Shouting in the Street

by Donald Trelford

  Not all the papers were on my side about the Matabeleland story. Paul Johnson said editors had no business trying to be reporters. John Junor wrote: ‘If Mr Trelford truly feels that way about Mr Rowland, wouldn’t it be more honourable for him to stop accepting Mr Rowland’s money?’ The Times suggested I had forced a showdown deliberately. The Daily Telegraph said: ‘Those who pay the piper must be expected to demand some influence over the choice of tunes he plays.’

  The Guardian said the paper should ‘find its salvation where the people who write the cheques and the people who write the words can work together’. This proved difficult at The Observer when Lonrho announced it was withdrawing financial support. Provoked by a ruling from The Observer’s independent directors that Rowland had interfered improperly, it put a hard-faced accountant in the office to stop me spending money.

  This brought questions in Parliament. When Peter Shore, for Labour, asked Norman Tebbit what he planned to do to protect the editorial independence of the editor of The Observer, the Secretary for Trade and Industry clearly enjoyed saying: ‘Nothing.’ This was soon after the paper’s revelations about Mark Thatcher’s business connections with Oman.

  • • •

  The Observer’s journalists were highly supportive of their editor – until Rowland let it be known he was planning to sell the paper to Robert Maxwell. A breakfast meeting at Claridge’s was announced for the next day and they were pictured laughing together. I had once asked Rowland what language he and Maxwell conversed in. ‘German,’ he said. I knew Rowland would never sell to Maxwell and this was just a bluff to frighten the journalists. If so, it certainly appeared to be working.

  I was interested to hear an interview with Maxwell about The Observer on my car radio. He ‘greatly admired’ me, he said, and would retain me as editor (which I very much doubted – he was a good friend of Tony Howard, who would surely enter into his inheritance on a Maxwell-owned Observer). Then, asked what he would have done about the Mark Thatcher stories, he paused and replied in his deepest tones: ‘I’d have stamped on him.’ I assumed he meant stamping on me, not Mr Thatcher.

  By now I felt the paper was being damaged and something had to be done to break the deadlock. Nick Morrell had told me that advertisement bookings were drying up. So I rang Robinson and asked to see him, but not at The Observer or at Cheapside. We met in a dingy workmen’s café near St Paul’s Cathedral. I gave him a letter to hand to Rowland. In this I said: ‘I could not allow the paper’s future and the prospects of its staff to be jeopardised by my personal position, which sadly seems to be all that stands in the way of the paper’s development.’ Tiny seized the olive branch, replying: ‘I support your editorship and refuse to accept your resignation.’

  We made up over an edgy lunch in the incongruous ambience of one of Lonrho’s London casinos. Undeterred by the pop music and scantily dressed females, we concocted a priceless statement that we shared an affection for three things: for Africa, for The Observer and for each other. Tiny described our disagreement as ‘a lovers’ tiff ’, providing material for cartoonists.

  This Punch cartoon strikes an upbeat tone between Tiny and me, but this was misleading.

  For us and for the paper, that was the end of the episode. For the people of Matabeleland, however, it provided only brief illumination before the darkness came again.

  • • •

  Tiny was deeply wounded by the Matabeleland row and it took several months before we could resume anything like a normal relationship. He had been stung by the independent directors’ attack on him and threatened to cut their directors’ fees, describing them as ‘plastic pygmies’. He had come over to the public as a hard-hearted capitalist who cared more about his company’s profits than the welfare of the Africans he professed to love. Above all, as Neal Ascherson put it: ‘He had been stunned to find an honest man on his payroll who refused to bend to his will. This had never happened to him before.’ And an employee, moreover, against whom he was forbidden to take any action.

  His pent-up rage boiled over at an Observer board meeting. He didn’t always attend the paper’s monthly meetings, but it was clear that he had come to make as much noise and trouble as he could. I was his main target and he lashed out at me, calling me a lousy editor who was losing readers and that Lonrho could not sustain the paper’s losses indefinitely if the company got nothing in return. I hit back by pointing out that the losses were chiefly caused by Lonrho’s failure to get to grips with the printing unions. The independent directors were shocked at the fierceness of our altercation. In an odd way, though, this argument seemed to calm things down between us.

  Why had I stuck my neck out so far? I sometimes asked myself the same question. It would be hard to think of a story more damaging to my owner’s commercial interests. Somebody wrote that ‘perhaps Trelford just wanted to do some serious reporting’. That was true, but it ignored the nature of the story. My prime motivation was what I had told Rowland in our angry telephone discussion: it was a story that had to be published. If one emotion was uppermost in my mind, it was pity. I owed it to the people of Matabeleland who had risked their lives to ensure that their voices were heard.

  Dick Hall, hardly my greatest fan, wrote in his book:

  Trelford was now virtually a national hero – the brave little editor who had stood up for the truth and outfaced the wicked giant of capitalism. Politicians of all parties had come to his support. Soon he was in demand as a speaker on press freedom. His television performances acquired a new prestige. His name was put forward for international awards. Such a feat would surely have been applauded by Houdini himself.

  The Houdini theme was picked up in an article by Peter McKay, who wrote: ‘Donald Trelford is regarded by friend and foe as the Harry Houdini of journalism. Bound, gagged and tied to the rails and within seconds of the locomotive wheels, Trelford wriggles free from each succeeding crisis. There has scarcely been a dull month in all his years as editor.’

  The award mentioned by Dick Hall was a commendation as International Editor of the Year from the World Press Review in New York ‘for courage, enterprise and leadership at an international level in defending human rights and fostering journalistic excellence’.

  By this time, as Hall put it,

  the granite-faced Andrew Neil had taken over at the Sunday Times … and the effects were calamitous. Neil was the authentic voice of the New Right, someone Murdoch could trust to finally obliterate the liberalism which the paper had become imbued with in the Harold Evans era. So, as Neil laid about him, the more admired became the subtle virtues of Donald Trelford.

  The Observer, he said ‘was undeniably displaying a caring and libertarian vision of the world. Trelford knew the sort of paper he wanted to edit, but he went after it by stealth. Whereas Neil charged headlong forward like a mastiff – knowing that his master was right behind him – Trelford showed the subtlety of a fox.’

  • • •

  One day in 1985 I was visiting New York when I took a call from Tiny. He wanted me to go to the Bahamas, where many of his African leader friends were attending a Commonwealth summit. My first reaction was hostile: why should Rowland tell me to go anywhere? My second reaction was more conciliatory: what was there not to like about a trip to the Bahamas?

  When the Queen’s press secretary, Michael Shea, saw my name on the list of accredited correspondents, he invited me for tea aboard the Royal Yacht. I was on crutches again after another sporting injury, this time on a cricket field. As I was piped aboard Britannia, a group of journalists were having coffee nearby. One of them apparently quipped: ‘Trelford must be getting a K.’

  In Michael’s cabin, we were interrupted by a visit from the Queen’s private secretary, Sir Philip Moore, a rather stuffy figure who didn’t seem too pleased to find me there. We talked about the Queen Mother. I suggested that history would credit her with making a king of her husband and a queen of her daughter. Moore looked unconvinced and asked: ‘Do you actually know t
he Queen Mother?’ He was a bit startled by my reply when I said I had played snooker with her when she opened new premises for the Press Club (she played left-handed).

  As so often, sport came to my rescue. Sir Philip’s attitude mellowed considerably when I said: ‘Didn’t you play rugby for England?’ I didn’t think it prudent to mention that he played only once, in 1951, and that England had been beaten comprehensively by Wales, after which he was dropped and never picked again.

  I was invited to a reception by the Queen on board the Britannia and joined the queue to meet her behind Lady Rothermere, who was wearing a red rah-rah skirt that failed to hide her prop forward’s thighs. When she was offered a drink from a tray, she declared: ‘I thought I had made it absolutely clear when I accepted this invitation that I only drink Dom Perignon champagne!’ At this, a white-uniformed flunkey appeared from behind a pillar with her ladyship’s favourite tipple.

  I had met Lady Harmsworth (‘Bubbles’ to the press, ‘Patricia’ to her friends) a number of times over the years and had always found her good company. On one occasion, Lajos Lederer, a long-time friend of the Rothermeres, had invited me with Pat and Vere to a Hungarian restaurant in Bayswater for dinner. They brought along young Jonathan (now the fourth Viscount), then a podgy teenager who, as I remember, tucked heartily into his meal.

  I hope he wasn’t listening when his mother whispered to me: ‘Have you seen today’s Private Eye? They say my husband is being tossed off by some Korean bint in Paris.’ There is very little one can say in reply to this. What I managed to say was: ‘Really? May I pass the salt?’ (The so-called ‘Korean bint’ is now the Dowager Lady Rothermere, having married Vere after the couple divorced.)

  I had also met Pat in 1975 in Canton when she had joined a group of Fleet Street grandees, led by Vere, who had just visited mainland China. She was talking to female members of the group when an imperfectly educated Chinese interpreter interrupted them and said – to general consternation and some amusement (on my part, at least): ‘Ladies, it is time for you to shit.’

  It so happened that Rupert Murdoch had been in the news that day, so when I met Her Majesty she said: ‘Do you know Mr Murdoch, Mr Trelford?’ When I said that I did, she asked: ‘How would you describe him, Mr Trelford – in a word?’

  Several words crossed my mind, none of them suitable to utter before a Queen, until I replied: ‘In a word, ma’am, I’d say he was a gambler.’

  ‘Ye-es,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘He seems to be winning, doesn’t he?’

  Then, moving away to greet the next guest, so that her words could hardly be heard, she added: ‘So far, anyway.’

  • • •

  On the tenth anniversary of the Iranian Revolution, in 1989, Tiny invited me to join him on a trip to Tehran. I jumped at the chance, because few Western journalists were allowed into the country. I had nearly gone there some time before, during the reign of the Shah. Lord Barnetson had taken me for lunch with the Shah’s suave ambassador, Parviz C. Radji, who wrote of me in a diary he published later: ‘Trelford strikes me as a perceptive, intelligent individual with a probing mind and a generally sympathetic disposition.’ I could have said the same about him. Despite all this goodwill, however, I couldn’t finally make the trip. So, I was doubly glad to get another chance.

  I hoped to secure an interview with one of the country’s leaders. President Rafsanjani never gave interviews to the Western media, but I managed to have a long and rare discussion with the Iranian Foreign Minister, Dr Ali Akbar Velayati, who went on to serve sixteen years in the job, a mark of his standing with the country’s religious leaders. We talked about the aftermath of the Iran–Iraq War and about the country’s relations with the United States and Britain. He said he wanted to encourage more trade with Britain. I made a plea for the release of a British businessman, Roger Cooper, who had been held there for three years without trial as a spy and was to serve another two years before he was freed.

  It was clear that Lonrho also had some serious business to discuss in Tehran, for Tiny was accompanied by Mahdi Al-Tajir, a former adviser to the rulers of Dubai and one of the world’s wealthiest men, and by Wolfgang Michel, a German businessman who had close links to Gaddafi in Libya. I knew his daughter Caroline, who was a literary agent in London and was to marry the publisher Matthew (later Lord) Evans, of Faber & Faber.

  On the flight, Al-Tajir and Tiny had a macho boasting contest about the respective size of their carpets. ‘Mine is the size of a tennis court,’ said Al-Tajir. ‘Mine is the size of a football field,’ said Tiny. Rowland also talked about owning a Columbian emerald mine, which he had been forced to sell because the miners stole most of the jewels. He went on to say that he kept a stash of the emeralds in his safety deposit box at Harrods. I recalled this remark some years later when Mohamed Fayed was accused of illegally breaking into Rowland’s deposit box, setting off another legal dispute between the two men.

  Tehran was not a comfortable place to be. There were anti-Western banners across the hotel lobby and in the streets. My hotel room faced the prison, where executions took place at dawn every day. On a drive through the capital I swear I saw a hamburger joint named after Bobby Sands, the IRA hunger-striker who was the first of nine men to die at the Maze prison at Long Kesh, near Belfast, in 1981. There was even a photograph of him outside the shop. I suppose it is possible that an IRA martyr would be celebrated in revolutionary Iran, but a hamburger joint in memory of a man who starved himself to death? It seemed like a sick joke.

  On the flight back, Michel showed me a thirty-page dossier he had prepared about massive bribes being paid to members of the Saudi royal family by British Aerospace as part of the Al Yamaha agreement, described as the arms deal of the century, worth billions of pounds. The arms, he claimed, were not really needed by Saudi Arabia, but the commissions were; besides, the contract provided badly needed employment for British industry.

  I thought the story was worth pursuing and showed the dossier first to Melvyn Marckus, the City editor, who said his staff were too busy on Fayed-related stories to carry out the checks and cross-checks that would be needed. I then involved Adam Raphael, an executive editor, who tried to interest David Leigh, the paper’s chief investigative reporter, in the story. That is when the proverbial hit the fan. There was no love lost between Raphael and Leigh, which I suspect was a key part of Leigh’s objection to the story.

  He said it was wrong for the paper to pursue any story that emanated from Lonrho because there were bound to be hidden commercial motives and the paper was just being used to promote them. Raphael and I disagreed, believing that there are usually hidden motives behind all stories provided to newspapers, especially leaks from politicians. The test was whether the story was true and important, not who benefited from it.

  Our inquiries revealed that there were indeed some hidden motives behind the leak to The Observer. Lonrho had links with Dassault, the French aircraft manufacturer, which had lost out when the contract went to British Aerospace. Rowland also hoped that exposure of the corruption would embarrass the chairman of BA, his old foe Professor Sir Roland Smith, who as chairman of House of Fraser had blocked his bids to get hold of the company. This knowledge did not deter us and Raphael published some strong stories about the Al Yamaha scandal.

  Leigh decided to make it an issue of principle and took it to the NUJ chapel, who referred it to the independent directors. He argued that he shouldn’t have been asked to cover a story supplied by Lonrho. In reply, I made the point that he could always refuse to cover it, which he did. It seemed to me that there was no problem in receiving a story from one’s owner, as long as the paper was free not to publish it if the information was found wanting. At no stage had Rowland pressed me to publish the story.

  The independent directors threw out the complaint, prompting Leigh to resign, complaining of ‘a whitewash’, and he returned to The Guardian, where the editor, Alan Rusbridger, was his brother-in-law. I was sorry to lose a first-class repo
rter whom I had once described as ‘my hunting dog’. That was a phrase used by Lord Deedes, then editing the Daily Telegraph, when we shared a train journey to Oxford to speak at the Oxford Union. At one point in our conversation he said: ‘A newspaper needs lapdogs and hunting dogs. At the Telegraph I need more lapdogs: at The Observer you need more hunting dogs.’

  I suspect Leigh was looking for a reason to move on, anyway, just as he had left The Times and The Guardian earlier in his career. The final irony about all this was that he went on to publish under his own byline a number of stories in The Guardian about corruption on the Al Yamaha contract. When I teased him with this at a party some years later, he had the good grace to grin.

  Like the Matatu non-affair, this was a manufactured crisis by individuals who simply hated the fact that The Observer was owned by Lonrho and wanted nothing to do with them. That was a luxury not available to me, because I knew, as many journalists did not, how vital it was for the paper’s future that Lonrho should invest in new technology and provide the money to pay off redundant printers. As a director for two decades and latterly as chief executive, I knew just how important this was.

  • • •

  Yet another cloud over The Observer’s future began to emerge in 1990 as The Independent, flushed with its success with the new daily paper, turned its mind to a Sunday partner. Two factors seemed to be prompting its founder and editor Andreas Whittam Smith in this direction: the launch of a rival paper, the Sunday Correspondent, funded by a business consortium; and the need to find something for Stephen Glover, one his co-founders, to do.

  The Sunday Correspondent was always going to be a failure, as I forecast on a TV programme at the time of its launch to Peter Cole, the paper’s editor. (Cole, by coincidence, was to replace me, some years later, as head of the Department of Journalism Studies at Sheffield University.) There was no need for Whittam Smith to panic about the Sunday Correspondent, because it lasted just over a year.