The History of the Times: The Murdoch Years

Elsewhere on the page the various angles were covered: an interview with a white woman who said she had come to fear the brooding violence of her largely black neighbourhood and ‘a young, sharply dressed Guyanan black’ who approved ‘ “of what’s happened. It’s the only way people can put across their case”.’ The police’s view was also represented and there was an article on Lambeth Council’s attempts to grapple with housing allocation between its white and black areas. The leading article backed the establishment of a broad ranging enquiry – which the Home Secretary, Willie Whitelaw, announced that day would be conducted by Lord Scarman. On 15 April, Op-Ed featured a gripping article by the Indian journalist Sasthi Brata detailing how, blindfolded and threatened, he was taken by a black gang in Brixton to see their amateur bomb-making cottage industry while one of his captors told him: ‘“There’s going to be a lot more, a big lot more, just tell ’em that. We ain’t kidding. We goin’ burn ’em down, everythin’ everywhere.”’[176]

Naturally, the immediate aftermath of the riots in Brixton (and those that followed in Southall and the Toxteth area of Liverpool) were dominated by the apportioning of blame. Political activism was pitched against insensitive policing, moral degeneracy against a trinity of overt racism, poor housing and unemployment. The affected areas combined high numbers of immigrants with a level of social deprivation that was all too obvious to see. But to what extent was the Thatcher Government to blame? That The Times stated nothing justified the rioters’ behaviour was to be expected but it went further, conceding that the wider social issues were relevant and that the Scarman Inquiry should have the widest remit to consider them. As for the Government, the leader article chose to pick on its inability to articulate and demonstrate a belief that its policies had a positive social dimension worthy of the same priority as the fight against inflation.[177]

But there was also the question of racism. In a leader entitled ‘The Soiled Coin’, The Times believed racist sentiments ‘will not be resisted by preaching integration. This is a fallacy of the sixties. It is unrealizable, it is questionable if it is desirable, and it raises more fear and animosity than it dissipates with its overtones of inter-racial sex, marriage and a coffee-coloured Britain.’ Social pluralism, it argued, was obtainable without tolerance requiring ‘that every Englishman should have a black man for his neighbour or that every Asian should forget his cultural identity’. Rather, while ‘the Government cannot be expected to resolve such a complex and volatile problem overnight’ it could at least follow the American lead in encouraging the rapid promotion of ‘qualified coloureds to positions of obvious authority – in the army, the police and above all the public service – so that the coloured community can identify with those who take decisions as well as those at the receiving end’.[178]

When it was published in November, the 150 page Scarman Report denied the existence of ‘institutional racism’ in Britain. Militant activists also disliked the report’s support for the police who ‘stood between our society and a total collapse of law and order on the streets’. But most sides of the community supported the principal recommendations: racist behaviour by police officers to be a sackable offence, better training, greater independent monitoring of the police complaints procedure, new statutory consultative committees with community liaison but no change to the Riot Act. Whitelaw moved immediately to endorse the principles of the report. Much of this was supported by The Times, although not Scarman’s enthusiasm for ‘taking the investigation as well as the adjudication of complaints out of the hands of the police’ which was ‘a minefield of good intentions’. Instead, ombudsmen and better lay scrutiny of the results of investigation would be preferable. The paper also lamented the failure to reform the Riot Act, taking the view that ‘if a riot is in progress the offence is, or ought to be, being in on it. No one should be able to feel that he can join in with impunity provided no further offence can be proved against him.’[179]

But The Times also gave space on the Op-Ed page to Darcus Howe, editor of Race Today, billing him as ‘a militant voice of black dissent’. According to Howe, the fault lay primarily with the way in which the police exercised their powers against the West Indian community. The trigger for the riots, Operation Swamp, had been regarded as a form of licensed harassment by Brixton’s youth. Instead, Howe argued for the ‘immediate abolition of all powers of stop and search’.[180]

The police countered that without ‘stop and search’ powers they had little chance of containing the violence and drug-related disorder that was prevalent in the inner cities and the areas dominated by blacks in particular. Yet, over the following fifteen years, the issue of racism slowly receded from the forefront of public debate until reignited towards the end of the century by the influx of asylum seekers and by the police’s inadequate handling of the racist murder of a black teenager, Stephen Lawrence. With the resulting Lawrence Inquiry, specific sore points like ‘stop and search’ not only became live issues again, but Scarman’s rejection of ‘institutional racism’ within the police force would be publicly revoked.

The critical tone adopted towards the Thatcher Government’s fixation with setting targets for narrowly defined money supply growth may have given the impression that under Evans The Times believed the State was a font of civic largesse. Certainly, the paper took the view that the Government needed to invest more in capital expenditure, citing the view of one with such impeccable monetarist credentials as Milton Friedman that there was no necessary relation between monetary growth and the size of the public sector borrowing requirement. But the paper took a more parsimonious view with regard to current expenditure. The Treasury’s demand of a 4 per cent public sector pay increase (at a time when inflation was running in double-digit per cent) was welcomed as an essential contribution to combating inflation. Indeed, the leader column argued that public sector workers had no right to expect the same pay parity with those in ‘the risk-taking’ private sector. What was more, those working in the nationalized industries should also see their wage increases pruned, ‘and that includes the wages of the miners and water workers as well as civil servants. If it means a hard winter, so be it.’[181] In this respect, The Times seemed ready to take on the miners before Mrs Thatcher, with memories of their defeat of Edward Heath, was prepared to do.

Not many miners read The Times. But on the issue of cuts in higher education, the newspaper was trespassing on the personal finances of a core area of its readership. In March 1980 the Government had announced three-year spending cuts in higher education. By May the following year, it was clear the University Grants Committee had failed to mitigate the full effects and universities braced themselves for falling matriculation rolls and the possibility of whole departments being axed as a consequence of an 8.5 per cent cut being enforced. Their woes were compounded by a fall in the income from foreign students, following the Government’s announcement that it would stop subsidizing fees for foreign students who would, in future, be charged the full cost of their course. Diana Geddes, the education correspondent, analysed the ‘grim future’ facing Britain’s universities. As a consequence of the 1963 Robbins Report, the proportion of eighteen-year-olds in higher education had risen from 3 per cent in the early 1950s to 14 per cent by the 1970s. The Government was now putting this process into reverse, having, as Geddes put it, ‘abandoned once and for all the Robbins principle that all those suitably qualified by ability and attainment should have the right to higher education’.

The universities were now paying the price for becoming the dependent wards of the State: over 90 per cent of their income came from public funds. But even ‘an overdue pruning of dead wood’ would be expensive. Redundancy bills alone could reach £200 million. This would wipe out most of the savings from reducing student numbers. Geddes’s article suggested that the Government might be better achieving its cuts by instead reducing its contribution to local authority-administered colleges and polytechnics – these ‘less respected institutions in the public sector’ – many of whose staff did not enjoy the same academic tenure and who would thus be much cheaper to sack.[182] In its leader column, the paper was prepared to accept the wrath of its readership in academia by stating that the cuts were necessary in the economic climate in which the country found itself.[183]

The plights of publicly funded professionals certainly provided a fitting moment for the Social Democratic Party (SDP) to launch itself. Departing the editor’s chair in carefree demob spirit, Rees-Mogg had penned one of his last leader articles by endorsing Shirley Williams as the best future hope for 10 Downing Street. The Labour Party’s lurch to the left under James Callaghan’s successor, Michael Foot, had been demonstrated in January 1981 when a special conference held at Wembley voted to elect future leaders through an electoral college made up principally of trade union block votes and of party activists. The Parliamentary Labour Party would be reduced to the status of minority shareholders. The immediate consequence of this was the breakaway of the moderate ‘Gang of Four’ (Shirley Williams, David Owen, Roy Jenkins and Bill Rodgers) to form the Council for Social Democracy. In March, the first twelve Labour MPs resigned the whip and the SDP was born.

The ‘Gang of Four’ were Murdoch’s first guests to lunch at Gray’s Inn Road. The main boardroom’s table was rather long, ensuring a disconcerting distance between each of the quiet revolutionaries. Fearing they might be given short shrift from the proprietor, Evans came away relieved that Murdoch had asked ‘polite, probing questions on policy’.[184] Indeed, the SDP’s Communications Committee harboured hopes, believing Murdoch was ‘usually open to persuasion, if not to be converted, at least to give us a fair crack’.[185] With no established national organization and without the funding of the trade unions or big business, the party’s success was dependent upon achieving maximum publicity in order to attract a mass membership quickly. The party’s birth was the main front page story in every national daily apart from the Sun. The Times reported the party’s opening press conference under the informative if underwhelming headline ‘SDP pleased by initial recruitment response’. Fred Emery and Ian Bradley reported from ‘a crowded news conference in London, staged brilliantly for television, and with a claque of applauding supporters’.

The SDP was launched with twelve policy tasks. Several were phrased in the inclusive language common to the public aspirations of all mainstream politicians. But a few distinctive polices stood out. The party differed from Thatcherism through its belief in a long-term incomes policy and a mixed economy in which ‘public and private firms should flourish side by side without frequent frontier changes’. In other words, it rejected monetarism as the principal means of curbing inflation and it would not role back the frontiers of the State. It was at odds with the Labour left by wanting to stay within the EEC and NATO and in resisting unilateral nuclear disarmament. It upheld traditional Liberal Party interests in constitutional reform, particularly of the House of Lords and the introduction of proportional representation. Yet overall, its bias was summed up from the first by Bill Rodgers who told the assembled press that the SDP was ‘not a new centre party, we are very plainly a left-of-centre party’.[186] As The Times put it in its leader, ‘with the exception of proportional representation there is no major policy being propounded by the Social Democrats now which was not at least attempted by the Callaghan Government’.[187]

It was natural that there should be curiosity and, indeed, excitement at the launch of a major new force in British politics. The SDP’s difficulty was in sustaining it in the months ahead, denied, as it was, the ability of the Government or the official Opposition to set the agenda in Parliament. It needed constant media interest. In this respect, The Times was less helpful than might have been expected. Unless there was a by-election campaign underway, the SDP rarely got more than two front-page mentions a week.[188] This was surprising, given the extent to which the SDP gained the reputation of being the journalists’ party with high-profile supporters like the Guardian’s Polly Toynbee, Anthony Sampson of the Observer and even the Daily Mirror’s agony aunt, Marjorie Proops. Tony Benn was convinced the BBC was an ‘agency of the SDP’.[189] The chronicler of the Guardian would even conclude that the ‘chief reason’ for the paper’s ‘success in the early 1980s was that the Social Democratic Party was founded in its pages and the battle for the soul of the Labour party fought out there’.[190] No such claim could be entertained by The Times. But the paper’s editorial line might have tilted more obviously towards the SDP if Rees-Mogg had continued as editor. He had made clear his belief that Shirley Williams was a figure around which a new national consensus could be constructed. Back in 1972, when the Labour Party appeared close to self-destruction over the Heath Government’s EEC entry terms, the Rees-Mogg Times had looked favourably on the possible creation of a government of the centre (that is to say, pro-EEC) under the leadership of Roy Jenkins. In the three general elections during which Rees-Mogg was editor (the paper was off the streets in 1979) The Times had expressed the hope of seeing an increase in the Liberal Party’s seats so that they might prove a moderating force on the two principal parties.

But if The Times under Harry Evans did not rush to pledge itself to the SDP’s red, white and blue colours, the atmosphere in Gray’s Inn Road was nonetheless respectful towards the new party. Its initial by-election performance suggested it was being taken seriously by an electorate fearful of Labour’s leftwards lurch and repulsed by the economic and social cost of Thatcher’s medicine. At a by-election in Warrington in July, Roy Jenkins achieved a 23 per cent swing to the SDP, almost unseating Labour in its heartland. The Conservative candidate lost his deposit. In October, following the creation of the ‘Alliance’ with the Liberal Party, a Liberal activist, Bill Pitt, became the first Lib-SDP Alliance candidate to win a seat, taking Croydon North-West from the Conservatives on a 24 per cent swing. Then, in November, Shirley Williams took Crosby from the Conservatives, recording the biggest turnover of votes in any parliamentary by-election. Repeated at a general election on a nationwide scale, it would give the Alliance 533 MPs, Labour 78 and the Conservatives four. The SDP really looked as if it might succeed in its great project, to break the mould of British politics.

By-elections are problematic for newspapers since the lateness of the declaration plays havoc with newspaper production. Nonetheless, Brian MacArthur and his team managed to beat the competition with the speed in which The Times led with Bill Pitt’s capture of Croydon. Unfortunately, the front page went to press with a pre-arranged victory article, ‘Our Credibility Barrier is Broken’ by Shirley Williams, to accompany it. By placing a partisan opinion piece by Williams on the front page, the paper appeared to be not only confusing news with comment but almost endorsing her party. This was a genuine slip. Nonetheless, Evans had to field a call the next day from an irate Gerald Long, the uncompromising new managing director of Times Newspapers, demanding an explanation.[191]

Whatever the placement on the front page, nobody could be in any doubt what the back page of The Times made of the SDP’s progress. That was where Frank Johnson’s daily parliamentary sketch appeared. To Johnson the ‘Gang of Four’ provided a rich quarry for satire. Roy Jenkins was ‘a Fabergé of an egghead … shining, exquisitely crafted, full of delights, a much loved gracious figure who is to the liberal classes what the Queen Mother is to the rest of us’. The SDP, he would later note in 1986, was ‘a happy party, fit for all factions’, there being:

the Owenites; the Jenkinsites; the Elizabeth Davidites; those who want a successor to Polaris; those who want a successor to their Volvo; militant Saabs; supporters of Tuscany for August as opposed to the Dordogne; members of those car pools by which middle class families share the burden of driving their children to the local prep school; owners of exercise machines; people who have already gone over to compact discs … readers of Guardian leaders; and (a much larger group) writers of Guardian leaders.[192]

But besides the affectionate whimsy, Frank Johnson was also a perceptive judge. He foresaw the strategic weakness in the SDP’s condition. As he noted in September 1982, in lacking ‘the irrational emotions, the cranky zeal, that drives on the rank and file of the other parties’ the SDP’s supporters would eventually become demoralized by any faltering in momentum. And that faltering would come. Johnson had been introduced to Maurice Cowling and the school of Tory historians at Cambridge’s oldest college, Peterhouse, who rejected Whig and Marxist interpretations of historical progress and inevitability in favour of a ‘high politics’ view of men and events. Johnson applied this approach in his own analysis. Try as the SDP might to take a rational or scientific approach, he reminded them ‘politics is not a “subject” or an academic discipline. It is simply the random play of chance on a few ambitious politicians. No one, no matter how great an authority on “politics”, predicted the Falklands war.’[193]

This was not an approach shared by the theorists of the left, where historical inevitability remained the vogue – especially if it could be given a push with the sort of underhand tactics still employed in the Eastern Bloc or Britain’s student unions. Twenty-four hours after Labour had won control of the Greater London Council (GLC) on 7 May 1981, its group leader, the moderate Andrew McIntosh, was ousted in an internal coup by the left wing Ken Livingstone. The radical left now had the opportunity to show what they could do with – or to – Britain’s capital city. As ‘Red Ken’ put it to Nicholas Wapshott who interviewed him for The Times shortly after the successful putsch, ‘if the left GLC fails, it will be a sad day for the left everywhere’. Wapshott did not paint a favourable background for his subject, stating that, ‘as the housing chief of Camden, Livingstone’s performance was generally considered abysmal’ and ended with Livingstone enthusing about his pet salamanders: ‘I feed them on slugs and woodlice. They just live under a stone, come out at night and are highly poisonous. People say I identify with my pets.’[194]

The Times was not impartial in its commentary on the left’s progress within the Labour Movement. The paper thought it iniquitous and was not slow to say so. When the former Labour Cabinet minister Lord George Brown asked if he could pen articles for the paper, Evans replied affirmatively, suggesting ‘we are particularly interested in the Communists making inroads into the Labour Party’.[195] During September, the paper ran extracts from a forthcoming book by David and Maurice Kogan on the activities of left-wing activists in Tony Benn’s campaign team, the ‘Campaign for Labour Party Democracy’ and the ‘Rank and File Mobilizing Committee’ who were trying to make the party leadership answerable to the activists rather than the Members of Parliament.[196] Labour was now led by the left wing, nuclear unilateralist, Michael Foot. But in September the battle commenced for the Deputy Leadership. Although this was not a position that involved the wielding of great power itself, the belief that Foot, aged sixty-eight, was a caretaker leader turned it into the struggle for the future of the party, one that was made critical by the possibility of it being won by Tony Benn.

Outside the ranks of his supporters, Tony Benn was perhaps the most feared figure in British politics. For those on the right, it would be more accurate to describe him as a hate figure. He certainly frightened The Times. Having seen Benn at close quarters during his period working with Callaghan, none was keener to save the Labour Party from him than Bernard Donoughue. With the Deputy Leadership election pending, Donoughue suggested the moment had come for a hatchet job on Benn in the form of an investigation into his considerable financial interests.[197] This would show the great tribune of wealth redistribution to be a multimillionaire who had craftily ring-fenced his own money. The piece appeared on 25 September in a profile of the contenders which described Benn as ‘a wealthy aristocrat who waged a remarkable campaign to shed his peerage and upbringing’. The profile stated that his ‘main assets’ were:

shares in Benn Bros, publishers; large house in Holland Park and farm in Essex; most of the Benn family wealth comes from legacies and trusts connected with his American-born wife, Caroline. The estimated total is several million dollars: city sources confirm the existence of a Stansgate trust in the tax haven of the Bank of Bermuda. No details of amounts or beneficiaries have ever been disclosed.[198]

The following day The Times found itself in the embarrassing position of printing an apology attached to Benn’s letter of complaint. Evans also wrote a personal letter to him. Benn’s letter stated, ‘Neither I nor my family have ever owned a farm nor had any assets in any trust in Bermuda or any tax haven in the world … I might add that your account of my wife’s assets is grossly exaggerated.’[199] So much for ‘city sources’ – the information had been supplied by two outside informants. The editor dictated a memo to Anthony Holden, Fred Emery and Adrian Hamilton, the business editor, concluding that the lesson to be learned was ‘that incidental attacks on someone like this are not worth making. It is only worth attacking or exposing someone, in any event, when we have very high certainty of our evidence.’[200]

The Deputy Leadership result was to be announced at the Labour Party Conference in Brighton. The declaration was expected in the evening so two different leader articles had been pre-prepared depending on the result. The leader assuming a Benn victory concluded that Michael Foot should ‘resign immediately’. ‘Both from personal self-respect,’ it elaborated, ‘and for the good of the Labour Party he should resign instead of providing a fig leaf of shabby respectability for the extremists who have now taken over the Labour Party.’[201]

In the event, The Times was not able to run that night with either leading article: a strike by the NGA print union prevented the paper from coming out. Thus was missed the chance to report on an evening of great drama. John Silkin had been eliminated in the first ballot. Benn’s rival, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, Denis Healey, appeared to have victory in the bag when the Silkin-supporting TGWU announced that it would use its 1.25 million block votes in the electoral college to abstain in the second round. Healey duly arrived in triumph at the conference hall only to discover that the TGWU had decided at the last moment to vote for Benn instead. This suddenly made the result a cliffhanger. When the declaration was made, Benn secured 49.574 per cent of the vote. Healey had squeezed home by a hair’s breadth.

Unrepentant in defeat, Benn claimed the ‘incoming tide’ was with him despite the fact that, ‘The privately-owned Press without exception have done all they possibly could to discredit the Labour party, its electoral mechanism, Socialism and the arguments we were putting forward in the campaign. To have got Fleet Street down to fifty-point-something in the Labour party is quite an achievement.’[202] At least The Times and the rest of the ‘privately-owned Press’ knew what to expect if ever the great champion of State control ever did surf in on the ‘incoming tide’.