When asked on Newsnight if I was going to quit, I replied: ‘Certainly not. Editing The Observer is the best job in the world.’ I especially enjoyed saying that in front of one of the panellists on the programme, Hugh Stephenson, a senior figure on The Times, who had been rumoured to be Lonrho’s choice as my successor.
• • •
The 1983 general election was as problematic for me as the one in 1979. We still found it hard to support Margaret Thatcher, whom our readers heartily disliked; yet Michael Foot, whose manifesto was described by one of his colleagues as ‘the longest suicide note in history’, was hardly likely to make a convincing Prime Minister. As before, I would have fudged a straight choice, describing the strengths and weaknesses of both the main parties, with a mention for the Social Democrat–Liberal Alliance too, and leaving it to the readers to make their own minds up.
Tony Howard was very dismissive when I mentioned the Social Democrats, clearly afraid that I might give them the paper’s backing, as Roy Jenkins had privately urged me to do. Howard had replaced Cole as the paper’s political commissar and was determined that The Observer should give its support to Labour. That was the general view around the editorial conference table, but it wasn’t backed with any great enthusiasm. Even Watkins, a lifelong Labour supporter, said he couldn’t see Foot, ‘the great bibliophile’, ever reaching Downing Street. Howard, I could tell, was keeping a close eye on me for any sign of backsliding.
According to a passage in Tom Bower’s biography of Rowland, presumably informed by Howard, Lonrho had been pressing for the paper to support the Tories and I had gone so far as to prepare a draft leader backing Thatcher. A horrified Howard had then, according to this version of events, reminded me that the paper had already committed itself to Labour at an editorial conference recorded by Newsnight earlier in the week. The BBC producer had been Howard’s friend Robert Harris, later a political writer on the paper and later still a successful novelist. The broadcast item had ended with me apparently reading out the editorial on the telephone to Tiny Rowland.
This was a phoney call, which I should never have agreed to, because Rowland wasn’t on the end of the line and he was cross when he saw the TV programme. In fact, as he pointed out, I had never consulted him about the position The Observer should take at the general election; nor had he ever shown much interest in knowing. In fact, Tiny had recently had a bitter row with Thatcher at Chequers at a lunch arranged by Lonrho’s new chairman, Sir Edward du Cann. After that, Tiny had encouraged me to continue an anti-Thatcher campaign we were running in the paper, claiming that she had used her position to help her son Mark to secure a lucrative business contract in Oman.
There was certainly a Newsnight item about The Observer’s stance at the general election. But I had never drafted a pro-Thatcher editorial; nor had Lonrho ever pressed me to support the Tories. The whole episode, as relayed by Howard to Bower, never took place.
Long after I left The Observer, I discovered that Howard had been having regular lunches with Terry Robinson, the Lonrho director most involved with the paper, though my deputy had never thought it necessary to tell his editor about these occasions. I can only assume that Robinson may have argued Thatcher’s case at one of the meetings and that Howard had assumed he was speaking for Tiny. The fact is that Tiny spoke for himself and didn’t need Robinson to pass on his political messages; it was naïve of Howard to think otherwise.
At that time, I was a regular Sunday paper reviewer for David Frost’s morning programme – we had known each other at Cambridge – and I was often partnered on the TV couch by Carol Thatcher. As we arrived at the studio, she said to me: ‘What is The Observer attacking my mother for this week?’ When I replied: ‘It’s not your mother we’re after, it’s your brother,’ she had laughed and said: ‘You can have him.’
• • •
Howard was chairing a Sunday TV election programme at the time called Meet the Press, generally known as ‘Meet the Chums’, since he always seemed to invite his friends. On the Sunday before the election I was a guest panellist on the programme myself, quizzing Cecil Parkinson, who was leading the Tory campaign as party chairman.
There was the usual after-show glass of wine, providing the journalists with a chance to quiz Parkinson off the record about the election. He was surprisingly talkative and seemed curiously reluctant to leave, especially for a man running the re-election campaign, and hung around while several bottles of wine were consumed. It was only afterwards that we realised why he was behaving like this. Just a few days later, on the eve of the election, he would have to tell Thatcher that his mistress, Sara Keays, was having a baby, that he had decided to stay with his wife, and that he would be resigning before an angry Ms Keays made the matter public and filled many tabloid pages with the scandal.
I became involved in the story later, when our photographer Jane Bown used a family connection to get access to the Keays household to take a photograph of Flora, the new baby. I ran it on the front page, attracting some criticism for an alleged breach of privacy. Ms Keays had raised no objection to the photograph being taken, so I thought I was in the clear.
On the Monday, however, the day after the picture appeared, The Observer happened to have a board meeting, at which several directors, led by Lord Shawcross, attacked me for publishing it. I shrugged my shoulders and said: ‘I’m sorry you feel like that about it, but I’m a sucker for baby pictures (having a two-year-old daughter of my own at the time) and so are the readers. I simply couldn’t resist it.’ My detractors may not have been mollified by this explanation, but it certainly silenced them.
• • •
My biggest problem at the 1983 election was not The Observer’s editorial stance, but a battle provoked by the printers. When the presses failed to roll with the pre-election edition of the paper, I rang down to the machine room to find out why. Monty Berzinski, the machine room overseer, said some officials from the National Graphical Association night chapel wanted to see me.
Half a dozen huge men arrived and sat down heavily on the chairs in my room. When I asked them what the trouble was, their leader said: ‘It’s the Tory advertisement on page eight, Donald. Why isn’t there an advert for the Labour Party? You always say The Observer treats all the political parties fairly.’
I replied: ‘There isn’t a Labour Party advert in the paper because they didn’t book one. Perhaps they’d run out of money.’
NGA: ‘In that case, Donald, we’d like you to drop the Tory advert in the interests of even-handedness.’
‘I can’t possibly do that,’ I protested. ‘They have paid for it and it helps to pay your wages and mine. It would be seen as censorship.’
NGA: ‘We thought you might say that, Donald, so we’d just like you to take out the parts of the Tory advert that attack the trade unions.’
‘You know I can’t do that. They wouldn’t pay for the advert, and they would be quite right not to. Besides, that would be political censorship and would make the paper and your union a laughing stock.’
NGA: ‘We thought you might say that too, Donald, so instead we’d like you to carry this statement we’ve prepared for the front page, saying the NGA night machine chapel at The Observer wishes to dissociate itself from claims made in the Tory Party advertisement on page eight, especially the clauses relating to trade unions.’
‘I can’t possibly carry that statement, on the front page or anywhere else. Why should your chapel claim a special right to respond to the advert? It would reflect badly on your union and make me look a fool. So the answer is no.’
They were about to reply when Tony Howard put his head round the door and asked me to go outside. He said Len Murray, the general secretary of the TUC, was on the line, evidently having been put in the picture by one of the other print unions, and wanted to talk to the head of the NGA machine room chapel.
The conversation went on for some time and we could hear raised voices, even through the closed door. Eventually the fat
her of the chapel took his men back to the machine room and they started up the presses. I rang Murray back to thank him. He said he had told the father of the chapel that he was stupid to stop The Observer, as it was one of the few papers likely to give Labour a fighting chance in the general election. If The Observer was stopped, the Tory papers would have the field to themselves.
• • •
‘Howard and Trelford were an odd couple and Howard never made much secret of the fact that he was not among Trelford’s greatest admirers.’ The writer was Robin Lustig, my former news editor and later a highly regarded presenter on the BBC World Service. He added in his autobiography: ‘Given his ambition, having edited two weekly magazines, it was only to be expected that one day he would try to find a way to take over the top spot on The Observer.’
Lustig described the divisive effect that my deputy had in The Observer office: ‘Howard was a great gossip and an inveterate schemer, usually over lunch or a glass of red wine, puffing away at a miniature cigar. He was invariably kind to colleagues whom he respected, but could be cuttingly rude about those he did not.’ ‘He’s got a tin ear’ was a favourite put-down for anyone whose prose style did not impress him.
Robin continues: ‘I was fortunate enough to be regarded as part of what less favoured colleagues called “Tony’s A-team”, although knowing how he spoke of some of our colleagues behind their backs, I was pleased that I never heard what he said about me when I was out of earshot.’ Knowing what Tony thought of me, I can guess what he said to the A-team about their editor.
I was particularly annoyed at the way Howard openly derided Angela Palmer, whom I had taken from her popular diary in The Times to run The Observer’s news desk, where she was a big success, respected by even the hardest of hard-nosed reporters. I had chosen her because of the sharp news sense her diary displayed – not, as Private Eye insinuated, because I fancied her.
Tony called her ‘Little Miss Muffet’ and ran her down at every opportunity. She majored on topics like health and property prices, which were novelties then but have since become part of the staple diet of all news agendas. She went on to show great flair as editor of the colour magazine until she was poached by Elle magazine. She has since forged a new career as an ingenious artist and sculptor.
It also irked me to learn from another colleague that Patrick Bishop, who had covered the Falklands War for the paper, then left to write books, had approached Tony to ask about returning to The Observer as a foreign correspondent. Tony had advised against it, saying it was ‘never a good idea to go back’. I had a high regard for Pat Bishop and would have taken him back like a shot, but Tony hadn’t even thought it worth telling me about. Bishop went to the Daily Telegraph instead.
When Nicholas Garland’s book about the creation of The Independent came out, I was astonished to discover that Howard’s name appears on more than forty pages. He had been deeply involved in discussions about the paper’s launch, yet had never once thought that he should share this information with the editor of the paper that paid his salary. I was both amazed and amused when his friend Roy Hattersley wrote at the time of his death in 2010: ‘Loyalty was one of Howard’s conspicuous virtues.’
We lost Mark Boxer, the great cartoonist and illustrator, when I refused to delete the mention of his wife, the news presenter Anna Ford, in a story about the role played by a resident MI5 man at the BBC in recommending the banning of staff with a radical past. I was amazed to hear Tony comment on the story on the radio, saying: ‘It’s very sad for The Observer to lose Mark. I only hope Donald thinks the story was worth it.’ What I found so amazing about that remark was that Tony himself had provided the paper with the story – and with her name.
Apart from Alan Watkins, Tony’s best friend in journalism was Paul Johnson, for whom he had worked when Johnson edited the New Statesman and who had written some of the most powerful pieces – notably the magazine’s attacks on those hitherto sacred cows: the Labour Party and the trade union movement – while Tony sat in the editorial chair. This was the same Paul Johnson who went on, throughout the 1980s, to write a weekly media column in The Spectator which attacked any paper that dared to criticise the Thatcher government, especially the Iron Lady herself.
His main targets during this period were The Guardian and The Observer: Peter Preston and I still bear the bruises. When he wrote about The Observer, he seemed to be remarkably well-informed about the paper’s internal politics and the current state of play in its relations with Rowland and Lonrho. It wasn’t difficult to detect the hand behind these off-the-record briefings against the paper that employed him.
Finally, I reached the point where I knew Howard had to go. I was prompted into action by my secretary, Barbara Rieck, who came in to see me one morning in a tearful state and was very cross with me. ‘You always pride yourself on your antennae and say that this is why you have survived as editor for so long. But your antennae are not working, Donald. You can’t see what is going on under your nose.’ I was clearly feeling the absence of Lajos Lederer, my ‘house detective’, who had died three years before.
The wall between Barbara’s office and Tony’s was so thin that she could hear every telephone call he made. ‘Did you know,’ she said in exasperation, ‘that he has been seeing the paper’s directors to try and get you sacked. Why don’t you ask Nick Morrell?’
I rang Nick and asked him what was going on. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Tony came to see me to ask for my support in getting rid of you. I told him that if he had a problem with his editor, why didn’t he go and talk to you about it? I know he has approached several directors, but I don’t know how they responded. Why don’t you ask him?’
So I did. The next time he came into my office, I asked if he was free for lunch. We went to Gavvers, a junior branch of the Gavroche, on the north side of Chelsea Bridge. ‘Any special agenda?’ he asked as we looked at the menu. ‘Yes, Tony, I gather you think it’s time I went and that you have said as much to some of the directors.’
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Well, I have to be honest. I do think you’ve had enough. You’ve had a torrid time and you deserve a break. Nobody else could have done what you have done to protect The Observer, but I think you’re getting tired and losing some of your fight and it’s beginning to show. You’re spending too much time away from the office writing books and living the high life.’
‘Why didn’t you come and tell me this, rather than going behind my back?’
‘I didn’t think you would listen.’
‘Well, Tony, you are the most political person I know. You must realise that once you have said this, either I go or you go.’
‘And are you going, Donald?’
‘No, Tony.’
‘So I’m going?’
‘Yes, Tony.’
Long pause, then: ‘Christmas, usual terms?’
‘Talk to Morrell about it.’
After that we ordered our meal and never mentioned the subject again.
• • •
Looking back, I think I might have listened to Howard if he had had the courage to tell me to my face that it was time for me to move on. I had been tired of the constant strain for some time and only hung on through a sense of duty. I was drinking too much, which was damaging my marriage, and it was true that I was acquiring a reputation as a man about town. Tatler magazine had even run an article about me with a headline: ‘Donald thinks that being editor of The Observer is an invitation to the cocktail party of life.’ Tiny Rowland must have sensed my semi-detachment from the paper, for he asked me: ‘Is it true that you’re getting bored with editing The Observer? Because if it is, I’ll get bored with owning it.’
But Tony enjoyed the intrigue too much to act in such a straightforward way. Watkins’s warning seven years before had been proved apt: ‘He’ll be after your job.’ I remembered with some amusement how, when Tony approached our table in the pub, Alan and I would suddenly start talking loudly about great prop forwards of the past to drive
him away. His lack of small talk could be tiring and Alan and I went to the pub to escape from politics. Tony resented my friendship with Watkins, and upbraided him for treating me too kindly in his autobiography.
• • •
When Conor Cruise O’Brien died in 2008, Howard criticised me in The Observer for allowing Tiny Rowland to remove him. Instead of being criticised, I should have been praised for delaying the inevitable for so long. Rowland had promised Robert Anderson, as part of the sale agreement to Lonrho, that Conor would have to go. Because he had been hired originally as editor-in-chief, he was senior to me and not, therefore, a member of the editorial staff over whom I had jurisdiction. His contract was with the chairman – first Barnetson, then Bradshaw, Anderson, and finally Rowland.
Conor himself understood this, as he wrote in his memoir: ‘Trelford held out against the proprietorial pressure to sack me for longer than I would have expected. But when a paper is making a loss, and the editor has regularly to ask the proprietor to make good the loss, the editor cannot hold out indefinitely against the proprietor’s continual pressure. Trelford and I remained on good terms.’
Some years later we were both guests at a dinner with some Americans on the shores of the Bosphorus while attending a conference of the International Press Institute in Istanbul. Conor takes up the story: ‘It emerged that both us had worked for The Observer. One of the Americans asked me why I had left. I nodded over at Donald and said: ‘He fired me.’ The Americans were quite upset. Why should one of these nice gentlemen have fired the other nice gentleman?
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