by Les Hinton
The unions rejected every effort to introduce new technology, reduce manning, and increase profits — in some cases, simply to allow newspapers to become profitable. While these methods were being adopted around the world, unions were binding UK newspapers to production practices that were a century old. Reporters sat at ancient typewriters when desktop computers could save time and expense, bypassing clunky mechanical practices. Printing plants were trapped inside an ancient, congested city when new technology could transmit pages to distant press sites.
It was a natural reflex for unions to protect jobs, but they didn’t only resist new technology. The unions practised extortion against pliable management. Many printers didn’t even work the days they were paid; workmates would sign them in while they stayed home or worked shifts at other newspapers. The power to hire rested entirely with union leaders, and jobs were passed from father to son. Salaries were huge; the men who cleaned the reporters’ room at The Sun earned more than reporters.
The unions exploited bitter competition among newspapers, picking them off one at a time. If a strike closed one paper, others increased their print runs to steal readers, forcing the newspaper under attack to surrender to the latest demands. This fatal cycle went on for years.
There were dubious sidelines. For years, I did my Christmas shopping in newspaper production areas, which would be turned into bargain basements selling everything from clothes and cosmetics to electric kettles. I never asked about the provenance of these goods.
By the time I went to New York, a turning point was approaching in the history of Fleet Street, and its fate would be rewritten by an epic confrontation. In 1981, exhausted by shakedowns, the Canadian Thomson Corporation, owner of The Times and The Sunday Times, decided to quit Fleet Street. After fighting union rapacity for years, Thomson had staged its last stand in 1979, suspending publication for almost a year rather than surrendering to union pressure. When the strike ended in another union victory, non-striking journalists, who had been paid throughout the dispute, staged their own walkout demanding higher salaries. This was when Thomson left town, and Rupert bought their struggling titles to become Britain’s biggest newspaper publisher.
The same intractable union demands confronted Rupert, but he had a plan. In January 1986, when more than 5000 production workers walked out in yet another dispute, he moved his entire newspaper production to a fortified new plant in Wapping, in the East End of London.
For months, the plant had secretly been made ready with the modern technology unions had scorned for years. The 5000 he left behind in Fleet Street were suddenly jobless and furious. They and their supporters lay siege on Wapping. There were many nights of violence and hundreds of injuries before the unions agreed a settlement and the pickets went away. The siege of Wapping lasted for 12 months.
Other newspaper groups watched this drama from a safe distance, but when Rupert prevailed they followed in his footsteps. One by one, they threw off their shackles, joined the late twentieth century, and left behind the neighbourhood and traditions of Fleet Street.
Wapping was a great drama of Margaret Thatcher’s struggle against trade unions. She had changed the law to diminish their powers, and protected Wapping with a strong police presence that ensured the plant remained in operation.
But the dispute left a bitter taste, and the left’s loathing of Rupert and News International had abated only slightly eight years later when Rupert introduced me to Wapping in May 1995.
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We drove around the turrets and battlements of the Tower of London, turned left onto The Highway, and headed into Wapping. Long ago, this was a rowdy seafaring village, the haunt of sailors, fishermen, footpads, and smugglers. Royal Navy press gangs prowled the pubs, kidnapping drunks to fight for king and country. Local entertainment was provided beside the Thames at Execution Dock where crowds gathered for the hanging of mutineers and pirates.
But the excitement had drained out of Wapping long ago. The thriving docklands economy had perished after the Second World War, and its great riverside warehouses had been transformed into flats and offices. The Wapping siege had been the most dramatic event since the London Blitz.
This was my first glimpse of the place the entire country knew as ‘Fortress Wapping’. Until now it had been the flickering backdrop on American television news, the scene of surging crowds and charging police horses.
It was not a sight to lift the heart. The building was massive, with a cold and Soviet blandness, and was encircled by tall fences topped with barbed wire. It looked like a penitentiary. Speed bumps slowed the approach of our green Daimler and guards lifted the barrier quickly when they recognised Rupert. Other vehicles were searched at random.
The building had been designed as a factory to print newspapers, and architects had failed in their attempts to give it the appearance of a successful company’s headquarters. The most recent effort when I arrived was an unfinished £2 million entrance lobby designed to impress the parade of cabinet ministers and other important visitors. It was attached to the original factory, with floors of chocolate-coloured marble, and enclosed by walls of glass. When finished, escalators swept guests between tall palms and indoor fountains pungent with chlorine. It felt like checking into a Midwest Marriott hotel. Rupert didn’t like it either. Within a few months, he also appeared to have forgotten who had built it, and accused me of squandering £2 million. When I told him he was pointing the finger at the wrong person, he grunted: ‘Bloody waste of money.’
The offices of The Times titles challenged every standard of decent working conditions. Journalists were housed in a narrow listed building next to the factory. Napoleonic prisoners-of-war had built it as a warehouse for barrels of rum shipped to London. It was fitting in a way. The Times, established in 1785, was about 20 years older than the building, but this cannot have given much comfort to the twenty-first century trustees of a historic newspaper. There were few windows, and rain bouncing off the modern corrugated roof drowned normal conversation.
The executive suite I inherited was so lavish I felt I needed an appointment to be there. I spent several years in it, but when the managing director left and wasn’t replaced, I moved next door to his more modest space and turned my old suite into meeting rooms.
My introduction to Wapping was fleeting. Rupert wanted to show me the scene of one of the triumphs of his career. It was Saturday, and whenever he was in London on a weekend, his favourite pre-dinner ritual was to visit his Sunday editors. These visits were unannounced, but never unexpected; when Rupert was in town, his arrival at your door was never a surprise.
We paid a hasty visit to the News of the World, thriving in 1995. Its editor was Piers Morgan, then aged 30. Piers wouldn’t be in the job for long, but none of us knew that. He ran through his big stories for the next day’s paper and Rupert nodded non-committally. Piers had become editor a year before, and already showed a talent for notoriety. The British Press Complaints Commission had admonished him for publishing a photograph of Princess Diana’s sister-in-law at a rehab clinic. She was the wife of Diana’s younger brother — Charles, Earl Spencer — and the photograph was a clear invasion of her privacy. Rupert had taken the unusual step of publicly rebuking Piers, declaring, ‘the young man went over the top’. In private he admonished editors all the time, but I don’t remember another occasion when Rupert did it in public.
‘He’s a very bright man,’ said Rupert as we left. ‘But he can be a bit reckless. Keep an eye on him.’
Rupert would later express his view more colourfully: ‘The trouble with Piers is that his balls are bigger than his brains.’
In the old rum warehouse, we visited John Witherow in his brick-walled office at The Sunday Times. Witherow was as taciturn and considered as Morgan was chatty and impulsive. He belonged to the school of editors who stayed in the office and produced the paper, avoiding the tempting glitz of the television sofa and the ov
erseas seminar. In this, Witherow and Paul Dacre of the Daily Mail were brothers; both shackled themselves to their desks for many successful years. These were the editors my mentor and guide at News International, Sir Edward Pickering, loved. He was still working in his eighties, and had taught a young Rupert Murdoch subbing skills on the Daily Express. ‘Pick’ scorned editors too frequently absent from their posts,. ‘An editor’s job is to stay in the attic and edit,’ he would say.
Having presented me with this vast enterprise, Rupert took me off to dinner. And for two hours I listened. We sat among white-clothed tables in the empty silence of a hotel restaurant near his St James’s flat. It was the kind of place where the old head waiter wore a stiff collar and tails. I suspected the menu hadn’t changed since Dickens was alive. This is why it was empty, and why Rupert chose it for our chat.
He laid out the problems at Wapping and was as frank as ever in his criticism of people and their mistakes. The place was stagnating, the workers were unhappy, and a deep antipathy had developed towards the bosses. Above all, the staff in the production departments — the historic source of most woes — were beginning to agitate. The Labour Party, after years in the wilderness, had been resuscitated by Tony Blair and already looked set to win the next general election. We were certain, should they win power, they would loosen the controls Thatcher had imposed on the unions.
The unions were back at the gates, literally, but this time they were wielding recruitment pamphlets instead of rocks. Wapping was the print unions’ crucible, where Rupert had crushed and humiliated them. Their defeat had released a gush of profit now being used for expansion in the United States, and the unions’ return to News International would be a catastrophe for the company, and, as the new boss, a disaster for me.
These circumstances helped Mary and me focus on family matters. The job of running News International was notoriously tricky and the mortality rate of bosses was high. I was to become the fourth chief executive in five years, and I was taking the job at what seemed to be the most dangerous moment since the siege.
When one predecessor, Bruce Matthews, died, an obituary said: ‘The court of Rupert Murdoch is much like the court of Henry VIII. Men and women are promoted to positions of great power only to be felled on the royal whim, either because they cease to be useful or because they threaten to gain more fame than the monarch himself. Bruce Matthews was Murdoch’s Thomas Cromwell.’
That might have been a harsh judgement of Rupert, but I had to be realistic. Based on history, my chances of long-term survival were about equal to that of a subaltern in a First World War trench. When the Hollywood executive Peter Chernin had been promoted at Fox, he sat down his children and told them that one day their dad would be fired, but there would be no disgrace in it. In fact, Chernin spent many years as Rupert’s deputy before deciding it was time to go.
We prepared for a short stay. We placed our two youngest children, James and Jane, into London’s private American School in St John’s Wood. After moving them from city to city — and now to a strange country — at least we could keep them in the same education system.
Rupert can be casual about turning the lives of people upside down. He did it to me a few times, but the move to London was completely unexpected. We were happy to be out of Los Angeles and looking forward to New York. We had lived in the United States for almost 20 years, and three of our five children had been born there; the two eldest moved with us to New York aged just 18 months and 5. We had become US citizens a decade earlier. We were an American family.
Mary took the news of London imperturbably. She had become accustomed to a life of perpetual motion. Will, our third, was 16 and at high school in Los Angeles. We worried he wouldn’t want to move to a country where he had never lived. He chose to stay behind at boarding school, and leaving him was hard on Mary and me. His two older brothers, Martin and Thomas, had jobs in New York.
When we moved to London in August 1995, the family saw it as a short-term foreign posting. I was still in the job 12 years later.
That night at dinner, Rupert warned me what to expect. I would be in charge of a company responsible for one-third of the country’s national newspaper sales. He said I should prepare for an onslaught of flattery from politicians, Royal Family acolytes, company bosses, and every civic leader with a cause to promote. As well as flattery, complaints would pour my way from important people annoyed at the way they had been treated in our pages.
‘Don’t get too close to these people,’ he said. ‘In a few years, they’ll probably offer you a knighthood. Be careful about accepting it.’
He talked about something else that night that I believe is a key to him. He talked about how often he had been underestimated. As a young man, he said, others dismissed him because of his age and inexperience. It had been the same whenever he arrived somewhere new.
Rupert didn’t reveal to me — then, or ever — any complicated secrets to his success. He repeated what he often said. He was willing simply to work harder than anyone else. But that night, alone in our restaurant, I saw him wistful. He had long ago lost the underdog’s ability to surprise and subvert. Never again could he be the little guy with not much to lose and so much to gain — the upstart with impossible ideas and boundless self-conviction.
In 1969, when he was seeking to buy The Sun, he arrived in the lobby of the Daily Mirror headquarters in Holborn Circus on his way to see Hugh Cudlipp. He walked up to a wall graphic showing the International Publishing Corporation’s newspaper circulations. The Mirror, Britain’s biggest seller at more than 5 million, towered above the limping Sun. Rupert unpinned the two ribbons tracking the newspapers and reversed them, putting The Sun at the top of the scale.
‘That’s what is going to happen’, he told Stephen Catto — the hereditary peer, Lord Catto — the banker who helped Rupert make his foothold in Britain.
‘I didn’t know where to look,’ Catto told me years later.
Later that year, Hugh Cudlipp, the IPC chairman, turned the pages of the first edition of the new tabloid version of The Sun, raised a glass of champagne, and told his team it had nothing to fear. Cudlipp soon knew he had made the mistake of his life.
This story repeated itself often, and each time Rupert became the big guy — in Sydney, in London, in New York, and in Los Angeles — he went looking for the next unconquered world, searching for a new place to be underestimated.
Rupert had been his own kind of revolutionary and overthrown giants on three continents to become the biggest giant of all, an authentic colossus. But I think he missed the life of a long shot, and that all his success had drowned a little of the original man.
CHAPTER 21
Wappingworld
Looking down the long boardroom table, I counted four lords, one baroness, and three knights, all murmuring among themselves. When I called the meeting to order, an instant silence resulted as they turned their gazes towards me.
I’m still embarrassed by how much pleasure this memory gives me. I had thought of my parents and imagined my mother’s pursed-lip pride as her son sat at the head of that important table, chairing the quarterly meeting of Times Newspapers Holdings Limited.
Twenty years before, these people would have intimidated me, but America — for all its imperfections, so irrepressible, so full of unruly ambition and self-belief — had inoculated me against the old class divides of Britain. Peers of the realm and people with hyphenated names no longer represented a superior species. The men and women at the table were interesting, and mostly clever, individuals, that was all. The few who affected old, high-born manners looked out of date. The best among them was Ralph, Lord Harris of High Cross, the economist who inspired Margaret Thatcher, and his father had been a London tramways inspector.
The Times board, whose duties included protecting the two editors from managerial interference, was a constant problem at News International. This was becaus
e so many people suspected it was toothless. Six independent directors had the power to agree the hiring and firing of an editor. The flaw in this part of the arrangement was that, no matter what the independent directors thought, no self-respecting editor would stay in a job where they felt unwanted by management, and no management could be expected to tolerate an editor it considered to be no good. But that didn’t mean these directors were impotent. Some rightly saw their presence as a nuclear deterrent, and understood the damage they could cause by publicly complaining that management was dictating policy to an editor.
But The Times board was far from top of my list of worries when I arrived in London. We needed to fix a faltering and unhappy company. Also, as Rupert had warned over dinner, I had to deal with the tides and currents of a high-profile job. Keeping a low profile was easier in America, but Britain was a smaller pond and I was a bigger fish. Uncomfortable references to me appeared in rival newspapers. Newspapers that didn’t like Rupert — that would be every one he didn’t own — described me in unappealing ways. I was his hitman, consigliore, henchman, capo, or, divinely, his ‘representative on earth’. Paradoxically, for all the antipathy towards us, every industry crisis seemed to arrive at our front door. Within weeks I had to decide the fate of the Press Association, the country’s premier news agency, which had existed since 1868. An alliance of newspaper groups, dismayed by the cost and quality of the PA, was supporting an effort to replace it with a new agency called UK News. I was besieged by rivals imploring us to join them. These rivals had a good argument against the agency; its coverage had deteriorated at the same time as it put up prices. The newly appointed editor-in-chief was desperate when he came to my office. ‘We’re on the brink,’ he said. ‘I know I can fix the place, but I need time.’ Paul Potts was an old friend and a talented editor. He had taken the PA job after quitting as deputy editor of the Daily Express. I decided against ditching the PA and Potts went on to rebuild Britain’s oldest news agency as editor-in-chief and chief executive, with many of its would-be destroyers becoming significant shareholders. Six years later, the official history of the Press Association — Living on a Deadline, by Chris Moncrieff — recorded the details of the company’s existential crisis. There was, it said, ‘a key figure in PA’s survival without whom the modern PA probably would not exist … it was Hinton who had saved the day’. It was nice of them to say so, but in truth I was too busy with other things to think clearly about the drastic action of killing off an institution.