The History of the Times

by Graham Stewart

  The editor’s insistence on making his mark in almost every possible part of the paper might have been a tolerable if irritating eccentricity had it only affected his relations with colleagues. The problem was that his interventions were wrecking the paper’s deadlines. The Times was becoming increasingly unobtainable in Scotland because the train at King’s Cross would not wait while Evans held up production in order to make some needless alteration. This was a question of priorities and the editor appeared to have lost sight of the commercial imperatives at work. The leader writers would deliver their copy on time only for Evans to announce that he would run them through his own typewriter. Aware that another deadline was being missed, Fred Emery would race over to the editor’s office to find its occupant kneeling on the floor with a pair of scissors in his hands. He would be cutting up the original copy and trying to insert some extra lines of his own on scraps of paper with glue. Emery did not even believe the editor’s additions improved the sense of the original. ‘Rhythms and disciplines are crucial to a daily newspaper’s morale and professionalism,’ Emery believed. When they were destroyed, ‘things fall apart’.135

  There was a journalistic maxim that ‘you can edit with a typewriter or a calculator, but not both’.136 This was exactly the problem at The Times in the dying days of 1981. The editor led with the typewriter while his managing director and the proprietor attempted to rule with the calculator. Famous names were departing and, as so often with voluntary redundancy, it was those most marketable to an alternative employer who were going while those who feared leaving the life raft clung on. Yet, Evans persisted in hiring new journalists, often at higher salaries than those they replaced. Each appointment became a battleground, particularly since, in the short term, even the redundancy programme was adding to the paper’s costs. One of many disputes concerned finding a replacement for Michael Leapman. Murdoch maintained that The Times could not afford its own correspondent in New York in addition to its office in Washington DC. Instead it should seek a saving by using News Group’s New York bureau instead. Ignoring both this opinion – which he felt was an attempt to see copy in The Times written by employees answerable to Murdoch rather than to himself – and that of Brian Horton, Evans sent out Peter Watson, formally of the Diary column.137 Evans simply did not see how he could satisfy the proprietor’s instruction to improve the paper without being left alone to hire whoever he felt could best achieve it.

  At the heart of the matter was Evans’s complaint that he was not given a clear budget allocation. A memo from Gerry Long demanding that all company executives seek written authorization for ‘any proposed action’ was understandably resented.138 Evans insisted that this was no way to run a newspaper. ‘I am a little shaken,’ he told Murdoch with restrained anger. ‘I do find it difficult to accept the principle of day-to-day approval for detailed items. I can’t honestly edit the paper properly without having discretion … It makes life difficult and erodes authority if I am not to be the sole channel for your instructions.’139 It was demeaning for the editor of The Times to have to scurry up and down stairs to the proprietor or managing director every time he wanted to spend money. In May 1981, John Grant, the managing editor, had drawn up a £9.1 million budget on inherited staffing levels for the next eleven months.140 The redundancy programme was supposed to cut that budget substantially and when, on 20 January, Evans was presented with a spending limit – £7,723,000 – along with the warning that he had already crossed it, it was clear there would have to be further job cuts. Evans’s defence that ‘in terms of real as distinct from money costs, The Times’s editorial budget is less than at any time in recent years’ fell upon deaf ears.141 Times Newspapers lost £8 million between June and November 1981, wiping out News International’s summer profits. Worse, this came at a time when the finances of News Corp., the parent company, were already being drained through the New York Post’s costly circulation war with the rival Daily News. In these circumstances, The Times really did look like a luxury the increasingly transatlantic Murdoch could ill afford.

  There was little by way of Christmas cheer. Evans injured himself putting up decorations and took time off to recover. With Charles Douglas-Home away on sabbatical, the paper was edited by Brian MacArthur and Fred Emery. It was at this moment that Evans committed an act that infuriated Murdoch. The proprietor knew that Evans had taken time off to recover from his spell of concussion but, long after he assumed that the editor was back at his desk, he was aghast to discover that he was, in fact, mysteriously in the United States. Evans had intended to keep his transatlantic mission secret but his secretary had forgotten to tell either MacArthur or Emery that this was the case. Hours before Murdoch was due to fly over to London from New York, he telephoned The Times expecting to speak to Evans, only to discover he was unaccountably in America. The proprietor was furious and perhaps not a little suspicious. When Evans hurried back to the office (having been tracked down by MacArthur and warned to return to London immediately), it was to find a bitter letter from Murdoch waiting for him, berating him for the time he had taken to convalesce. Given how manically hard Evans had worked since his appointment, this was unfair, although, in the circumstances in which the paper found itself, the furtive trip to America certainly looked peculiar. Indeed, the letter read more as if the proprietor was issuing a written warning, putting on record that he was distancing himself from his chosen editor. This was ominous. Evans fired back a six-point rebuttal of Murdoch’s charges, reasserting his acceptance of the necessity for hard work and pleading, ‘I love The Times. We have until now, I thought, had an extremely close liaison.’142

  From this moment on, suspicion governed Evans’s attitude to Murdoch. He began to suspect Murdoch was complaining about him behind his back and that one of those listening was Paul Johnson, whose media column in the Spectator was giving Evans critical reviews. Unless he was there in the room to monitor possible interference, Evans was nervous about Murdoch sounding forth on politics to Times journalists. On his return from his Christmastide absence, Evans discovered that Murdoch had expressed a preference for economic sanctions against the USSR while chatting to Owen Hickey. Hickey, who was not likely to compromise his intellectual self-certainty to anyone, did not feel Murdoch was leaning on him. But Evans went out of his way to write a leader condemning the policy as a ‘romantic notion’ and, worse, an ‘apocalyptic strategy’.143 Whether this could be considered an overreaction depended upon how narrowly the proprietor’s guarantee not to direct editorial policy could be reasonably defined. To assume he had to take a Trappist vow whenever a conversation touched upon the modern world was clearly ridiculous. The problem was, did all journalists have the strength to put from their mind Murdoch’s stated opinions when they filed copy he might read and note?

  Evans’s predicament was that tensions were now running high not only with Murdoch but with Gerry Long as well. Scarcely anyone had missed The Times’s decision to cancel its detailed coverage of the European Parliament but Long also wanted to cut costs by scrapping the paper’s Westminster gallery staff and rely on PA reports instead.144 This would certainly undermine the paper’s claims to be offering something more than its competitors and Evans would have none of it. It was not just Evans who had difficulty relating to Long. Frank Giles, the Sunday Times editor, also felt ‘to describe his nature as complex is about as observant as pointing out that Schubert’s Eighth Symphony is unfinished’.145 Shortly before he assumed the editorship, Evans had a foretaste of Long’s eccentricity when he went to the latter’s house for dinner. When the discussion turned to how The Times’s reputation should be restored, Long became animated, telling Evans, ‘The man you need for authority is Penning-Rowsell of the Financial Times’ and reached from his bookshelves the proof – a copy of Penning-Rowsell’s The Wines of Bordeaux.146 This proved to be a portent of his priorities. Although Long proceeded to demonstrate his readiness to sacrifice good journalists in pursuit of cutting costs, he was never prepared to compromise
gastronomic standards at The Times. On one occasion when Sir Geoffrey Howe, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, came to lunch at Gray’s Inn Road, roast lamb was on the menu. When Howe asked for mint sauce, the waitress pulled rank, grandly announcing, ‘Mr Long does not allow mint sauce on the fifth floor.’147

  Evans could not unseat Murdoch, but he could try and undermine Long. The easiest way of doing this was to provide Long with a public platform for self-immolation. Long had suggested the financially imprudent idea of importing a French and a German food critic to eat their way round Britain’s most famous restaurants as part of a forthcoming Times series of articles on expensive foods.148 Discovering that the managing director had been in acrimonious correspondence with the leading restaurateur Albert Roux, Evans persuaded Long that publishing the exchange would be a wonderful opening salvo to start the series. Long had dined at Roux’s celebrated Le Gavroche restaurant and had asked for the ‘farmhouse cheeseboard’. But, horror of horrors, he suspected that one of the cheeses, a St Paulin, was industrially produced, a fact confirmed upon consulting his trusty Androuet Guide du Fromage. ‘This met at first with an indignant response from your waiter,’ Long informed Roux. Perhaps unwisely, the waiter retaliated with the flip put-down, ‘if Monsieur knows cheese better than I do, then of course Monsieur is right’. This remark appeared to have straightened the bristles on Long’s Lord Kitchener-style moustache. Roux wrote to assure him that the offending cheese was a product ‘made by craftsmen on the scale of a cottage industry’ thereby generating a fresh debate on Long’s second major hobby – semantics. Long replied at great length, also finding fault with the turbot and making clear he was sending the correspondence to Michelin who had recently given Le Gavroche the only three star rating in England. Despite the provocations, Roux attempted to bring the argument to a close, somewhat incredibly assuring Long, ‘the fact that you have taken so much trouble to write about food leaves me with endless pleasure’, and inviting him and his wife to dine with him. Boorishly, Long declined the offer.

  The unintentionally hilarious correspondence appeared in the paper on Saturday 6 February, suitably illustrated with a Calman cartoon of a French waiter intoning, ‘I’m a bit – how to say – cheesed off by these complaints.’ Running into Anthony Holden in the office, Long asked him what he thought of the exchange. When the features editor replied that it was ‘in the great tradition of British eccentrics’, Long was uncomprehending, exclaiming, ‘Eccentric? What’s eccentric about it?’149 He would soon find out. When Murdoch toured the Sunday Times on the Saturday afternoon (supposedly its busiest period), he found its journalists, feet on table, laughing with childlike glee at Long’s cheese pantomime. Evans had knowingly published a correspondence that made the managing director appear ridiculous. What was more, he had allowed Long to demonstrate his obsession with expensive dining at exactly the moment he was also calling for six hundred redundancies, mainly among the clerical staff at Times Newspapers. Long may have hoped that his correspondence would lead Michelin to reconsider the three stars awarded to Le Gavroche. But it was Long who was about to find himself downgraded.

  Times Newspapers employed 671 clerical workers (excluding managers and juniors). The combined clerical payroll of its daily and Sunday rivals, the Guardian and the Observer, was 250. It was clear that TNL was grossly overmanned; indeed, it was the principal reason why a company capable of generating nearly £100 million a year in revenue was still so monumentally in the red. Murdoch was blunt with the staff: ‘You will say you have heard of Times crises before. I say to you here that if the crisis facing us today is not resolved within days rather than weeks our newspaper will have to be closed.’150 Despite intense hostility to this ‘straight forward mugging’ from Barry Fitzpatrick, the father of the Sunday Times clerical chapel, and rumours that those doing management’s bidding by applying for voluntary redundancy would be blacked by their union brothers,151 negotiations to find the job cuts got underway with the more moderate union officials. It was another torturous exercise and, in the midst of it, Gray’s Inn Road was rocked by a second crisis.

  A meeting of the TNL board had been convened on 16 December 1981. In Murdoch’s absence, Long had taken the chair and, with Evans and Frank Giles present, won universal – if qualified – approval to remove The Times and Sunday Times titles trademarks from TNL to News International. The stated reason was that September’s NGA dispute had demonstrated that without this change The Times could not be published if the Sunday Times was liquidated. Transfering the titles to News International would give greater flexibility in future industrial disputes.152 Consent was agreed subject to ‘a reasonable price’ being paid for them. At a rushed TNL directors meeting held two days before Christmas at the Sun’s headquarters in Bouverie Street (with only Long, John Collier, the company’s secretary Peter Ekberg and Farrar’s lawyer, Geoffrey Richards, present) News International’s offer of £1 million for The Times and £2 million for the Sunday Times was accepted.153

  The first Evans and Giles heard of the 23 December meeting and its decision to transfer the titles of the papers they edited was on 16 February 1982 when they were sent a copy of the minutes. They were horrified.154 Why had they not been informed of the meeting? Why was it held at the Sun’s headquarters? The impression was clear: Murdoch’s henchmen had attempted to ‘pull a fast one’. But what was their motive? If TNL was liquidated while still in possession of its principal assets – the titles – it could be bought by another buyer. Evans approached Jim Sherwood of Sea Containers and encouraged him to buy The Times from Murdoch.155 Murdoch promptly rebuffed Sherwood’s offer when it was sent to him on 9 February. Transferring the titles to News International would, wrote one chapel father (Peter Wilby), allow Murdoch to liquidate TNL and restart the papers at a later date with a more favourable set of union (or nonunion) staffing agreements.156 This, and the rejection of the Sherwood offer, suggested that if Murdoch did not get the mass redundancy package accepted he really did intend to abolish TNL and relaunch the titles on his own terms, in his own time. It also placed a gun to the head of the unions in the negotiations over cutting six hundred jobs.

  Transferring the titles to News International ran counter to Sir Denis Hamilton’s strategy of ring-fencing Times Newspapers in the Articles of Association so that, as he put it, ‘in no way could it be mixed up with the operational or financial side of News International’.157 But Evans and Giles could no longer appeal to Hamilton who, seeing the way events were moving, had resigned as chairman of the company’s board of directors. The new chairman was none other than Keith Rupert Murdoch. All of a sudden, it seemed Murdoch was doing to Times Newspapers what he had done to the News of the World chairman, Sir William Carr – arriving in the guise of a financial white knight, only to seize the keys to the castle. Yet, was it not inevitable that the person paying the bills also wanted outright control of the company? The only prop keeping TNL on its feet was the money being pumped into it by News International. As Richard Searby, chairman of the parent News Corporation, bluntly put it, ownership of the titles was the security it needed if it was to continue backrolling this liability.158 The City reacted to the news by wiping £4 million from News International’s stock market value.

  There were two problems with this strategy. First, if Murdoch attempted to close TNL and relaunch The Times in a manner that displeased the print unions they could strike at Bouverie Street, bringing down the Sun and the News of the World, the two sure cash cows that contributed most to keeping his media empire afloat. Secondly, the titles transfer appeared to be illegal under point 2 (iii) of the terms set out by John Biffen unless the board of independent directors’ gave their approval, a detail overlooked in the hastily convened and inquorate TNL meeting of 23 December. Biffen had stipulated that a fine or two years imprisonment would apply to Murdoch if he broke the conditions upon which his purchase of TNL had been granted. This included changing the Articles of Association without consent. The Times NUJ chapel pressed for the
transferral to be disallowed, threatening if necessary to seek a High Court injunction.159 Rees-Mogg added his voice to the controversy, writing to Biffen and denouncing the attempted titles shift on the BBC’s The World This Weekend. The independent directors also waded in, Lord Dacre describing it as a ‘gross incivility … the Proprietor met the national directors on January 12 and said nothing about it’ while Lord Greene at least struck a supportive note for the newspaper’s reporting of the fracas by claiming ‘All I know about it is what is in The Times.’160 Evans had certainly ensured that his paper could not be faulted when it came to washing its owner’s dirty linen on both front and back pages. Even if Murdoch’s exact motives were unclear, the manner in which Long had acted created a suspicion of shadiness. The Shadow Trade Minister, John Smith, complained that Murdoch was attempting ‘a breathtaking subterfuge, which raises very serious questions about his future intentions for both newspapers’.161 The Conservative former Cabinet minister Geoffrey Rippon asked Mrs Thatcher to consider establishing an enquiry.

  Murdoch, Searby and Long had miscalculated. Talks with Department of Trade officials indicated the transfer was probably illegal. Searby got to work on preparing a dignified retreat. The decision to transfer was reversed pending a meeting of the Times board of independent directors who duly made clear their opposition to the plan, killing it there and then.162 Meanwhile, the deadline for achieving the six hundred redundancies had been reached. But when the requests for voluntary redundancy were counted they numbered scarcely more than one hundred and fifty. Murdoch flew back to London.