Launching the Independent on Sunday turned out to be a colossal mistake, an act of vanity or hubris that led eventually to the end of the whole Independent dream. Before committing himself to the new paper, however, Whittam Smith had a better idea: why not buy The Observer instead and save on the costs of launching a new paper at all? Rupert Murdoch and David English had had the same idea thirteen years before.
I was invited to a breakfast meeting at Brown’s Hotel with Whittam Smith and Glover. I was wary about the meeting, as Glover noted in a book he wrote later. He said I had ‘displayed legendary political skills and a genius for survival’, but that on this occasion my ‘eyes darted nervously, as though we had laid a trap for him’. Whittam Smith’s proposal was a merger between The Independent and The Observer into a new company – 85 per cent Indy, 15 per cent Lonrho. I said I doubted if Rowland would accept as little as 15 per cent. He said that was the statutory limit on the size of any outside shareholding.
I said I could see the commercial sense, from their point of view, of The Independent buying The Observer rather than launching its own paper: it would reduce the competition in the Sunday market and would give the joint paper a flying start by building on The Observer’s circulation and reputation. I also said that I had no interest in editing The Observer for very much longer. ‘My only concern now’, I said truthfully, ‘is to secure the future of the paper.’
Whittam Smith then made a tactical error by assuring me that a financial contract for me would be included in the new arrangements. I was annoyed at the implication that I could be bought – cheaply too, by the sound of it – and resented his arrogance in suggesting it.
In fact, I was becoming more and more angry about the proposal, though I tried not to show it. It was clear that The Independent would dominate the joint paper and that The Observer’s existing staff and character would be submerged. Here was a man who had run a daily paper for four years, and knew nothing about Sunday papers, talking about taking over – and effectively destroying – the oldest Sunday paper in the world, just three years short of its 200th anniversary. I said I would report the conversation to Tiny Rowland. But I had already decided that the merger would never happen if I had anything to do with it.
The Sunday Times then ran a story about merger talks between The Independent and The Observer, prompting a firm statement from Lonrho that The Observer was ‘not for sale’. Glover commented on this episode:
I interpreted this story as a leak from Donald Trelford. It seemed that Trelford had brilliantly drawn Andreas and me into talks which he had then scuppered by making them public, thereby inviting a denial of sale by Terry Robinson, one of Tiny’s closest henchmen. If this was true, Trelford was more than worthy of his reputation. He was a wonder.
Having failed to secure The Observer, Whittam Smith went ahead with the launch of the Independent on Sunday in 1990. It caused me a number of problems, not just stealing some of our readers, but some editorial staff as well. I lost Blake Morrison from the literary department and Neal Ascherson, one of the very best writers on the paper. The Indy’s clarion call – that it had no commercial proprietor – was a powerful message to readers who distrusted the likes of Rupert Murdoch, Robert Maxwell, Conrad Black and Tiny Rowland.
The year of 1990 was a bad one for me, the worst in my time as editor. I was ready to quit, except that I needed to be sure that the paper would end up in good hands. It was also a bad time for Lonrho. As the 1990s progressed, it became clear that Tiny was losing control of the empire he had created, which made The Observer’s position highly vulnerable. The company’s share price was badly hit (coming down from 259p to 59p) towards the end of 1991 when Robert Maxwell fell off his boat. There was a sudden loss of confidence among investors in companies that relied on a single charismatic leader and Rowland was targeted as one of the most prominent of these.
The lower share price attracted a new investor, to whom Rowland sold off many of his own shares, attracting criticism for receiving a higher price than the one available to other Lonrho investors. His new partner was Dieter Bock, a German property magnate, whose only interest seemed to be in selling off Lonrho’s assets.
At that time Lonrho had debts of nearly £1 billion, which is what forced Rowland to sell the Metropole hotels group to a Libyan investment company, essentially to Gaddafi, who was seen by the City as an international pariah. This may have been essential to save Lonrho at the time, but it turned out to be a huge mistake, since it looked to the City as if the company was so desperate for cash that it didn’t much care where it came from.
Bock had no interest in retaining a loss-making Sunday newspaper. Tiny (and now Nick Morrell) were the only Lonrho directors with any real interest in the paper. It was certain to be sold: Morrell’s concern was not just to get a good deal, but to ensure that the paper found a good home. The only two real contenders were The Independent, which wanted to merge The Observer with its own Sunday paper, and the Guardian Media Group, which had no Sunday paper to partner its daily.
Some of The Observer’s journalists, led by Robert Low, wrote a personal letter to Rowland, thanking him for his stewardship of the paper over the previous dozen years, and begged him not to sell The Observer to The Independent because that would effectively be the end of the paper as a separate voice. Rowland was evidently moved by the letter, though Morrell’s instructions were to get the best price for Lonrho.
The Independent had offered a price of £25 million. Morrell, a clever negotiator, told Harry Roche, the Guardian chairman, that they would need to go up to £27 million to secure the paper. He reported The Independent’s offer to Rowland and urged him to see The Guardian himself and find out if he could push them higher. This he duly did, settling at Morrell’s projected figure of £27 million.
Morrell told me in strict confidence a couple of weeks before the sale that the paper would be going to The Guardian, which pleased me. So the Sunday Times story about the sale – that the editor was the last person to be told – was completely wrong.
I asked Morrell how Whittam Smith had received the news at 7 a.m. on the morning of the sale that The Observer wasn’t going to The Independent. ‘All I heard’, he said, ‘was a gurgling noise on the telephone, like somebody drowning.’
There was no party to mark the end of an era. I was ‘banged out’ by the journalists on my last day – an emotional ceremony in which they all whacked filing cabinets or desks with bits of metal. This used to happen in the composing room, when newspapers had composing rooms. A couple of weeks later I had a card from the sub-editors’ table saying they didn’t know if I was missing them, but they were missing me. I used to fool around with them close to edition time, wearing a cap with a flashing sign saying ‘Editor’ and comment on their headlines: ‘Who wrote this rubbish?’ and so on.
Much of the press comment described the sale to The Guardian as some sort of failure by The Observer. That seemed to me to be unfair: the miracle was that we had lasted so long as a stand-alone Sunday paper.
There were two friendly comment pieces about me, both of which I prized. One was by Peter Preston, who wrote:
He was fated, for many years, to be a defender as well as a crusader; a bruising role where he sometimes felt himself beset on all sides. But Trelford was first and foremost a journalist and an editor: multi-talented, hands-on, a master of sport as well as news, shrewd and decisive. The paper, through his years, may often have been under attack, but it also won many awards and gathered together brilliant teams of writers who kept the flame of Astor alive. And Trelford, at the end, was there to pass The Observer on, unbroken and unbowed.
The other was by Gavin Young, one of The Observer’s greatest foreign reporters and later a bestselling travel writer. He wrote in the paper on my departure:
It is an indisputable fact that, although Donald is quite unlike David Astor in a number of ways, he has proved to be a real chip off the old block, which David himself acknowledges. Donald is a journalists’ edi
tor. Like Astor, he appreciates good reporting and instantly recognises it when he sees it. And he has another great advantage over rival editors: he can write as well as his staff. He is an expert reporter with a sensitive ear for words and a nose for news that would do credit to a beagle. These gifts are priceless.
He also managed to lay out the front page and write many of the best headlines himself – something beyond most editors these days – while simultaneously taking bets from the staff on every big race or rugby international. The queue of people outside his office door after first edition, waiting to hand over fivers, was like Russian serfs paying tribute.
• • •
Tiny’s grip on Lonrho was slipping and it would only be a matter of time before he would be edged out of the company altogether – one he had created and built over thirty-four years. The coup de grâce came two years after The Observer was sold. He had started leaking stories against Bock, who was now the company’s chief shareholder – a situation that clearly couldn’t go on.
The Lonrho directors, now chaired by a former British ambassador, Sir John Leahy, voted him off the board, citing ‘irreconcilable differences’. Leahy handed over the job of giving Rowland the bad news to Morrell, saying that as he had drafted the press announcement about Rowland’s impending departure, he was the right man to read it to him. Rowland’s only reaction was to point across the table at Morrell and say a single word: ‘You!’ Morrell never doubted that the board had made the right decision, but he liked Rowland and was upset by the task he had been given.
Bernard Levin wasn’t the only person to find something tragically moving in the situation. He described Rowland, for all his faults, as a man who could never resist a fight – and nearly always won, even when the odds were stacked against him. He wished he had won his last fight against Dieter Bock, who had achieved nothing comparable in his life.
This is a fair point. Rowland had a vision of Africa that has sometimes been compared to that of Cecil Rhodes. The essential difference, however, is that Rhodes was building an Africa for whites; Rowland an Africa for Africans. Lonrho became the second biggest food producer on the continent, which is no mean achievement. Rowland had also obtained some first-class assets for the company and its shareholders.
For his part, Bock built some apartment blocks for profit, before stripping Lonrho of the assets built up over three decades. He will be chiefly remembered for the manner of his death: choking on a steak in his own hotel. Rowland’s monuments are all over Africa – in the tea and sugar plantations, the wheat fields, the cattle farms, the coffee estates and the gold mines.
• • •
Andrew Marr went much too far when he said that Rowland had treated me ‘with cold brutality’ and had been ‘exceptionally nasty’. Bob Edwards, however, went too far the other way when he described him as ‘an ideal press baron’. Tiny was what he was, beguiling and unpredictable, never easy to live with. But he really tried, in his own way, to help The Observer and achieved more than he has been given credit for, though it cannot be denied that the paper’s public reputation suffered under his ownership.
He wrote a last message to the newspaper we had fought over for the past twelve years:
And so farewell to The Observer. When Lonrho bought it, I thought we would soon be outselling the Sunday Times. I hope the new owners, The Guardian, will do much better. Donald Trelford will be leaving too. I’d like to say how well he did the job of preserving the paper’s independence – perhaps too well. My interest was to bring in new life and increase its circulation. Apart from being allowed to start a profitable Business section under Melvyn Marckus, whom I greatly admire, ours was a one-sided love affair. Lonrho loved The Observer.
That wasn’t altogether true. Tiny may have loved The Observer (even though he sometimes had a funny way of showing it) but few of his Lonrho colleagues shared that feeling. Nor is it true that the feelings were wholly ‘one-sided’. I don’t think I was alone at The Observer in becoming very fond of the remarkable, amusing and sometimes dangerous man who put us on a rollercoaster for so long, but kept the paper going through difficult times – and, also like a fairground rollercoaster, brought something into our lives that can best be described as fun.
CHAPTER 11
TOOTSIE
Tiny Rowland was in a sprightly mood as we arrived at the smart apartment block in Park Lane, next to the Dorchester Hotel. He was taking me there to meet an old friend of his, Mohamed Fayed. I was a bit put out at being dragged along and asked him why I had to be there. ‘He wants to see you – I think he wants your advice,’ he replied. When I asked him what Fayed was like, he did a surprising little jig in the apartment’s gilt and marble hall as we waited for the lift, startling a posh-looking elderly couple.
Then, by way of an answer, he said, almost singing the words: ‘If you knew Tootsie like I know Tootsie, oh, oh, oh – what a guy!’ I gathered that ‘Tootsie’ was his nickname for Fayed, whom he seemed to regard as a bit of a joke, or maybe a joker. Which of them had the last laugh became a fraught issue between them. Tiny left me after introducing me to the squat middle-aged Egyptian in a room kitted out like Ali Baba’s cave.
Fayed explained that he wanted a coffee table book, with stunning pictures, about the Ritz Hotel, which he owned in Paris. He wanted me to write the words, but I deflected that request by saying I would introduce him to Mark Boxer, who was then producing exactly that sort of book for publisher George Weidenfeld. He then invited my wife and me to stay at the Ritz as his guests, and I saw no reason not to accept the invitation.
We had a slightly odd, out-of-focus conversation about newspapers and about British politics, not helped by the fact that I could barely understand his accent and was distracted by the sheer number of expletives he managed to include in almost every sentence. When Rupert Murdoch’s name came up, he said dismissively: ‘He’s a Jew from Alexandria.’ I said: ‘I think you’ll find he’s from Australia.’ At this, he banged a little table and insisted: ‘No, the Murdochs are f***ing Jews from Alexandria.’
As I stood up to leave, he asked me if I would like to stay on to see a new porn film that had just arrived from Beirut. I made my excuses and left. When Tiny asked me later what I thought of Tootsie, I used a phrase of my father’s and said I thought he was a bit barmy. He laughed and added: ‘More than a bit.’
Some time later, when DTI inspectors were appointed to investigate Fayed’s purchase of House of Fraser, I reported the Murdoch conversation to them. In their report, the inspectors say Fayed denied the remark, describing me as ‘a hired dog on a leash for Mr Rowland’. The inspectors concluded: ‘We see no reason why we should not accept Mr Trelford’s evidence, particularly as we preferred Mr Trelford to Mohamed as a witness of truth.’
My then wife and I accepted Fayed’s offer of free accommodation at the Ritz – I didn’t think it would be fair to land the bill on The Observer and we paid our own air fares. We stayed in a palatial room occupied the previous week, Fayed declared proudly, by the King and Queen of Jordan. I wasn’t so much impressed as fearful on hearing this news, since the king was one of the world’s prime assassination targets. I just managed to restrain myself from looking under the bed.
When my wife bought a few gifts for family and friends from the shops at the Ritz, she was told that as guests of Mr Fayed we were not allowed to pay for them. I took this up with Fayed when we left, but he repeated the edict and refused to allow me to pay for anything. These modest transactions, amounting in total to about €600, became an issue some time later, after he and Tiny had fallen out, when Fayed sent the bills to all the Fleet Street papers, claiming that my wife had been freeloading. Only Private Eye ran the story, the other papers having recognised it as the unfounded smear it was.
Fayed had offered a second visit to the Ritz as thanks for my help in getting his glossy book about the hotel into print. My wife refused to go again, saying she didn’t trust Fayed and warning me not to trust him either. In her place I t
ook my eldest daughter Sally, who, as a feminist, not to say an intelligent politics graduate, was not impressed when Fayed gave us tickets for a semi-nude review at the Lido. She was even less impressed when, after we had returned from Paris, he invited her back to his Park Lane eyrie and offered to set her up in a boutique at the Ritz. Sally, needless to add, is very attractive.
• • •
When Lonrho acquired the paper in 1981, they made a strong point of the fact that, unlike the Sunday Times or, especially at that time, the Sunday Telegraph, business people didn’t take The Observer seriously, or at all. I had to admit they were right. Business had never been a high editorial priority for David Astor or for me and the section had never really recovered from the loss of Anthony Bambridge and Roger Eglin to the Sunday Times in the early 1970s. We had a brilliant share tipper in John Davis, a shrewd economics columnist in William Keegan, following in the great tradition of Sam Brittan and Andrew Shonfield, and an excellent adviser on personal finance in Joanna Slaughter. But our business news was weak and under-resourced.
Lonrho said we should have a strong business section and were prepared to pay for it, counting on a commercial return in additional readers and advertisers. To run the section, Tiny recommended Melvyn Marckus, then number three at the Sunday Telegraph business section, because he had found him reliable when he had dealt with him over Lonrho stories, and rather liked his crumpled appearance, which reminded him, he said, of Walter Matthau. I read Marckus’s cuttings, which were very fluent, and was impressed by his ideas for the section when we had lunch. I was aware that some senior figures on The Observer, who didn’t know or care much about business stories, were concerned at the idea of Rowland effectively appointing the paper’s City editor.
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