It was now a few minutes before the board meeting. I found Alan Bullock taking off his coat. He asked me for the latest news. I said ROA was planning to make himself chairman – and KH his vice-chairman. ‘You’ll want to stop that, I fancy,’ he said in his broad Yorkshire accent. ‘And you’ll be right to. But you can’t count on me. I owe Bob too much for a start. And I taught Kenneth. Let’s hope it doesn’t come up.’
ROA took his place at the head of the boardroom table. KH sat in his usual place at the other end. Anderson started in his low drawl. He’d decided to take the chair himself, he said, since Bradshaw had left the company. We had a tough fight on our hands, but he was confident that we had the right people to tackle it. ‘Brian, Roger… Conor – Conor’s going back to Ireland and I think that’s the right place for him.’ (I looked across the table at Conor, who was looking straight down, not catching my eye – had Bob said something to him before the meeting?) Anderson went on quietly: ‘Conor was due to go in March, but with the fight we’re in I think Donald should be given the reins now, so from today Donald assumes all Conor’s responsibilities. Off you go, Don, pick up the reins.’
I was rather amazed – was I now editor-in-chief as well as editor, or what? I looked across at Conor again: he had taken it like a lamb. Bob must have spoken to him – but when? I’d been with Conor until shortly before the meeting started and he hadn’t said a word.
Then came the crunch. I think we all saw it coming. Everyone was silent, concentrating on every word. ‘My friend Kenneth Harris’, he began ‘has been a great help to me from the moment we took over this paper. He is going to be very important to me if I’m to be your chairman. I would like him to be my vice-chairman and my main line of communication with the paper. But first, gentlemen, I think you should elect me to your board.’ (He had never previously bothered to be a director.) We elected him with some mild humour. Then he said: ‘Gentlemen, I’d now like you to propose myself as chairman and Kenneth Harris as vice-chairman.’
There was an uncomfortable silence for what seemed a very long time. Finally, Lord G, looking very unhappy, and sitting next to Harris, spoke up.
‘I beg you, Mr Chairman, not to proceed any further with that motion. If you do, I regret to say this but I would have to break my twenty-year association with The Observer. I urge you most strongly to allow me to speak to you privately before going any further.’
ROA looked down, saying nothing. We all waited. He started talking again about his need for KH if he was to do this job. He didn’t see him as a main line executive, but a channel of communication. Would he press the matter to a vote, linking his own appointment and Kenneth’s together?
Then Conor spoke. ‘I should like to add my support to Lord Goodman. None of us would be happy to see this motion go forward. Could I suggest that we discuss this matter in the absence of Mr Harris?’ Goodman started objecting to this for some reason; there was a series of disconnected remarks around the table; then Anderson spoke: ‘OK, Ken, on your hoss.’ KH, who had sat impassive throughout, collected his papers and left the room.
The discussion went on for about half an hour, very tense. Everyone stressed our debt to ROA – ‘You have given us so much and you ask for so little, yet we must deny you on this.’ ROA insisted that he didn’t see KH’s role as that of a ‘main-line executive’, so what were we worried about? Stanton, RH and Astor said nothing; I said the heart of the matter was whether Harris as vice-chairman would be senior in commercial matters to Roger and Brian, and in editorial matters to me. If it was clear that he wasn’t, the title wouldn’t matter so much. But at present he was a member of the editorial staff and the staff would want to know if he had editorial authority over me. Bob looked a bit impatient at this.
Brian Nicholson said: ‘It would be an insult to Roger Harrison and myself to be answerable to Kenneth Harris.’ Finally, Bob spoke after another long silence: ‘I guess we won’t be proceeding with the choice of a vice-chairman at this meeting. I’d better tell Kenneth.’ He then left to go to Harris’s room.
There was a sense of release from high drama. RH turned to Stanton: ‘I hope we persuaded you, Frank.’ To which he replied: ‘I didn’t need any persuading. It was Bob you needed to persuade, and I think you have persuaded him. I’ve sat on many boards with Bob Anderson and never before have I seen him told by a board that he couldn’t do something. You gentlemen have just done that.’
ROA and KH returned, KH smoking a cigar and muttering: ‘Well, well…’, but not looking too put out. The rest of the meeting was anti-climax. When it finished, Brian took my arm and muttered: ‘Congratulations.’
As we gathered for pre-lunch drinks at the bar, I took KH aside. ‘That was a very gruelling experience for you,’ I said, probing for his reaction. He waved an arm expansively.
‘I’ve lived a long life, Donald. I’m sixty-one. This isn’t the worst thing that has happened to me, not by a long chalk (by which I took him to mean his wife’s suicide). I only hope Bob will take it as well as I am. My only interest is The Observer. As long as everyone understands that. I’ve stopped Bob Anderson doing some things in the last twenty-four hours that wouldn’t have been right for The Observer – now I get this for my pains.’
‘Did he mean Rothermere?’ I asked. ‘I’d better say no more,’ he replied. ‘I’ve said too much.’ ROA and KH left together. They weren’t lunching with us. I was never to see ROA again.
There was a euphoric mood at the board lunch, which are usually boring affairs, a feeling that history was being made. How would ROA react? Would the rebuff over KH make him disenchanted with the paper and hasten Arco’s departure? Astor was especially concerned about this. RH said everything depended on our commercial performance this year – we were on target for a reasonable year, and the Guardian printing contract might be very profitable. Why not a closer association with The Guardian, I asked? ‘Wrong image for advertisers,’ said Brian. We all agreed to keep mum about the Harris drama. ‘It’ll get out,’ said someone. ‘These things always do.’
After the lunch Conor took me to his room. ‘This is the last time you’ll see me as editor-in-chief. I’m going to Rome now. When I return it will be as a columnist, not editor-in-chief.’ I asked if ROA had seen him before the meeting. ‘Yes, he came in for five minutes and told me I should leave you to it. Since the editorial side of the paper is in good hands, I saw no point in disagreeing.’ I said the status of the editor was now much higher in the organisation than it had been before, chiefly thanks to him. I meant it.
SATURDAY 21 FEBRUARY 1981
Brian Nicholson came in for a chat. He said ROA and KH had gone to Brighton for the night and were staying at the Metropole. What for, I asked? Brian’s eyes looked at the ceiling: ‘Why else do people go to Brighton hotels?’ Surely not, I said, remembering that Brian had seen them with two girls at Annabel’s on Bob’s last visit. We both laughed at the improbable thought. I asked Brian if he thought the chances had risen of the paper being disposed of. ‘I think the likelihood of our being sold this year is very high – almost certain,’ he said.
SUNDAY 22 FEBRUARY 1981
Family lunch at Adam Raphael’s. At home, there was a message from David Astor on the answering machine: ‘Nothing urgent, but give me a ring. It’s good news, by the way.’ When I rang he said he’d met ROA at Claridge’s for coffee before he flew back to the States. The KH question didn’t seem to be troubling him. He spoke in a very reassuring way about the paper and especially about me. He thought I ought to know, because he [David] had been worried about ROA’s reaction to the Friday meeting. But all was well.
MONDAY 23 FEBRUARY 1981
Radio 4 programme about the great Fleet Street proprietors, back to Northcliffe and Beaverbrook. I was quoted and William Rees-Mogg described me as ‘a highly successful editor’.
WEDNESDAY 25 FEBRUARY 1981
Various routine meetings – features with Trevor Grove, magazine with Peter Crookston, miscellaneous admin items with N
igel Lloyd – when KH comes on from LA about 6 p.m. ‘He says it’s very urgent,’ says my secretary, so out goes Nigel while I take the call.
He reads a statement to be issued at eight o’clock London time by ROA. I start to write it down, then freeze in mid-sentence when I hear the news. Arco have sold The Observer to Lonrho in exchange for 40 per cent of Lonrho’s Scottish subsidiary, George Outram & Co., which publishes the Glasgow Herald. ROA to remain chairman of The Observer. ‘Well, well,’ I say, rather stunned. ‘What does it mean, Kenneth? Is it good for The Observer?’ ‘Oh yes,’ he says. ‘It’s much the best solution for The Observer.’
Ring my wife to warn her I might be late for dinner – we have guests due to arrive at eight. ‘Heavens,’ she says when I tell her the news. I warn Cole and Lindsay Smith there’s something afoot and ask them to call the staff together. I take John aside and tell him in confidence – ‘We’ve been sold to Lonrho’ – and rush upstairs to see if the management have more information. RH just putting down the phone on a similar call from Los Angeles. He laughs and waves his arms up and down helplessly. What can one do? ‘We’ve been through so much, you and I, over the years, one can hardly care anymore.’
He knew no more than I did, so I went downstairs to tell the staff – or the twenty or thirty who were still around.
‘I’ve just been told that The Observer has been sold to Lonrho. As part of the same deal, Arco have taken 40 per cent of George Outram, who publish the Glasgow Herald. I know no more than that. But I thought I should tell you myself rather than let you learn it from watching TV tonight. I’ll let you know more tomorrow when I know more myself.’
As The Guardian said later, it was ‘the classic B-movie scene – editor tells staff their paper’s been sold.’
The phone had started ringing, with every paper in Fleet Street wanting a comment. I pretended to be out. But one of the calls was from John Crawford, managing director of Outram’s, who wanted a chat. I decided I’d better see him and took Iain Lindsay Smith with me to the Stafford Hotel, since he had worked for Crawford in Glasgow and knew him well.
We found Crawford in the bar – a neat, hard-looking Glaswegian. He wanted to know the reaction of the staff. ‘Shock,’ I said. What would it be like when the shock wore off? ‘Hard to say.’ What’s your own reaction? ‘Shock.’ That all? ‘Perhaps a feeling of inevitability – the Arco connection had begun to look unreal.’ What will the staff do? ‘That depends partly on my reaction. I think I should see Tiny Rowland to find out what he wants to do with the paper.’ He doubted if that would be possible – ‘He hardly sees anyone.’ ‘I’m afraid he’ll have to if he wants my support. I can’t convince the journalists that they should go along with this until I’m convinced myself.’ He said he’d see what he could do.
Home late to the dinner party to find everybody high on the news and pre-dinner drinks. We watch the nine o’clock news – paper sold without knowledge of editor (picture of self on screen). Tiny Rowland shown as amiable: has he confidence in present editorship of The Observer? ‘I’ve never met the editor, but if he was acceptable to Atlantic Richfield I’m sure he’ll be acceptable to me.’ On Newsnight, which we all watch, David Astor says he feels betrayed and fears for the paper’s future.
Thinking things over that night, I couldn’t help noting the irony that, while it was Harris who had saved The Observer from Murdoch, it was also Harris who had caused The Observer to be sold to Lonrho. But he wasn’t the only person responsible. What if Conor Cruise O’Brien hadn’t forced The Observer to vote Labour in the 1979 general election (against his own instincts, or so he claimed, and certainly against mine) and thereby caused Arco’s disillusionment with the paper?
O’Brien and Harris: two men caught up in a classic personal feud. Two men who hated each other. The more I thought about it, the image came to mind of Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty, his arch enemy, wrestling their way down the Reichenbach Falls. Meanwhile, the paper they were fighting about had landed in the hands of Lonrho. As my then wife said on hearing the paper had been sold: ‘Heavens, Tiny Rowland and Tiny Trelford!’
CHAPTER 10
TINY
When the news broke about the sale of The Observer to Lonrho, dominating that morning’s front pages, I emerged from the lift at Lonrho’s Cheapside head office to find Tiny Rowland waiting with his arm outstretched. ‘Mr Trelford, I recognise you,’ he said, with a punctiliousness that reminded me suddenly of David Astor – both tall, fair, rich, handsome men of German extraction, and of a similar age.
I introduced The Observer’s two managing directors, Roger Harrison and Brian Nicholson. We were still in a state of shock, wandering around like men on laughing gas, not sure what to do next, not sure if we still had a job. Rowland introduced us to his two colleagues, Paul Spicer and Alan Ball. I had recently had a shouting match with Spicer on the telephone over a Lonrho story in The Observer, but we both decided not to remember this. Ball had a gloomy, almost funereal air. I gathered later that this was nothing to do with us; it was his habitual hangdog expression.
Our mood hadn’t been helped by a statement from Glasgow by Sir George Bolton, the eighty-year-old deputy chairman of Lonrho and chairman of George Outram & Co., which had been quoted on the front page of The Times that morning. He had said The Observer would be run from Glasgow and that the editor of the Glasgow Herald would have as much say as anyone else in the running of the paper. He joked: ‘I suppose there may be some editorial people at The Observer who are having kittens tonight,’ and added: ‘We have always wanted a paper so that we could really express the views of Africa and the Third World.’
Before we could start our meeting, Rowland was called away from the Lonrho boardroom to take a telephone call. While he was out, Spicer surprised me by asking what school I had been to. When I told him about my modest Midlands grammar school, he asked: ‘Did you get any O Levels?’ I recounted this bizarre conversation later to Conor Cruise O’Brien, who explained: ‘I don’t think he was trying to insult you, Donald. He wanted you to ask him the same question, so that he could tell you he had been to Eton and that he had some O Levels.’
Harrison was annoyed that his coup in securing a £500,000-a-year printing contract with The Guardian had been scuppered by the sale. Rowland agreed to ring The Guardian to say that Lonrho would honour the contract, but his lawyer later rang the newspaper back to withdraw the commitment. So The Guardian, quite reasonably, walked away. Anderson hadn’t known about the printing contract. It was another example of Atlantic Richfield’s lack of interest in The Observer’s attempts to become self-supporting.
When we complained about Bolton’s overnight comments on the paper, Rowland dismissed them with a wave of his hand. ‘Editorial control of The Observer’, he said, ‘will remain in London,’ then adding, after a pause, ‘by the people who control it now.’ I asked him if I could define editorial control as I understood it and drew from my pocket a scrap of paper (which I still have) on which I had jotted down a few points: the editor would control the content of the newspaper and the recruitment and dismissal of journalists, subject only to an agreed budget; he would have final say on editorial policy; and he would be free to comment on Lonrho’s affairs, including criticising the company if necessary, subject to hearing the company’s point of view.
Rowland said blandly that he accepted all that. I thought this was rather too easy, so I asked him if he would repeat those pledges of editorial freedom to the journalists. He said he would. Why he ever agreed to meet the full body of journalists I never knew. It was a major tactical error and got the new arrangement off on the wrong foot. He could just as easily have said to me: ‘Why don’t you bring a representative group of the paper’s journalists to my office?’ That way he could have controlled the occasion, dispensing hospitality and charming a small group in the way he knew best.
The Observer’s shabby basement canteen, with about seventy journalists slouching around on plastic chairs or sitting on the ed
ge of chipped Formica tables, was hardly an encouraging environment for The Observer’s curious and slightly apprehensive journalists to meet their new employer. The meeting started badly and got worse. The first person Tiny confronted was John Davis, the City editor, who had described Lonrho’s bid for House of Fraser as ‘downright cheeky’.
But the case for the prosecution was put most forcefully by veteran Africa correspondent Colin Legum, who said it would be impossible for Lonrho to allow the newspaper to report objectively in places where its business relied on Rowland’s personal friendship with the country’s leader. Tiny was angry, bristling at the way Legum seemed to be claiming a superior knowledge of Africa, and hit back strongly. They talked about Kenya, the Sudan, Angola and other countries in a way that was over the head of most of the journalists present, who were only concerned about their jobs.
At one point, Rowland asked if the paper would support the removal of Cubans from Angola in return for the removal of South Africans from Namibia, a plan of his that had been approved by the American State Department. Legum said The Observer would take account of the benefits to the people of the countries concerned – not, by implication, the interests of Lonrho shareholders. When Rowland asked: ‘Could I have counted on The Observer’s support when Lonrho’s assets were seized in Tanzania?’ Adam Raphael, the political correspondent, responded: ‘Editorial freedom surely means that the owner can’t count on anything.’
By this time Rowland had had enough. He had gone puce and was clearly raging inside – a rage that didn’t subside on the car journey back to Cheapside, according to chauffeur Jimmy Rennie. After he had left, the NUJ chapel passed a motion approving the sale to Lonrho, subject to editorial safeguards. The journalists had obviously been impressed by Richard Hall’s testimony at the meeting that Lonrho had never interfered with his paper in Zambia.
Shouting in the Street Page 23