The History of the Times: The Murdoch Years

A fifty-two-year-old father of three, Evans had been divorced from his schoolteacher wife, Enid, after twenty-five years of marriage in 1978 and for the past six years had been seen in the company of his fiancée, the up-and-coming twenty-seven-year-old editor of Tatler, Tina Brown. The couple married on 19 August at the Long Island home of Evans’s friend, the renowned Washington Post editor, Ben Bradlee. Bradlee was Evans’s best man and, with the bride’s parents in Spain, Anthony Holden stepped in to give the bride away. Anna Blundy, daughter of the Sunday Times’s fearless foreign correspondent, David Blundy, was maid of honour. However far from Fleet Street, it was still a journalists’ wedding. Some months later, Evans dropped a memo to Colin Watson, the obituaries editor, telling him to advise his contributors to ‘introduce the subject’s marriage(s) if any, at the appropriate chronological moment. A marriage and the support of a wife is often an important point in a person’s life and we have come to the conclusion that it is wrong merely to tack on a sentence to say that so and so is survived by various people.’[147]

IV

Mr and Mrs Harold Evans spent part of their honeymoon staying with Henry Kissinger. Evans wanted Kissinger to write a weekly column for The Times and, after consultations with Murdoch, promised a financial inducement the scale of which would have been unprecedented in the paper’s history.[148] In the meantime, he had been reading the drafts for the second volume of Kissinger’s memoirs, Years of Upheaval 1973–77, even helping to rewrite certain passages. This was not a role he would have easily taken upon himself with regard to a senior British political figure. In London, Evans was anxious to avoid compromising entanglement between press and politicians, but he enjoyed a more relaxed perspective across the Atlantic and, in later years, he and his wife would happily mix their journalistic careers with the society of, in particular, leading Democrats.

It was a verdict on the past four years rather than a discovery of latent Toryism that had encouraged Evans to vote Conservative in the 1979 general election. Observing him in the morning conferences, Frank Johnson came to the conclusion that Evans, while an enthusiastic campaigner, did not have a considered political position or particular insight into the Westminster village. He had grown up assuming that the welfare state had improved opportunity immeasurably. The arguments propounded by Keith Joseph and the Institute for Economic Affairs, then gripping the radical right of the Conservative Party, had made little impact upon him.

But they had not escaped Frank Johnson, the lone Thatcherite in the editor’s trusted circle (Evans used to tease him in the morning conference by summoning his contribution with the cry, ‘I call upon the Leader of the Opposition’). Evans and Johnson shared a non-middle class background. Johnson was the son of a pastry chef. Working his way up from local reporting to the Sun, he had been a parliamentary sketchwriter for the Daily Telegraph before joining James Goldsmith’s short-lived Now! magazine (fortuitously leaving it for The Times only days before that journal’s demise). While Evans was a proud Durham University graduate, Johnson was an autodidact with strong interests in opera and history who had been cultivated by the Telegraph’s coven of in-house Tory philosophers. ‘I believed Britain was in a life or death struggle,’ he later reflected, ‘and that if Thatcher lost, it was all over for Britain.’ He did not sense that Evans, admiring the achievements of the welfare state and sixties progressivism, shared the same sense of urgency. What was more, Evans had placed the paper’s political direction in the hands of Bernard Donoughue who, fresh from advising James Callaghan, was opposed to the line Johnson wanted The Times to take.[149]

That line was set almost from the first day of Evans’s editorship by the paper’s analysis of Geoffrey Howe’s 1981 Budget. The headline, ‘Harsh Budget for workers but more for business’, was, according to Paul Johnson in the Spectator, ‘the headline which we all thought was the copyright of the Morning Star and kept in permanent type there’. The subheading, which claimed ‘unexpectedly harsh tax increases’, did not seem to follow the accurate predictions that the paper had been making on this very subject over the previous days. Meanwhile, the assertion that the Budget was pro-business was contradicted in the business news section where both the City and industry were stated as being distinctly cool about the measures. The Times’s handling was, according to Paul Johnson, ‘a disaster’. He also detected hyperbole in the headlines of succeeding days such as ‘Chancellor under savage attack from all quarters’ and a headline on higher education cuts ‘Fears of university system collapsing from loss of income’.[150] This was the sensitivity of a Thatcheritie convert, but ‘all quarters’ and ‘collapsing’ left little margin for error.

It was certainly difficult to read the front page without concluding a disaster had befallen the country. Fred Emery’s report made the most of ‘this muddle of severity against consumers with no clear thrust of benefits to business that worries a number of senior Conservatives’.[151] By contrast, the summary of the Treasury’s forecasts by the economics editor, David Blake, was in the older, straight-reporting tradition of the principal news page. The leader column was where opinion was supposed to be located. This Evans wrote himself. He rejected both ‘the primitive compass of monetary aggregates’ and ‘crude expansion’. Instead he argued that the country was locked in a vicious circle where rising unemployment was pushing up current expenditure while capital expenditure, a fifth of all public spending as recently as 1974, had fallen to one tenth. The consequence of this for the country’s infrastructure was harming business, thereby pushing up social security payments. It was not entirely clear where the editorial thought the balance should be, although Evans’s belief that ‘prudent control of the money supply’ was ‘no longer an adequate prescription for policy’ implied he was backsliding from Rees-Mogg’s commitment to sound money.[152] As Evans assured Michael Foot with a slight sideswipe at one of Rees-Mogg’s more distinctive obsessions, ‘I cannot promise much but at least there will be no more articles calling for the return of the gold standard.’[153]

The Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, believed the Budget’s critics had got it wrong. Far from being deflationary, reducing Government borrowing would precipitate a fall in interest rates and a reduction in sterling’s overvalued exchange rate.[154] In the short term this proved accurate, with interest rates falling 2 per cent, to 12 per cent, the day after the Budget. By October, though, it was a run on the pound that caused nervousness, and interest rates were hiked back up to a crippling 16 per cent.

At the end of March, 364 economists sent a letter to The Times denouncing monetarism. The signatories included seventy-six present or past professors and five former chief economic advisers to the Government. It was the idea of two Cambridge professors, Frank Hahn and Robert Nield, and academics at thirty-six universities appended their names. Although it became famous as the ‘Letter to The Times’, the newspaper almost squandered it. David Blake wrote up the story, but its front-page position was anything but prominent and much of it was continued fifteen pages on in the business news section. By the time it attracted a leader article, the following day, it had been downgraded by the altogether more dramatic story of the assassination attempt on President Reagan.

But the letter was important, not only as a counterblast of the learned and eminent against the Government’s economic policy but also as a measure of the culture clash between those now in power and the academic community whose stipends were about to be cut. The letter did give grounds for ambiguity. It claimed there was ‘no basis in economic theory or supporting evidence for the Government’s belief that by deflating demand they will bring inflation permanently under control’ or, as a consequence, bring about an economic recovery. In ignoring the alternatives to monetarism, ‘Present polices will deepen the depression’.[155]

When the leading article ‘An Avalanche of Economists’ appeared, it was somewhat more circumspect. It avoided explicitly endorsing the round-robin letter but made clear The Times believed the Treasury’s fixation with Sterling M3 concentrated minds upon too narrow a measure of the money supply. Rather, there was now a need for controlled reflation rather than further deflation.[156] The monetarist response appeared in the business pages in an article by Patrick Minford, Professor of Economics at Liverpool University. His article so pleased the Prime Minister that she wrote to congratulate him.[157] Suspecting the 364s’ ‘apparently political ends’, Minford claimed they were more Keynesian than Keynes: Keynes had supported reflation in 1932 when there was sub-zero inflation and less than 1 per cent money supply growth. He had thus advocated price stability. But the public sector borrowing requirement for 1980–81 was an inflationary 4 per cent. Consequently, reducing the PSBR would create the structure for the sort of price stability Keynes had in mind. Recent history suggested incomes policies were not an effective alternative. What was more, Minford even maintained ‘there is no evidence that those with sound long-term prospects are going to the wall’ since ‘the stock market is now increasing the capitalization of even the hardest hit sectors’.[158] Nigel Lawson later wrote of the 364 economists, ‘Their timing was exquisite. The economy embarked on a prolonged phase of vigorous growth almost from the moment the letter was published’.[159] This may have surprised the still swelling ranks of the unemployed, but it was true, nonetheless. The standard measure of national output, gross domestic product (GDP), reached its bottom in the first quarter of 1981, at the very moment when the massed ranks of academia staked their reputations to the statement ‘present policies will deepen the depression’.

The end of fixed exchange rates in 1972 had freed governments from the necessity of manipulating their balance of payments to stay in check in order to uphold the exchange rate parity. This liberty permitted running up a persistent budget deficit as a means to stimulate demand and fund the welfare benefits of those for whom there remained no demand. But easing discipline in this way quickly drove western governments onto a road to ruin and by the late seventies Whitehall was desperately trying to rein back the PSBR’s share of GDP. The squeeze applied by the Thatcher Government’s high interest rate policy also had the effect of pushing up the exchange rate because high rates of interest made it attractive for ‘forex’ traders to buy sterling. At a time when North Sea oil revenues were already giving the pound the credentials of a petrocurrency, the resulting high exchange rate made exports yet more uncompetitive. During 1981, The Times became increasingly hostile to the notion that the Government, obsessed by its monetary targets, should have no view on what the appropriate exchange rate should be. In July, a leader column, ‘The Price of Floating’, attacked the whole post-1972 free-for-all. Railing against ‘the ideology of do-nothing monetarism’ with its exclusive focus on combating inflation, the editorial maintained that since ‘it is doubtful if a sensible exchange rate policy can be maintained unilaterally’ it was necessary to restore international cooperation.[160]

Supporting calls for new world central banking institutions to curb the supposed excesses of the foreign exchange markets, Evans wrote a leading article claiming, ‘our fortunes and our prospects have been devastated’ by ‘the experiment with floating rates and the stupendous growth of international mobile funds’. There was ‘a currency casino’ in operation when ‘on the world market the average trading volume in currency is now some 70,000 million dollars a day, a volume by which the global trade in goods, services and investment is insignificant’. The leader article mentioned Enoch Powell and Samuel Brittan among the false prophets who had preached floating as a means of ridding the country of its balance of payments problems. In fact, Peter Jay had penned an influential four column Times leader article in September 1976 advocating monetarism and a ‘cleanly’ floating currency only days before he had drafted the speech his father-in-law, James Callaghan, delivered to the Labour Party conference denouncing reflationary politics – a turning point in the country’s affairs. But in July 1981, The Times renounced its own former position with the excuse that ‘the beginning of wisdom is the admission of error’ (unfortunately the ‘i’ was missing from the word ‘is’ when the sentence was printed).[161]

Margaret Thatcher had told the 198 °Conservative Party conference, ‘You turn if you want; the lady’s not for turning.’ With Evans at the steering wheel, The Times now made clear it was performing a very public U-turn. It marked the 1981 party conference debate on economic policy with a damning analysis of monetarism by James Tobin, the Yale professor who had the previous day been named as the winner of the 1981 Nobel Prize for Economics.[162]

‘Three million unemployed and still more to come’ was the front-page headline for Melvyn Westlake’s report that one in eight of the workforce was without a job and that the figure – which excluded a third of a million more on special employment and training schemes – was likely to keep rising at least until 1983. This proved an optimistic forecast. The accompanying leader column concluded that with output below its 1974 level and the national fabric fragmenting:

It is devastatingly clear that Britain needs massive investment, private and public, to restore its competitive strength … The Europeans are valiantly trying to create a pool of lower interest rates to protect their nascent recovery from another surge of American interest rates … we need not be flotsam on the high seas.[163]

The paper’s position had suffered from the conundrum that if it thought the exchange rate was so overvalued, why was it wanting to see it locked in at such a rate? But a relatively trouble-free realignment of the major currencies within the European Monetary System encouraged the leader column to adopt the line that it was ‘a good time for Britain to join’.[164] This allowed the paper to preach currency stability and commitment to the ‘European Vision’ that Rees-Mogg’s paper had encouraged. But it was premature for it to declare, ‘the excuse that the pound is now a petrocurrency is not valid’.[165] On currency stability, as on ‘European Vision’, The Times would find consistency as difficult to sustain as did the Treasury.

Indeed, it was across the English Channel that the paper needed to look if it wanted to see alternatives to monetarism in practice rather than theory. A golden opportunity was provided by the victory of François Mitterrand over Válery Giscard d’Estaing. Sixteen years had separated Mitterrand from his first challenge (to de Gaulle in 1965) and his taking possession of the Elysée Palace. More importantly, as Charles Hargrove reported from Paris, it was a ‘turning point’ in French politics. It was the first presidential victory for the left in the twenty-three year life of the Fifth Republic. Indeed, it was the first time the left had been in complete power since Léon Blum’s ill-fated Popular Front in 1936. With the news of Mitterrand’s triumph, Ian Murray reported that French customs officers were given urgent instructions to stop attempts to export money from the country: ‘The officers have been told to watch particularly for large cars not registered in frontier areas.’[166]

While the Conservatives had abandoned exchange controls shortly after coming to power in Britain, Mitterrand tightened the French State’s preventative powers to see capital exported beyond its border. A real socialist experiment was underway. Editorially, The Times was caught between fearing the possibility that a far left resurgence in the coming National Assemby elections could lead to a left – Communist coalition and the satisfaction of seeing the fall of Giscard d’Estaing and ‘his scandalous relations’ with the Central African Empire’s Emperor Bokassa.[167] Writing in his column, Ronald Butt suggested Mitterrand’s election might ‘bring greater flexibility and a greater significance to the European voice’ and ‘establish for the first time that the European Community is not simply a vehicle for the centre-right’ as it had been under its Christian Democrat domination (for even Germany’s SPD Chancellor Schmidt ‘makes the kind of leader many a British Tory would be glad to own’). The consequence could be a softening in the anti-EEC attitude of Britain’s Labour Party.[168]

The British summer of 1981 was one of disorder. From a news reporting perspective, the most graphic examples came on the streets of Ulster and the deprived inner cities of England.

The hunger strikes among Irish Republican prisoners housed in the ‘H-Blocks’ of the Maze prison near Belfast had started in October 1980 with demands to wear their own clothes, to have the restrictions on their movement within the prison lifted and to be exempted from doing any work. The Government made a concession, permitting ‘civilian style’ (but not personal) clothing, but was wary of going further for fear that it was all part of an orchestrated IRA campaign to give their terrorists effective run of the prison and to see them accorded ‘political prisoner’ status. Indeed, a May 1980 report by the European Commission on Human Rights had rejected the bulk of the prisoners’ complaints. A letter was smuggled out from an inmate of Wormwood Scrubs to The Times endorsing the view that Irish terrorists enjoyed a far laxer regime than British individuals convicted of more minor misdemeanours on the mainland.[169] The hunger strike had been called off in December 1980 when one of the participants lost consciousness. This was followed by a mass ‘dirty protest’ in which cells were deliberately fouled.

In March the dirty protests ended and the hunger strikes recommenced. By the time the campaign ended, seven months later, ten Republican prisoners had starved themselves to death. But it was the first prisoner to die who captured the public imagination and caused the most serious political upset. Bobby Sands was a twenty-seven-year-old Republican who had served five of his fourteen-year sentence for being caught with a gun in a car. His decision to stand for Parliament, in absentia, on an anti-H-Block ticket in the Fermanagh and South Tyrone by-election was given a boost when the Nationalist SDLP opted to stand aside, giving him a direct run against his Unionist opponent. The consequence of uniting the Nationalist and Republican vote was to hand Sands victory by a margin of 1446 votes.

Filing his Times report, Christopher Thomas suggested the result had ‘dealt a severe blow to the stronghold of moderate Roman Catholic opinion, the Social Democratic and Labour Party, from which it may never fully recover. Recriminations over the party’s failure to contest the seat are biting deep.’[170] The Times’s leader was in no mood to indulge dangerous games. ‘The House of Commons should move at once, that is before the Easter recess, to unseat him,’ it announced, continuing, ‘that would be an entirely proper thing to do since he is precluded from attending the House for the duration of this parliament.’ The clear extent of polarization precluded pushing ahead with early ‘attempts to introduce provincial institutions acceptable to the leaders of both communities’. Instead, the Government was faced with no option but to concentrate on ‘normalizing’ the ‘administration of the province within the United Kingdom’.[171]

In May, Sands died. The immediate response was an orgy of rioting in Belfast and protests beyond. But the main legacy was a propaganda coup for Irish Republicanism, attracting the world’s media and drumming up financial support from United States citizens. The Times did not form up behind the long procession of mourners that followed Sands’s IRA-decorated coffin. ‘By refusing to submit to Mr Sands’s blackmail, the British government bears no responsibility whatever for his death,’ the leader column stated. ‘He was not in prison for his beliefs, but for proved serious criminal offences. He was not being oppressed or ill-treated. Indeed the opposite was true. The prison rules applying to Northern Ireland allow for a more comfortable existence than do most English prisons.’ It ended, ‘There is only one killer of Bobby Sands and this is Sands himself.’[172] He did not get an obituary.

The paper’s position continued to be stalwartly supportive of the Thatcher Government’s inflexible approach, maintaining, ‘It has chosen the right ground to stand on – denial of separate political status in name and substance.’ As for the ‘murderous’ IRA leadership, ‘Hope is their oxygen. It must be denied them.’[173] Mrs Thatcher would later refer to the need to cut off the IRA’s ‘oxygen of publicity’. But far from gulping for air, the Republican movement appeared wholly revived. Indeed, the upsurge of tension in Ulster ensured that The Times had to send its first itinerant news team there for many years, with Tim Jones and John Witherow joining the permanent reporter, Christopher Thomas. ‘Amid mixed scenes of jubilation and despair,’ Thomas reported from Enniskillen the victory of the IRA supporting candidate who retained – with an increased majority – the Fermanagh seat on Sands’s death. The leader column condemned a situation in which ‘the Irish Government and the Roman Catholic Hierarchy of Ireland so conspicuously qualify their condemnation of this extension of terrorist violence by piling the blame on British ministers for allowing it to continue’. In doing so, the hunger strikers were gaining the virtual ‘status of martyrdom’.[174]

The IRA ensured that the hunger strike ended in October with a bang. They detonated a nail-bomb on a coach in Chelsea Barracks carrying Irish Guards. The following month the Unionist MP for Belfast South was shot dead while he was holding a surgery for his constituents. An Anglo-Irish summit brassed up the existing ministerial and official collaborations under a new name, ‘The Inter-Governmental Council’, but by the following spring, when the proposals of the Northern Ireland Secretary, Jim Prior, for ‘rolling devolution’ of responsibilities held by Whitehall back to Ulster were ready to get underway, they faced opposition from the SDLP and from across the border from the Taoiseach, Charlie Haughey. Sinn Fein made gains in the elections to the Northern Ireland Assembly in October 1982 and the SDLP members refused to take their seats, effectively torpedoing the project. Once again, the Province’s future appeared to be wedged in an impasse. It would take time, and a more emollient attitude in Dublin with the election of Dr Garret Fitzgerald, before the next initiative could be sprung upon the Province.

During 1981, political unrest in Ulster was matched by social disorder in Britain’s inner cities. In April, petrol bombs were thrown for the first time on the streets of the mainland. The Brixton riots injured 279 policemen and forty-five members of the public. Twenty-eight buildings were set on fire while surrounding shops were systematically looted. News of scuffles in Brixton came late and received minor billing in the following day’s paper under the brief headline, ‘Police hurt in scuffles with blacks’. But after a weekend of serious rioting and looting, the events dominated Monday 13 April’s paper, forcing Michael Leapman’s report from Cape Canaveral on the launch of the space shuttle Columbia to take second place on the front page. Inside the edition, Martin Huckerby, who had been jostled by the mob, provided a graphic eyewitness report of the chaos in Brixton:

The only sign of authority was an abandoned fire engine astride the junction, its windows smashed and its wrecked equipment strewn across the road … Red hot debris dripped from a series of burning buildings along both sides of the road. Amid the roaring of the flames and crashing of collapsing buildings there were screams and shouts. Despite the furnace of heat, figures could be seen running through the smoke, hurling missiles at unseen police.[175]