The question was put to Donald, who replied calmly and truthfully: ‘The proprietor made it plain to me that if I didn’t sack Conor he was going to sack me. I thought if he sacked me, I might not survive. But I thought that if I sacked Conor, he would survive, and he has.’
In his autobiography, Alan Watkins wrote: ‘When Trelford finally left the editorship, O’Brien predicted to me that history would judge him kindly for having maintained the standards of The Observer in the most difficult circumstances.’
• • •
I was amused to see Tony Howard quoted – and once heard him say the same thing on the radio – that he left The Observer because it was too much under the thumb of Tiny Rowland, especially in its coverage of the Fayed affair. The truth is that I sacked him for going behind my back to The Observer’s directors and trying to persuade them to get rid of me. He never once complained about coverage of the Harrods campaign, which, as related earlier, was actually launched when I was on holiday and he was in charge of the paper. He even stood up when Tiny Rowland rang him on the telephone, like a subaltern saluting a general. He told Robin Lustig that Tiny had ‘beautiful manners’ and was ‘incredibly good-looking, like George Sanders’, the film star.
A word often used to describe Howard by one of his less admiring colleagues was ‘self-righteous’. The son of a clergyman, Canon Guy Howard, he had a faintly clerical air that sometimes came through in his manner and speech. Watkins told me that, when they had visited churches together in their younger days, Howard had always climbed up into the pulpit to survey an imaginary congregation and even declaimed from the Bible that was lying open there.
This clerical style sometimes showed in his writing too. I have a letter he sent to me when he was editing obituaries in The Times after both of us had left The Observer. Giving me what he called ‘a gentle nudge’ for being late with an obit he had commissioned, he wrote: ‘The Christian Year moves on in its own imperturbable way. Could I hope to get your piece by at least Pentecost (or, as I still prefer to call it, Whitsun)?’ At his funeral, he was said to have described himself as ‘an agnostic, but a C of E agnostic’.
Howard’s career in broadcasting was stalled by what a friend in the business told me was his old-fashioned orotund style of delivery that hadn’t advanced with the times. The same was true of his return to writing a political column for The Times in the 1990s, three decades after his prime at the New Statesman. It was stopped for much the same reason, but also because he appeared to have lost touch with the modern political scene.
He relied too heavily on his two main political contacts, Michael Heseltine and Roy Hattersley, and to a lesser extent on Julian Critchley, the Tory MP.
Tony’s real interest was in the politics of 1955–80, which made him an excellent reviewer of books about that period – and an obituarist of politicians from that time – but a less reliable commentator on more recent events. Watkins survived by employing a different technique – sitting on a stool in Annie’s Bar in the House of Commons while MPs of all parties came to join him for a gossip.
Unlike Howard’s, Alan’s style was ageless. His comment when David Cameron came to power now looks prescient: ‘Once a PR man, always a PR man.’ His final published words were about one of the pre-election debates in 2010: ‘Mr Clegg is adept at the soft answer that turneth away wrath. He does not have anything to teach Mr Cameron; still less poor Mr Brown, who chews gum even when he does not have anything to chew.’ My favourite example of his style is worth repeating here. Talking to Sir Edward du Cann, he said, was ‘like descending a staircase in the dark and missing the final step. You are not hurt but you are mildly disconcerted.’
Watkins had married Howard’s sister, Ruth, who committed suicide; one of her daughters with Watkins also took her own life. Howard had a secret love affair over three decades with Corinna Ascherson (Neal’s former wife) while staying with his wife Carol, a member of the Lloyds banking family. Both men died in 2010, their lives intertwined by politics, journalism, love and tragedy from the time they had met at Cambridge fifty-eight years before.
I wrote a column after Howard’s death for The Independent’s media page that was badly cut (my fault, not theirs, as I wrote more than they had asked for). As a result, all the positive things I said about him were left out and all the negative points appeared. I had said that I didn’t think he would have made a good editor of The Observer. A main reason was that he hated sport, which is often all that happens on a Saturday. Nor did he care much about what was going on abroad, apart from America, and then only at election times. He certainly had no interest in Europe, Africa or the developing world, all disturbing lacunae in an Observer editor. Nor did he have any interest in typography or make-up. I couldn’t imagine him laying out the front page himself, as I always did – using a Barbie ruler my daughter Laura had given me.
This article offended Tony’s acolytes. One of them wrote in the Telegraph diary that, unlike Howard’s funeral, where distinguished figures like Lords Hattersley and Heseltine and Robert Harris had spoken, nobody would bother going to mine.
CHAPTER 14
PAMELLA
Pamella Bordes swanned into my life during a performance of Swan Lake at Covent Garden. Editors and their other halves had been invited there for a freebie hosted by the British Airports Authority. She turned up late, having missed the first act, on the arm of Andrew Neil, my rival editor at the Sunday Times. She made a striking entrance in red and black, looking as glamorous as a recent Miss India might be expected to look, though she didn’t seem too pleased to be there. She and Neil were having some sort of argument, perhaps about him dragging her to the ballet when she would rather be somewhere else. Their disagreement became so obvious that one of our hosts said to me: ‘Andrew looks as if he’s having as much trouble with her as the Prince is having with Odile on stage.’
Afterwards we were all taken to dinner at L’Opera restaurant. I was seated next to Ms Bordes, with my then wife next to Neil across the table. We talked about Swan Lake and I compared the production with one I had seen in Moscow. She asked why I had been in Moscow and I told her I had been writing a book with Garry Kasparov, the world chess champion. She said that she and her mother were fascinated by Kasparov and could I possibly let her have a copy of the book. I said I would send her one and she gave me her card, in front of everyone, and that was that.
I posted the book with a corny inscription: ‘For Pamella, a queen among pawns’. This was my standard inscription: for men I would write ‘a king among pawns’. Nothing happened for a couple of weeks until I received a telephone call from her at the office. ‘No man’, she declared in an affronted tone, ‘has ever failed to ring me when I have given them my card.’ She said she was interested in finding work, ideally at the House of Commons, and would welcome my advice. Could we have lunch?
Such was the innocent beginning of what was in truth an innocent relationship. As she herself was to tell the Daily Mail when the Bordes scandal reached epic proportions: ‘Donald and I were never lovers. We just used each other in our own ways to manipulate Andrew.’ That was the truth. She used me to get back at Neil, who was trying to get rid of her; I was using her to find out what Neil was planning for the Sunday Times.
Believe it or not – and given her looks and my reputation, I realise many people won’t believe it – my interest in Ms Bordes was commercial rather than erotic. It was at a time when Murdoch had smashed the print unions and given the Sunday Times the opportunity to spread its wings with more pages and new sections that gave it a big competitive advantage. The Observer’s management wanted to know about their plans and, when the story broke that I knew Neil’s girlfriend, they encouraged me to use her to find out more, even suggesting that I put any entertaining or gifts on expenses.
When Neil discovered these gifts, which included a bracelet and a Cartier pen, he sent his chauffeur round to my office to return them. I sent them back to Pamella on the grounds that they were not Neil’s
property to dispose of. He may have guessed that some sort of industrial espionage was involved because he sent a solicitor round later to ask if I would return some of his papers or audio tapes, which had gone missing, in which reference was evidently made to the Sunday Times’s editorial and commercial plans. I told the solicitor honestly that I couldn’t return the documents because I didn’t have them; nor had I destroyed any audio tapes. This didn’t mean, however, that I hadn’t learned what they contained.
Marc Burca, who had published a flattering profile of me in Boardroom, invited me to the opening of a nightclub to celebrate the sale of his business magazine to Pearl & Dean. Ms Bordes had also been invited. When the photographer came round, she held my hand for the camera – a picture that was to be used time and again by newspapers in the weeks, months and years ahead to imply that our relationship was not as innocent as I claimed. It even appeared in Time magazine in the United States under a headline: ‘More sex please, we’re British.’ The whole Bordes episode was embarrassing for me because, unlike Neil at the time, I was married, and it caused distress to my family, which I shall always regret.
All this was happening, of course, before the News of the World splashed with the story that she was a call-girl, which came as a surprise to me and a massive shock to Mr Neil. It turns out that the notorious publicist, Max Clifford, now serving time at Her Majesty’s pleasure, was pulling the strings on the whole Pamella story. A ‘madam’ who handled a string of prostitutes was being investigated by the News of the World and went to Clifford as a client to get the paper off her back.
When Max heard that Bordes was one of her ‘working girls’ and that she was the girlfriend of the editor of the Sunday Times, not to mention a friend of mine, he persuaded the paper to drop the investigation into his client in return for a much better tale. The story of two editors and a call-girl bears all the hallmarks of a Clifford special, too good for any paper to resist: ‘SHOCK HORROR OF TWO POSH EDITORS IN LOVE TUG TANGLE SENSATION (HONEST!!!)’, as Today newspaper calmly put it.
Once in the public domain, the story acquired wings and took off in some bizarre directions. It so happened that the film Scandal, about the Profumo affair, came out at the same time, so comparisons were made between Bordes and Christine Keeler. What the story lacked, compared with the original, was a political aspect, but that was swiftly supplied by the News of the World: ‘CALL GIRL WORKS IN COMMONS’. The story was illustrated by a picture of Pamella arriving at the Tory Winter Ball as the guest of the Sports Minister, Colin Moynihan.
She had evidently achieved her ambition of becoming a researcher at the House of Commons, working for the MP for Dover, David Shaw. Her Commons pass had been counter-signed by another Tory member, Henry Bellingham, MP for North West Norfolk (later Sir Henry and a Foreign Office minister). Of course, neither man had known she was a prostitute; the word prostitute, though correct, seems a harsh word to use about Pamella; playgirl, courtesan, good-time girl – all seem more appropriate. The Daily Express evidently thought so, running a splash headline: ‘PLAYGIRL HAS MPs BLUSHING’, and the Tory grandee William Whitelaw wasn’t the only one to find the episode ‘very entertaining’.
What the story still lacked, however, to keep it going and to match up with the Profumo affair, was a security angle. This too was swiftly provided – The Sun leading with a headline: ‘PAMELLA DATED LIBYAN AGENT’, while Today splashed with ‘GADDAFI BOMBER AND MPS’ BEAUTY’. The agent/bomber in question was Ahmed Gadaff al-Daim, a cousin of Colonel Gaddafi and a senior figure in Libyan intelligence who had been linked to terrorist attacks in Britain. As the Daily Mail wrote: ‘The disclosures changed the atmosphere of the Bordes episode from that of a soap opera to a potential scandal.’
The Sun added fuel with the headline: ‘PAM: I COULD BRING DOWN THE GOVT’, prompting Labour’s shadow Leader of the House of Commons, Frank Dobson, to call for an inquiry. MPs weighed in with parliamentary questions. According to the Mail’s political editor, ‘the Westminster adventures of Miss Bordes almost overshadowed the Budget’.
Then, out of the blue, as if the story needed any more fuel, came a royal connection, when Buckingham Palace confirmed that Mark Phillips, then the husband of Princess Anne, had met Pamella at their home, Gatcombe, in Gloucestershire, though he denied any ‘liaison’. All the tabloids led with the story, the Daily Mail screaming ‘PAMELLA AND THE ROYAL FAMILY’ and Today leading with ‘COMMONS CALL-GIRL TORMENT FOR ANNE’.
The story ran on for weeks but came to nothing in the end as the political and security angles were found to lack any substance. However, as Thomas Babington Macauley, the nineteenth-century historian, put it, there is ‘no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodic fits of morality.’
All this time I was trying to keep my head down, hoping the whole business would go away. But I made a bad error. Addressing a TUC media conference, I hit out at the Murdoch papers for highlighting my alleged part in the scandal. Someone with my experience of the media should have known better.
The Sun’s resulting headline, ‘I’M NO DIRTY DON’, was undoubtedly true, but my ill-judged comments had served only to add extra mileage to the story, which appeared in every paper, mostly accompanied with that same stock photo of me holding hands with Ms Bordes. Neil was furious with me – but nothing like as furious as I was with him when he made a much bigger mistake in taking the whole business to court, thereby guaranteeing mammoth and seemingly endless publicity as the papers, not just the tabloids, gorged on the story.
The Sunday Telegraph, edited by Peregrine Worsthorne and prompted by that mischievous sprite Frank Johnson, had run an editorial called ‘Playboy Editors’, in which Neil and myself were roundly insulted for keeping ‘inappropriate’ company with Ms Bordes. Worsthorne got carried away, becoming ‘inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity’ (as Disraeli said of Gladstone). He admitted afterwards: ‘How I enjoyed writing that leader … vituperation can become an addiction … I was no more restrainable than any wild animal which has once smelt blood.’
Had he written the article as a signed feature, rather than as a statement of editorial policy, I doubt if it would have caused so much trouble for him. He was basically saying something undeniable: that editors of serious newspapers used to mix with politicians in gentlemen’s clubs rather than with women of dubious virtue in nightclubs. What prompted Neil to sue for libel was the implication, which Worsthorne says he never intended, that neither Neil nor I were fit to edit our newspapers.
Yet there had been no threat to his job or to mine. Murdoch funded the libel suit, albeit reluctantly. Rowland regarded the whole thing as a joke. Ironically, it was Worsthorne who fell off his editorial chair within days of publishing the offending article and months before the libel case came to court. So why Neil pursued the case is hard now to understand – for him too, I expect.
I liked Perry as one of Fleet Street’s most attractive characters and as a writer who, while often wrong-headed, sometimes made a point that others had missed or hadn’t dared to mention. I met him on a press visit to China in 1975. One bitterly cold night in a northern province we shared a room and he suggested cuddling together for warmth in our Chinese Army greatcoats. Remembering the story about him curling up at Stowe school with George Melly, for purposes other than warmth, I politely declined. The resulting articles on China that we published in our respective papers were praised by Bernard Levin for being ‘implacable in the search for truth’.
What Worsthorne seems to have overlooked was that a court case – which he could have avoided if he had been ready to publish a reasonable apology or clarification – left him wide open to evidence being introduced about his own private life. His long extra-marital affair with the actress Moira Fraser was bound to come out in disclosures that his wife, Claudie, would hear in court. I remember one Saturday evening when he took Mrs Lubbock (Ms Fraser’s married name) for what he hoped was a secret drink near St Paul’s Cathedral, well away from the Te
legraph office in Fleet Street. He then looked up, startled to find himself surrounded by journalists in one of The Observer’s favourite watering holes, the Rising Sun.
Although Neil got token damages of £1,000 (‘RANDY ANDY GETS A GRANDY’), this was no compensation for the leering headlines we had both had to suffer, day after day, as the papers lapped up and published every grubby detail. Both Worsthorne and Neil were said afterwards to have ‘ended up panting, dishevelled and bloody-nosed’. The judge, Mr Justice Michael Davies, said the collision of the editors was a matter of ‘Greek meets Greek’. Neal Ascherson, writing in The Independent on Sunday, responded: ‘Only one member of the affair acted Grecian, and that was the absent Donald Trelford, editor of The Observer. The Sunday Telegraph article was much more insulting about him but he had the sense to do nothing.’
It was George Carman QC who had advised me, as a friend, not to sue. ‘Anyone who knows you doesn’t think any the less of you,’ he said. ‘Fairly or unfairly, it just enhances your reputation as a ladies’ man. I should be so lucky!’ The Observer’s lawyers said I had a case against any paper that accused me of having an affair with Ms Bordes, but I took the view that the damage was done and any litigation would only make things worse. But it was an uncomfortable and deeply annoying experience to read lies about myself during the court case, many of them projected in huge headlines, knowing that they would hurt my family and yet unable to do anything about them. I accept, however, that I had brought much of the embarrassment on myself.
It was simply untrue, however, that I had ‘pursued’ Ms Bordes, as Neil claimed in court. I had already told him that firmly when he telephoned me to demand that I should leave the lady alone. He painted a totally false picture of the two of us as rival lovers, he being the winner and me having ‘made several advances and been rebuffed’. That was complete nonsense or, as Worsthorne might have put it, balderdash.
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