by Andy McSmith
The next newcomer to the airwaves was TV-am, launched on 1 February 1983. Other independent television companies were defined by the regions they served; TV-am, uniquely, covered the whole country but was defined by its hours. The franchise was bought by a consortium headed by Peter Jay and David Frost. Frost was a well-known broadcaster and Jay was an erudite economist and journalist who had served as ambassador to Washington when his father-in-law, Jim Callaghan, was prime minister. On the first morning, no fewer than five presenters filled the Good Morning Britain sofa – Frost, Anna Ford, Robert Kee, Michael Parkinson and Angela Rippon. Viewers were not impressed. Audience figures started at 800,000, far behind the BBC, and fell within four weeks to 300,000. With the company losing thousands of pounds a week, the board decided that they could not afford all five highly paid presenters, and sacked Peter Jay when he refused to carry out the required surgery. The new chief executive was Jonathan Aitken, a Tory MP and great-nephew of Lord Beaverbrook, owner of the Daily Express. He invited the five to take a pay cut, which the three men agreed to do, but Ford and Rippon refused and were sacked. Anna Ford’s parting gesture was to pour a full glass of wine over Aitken’s head.5 He handed over the role of chief executive to his cousin, Timothy Aitken, but remained a major shareholder until 1988, when both Aitkens resigned after it emerged that shares they claimed to own were actually owned by Saudi princes.
Brutal though these changes were, they saved the station, mainly because of the inspired appointment of Greg Dyke as programmes editor. He realized that the average viewer did not want to listen to the intelligent thoughts of renowned journalists first thing in the morning. Frost was given a Sunday morning slot to conduct in-depth interviews with politicians, while the job of presenting the programme during the week was turned over to two unknowns, Nick Owen and Anne Diamond, who brought a lighter touch. The other character Dyke promoted as the public voice of TV-am was a puppet, Roland Rat. Driven thus downmarket, the station saw its audience surpass 1m by October – the first known case, it was said in television circles, of a rat saving a sinking ship.
In the mid-1980s, two very rich men bought out national newspapers. In May 1985, Conrad Black, a Canadian millionaire, acquired a minority share in the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph, which he used to squeeze out the old owners. Ten months earlier, in July 1984, Robert Maxwell acquired the entire Mirror group – the Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror and People in London, and the Record and Sunday Mail in Scotland – for £90m. This came as a shock to its staff , who had been promised by their previous employers, Reed International, that the company would be floated on the Stock Exchange, so protecting it from falling into the hands of a single proprietor. Moreover, the proprietor in question, a buccaneer capitalist born to a family of Jewish peasants in Ruthenia, which was then in Czechoslovakia, had been the subject of a famous judgement by inspectors from the Board of Trade, in 1970, that he was someone who could not be ‘relied on to exercise proper stewardship of a publicly quoted company’.6 Both of these moguls’ careers ended in scandal. Maxwell avoided going to prison for looting the pension funds under his control by drowning at sea, in November 1991; Black was sentenced in 2008 by a US court to six-and-a-half years for fraud. From this it might be deduced that they were the worst people to have been allowed to own newspapers; yet, curiously, when they were eventually replaced by less egotistic and more cost-conscious owners, their former employees wished the old rogues were back.
In Maxwell’s case, though, what virtues he had as a proprietor were well disguised in the first year, as he wallowed in his new status, forgetting his promise not to interfere in the paper’s political line. He altered editorials to make them more hostile to Scargill and the miners, and promoted himself as if the fact that he was proprietor was inducement enough to Sun readers to switch to the Daily Mirror. The Daily Mirror gave him coverage wherever his private jet touched down, whether it was in Ethiopia, to deliver famine relief, or in one of the East European Communist states, where he had business interests. A month after he had bought the paper, television viewers were treated to advertisements, fronted by Maxwell, promising that its new game ‘Who dares Wins’, a variant of bingo, would result in someone soon winning £1m. Frustratingly for Maxwell, within less than a week, the Sun proclaimed its own first bingo millionaire. After just over a year of this eulogistic publicity, Maxwell was shocked to learn that circulation was falling and the previous year’s prof t of £1m – paltry for a business of that size – had been converted to a £6m loss.
Despite Maxwell’s megalomania, he grasped that it did not serve his interests to have his newspaper run by people too cowed to stand up to him. He moved Mike Molloy, the malleable editor of the Daily Mirror, upstairs and replaced him with Richard Stott. Unlike other executives, Stott was not in awe of Maxwell; indeed, there was one occasion when the proprietor was dining with his three editors and Joe Haines, Harold Wilson’s former chief press secretary whom Maxwell promoted to the post of the Group’s political editor, when one of them made a speech in praise of the boss and, raising his glass, told Maxwell: ‘You’re a genius.’ Stott retorted by raising his glass to the speaker to say, ‘And you’re a fucking creep.’7
With fewer pictures of Maxwell adorning its pages, the circulation of the Daily Mirror rapidly recovered. Maxwell also introduced colour printing and embarked on tempestuous negotiations with the print unions. It was notorious that, because of the strength of the print unions, newspapers employed more staff than were needed to bring out the newspapers. Through sheer hard-nosed negotiation, Maxwell managed to get the shop stewards to accept new technology and tighter working conditions, which enabled him to cut 2,000 jobs, saving the company £40m a year, which even Maxwell’s highly critical biographer, Tom Bower, acknowledged was ‘an overwhelming victory’.8 On the day after Maxwell’s death, before his thievery had been uncovered, the front page of his newspaper was filled with a tribute signed by Stott under the headline ‘The Man Who Saved the Daily Mirror’.9 Four weeks later, a difierent headline filled the front of the same newspaper: ‘Maxwell: £526 million is missing from his firms’.10
While Maxwell was a former Labour MP, Conrad Black was an unqualified admirer of Reagan and Thatcher, and believed that the UK should leave the EU. This caused no internal problems with the Sunday Telegraph, whose editor, Peregrine Worsthorne, was of the same mind, but Max Hastings, appointed editor of the daily in February 1986, was a maverick liberal Conservative, under whose control the newspaper was in the unusual position of being slightly to the left of The Times. Hastings also earned himself the nickname ‘Hitler Hastings’ by sacking a large number of journalists he had inherited from the old regime, including Carol Thatcher, the prime minister’s daughter, who had been employed in the features department. Her mother took this as a personal insult. It was the moment at which a well-disposed Tory MP, Jock Bruce-Gardyne, decided that Hastings must have gone mad. He told Hastings, ‘You can’t go around sacking prime minister’s daughters. I’ll add this: if it had been Mark you ditched, you wouldn’t still be editor of the Daily Telegraph.’11
The Daily Telegraph opposed the use of British air bases for the bombing of Libya, rebuked Thatcher for failing to protect the underclass, opposed the restoration of hanging when Thatcher and other cabinet ministers voted for it, and criticized the shootings of three IRA members in Gibraltar. This provoked a number of long memos from Black, or from Andrew Knight, chief executive of the Telegraph group. Black used the letters pages of the Telegraph to write in, as a reader, opposing the line taken by his own newspaper. And it earned Hastings the enmity of Thatcher acolytes, including the furious Paul Johnson, who had edited the New Statesman in the 1960s and defended Thatcher with the fervour of a convert. Seeing him at a party one evening Hastings asked: ‘Are we on speakers at the moment, or not, Paul?’, whereupon ‘the great sage gnashed his teeth – the only occasion outside the pages of P.G. Wodehouse that I have known this feat physically accomplished – and snarled: “No, we are
not. You are a swine and a guttersnipe of the lowest sort. And what’s more, if you weren’t a coward as well, you’d hit me for saying that!”’12 Yet for all the apoplexy the Daily Telegraph must have provoked among core readers, it retained a circulation healthily above 1m, while the ideologically pure Sunday Telegraph’s circulation fell.
Rupert Murdoch was already the dominant figure in the tabloid end of the market through his ownership of the mass-circulation newspapers, the Sun and the News of the World. His company, News International, like all newspaper companies, was in thrall to highly organized trade unions, particularly the elite National Graphical Association (NGA). Their power came from the nature of their work. Before the arrival of computers, newspaper pages were made up ready for the printing press ‘on stone’ – the stone being basically a shelf the size and shape of a page, upon which the text was inserted, letter by letter, in the form of thin metal slats. The metal letters were cast back to front, and the entire page was set in the form of mirror-writing. A skilled compositor could perform this task in minutes, without mistakes. That skill was so valuable, in an industry where speed of production was everything, that proprietors were prepared to pay very high rates and accept short working hours, provided the pages were ready. When Andrew Neil was appointed editor of the Sunday Times in 1983, his annual salary was £50,000, which was what the best paid compositors on the Sun were said to be receiving. A strike by the compositors inevitably meant a day’s edition lost, unless it could be resolved speedily. This gave the print unions’ chapels a power that they sometimes used altruistically. Early in the miners’ strike, in May 1984, the Sun sought to publish a front-page picture that had caught Arthur Scargill with his arm raised in what looked deceptively like a Nazi salute, under the headline ‘Mine Fuhrer’. In later editions, the picture and headline were gone, replaced by an announcement in bold type that they had had to be withdrawn because the print unions refused to handle them.13 For the most part, though, the NGA’s mission was to protect the high wages and agreeable working practices of its members in a manner that made it unpopular with other unions, as well as driving management to exasperation.
Yet Murdoch had one reason to be grateful to these militant ‘inkies’. By the early 1980s, the NGA printers were caught in a dilemma that has confronted successive groups of skilled workers since the eighteenth-century days of Ned Ludd: their skills had been rendered useless by advancing technology. It was no longer necessary for newspaper pages to be put together by assembling metal blocks on stone. It could all be done by computer and journalists could input their copy directly, cutting out the need to employ NGA members at all. In the late 1970s, Kenneth Thomson, owner of The Times and Sunday Times, proposed to bring the new technology to his newspaper offices in Gray’s Inn Road, near King’s Cross. This led to a confrontation so serious that many people feared that The Times and its associated titles would not survive. During the last months of the Labour government, Tony Benn even called the unions to put them a proposition that the BBC should buy the titles – only to be ordered by Jim Callaghan to stay out of a dispute that was not part of his remit.14 Soon afterwards the unions struck, and stayed out for more than a year, costing Thomson £40m. The strike ended with an agreement that no one except a member of the victorious NGA could lay a finger on the new computer keyboards. A few months after the return to work, journalists on The Times went on strike, whereupon Thomson lost heart and on 12 October 1980 he put both titles up for sale. Murdoch made a late entry into the bidding war that followed, and by sheer charm convinced Harold Evans, the highly regarded editor of the Sunday Times, that joining the Murdoch empire was the least-worst option on offer. The NGA also made the mistake of thinking that their members’ jobs would be safe with Murdoch. Michael Foot fought a rearguard battle to have the sale referred to the Monopolies Commission, but Margaret Thatcher was grateful for the support Murdoch’s newspapers had given her in 1979 and did not propose to stand in his way. In January 1981, Murdoch bought the two national newspapers, and their supplements, and the building in Gray’s Inn Road, whose combined worth was several times the £12m he paid for them.
Harold Evans, who was moved from the Sunday Times to edit The Times, enjoyed a good relationship with Murdoch for a time – better certainly than his successor on the Sunday title, Frank Giles, whom Murdoch classed as a Communist, ‘and his wife too’. However, for Evans, trouble was not long in coming. Murdoch was in the office on the night that Egypt’s President Sadat was assassinated, and overheard a journalist querying a cartoon on the grounds of taste. The conditions attached to the sale of The Times supposedly prevented Murdoch from giving a direct instruction to a journalist, but that did not deter the new proprietor, who – according to Evans – said: ‘Bugger taste. We want to sell newspapers. Print it!’15 Soon, Evans had gone.
Andrew Neil, who edited the Sunday Times from 1983 to 1994, wrote:
When you work for Rupert Murdoch you do not work for a company chairman, you work for a Sun King. All life revolves around the Sun King: all authority comes from him. He is the only one to whom allegiance must be owed and he expects his remit to run everywhere.16
Neil was just thirty-four when Murdoch plucked him from a reporter’s job on the Economist to put an end to what they both saw as the left-liberal ethos of the Sunday Times. The main casualty was the political editor, Hugo Young, who left to become chairman of the trust that owns the Guardian. Neil was right wing in his beliefs about trade unions and the free market, but did not altogether share his boss’s admiration for Margaret Thatcher. In March 1984, the Sunday Times filled its front page with the revelation that Mark Thatcher had arrived in Oman soon after his mother had paid an of cial visit, using her name to tout for business for a British construction company. The proceeds were paid into a bank account of which Denis Thatcher was a co-signatory. Challenged about this in the Commons, Thatcher attacked the Sunday Times for using subterfuge to obtain details that ‘are not in any sense a public matter’.17 Neil was never permitted to meet Mrs Thatcher socially.
The first challenge to the power of the NGA since the dispute that took The Times out of circulation came not from Fleet Street but from a man named Selim ‘Eddie’ Shah, a British-born self-made businessman of Iranian descent who owned a number of giveaway newspapers that he wanted to print on a second-hand press on an industrial estate in Warrington. With the new computer equipment he had installed, Shah believed that it needed only six people to operate the presses; the print unions insisted on eight each from the NGA and Society of Graphical and Allied Trades (SOGAT) unions, so Shah hired non-union staff . When six NGA members at his Stockport plant went on strike in protest, he sacked them. The NGA made it a national dispute, placing pickets at each of Shah’s plants, and warned firms that if they took advertising in a Shah newspaper where there was an NGA closed shop they would be boycotted.
This was secondary action, which had been illegal since 1980, but no employer had ever dared try to enforce the law. Shah, however, proved to be an obstinate enemy. He went to the High Court and obtained an injunction under which the NGA was heavily fined and ordered to keep its actions within the law. The union called a two-day national strike, which meant that there were no newspapers over the last weekend of November 1983. On the following Tuesday, hundreds of printers and sympathizers, including a contingent of Welsh miners, picketed Shah’s Warrington plant. That also was illegal. In the early hours, Cheshire police called in the Manchester riot squad to disperse the crowd. On 9 December the NGA was fined £550,000 for organizing an illegal mass picket. Four days later, the TUC General Council met in a long, tense session. The NGA wanted their support for a second national strike, which would put the TUC in direct confrontation with the government, but they voted 31 to 20 not to risk it. The NGA action in Warrington petered out.
During 1985, Shah followed up this victory by launching Today, the first national newspaper produced with the new technology and by members of the electricians’ union, the Electric
al, Electronic, Telecommunications and Plumbing Union (EETPU), who agreed to a no-strike clause and did not insist on a closed shop. The paper never took of , having no obvious identity, and Shah ended up selling it to Tiny Rowland, who sold to Murdoch, who closed it in 1995. One of the first people to forecast that it would not succeed was Andreas Whittam Smith, City editor of the Daily Telegraph, a canon’s son who ‘seemed permanently swathed in a long dark grey overcoat [and] looked like an old-fashioned bishop, or possibly archdeacon’.18 He was asked his opinion by an American magazine and without much thought fell back on the accepted wisdom that the crowded national newspaper market was too expensive for any new entrant to survive. On reflection, though, he realized that this need not be true, if the new technology was put to use. He sounded out people he knew in the City, enlisted two colleagues from the Daily Telegraph, Matthew Symonds and Stephen Glover, and between them they laid secret plans to launch a new national daily. It is a moot question whether or not this plan could ever have succeeded, if it had not had unexpected, unplanned help from Rupert Murdoch.
In 1979, Murdoch had invested £100m in new printing facilities in Wapping, on the edge of London’s Docklands, where he had ‘some of the finest Georgian warehouses in Britain’ ripped down and replaced by ‘one of the ugliest modern factories in London’.19 He had intended to move his two tabloid newspapers there, but could not reach agreement with the print unions. He devised a stratagem to lure the print unions into a trap. In February 1985, he announced that he was planning a new London evening newspaper, to be printed in Wapping, as a competitor for the Evening Standard. This newspaper was even allotted an editor, who interviewed other possible recruits. This was just a smokescreen to conceal the arrival of specialists from an American IT company to set up a computer system capable of bringing out all four of Murdoch’s titles, on which journalists would write their copy directly into the computer, without any input from NGA linotype operators. Eric Hammond, leader of the EETPU, was brought into the secret and helped recruit maintenance staff . Hammond expected his union to get negotiating rights in return, but they were never granted. After he had served his purpose Murdoch refused even to return his calls. Murdoch also arranged for an Australian firm, TNT, to deliver his newspapers by road in order to head of the risk that the rail unions would refuse to handle them. Late in the year, the unions were informed that when the new London newspaper went into production, it would operate with half the normal level of SOGAT members and there would be direct inputting of copy by journalists. Murdoch was counting on provoking a strike, and got what he wanted. When 5,000 NGA and SOGAT members walked out, in January 1986, Murdoch sacked them all.