by Andy McSmith
The print unions were accustomed to winning their industrial disputes, because they could usually afford to keep their members out longer than the employers could afford to have their newspapers out of circulation. But this time they had thousands of strikers picketing a compound fortified by razor wire, behind which the newspapers were being produced by hundreds of strike-breakers, even when the streets outside were blocked by protestors. Inside Wapping, Murdoch’s flying visits generally had the ef ect of making a tense situation worse as – to quote Andrew Neil – ‘he had become increasingly unsympathetic and fractious . . . terrorising his senior managers and making them too scared to take any decisions’.20 The Labour Party announced that journalists working for Murdoch would not be admitted to press conferences at Labour headquarters. Journalists on the Sunday Times, who felt they had been railroaded into being part of a dispute that would never end and who had very nearly voted as a National Union of Journalist chapel to refuse to enter Wapping (the vote was sixty to sixty-eight), threatened to strike. Murdoch ignored the threat, until he learnt that journalists on the Sun were also in a mutinous mood. He gave them all a 10 per cent pay rise.
In the East End of London, the Wapping dispute was the local equivalent of the miners’ strike. It had the same divisive ef ect on the working-class community and veterans of the dispute remember it with the same unforgiving clarity. In London, there were near neighbours who would not speak to each other, twenty-four years later, because they were on different sides in the Wapping dispute. The Wapping compound was under siege day and night from pickets, with reinforcements coming in from far af eld, including the Yorkshire mining villages, but they never once stopped the TNT lorries from taking the newspapers out for distribution. Since they could not halt production, the unions had to acknowledge, eventually, that they could not win. After more than a year, they surrendered and took a pay offer worth between a third and a half of what Murdoch would have had to pay in redundancy if they had not gone on strike. Not only was the power of the print unions broken, but every union and every management in the private sector took note that, with a sympathetic government behind it, any firm with enough funds to bear temporary losses could defeat a union, no matter how well organized. After Wapping, no shop steward in any private firm ever wielded the influence that the fathers of the NGA chapels used to have. This was the most significant victory by a private employer in any industrial dispute in post-war Britain.
Victory allowed Kelvin MacKenzie, the new editor of the Sun, to give free rein to what one of his former protégés, Piers Morgan, described as his ‘particular form of dangerous genius’.21 MacKenzie’s origins were middle class; his parents and both his brothers were journalists; he was educated at Alleyn’s in Dulwich, a direct grant school that later became a private school; but he aped the mindset of a working-class Tory, even to the extent of professing to support Millwall Football Club. When entertaining senior staff , he offered lager from the can; when angry, he used streams of foul language. The Sun’s political editor, Walter Terry, left in 1983 having had the words ‘crap’, ‘cunt’ and ‘fucking’ hurled at him more of en than he could stand. No one was more sorely tested by the boss’s mercurial moods than Stuart Higgins, on the news desk, who drove MacKenzie to heightened fury by sitting through a torrent of abuse, smiling. On one occasion, Sun hacks heard demonic laughter coming from the editor’s office, and in the morning, on page five of the newspaper, they saw a photograph of Higgins under the heading: ‘Want someone to yell at? Scream at? Fume at? – Ring Higgy the Human Sponge, He’ll Soak It Up’. Under this, Higgins’s direct line number was printed in large type. Around 1,000 readers took up the invitation to ring and be abusive, a response triumphantly recorded in the next day’s paper under the heading ‘We Hate Higgy’.22 The resilient Higgins survived to take MacKenzie’s job in 1994.
Between high jinks, the Sun was a pillar of support for Margaret Thatcher, preaching for the free market, strong defence and mistrust for foreigners, particularly the French. In 1984, during a dispute over the export of British lamb, the Sun distributed badges bearing the slogan ‘Hop Off You Frogs’.23 When Jacques Delors produced a report in October 1990, proposing the launch of the single European currency, the Sun had a front-page graphic showing two fingers to the EU president under the headline ‘Up Yours Delors’.24 This ferocious popularism, combined with the Sun’s huge circulation, which reached 4.3m in February 1989, gave it a reputation for being able to make or destroy politicians. When the Conservatives were re-elected in 1992, the newspaper boasted that it was ‘The Sun wot won it’. The defeated Labour leader, Neil Kinnock, who had refused to communicate with the Sun except through libel lawyers, seemed to agree. Detailed research suggested that about 11 per cent of Sun newspapers readers, or 116,000 voters, had switched from Labour to Conservative, enough to make a difference in some marginal seats.
Meanwhile, Andreas Whittam Smith’s secret had been rumbled. On 27 December 1985, the Financial Times accurately reported that a quality daily newspaper produced on new technology was to be launched in 1986, the Independent. Whittam Smith and his confederates had raised only £2m out of the £18m they needed for the launch, but circumvented this problem by bluffing, attracting other investors by giving the impression that the project was more developed than it actually was. In April, they announced that they had the necessary money and would launch in the autumn, causing a rush of job applications from journalists on The Times and Sunday Times eager to escape Wapping. This was a lucky circumstance that meant that when the newspaper appeared for the first time, on 7 October 1986, it had one of the best teams of writers in the industry. The first day’s main story was written jointly by Sarah Hogg, who went on from journalism to be head of the Downing Street Policy Unit under John Major, and Andrew Marr. There was no self promotion on the front page, as if the appearance of a new national newspaper was not news in itself, and the design was unexpectedly conservative, so that instead of appearing to break the mould of British journalism, it looked like a newspaper that had been coming out for years.
Despite the huge goodwill that it attracted, the new venture was in a parlous financial condition for months and it would have been a bold punter who would have bet on its surviving for much more than a year. Sales started at around 330,000, but by January they were down to 257,000 and the venture was estimated to be losing £20,000 a day. Then, for no obvious reason, the figures improved, and by March 1987 were at 291,000. The following month, the newspaper had a sensational scoop, when Phillip Knightley, a former Sunday Times journalist, turned up from Australia with a manuscript of Spycatcher, the memoirs of the embittered former MI5 employee Peter Wright. The government had deployed the Official Secrets Act to prevent publication in the UK, but, try as it might, was unable to have the ban extended to Australia. The Independent published a long extract on a Monday morning, focusing on Wright’s allegation that MI5 had tried to prove that Harold Wilson was a Soviet agent. This helped launch the forbidden book as the publishing sensation of the year – though after the excitement had died down, people who had spent money on it were left wondering why so much attention had been paid to the unreliable memoirs of an angry, weird old man obsessed about his pension. It also landed the Independent in court. The case drifted inconclusively through the legal system while performing wonders for the newspaper’s reputation. Circulation climbed above 400,000 and a copy of the day’s Independent almost had the status of a fashion accessory.
Then its founders heard that a group including David Lipsey, editor of New Society and a former Downing Street adviser during Callaghan’s premiership, was planning a similar venture. This would be a new quality Sunday newspaper to be called the Correspondent. Mainly on Stephen Glover’s initiative, the Independent rushed to launch its own Sunday title in competition. Thus two new Sunday newspaper entered the same market, the Correspondent in September 1989, and the Independent on Sunday in January 1990 – just as the economy headed into recession. The Correspondent
went out of business after fourteen months and the Independent titles failed to achieve the profitability and circulation that had almost been in their grasp.
After Wapping, it was always likely that one of the broadcasting unions would be the next target of a union-busting operation. The camera crews and other technicians were protected by agreements dating from the 1950s, which had not changed as technology improved, and could be tiresome for those trying to make programmes. However, owning a television franchise was so profitable that managements preferred to keep paying rather than risk a strike. In September 1987, fired by her third election victory, Margaret Thatcher summoned television executives to Downing Street for a lecture, stating that they had allowed their industry to be the ‘last bastion of restrictive practices’.25 The practices of which she complained were mostly to be found in the large, profitable regional television companies, but it was within two smaller ones that confrontations began. The management at Tyne Tees Television, in Newcastle, told its technicians that staff costs were too high and then sacked the thirty-four members of the EETPU who walked out in protest. David Reay, the managing director, refused an offer from the men to return to work while talks continued, and insisted on bringing programmes out without them.
However, the main battle was at TV-am. Early in 1984, the Australian media mogul Kerry Packer bought into the company and installed a fellow Australian, Bruce Gyngell, as managing director. The company had such heavy debts hanging over from its first loss-making months that it was not even certain that it could pay that month’s wages, until Gyngell arranged an unusual £1.2m advance payment for an advertising campaign for toys and applied himself with great energy to pushing up the ratings. Until then, it was assumed that television viewers wanted their weather forecasts delivered by people with some understanding of meteorology. Gyngell decided that anyone who could read an autocue and smile would do, and turned his attractive Swedish secretary, Ulrika Jonsson, into the nation’s first celebrity weather girl.
Even that stroke of genius did not stop Gyngell obsessively worrying that the company would lose its franchise unless it could reduce costs. The showdown began over something seemingly trivial. Good Morning Britain ran a ‘Caring Christmas’ roadshow that, under the union agreement, required six support staff. Gyngell insisted that four would be enough. The main broadcasting union, the Association of Cinematograph Television and Allied Technicians (ACTT), fired a shot across his bows by calling its 229 members out on a one-day strike in November 1987. It had a shock when Gyngell refused to allow them back. Gyngell had decided to ‘do a Wapping’: ‘I don’t want to see another ACTT man in this building ever again,’ he told his senior staff.26 The union was thus manoeuvred into an unwanted, prolonged dispute as Christmas approached. The example of Wapping made victory unlikely, and public opinion was bound to be against them when popular television presenters such as Lorraine Kelly were seen crossing picket lines in a dispute over a Christmas charity drive. ‘The public relations battle is a no-hoper for us. We might as well forget it,’27 their shop steward, Tim Wight, confessed ruefully. Meanwhile, Good Morning Britain continued to broadcast, on an annual wage bill that fell from £8m to £2m, with executives or secretaries handling the cameras. Audience figures went up and up, and Bruce Gyngell won a place in Margaret Thatcher’s heart because there was no one she loved more than a union-buster. As a mark of favour, she agreed to be interviewed several times on David Frost’s Sunday morning programme. The dispute was settled after 22 months when Gyngell in effect paid the ACTT members £700,000 to go away. By 1989–90, TV-am had a strong claim to be the world’s most successful television company, showing an annual profit of £24m and having taken 70 per cent of breakfast TV audience.
Just before Thatcher was brought down, her government passed the 1990 Broadcasting Act, which set out new rules for the ownership and regulation of the mass media. Its avowed intention was to make regulation lighter and choice greater. It also restricted cross-media ownership by stipulating that no newspaper company could own more than 20 per cent of a television company – though, of course, there was no question of this rule applying to Rupert Murdoch. For the purposes of this piece of legislation, Sky was defined as a non-UK service. The Act also laid down that television franchises would be awarded in blind auctions to the highest bidder. Under this much criticized clause, Thames Television lost its franchise to Carlton, in what looked like revenge for their documentary Death on the Rock, about the killing of three IRA members in Gibraltar. An unintended consequence was that when the broadcasting authority was presented with a bid for the breakfast franchise from GMTV, which was so extravagant that it later had to be revised downwards, they had no option but to accept. All Gyngell’s union-busting was to no avail. TV-am went out of business on 31 December 1992. One of the letters of commiseration he received was from Margaret Thatcher. She wrote, ‘When I see how some of the other licenses have been awarded I am mystified that you did not receive yours, and heartbroken. I am only too painfully aware that I was responsible for the legislation.’28
The decade’s final addition to the airwaves was the satellite company Sky, which started broadcasting on 5 February 1989, after Rupert Murdoch had emerged victorious from a war of nerves with Richard Branson, who planned a rival channel called BSB. It was very uncertain that any satellite television could make a profit in Britain, competing against four well-established terrestrial channels; two rival satellite channels would have been doomed to fail. Before Sky was launched, twenty-four-hour rolling news bulletins were unknown and there was a great deal of scepticism about whether or not the public needed the service, but Sky was blessed in its early years by such events as the collapse of communism, the release of Nelson Mandela, the World Cup and the fall of Thatcher, all of which suited the twenty-four-hour format well.
As the press barons and television companies thrived, so did members of an unloved profession that feasted off them – the libel lawyers. Britain’s libel laws have been the recipient of endless criticism, because it is so much easier to sue than to defend a libel case. In the latter half of the 1980s, they had the additional cachet that juries were awarding higher and higher damages so that, in the absence of a national lottery, one of the most obvious ways to get rich quickly was to be libelled. In 1987, a former naval commander, Martin Packard, sued a Greek newspaper that had accused him of betraying the resistance movement during the years when Greece was ruled by a junta. The offending newspaper sold forty copies in the UK. A jury awarded Packard £450,000. The following year, Koo Stark, a thirty-two-year-old former soft-porn actress who had been seen in the company of Prince Andrew, was awarded £300,000 from the People for a report that wrongly implied that she had been to bed with him. These sums, like all libel awards, were tax free. It seemed as if no one could ever lose a libel case until an elected politician, Michael Meacher, sued Alan Watkins of the Observer for implying that Meacher had falsified his background to make him appear more working class than he really was. Uniquely, the jury found for Watkins, as if MPs were the only class of human being that libel juries held in lower esteem than journalists.
It also seemed that the race was on to set new records in damages. In October 1986, the millionaire thriller-writer Jeffrey Archer had to resign from his position as deputy chairman of the Conservative Party after the News of the World photographed him at Victoria station, in London, meeting a prostitute named Monica Coghlan, to hand her £2,000 in cash. Archer denied the obvious inference. ‘I have never, repeat never, met Monica Coghlan, nor have I ever had any association of any kind with a prostitute,’29 he said. He claimed he was giving her money so that she could escape journalists who were trying to get her to say that she had sold him her services. The next day, the Daily Star went further than the News of the World by alleging that Archer had paid for sex. Archer sued the Star. In court, Coghlan gave a detailed description of meeting Archer for sex in a hotel room, while he persisted in his denials. One of the extraordinary aspects of the case w
as the number of people who either knew or suspected that Archer was committing perjury. While the Daily Telegraph’s coverage of the case seemed to take Archer’s side, its editor, Max Hastings, privately ‘did not venture to anticipate that in reality Jeffrey would end up in prison’, but ‘never doubted that he deserved to’.30 Woodrow Wyatt noted in his diary: ‘I think that the prostitute was telling more of the truth than Archer.’31 But the judge was more impressed by Mary Archer, a confident Oxford-educated scientist. He admonished the jury:
Remember Mary Archer in the witness box. Your vision of her will probably never disappear. Has she elegance? Has she fragrance? Would she have – without the strain of this trial – a radiance? . . . Is there abstinence from marital joys for Archer – for Jeffrey? Is he in need of cold, unloving, rubber-insulated sex in a seedy hotel?32 The jury took the hint, and awarded Archer £500,000.