running to ground his quarry – from trendy dons and churchmen to CND campaigners and modern architects. Scruton was a friend of Charles and Jessica Douglas-Home but it was Peter Stothard, with whom responsibility for columnists fell, who took the brunt of the backlash from the soi-disant ‘great and the good’ at their most outraged. Reflecting on the matter a decade later, Stothard concluded that ‘no decision brought me more trouble’ than Scruton’s weekly philippics since ‘barely would a piece have appeared in print before my in-tray was filled with “dump the mad doctor” from all sides of polite society and the political left’.[434] An admirer of Edmund Burke, Scruton was an articulate, intelligent and authentic critic of modernity’s failings, which, in the eyes of progressives bent on cultural conformity to their own nostrums, made him something equivalent to a dangerous revolutionary.

Yet, it was with Douglas-Home’s leader writing policy that dissent within the ranks of the paper’s ‘college of cardinals’ was most strongly expressed. None were closet fellow travellers: they were as opposed to the Kremlin’s world view as was the editor. Nonetheless, two leader writers in particular who specialized in foreign policy, Richard Davy and Edward Mortimer, were increasingly unhappy with Douglas-Home’s tendency to see the editorial column as a fire and brimstone preacher’s pulpit rather than the open house for mid-term discussion and the expression of honest doubt. ‘Until Charlie took over,’ Davy lamented, ‘the best Times leaders started from an independent position and argued their way to a conclusion giving due weight to other views … He seemed to want leaders to do no more than fulminate about the Soviet threat whereas I wanted to discuss the political and diplomatic problems of dealing with it.’ Davy believed that the tired, old men who ran the Kremlin could not last forever and it was necessary to reinvigorate the 1970s spirit of détente. He was horrified when Douglas-Home looked at him blankly and replied, ‘What is there to talk about?’ To the editor, détente was indistinguishable from appeasement while to his chief foreign leader writer it was a form of diplomacy that ‘merely required periodic adjustment to new circumstances and regular checks to keep it in line with military security’. Where necessary, this meant not only attempting to encourage the trapped peoples of Eastern Europe but also to find means of ‘improving relations with their ghastly governments at the same time’. There was, of course, no meeting of minds with Douglas-Home on this point and when in 1984 Davy realized that he was no longer going to be given the space to present his more nuanced argument he resigned. Edward Mortimer left shortly thereafter, also disillusioned. With their departures, Mary Dejevsky started writing leaders. She was much closer to the editor’s perception of Cold War realities. With hindsight and the opening of previously closed archives, Davy concluded that Douglas-Home was more hawkish than Ronald Reagan – the latter had, after all, established private channels to Moscow even when his public pronouncements remained at their most defiant.[435]

On most political matters, Douglas-Home and Rupert Murdoch were of like mind. Unquestionably, this made the proprietor more benevolent towards his editor than he had been towards Harold Evans. Consequently, the self-confident Douglas-Home felt able to take the sorts of liberties with his boss that it would not have been sensible for Evans to have risked. Douglas-Home was not averse to putting the phone down on Murdoch – particularly if there was an audience to appreciate such lèse-majesté. The belief that their editor had the social confidence not to be intimidated by the proprietor certainly enhanced his popularity among the staff. Many, however, were uneasy about the political repositioning of the paper. Hugh Stephenson, the former editor of The Times business section who had gone on to edit the New Statesman, felt the political move defied commercial sense, doubting ‘whether there is room for two Daily Telegraphs’.[436] But Murdoch was an admirer of the Telegraph’s sense of mission and identity and believed The Times should be equally purposeful. At one stage, Douglas-Home got so tired of hearing Murdoch sing the Telegraph’s praises that he shouted back, ‘then why didn’t you buy the bloody Telegraph?’[437]

An unshakeable belief in defence and NATO was at the core of Douglas-Home’s views. At a time when Labour was committed to unilateral nuclear disarmament and the Cold War was going though a tense phase, it was natural that he should back the Conservatives. But under his editorship The Times became much more sympathetic to monetarist policies at home. The dislike of monetarism red in tooth and claw evident in the leader columns of Harold Evans was cast aside. ‘British economic policy should be guided by two rules: the first is that the Government should have a balanced budget and the second is that the growth of the money supply should be roughly similar to that of underlying production capacity’ the column now announced. ‘Only if the Government adheres to them consistently will it achieve price stability and, in the long run, price stability is the only macro-economic objective which it can deliver.’ Yet there were complications associated with pursuing purity in a world of sin. Britain’s problem was the same as that experienced by Switzerland in 1978: trying to achieve balanced budgets and price stability when other countries remained profligate turned the currency into such a safe haven for international investors that the exchange rate rose to levels that made manufactured exports prohibitively expensive. Although The Times continued to advocate a way round this problem by re-establishing fixed exchange rates it conceded, somewhat lamely, that in the meantime Britain could do little more than ‘set an example of good monetary management and encourage other industrial countries to behave the same way’.[438]

Certainly, if everything else depended upon bringing down the cost of money, there was finally some cause for hope. By November 1982, the inflation rate had fallen to 6.3 per cent, the lowest for a decade, but there was still no sign of this having a positive impact upon the unemployment rate. The Times leader column could draw comfort from the reality that ‘few people would have believed in 1979 that an unemployment total of three million would be accompanied by so little social discontent’[439] but many felt complacent observations of this kind failed to grasp the extent of social disarray. It was not until September 1983 that there was the first recorded fall in unemployment since 1977, the true extent of joblessness masked by a proliferation of training schemes of varying degrees of usefulness.

The recession was reflected in the fortunes of the business pages of The Times. Confronted with the necessity of finding economies, the axe fell on The Times business news. Anthony Hilton was appointed City editor but the once large supporting staff was decimated. The journalistic range contracted accordingly. Even great culls present opportunities for those who remained and this was the attitude of the new financial editor, Graham Searjeant, who came over from the Sunday Times in 1983. Douglas-Home greeted him with words of advice that could have served well many a new boy: ‘Never attempt to be definitive, because you will have to write again tomorrow.’[440] Searjeant proved to be one of the most accomplished business commentators of the next two decades, contributing not only in the business pages but also, anonymously, as a leader writer. For the paper as a whole, though, the comprehensive filleting of The Times business news – the section the old Thomson ownership had once imagined would rival the FT in its coverage – represented a major contraction. It left the FT with an almost unassailable advantage in this vital sector of the market for the next decade.

It was thus surprising that The Times was endorsing the Thatcherite vision of the enterprise economy while simultaneously cutting back on its own business coverage. The transformation to Thatcherite cheerleader was not swift or unquestioning, however. The bulk of the Government’s privatization campaign to roll back the frontiers of the nationalized economy lay ahead in a second term of office. The first attempt, in 1982, left The Times noticeably underwhelmed. The privatization of a majority stake in ‘Britoil’, as the British National Oil Corporation was renamed, was, as its author Nigel Lawson put it, ‘the largest privatization the world had ever known’.[441] But with Labour immediately pledging to renationalize the oil assets at the sale price, investors were cautious. This, together with a flotation in November 1982 that badly coincided with gloomy predictions about future oil prices, ensured it was embarrassingly undersubscribed. Neither Adrian Hamilton in the business news section nor The Times leader writers were surprised, concluding that ‘a decent interval before the next major sale would be judicious’.[442] What was more, the paper still had to be convinced that ‘selling assets at a discount’ and ‘transferring ownership from twenty million taxpayers to a few hundred thousand shareholders, simply to raise a relatively small amount of money’ made sense.[443] This was one tune that time and experience would later change.

Whatever the battles over the opinion pieces in the paper, there was still enough of the journal of record spirit within The Times to ensure straight, unbiased reporting on the news pages. The political editor was Julian Haviland, whom Harold Evans had appointed after he had spent more than twenty years at ITN. Haviland was reinforced by Tony Bevins, the chief political correspondent, and a team of four journalists working from the House of Commons to report British political news. In any case, despite the claims that it was now a bastion of right-wing prejudices, it was hard to discern too much enthusiasm for the Conservative Party even on the comment pages of The Times as the 1983 general election approached. ‘Only the conquest of inflation and of the Falklands were measureable successes,’ the leader column conceded, ‘with the rest having to be taken on trust from a not very eloquent band of ministers.’[444] But the Labour Party manifesto, immortalized by Gerald Kaufman as ‘the longest suicide note in history’, put beyond the slightest doubt which party the paper would endorse. Labour’s manifesto called not only for the scrapping of Trident, unilateral nuclear disarmament and withdrawal from the EEC, but for the reimposition of exchange controls and the threat to the major clearing banks that if they refused to ‘cooperate with us fully … we shall stand ready to take one or more of them into public ownership’. Nationalization would be extended over electronics and pharmaceutical companies, on all tenanted land and on any private property ‘held empty without justification’. Private schools would lose charitable status and were to be ‘integrated’ into the local authority sector ‘where necessary’.[445] There was scarcely a word in the entire manifesto with which The Times columnists and leader writers did not take issue. Claiming to feel sympathy for his predicament, Bernard Levin described Michael Foot as ‘lurching between disaster and calamity with all the skill and aplomb of a one-legged tightrope-walker’. He was, Levin maintained, a man ‘unable to make his own Shadow Cabinet appointments or indeed to blow his nose in public without his trousers falling down’.[446]

The paper was also critical of the Liberal-SDP Alliance’s offering which was ‘a worthy compilation of much that has been tried, half-tried or at least seriously considered over the last political generation’.[447] Editorially, the switch from Harold Evans to Douglas-Home probably made little difference to the paper’s hostility to Michael Foot’s Labour Party, but it ensured a less charitable attitude towards the centre-left alternative. Despite this, subsequent estimates suggested that a third of Times readers voted for the Alliance. With the exception of the Guardian (41 per cent), this was the highest proportion for any national newspaper’s readership.[448]

Due to the 1978–9 shutdown, the 1983 general election was the first that The Times had covered since 1974. There was a last minute danger that it would miss out again when Fleet Street was hit by a fresh wave of strikes. A nine-week dispute with its print workers ensured the Financial Times missed the general election. Two hundred thousand copies of the Observer’s final edition before election day were lost when the NGA decided to punish the newspaper’s editor, Donald Trelford, for not allowing the NGA space in his paper to attack a Conservative Party advertisement. Since the Observer supported Labour, it was hard to see what the NGA’s action was intended to achieve. The following night, the NGA members took exception to the main leader in the Daily Express and refused to print it. Early editions of the paper appeared with a blank space where the offending leader should have appeared. In these circumstances, The Times could consider itself lucky to escape the unions’ ad hoc attempt at press censorship.

Nor, happily, did the paper have to contend with any political direction from the proprietor’s office. Although Murdoch was in London on polling day, he had not felt the need to be in the country during the election campaign. He did not interfere with The Times’s stance (not that he would have felt the need to) and the same was true at the less resolute Sunday Times whose editor, Frank Giles, later made clear that ‘at no period had Murdoch raised with me the question of our political line. Nor had [Sir Edward] Pickering.’[449]

The Times reported the election result below the headline (which it would have been safe to have prepared in advance) ‘Mrs Thatcher back with a landslide’. Julian Haviland’s reporting was updated as results came in, though, by 2 a.m., the picture was pretty clear. Tony Benn was ousted in Bristol East, the paper quietly whooping that ‘the man who seemed certain to challenge for the Labour Party leadership next autumn has lost his principal power base, a seat in Parliament’. No less significant was the defeat of two of the Gang of Four – Shirley Williams and Bill Rodgers. It was a frustrating night for the Alliance. It received almost as many votes as Labour but the vagaries of the electoral system ensured it made little headway with a quarter of the vote translating into one twenty-eighth of the seats. All but five of the former Labour MPs who had defected to the SDP were defeated. The results were received from Press Association wires and rekeyed. The Times managed to publish around 450 results by the time the last election-night edition rolled off the press, which was more than any of its rivals. The Saturday paper was accompanied by a twelve-page supplement produced by Alan Wood, who was covering his seventh general election. It provided short biographies of all 650 MPs, an unprecedented feat. The final tally was Conservatives 397 seats, Labour 209, Alliance 23 (and Others 21). Margaret Thatcher was the first twentieth-century Conservative Prime Minister to win two successive working majorities. It was the worst result for Labour since 1935. Pat Healy, the only Times employee standing, found the soil of North Bedfordshire unfertile for Labour.

Michael Foot was the first post-election casualty of his party’s disastrous showing at the polls. His oratorical style had amused Frank Johnson who drew attention to the Labour leader’s ‘peroration trouble’ – the habit of inserting an extra subclause into the ending of a speech that forced him to digress, take the tempo down, rewind and recapitulate like the conclusion of a Beethoven symphony. Foot’s successor, Neil Kinnock, also proved a gift for Johnson, who played on his supposed ‘windbag’ tendencies. Editorially, The Times was not confident about the new leader, fearing he was still far too left wing. The day after Kinnock won the party leadership, a four-sequence photo shot was spooled across the front page showing him on Brighton beach stumbling into the advancing sea and having to be hauled to safety by his wife Glenys. The caption read: ‘Early lesson for new leader: time and tide wait for no man.’[450] Douglas-Home wanted Foot, liberated from the cares of leadership, to write regular book reviews for The Times, but, citing various commitments, he politely declined.[451]

Cecil Parkinson had masterminded the Conservatives’ 1983 election campaign and was talked of as Thatcher’s eventual successor. The Times reacted to the revelation that Sarah Keays, Parkinson’s former secretary, was expecting his child with a stalwart defence: ‘whatever society’s aspirations to the contrary, life in this land is full of split homes, illegitimacy, and one-parent families. Why then does the public expect its leaders to preserve the outward forms of a morality which it no longer practises, if it ever did?’[452] But when Parkinson responded to questioning on the matter during the course of an interview on Panorama, Sarah Keays decided to offer her side of the story exclusively to The Times. Douglas-Home was at Blackpool for the Conservative Party conference, but as soon as the offer was put to him he dispatched a reporting team to visit her in Bath. In the small hours of 14 October, the Daily Telegraph journalist Graham Paterson was awoken in his Blackpool hotel room by an irate editorial office in Fleet Street desperate to find out what was going on and furious at having been scooped by its rival.[453] The headline said it all. ‘Sarah Keays talks to The Times of “loving relationship”’ appeared across the top of the paper that morning, overshadowing the enthusiastic reception Parkinson had received at the Conservative Party conference the previous day. Within hours, Parkinson had resigned. The one hundredth anniversary Conservative Party conference had turned from celebration to deep gloom, with many outraged that The Times had sunk to the depths of printing what they took to be the fury of a woman scorned. The familiar cry went up that the ‘paper wasn’t what it used to be’ and ‘what is The Times coming to?’. The use of a picture of two of Parkinson’s daughters looking distressed outside the family home came in for particular attack. The editor was deluged with letters of complaint, one reader who had been subscribing to the paper for sixty years assuring him, ‘the tone of The Times is beginning to resemble that of the so-called gutter press … you have become VULGAR’.[454] Yet Sarah Keays was not paid for her story and, as Douglas-Home told Alastair Hetherington, ‘what ground have I got for not publishing it? Answer: only those of protecting the Minister, and that’s not my job.’[455] Further offence was caused when the paper quoted Miss Keays’s claim that the Daily Telegraph had recommended aborting the child. In fact, the Telegraph had stated that such an option ‘hardly seems a moral advance’ and prominent space had to be hurriedly found for the Telegraph’s editor, Bill Deedes, to point this out.[456] For its part, The Times continued to be sympathetic to Parkinson’s predicament. Jock Bruce-Gardyne wrote an Op-Ed appreciation of the fallen minister, ‘hounded out by hypocrisy’. Bernard Levin also raised his eyebrows at the moral panic, finding his usual seam of satire in the lofty pronouncements of the Daily Mirror, the Daily Telegraph and the Bishop of Bath and Wells.