David Astor took me to lunch at Boodles and gave me some idea of the way things were heading. He told me that Harris had been to see Goodman, evidently encouraged by his new friend Anderson, to seek support for his own appointment to a more senior role on the paper – apparently as editor-in-chief or in some similar controlling position. In any event Goodman had sent Harris away with a flea in his ear.
The words Goodman actually used, according to Astor, were:
Kenneth, we are as other people see us, and the way we are seen depends on the way we have lived our life. I know, for example, that I would make a splendid prima ballerina, but alas the world will never see me in that role. Likewise, Kenneth, people will never see you as editor or editor-in-chief of The Observer. It is not just that you lack the technical qualifications: you would have no credibility.
The ballerina analogy, coming from a man of over twenty stone, was especially wounding. Harris, not a man lacking in vanity, was gravely offended.
Astor added that Barnetson, an experienced operator who knew how newspapers worked in the real world, had no time for Harris and little more for Cater. So I had nothing really to fear from them, except as a nuisance. He let me see a confidential memo that the chairman had sent to Anderson and Bradshaw, saying that the company would be hardpressed to find another editor who could combine my alleged ‘first-class brain’ with my ‘technical expertise and editorial know-how’. He said he ‘certainly couldn’t think of anyone better suited to edit The Observer’.
However, David warned me that the owners were thinking of creating an editorial board containing well-known intellectuals like Isaiah Berlin and Alan Bullock to help the paper meet their Aspen-type aspirations. They were also considering the appointment of an editor-in-chief who would be in charge of policy and would leave the running of the paper to me. The editor-in-chief might or might not work in tandem with an editorial board – that would be up to him.
What was essential, he said, was a buffer between the owners and the editor. He then came to the main point of the lunch: that he would like to put forward the name of Conor Cruise O’Brien as the editor-in-chief – but only if I approved. At that stage, he had no idea if Conor would be interested, but he had recently heard him speak at a meeting of the British-Irish Association and immediately thought he could be the ideal figure the paper needed – someone whose intellectual credentials would satisfy Arco and who would not seek (nor had the necessary experience) to run the paper on a day-to-day basis.
As it happened, Conor was one of my heroes. Collections of his essays on political and literary themes had always had pride of place on my bookshelves alongside those of George Orwell, and still do. They seemed to me to combine good sense and good style in a way that reflected my own beliefs and convictions more closely than anyone else I had read. Long before I met him, I had hero-worshipped him as an intellectual action man.
So, when David told me in 1978 that he was thinking of proposing O’Brien as my editor-in-chief, I was surprised and delighted, even though the arrival of such a strong-minded figure was likely to impinge on my own editorial freedom of action. I went to Dublin to see him, armed with a letter from Barnetson (which I naturally opened beforehand) offering him a salary about three times my own. In the taxi from the airport, I asked the driver if he knew Dr Conor Cruise O’Brien and what he thought of him. ‘There are two views of Conor Cruise O’Brien,’ he said. ‘I’m of the other view myself.’
We met at the Gresham Hotel and immediately hit it off. He already knew my deputy John Cole and shared his approach to the Irish question. He also knew Terry Kilmartin, the literary editor, from writing book reviews for the paper. He knew Colin Legum, the paper’s Africa guru, who had strongly supported the stand he took in the Congo as the UN’s special representative in Katanga. The backing of these senior figures smoothed Conor’s entry to the paper.
Mary Holland, our Irish correspondent, caused a few tremors, however, by reminding the staff that Conor had censored media coverage of the IRA when he was Minister of Telecommunications in the Dublin government. The tension between these two strong-minded Irish figures, Holland and O’Brien, would eventually lead to a major confrontation.
The Americans had been greatly impressed with Conor when they met him – ‘to the point of infatuation,’ as Goodman put it – though Anderson was heard to say to Bradshaw afterwards that he could be ‘a difficult man to deal with’. Bradshaw replied that if he wasn’t a bit difficult to deal with he wouldn’t be the kind of person they needed.
His arrival had the desired effect of putting the noses of Cater and Harris seriously out of joint. Cater, however, after showing initial hostility to Conor’s appointment, soon fell graciously into line and, after a heart by-pass operation, limited himself to attending board meetings and introducing famous American visitors to the paper, such as Lady Bird Johnson, the former President’s widow, when they were in London.
Harris was a harder nut to crack. He was never reconciled to Conor’s appointment, whose job he doubtless thought should have gone to him, and did all he could to undermine his authority. In his memoir, Conor said Harris’s objections to him were ‘formidable, deep-laid and dangerous’ and described him as ‘a poisonous presence in my professional life’. They had two meetings over dinner. At the first, according to O’Brien, Harris ‘was faintly menacing. At the second he was openly bullying, or tried to be, and then there were no more dinners.’
The truth of the matter is that, because Harris and Cater had saved the paper, there was never a clear line of command between The Observer and Arco. They always got in the way. There should have been a straightforward management link between The Observer and the executives who ran Arco’s business in Los Angeles.
We planned to use The Observer’s name to broaden the company’s operating base into related activities – perhaps a publisher, a provincial newspaper (The Guardian’s link to the Manchester Evening News had saved the paper at a crucial time) or a mail-order firm. Although several projects were proposed, they all foundered on Arco’s refusal to see The Observer as anything but a charitable investment that might pay dividends in North Sea licences.
But life under Arco wasn’t all conflict and plotting. In the summer of 1977, the whole board and their families travelled on an Arco jet to Aspen. As we stood on the tarmac at Stansted airport, David Astor nudged me and pointed at Barnetson, who was dressed in a summer suit with a big cravat and a straw hat. ‘I haven’t seen anything like that since the 1930s,’ he whispered.
On the journey, the children found some videos scattered across the floor and put them on. They were porn films, left behind by Arco oilmen on their way home from the drilling fields in Alaska. There was a bit of a fuss among the adults until Barnetson spoke up: ‘Leave them alone,’ he advised. ‘They’ll soon get bored.’ As indeed they did, or at least pretended to.
The annual outings to Aspen suited me perfectly. I was quite good at that type of high-minded Aspen-speak and prepared a paper for the board each time on my plans for The Observer’s future that seemed to go down well. Even Harris was heard to mutter: ‘Excellent delivery.’
I took part in a Greek play, wearing a toga, and enjoyed a concert given by the Juilliard Quartet, who were resident at Aspen. One day I arranged for the board to go white water rafting on the Colorado River. Another time I stayed with my three older children in a condominium in Aspen and they had the time of their young lives.
When our annual visit coincided with the Fourth of July, the board was invited to join a big Independence Day party in a forest just outside Aspen. I found myself sharing a picnic basket under the shade of a tree with Danny Kaye and the actress Jill St. John, a rather upmarket former Bond girl. When I was introduced, Danny pointed to the Stetson I had bought myself in Denver and said: ‘I can tell you’re English by your hat!’
One year, after a formal dinner at Aspen, I couldn’t find my way back to my guest-house in pouring rain. My situation wasn’t helped by the
fact that my luggage had failed to arrive from Denver and I had to turn out in the casual gear I was wearing to travel on the plane, covered by an old raincoat.
I tried to take a shortcut to what looked like the right house when two men stepped out of the bushes with loaded guns and grabbed me. It turned out, after I had been closely questioned under armed guard, that they were FBI agents protecting Henry Kissinger, the grounds of whose guest-house I had unfortunately stumbled upon in the rain.
• • •
I had some forebodings when Bob Anderson rang me out of the blue and asked me to meet him in Los Angeles. It was my first visit to Arco’s palatial and highly tasteful headquarters. It turned out that I had nothing to worry about. Anderson said he had arranged for me to have breakfast at the California Club in LA with Helmut Schmidt, the former West German Chancellor.
Newspaper editors don’t spend all their time on jaunts like this, I’m sorry to say. Most of one’s time is spent in the office taking news, features and leader conferences, arguing with the management about editorial space, talking to individual journalists and departmental heads, meeting the NUJ chapel, responding to legal issues, taking endless telephone calls from publishers and literary agents trying to sell me a serial, not to mention family matters.
One entry from my journal from that time is worth repeating:
Any Questions? in Cambridge with Arianna Stassinopoulos, Michael Winner and Paul Ostreicher, preceded by dinner at Downing College. In car on way back Ostreicher tells me that the wife of Runcie, the new Archbishop of Canterbury, had had a row with Margaret Thatcher at a Downing Street function over poverty in Britain. She had also been heard to say: ‘Too much religion makes me go off pop.’ Mention this in the office and say that Runcie seems a bit of a wimp. Patrick O’Donovan shuts me up by saying quietly: ‘I was with him in the Irish Guards. He won an MC for saving people from a burning tank.’
Winner good company, though political views simplistic. Invites me to glossy party at his house after the first night of his remake of The Big Sleep. Watched Robert Mitchum reach into ice bucket with huge hand, fill his mouth with ice, then pour a bottle of vodka over it.
When I first appeared on Any Questions?, John Cole gave me some advice: ‘Two gin and tonics at dinner; not one, not none.’ When I got there, however, rather late because of the Friday-night traffic out of London, I found Roy Jenkins and Lord Hailsham way beyond Cole’s proposed alcoholic intake.
Jenkins’s so-called Balliol ‘r’, I decided, was not a speech impediment but a drink impediment. As I came in he was saying: ‘I say, is there any more of that claret? It’s rather good.’ Hailsham had had so much to drink that when he took his seat for the broadcast he was waving his stick around his head and nearly fell off the stage.
The other member of the panel was Glenda Jackson, the actress and then Labour MP. As we took our places she said to me waspishly: ‘You’re far too young to be editor of anything, never mind The Observer.’ It was on the tip of my tongue to reply: ‘And you’re too ugly to be Glenda Jackson,’ but I was too gentlemanly, or too scared, to say so. She kept up a running left-wing commentary, in an angry whisper, about everything the other panellists had to say.
• • •
Before Conor came on the scene as my Lord Protector, I had to endure board meetings where the directors would weigh in against writers or parts of the paper they didn’t like. I remember Lord Bullock complaining that the colour magazine was much inferior in quality to the newspaper. He was backed by Frank Stanton, who said ours was third out of three among the Sunday magazines. Bullock proposed that the magazine editor and the design director should attend the next board meeting to hear the directors’ views.
Barnetson, a bully at heart – but a cautious one, who would wait to see which way the wind was blowing before acting – was suddenly emboldened enough to declare: ‘The editor has abdicated his responsibility for the magazine.’ He went on to maintain that I had ‘resisted the talents’ of Iain Lindsay Smith and Jack Crossley.
Sensing that I was about to explode, David Astor intervened gently to remind Bullock that board members should not talk directly to the paper’s journalists but only through the editor. I was tempted to quote the comment of Arthur Mann, the great pre-war editor of the Yorkshire Post (under whom Astor had some training): ‘Gentlemen, as directors you may dismiss me if you wish but you will not tell me how to do my job.’
Bullock then backed off, saying he was happy to leave the matters he had raised in my hands. Astor whispered to me: ‘Well done. In your place I would have made a fool of myself.’ Barnetson’s face was like thunder. This was the sort of thing I had to deal with at every board meeting, even from well-meaning directors, because everybody thinks they are an expert on newspapers.
What really annoyed me, however, was that it was easy for them to pick out faults in the newspaper, but they did absolutely nothing about the overwhelming problem that was bringing The Observer, like many other papers, to its knees: the over-manning and so-called Spanish practices of the printing unions, who held the paper to ransom almost every week.
The American directors would come over once a month for the weekend, usually with their wives, stay at Claridge’s, shop in the West End, attend the board meeting on a Monday morning, then fly back home later in the day. It was all very cosy but did nothing to address the paper’s fundamental problems, which were several floors below the editorial department. Arco’s ownership may have been benevolent (Harris’s disruptive influence excepted) but the paper was effectively coasting along and avoiding tough realities.
This became a crucial issue when the management of The Times and the Sunday Times, then owned by the Thomson group, shut the papers down for eleven months in a showdown with their printers. The Observer and the Sunday Telegraph, seizing their opportunity, upped their production to over a million copies each. This was difficult and expensive for us, because we had to introduce mid-week shifts to get some sections printed in advance, because we couldn’t cope with the much larger papers in one run on our presses. The extra cost was covered by the massive increase in advertising.
When the strike ended in failure and the papers resumed printing, The Observer had a dilemma. Should we go on with mid-week printing to produce a million copies and aim to retain the Sunday Times readers we had ‘borrowed’ over the strike? Or should we accept that demand for the paper would return to its pre-strike level and therefore abandon the expensive mid-week printing schedule and reduce the number of pages, knowing that many advertisers would return to the ST?
The cost of taking the fight to the ST would, admittedly, have been horrific. But simply abandoning those extra readers seemed to me to be a terrible wasted opportunity for the paper to make the breakthrough it had always sought. What were Arco’s billions for, I thought, if not to take on a challenge like this? It would have been a bold and expensive gamble, and it might not have worked, but we didn’t even try. In fact, it was hardly considered for a moment, even though it meant turning away thousands of pounds of advertising we hadn’t room to accommodate.
This was happening in 1979, some years before Eddie Shah and Rupert Murdoch made the breakthrough that finally put paid to the power of the printing unions. For The Observer to have led this revolution would, perhaps, have been over-ambitious, even foolhardy. The print unions might have put us out of business rather than agree to new arrangements that would have knock-on effects on the rest of the industry.
I can see all that, but it was a critical moment in the paper’s history and there should at least have been a strategic review of the options. Arco’s casual, passing-through approach to The Observer, saluting the flag while spending weekends at Claridge’s, did not allow for the kind of concentrated management planning they brought to their oil business.
Besides, Arco was already becoming disillusioned with owning The Observer – for reasons we shall come to – and was in no mood to lead a Fleet Street revolution that would cost a fortune an
d involve them in battle they wouldn’t have known how to fight anyway.
• • •
Conor had decided to rule by memo, rather than by taking editorial conferences himself, which made my life easier by not confusing the journalists as to who was their boss. He sent out some memos that were amusing and beautifully written. I sometimes wish I had kept them: The Collected Memos of Conor Cruise O’Brien. The subject of his first one was ‘muzziness’, which he described as The Observer’s abiding sin.
It became a bit muzzy, at least to me, what weight should be attached to Conor’s views on specific topical issues: were they edicts that he expected the paper to follow, or just random ideas we could take or leave as it suited us? It was David Astor again who solved the problem. He said to me over lunch one day at the Garrick when I raised this matter: ‘Why don’t you use him as a columnist? All he wants is to get his thoughts into the paper.’
This turned out to be a brilliant idea, one of the most admired features in the paper, and won him two Granada awards as Columnist of the Year. In this way, he could express his own views without imposing them on other parts of the paper. I created a page containing the Observer profile, illustrated by a Marc drawing, with Conor’s column alongside it at the top, with Alan Watkins’s political column spread across the bottom of the page. I was pleased to see this once described in The Spectator as ‘the best page in Sunday journalism’, but I was not best pleased to see the idea credited to Anthony Howard, who hadn’t even joined the paper at the time it was introduced.
• • •
One day my secretary, Monica Craig, whom I had inherited from Astor, came to find me in the newsroom and said there was a telephone call for me that sounded important. ‘It’s somebody called Bellow,’ she said. Monica had many virtues, but knowledge of Nobel Prize-winning novelists wasn’t one of them. A couple of years before I had carried long passages from a Jerusalem diary written by Saul Bellow. He had rung me at the time to thank me for running the extracts and for the way they had been presented. He said he would like to meet me and we agreed that he would call when he was next in London.
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