Because of their well-placed mole, Evans’s critics had access to more than one incriminating piece of evidence. In a first-year progress report of 21 February, Evans had adopted an excessively ingratiating tone towards Murdoch. ‘Thank you again for the opportunity and the ideas,’ he purred. ‘We are all one hundred per cent behind you in the great battle and I’m glad we’re having it now.’ Evans’s upbeat assessment appeared to offer Murdoch what it could be assumed he wanted. Evans announced that he had approached the right-wing Colin Welch about joining The Times, adding a line that seemed designed to appeal to the Australian’s sociopolitical assumptions, ‘I did talk to Alexander Chancellor but came to the conclusion he represents part of the effete old tired England.’ However, ‘there would be mileage I think in your idea of having some international names (like Dahrendorf, Kissinger, Kristol)’. Regrettably, Evans proceeded to speak ill of past or present colleagues: ‘You’ll perhaps have seen the attack on me in the Spectator for getting rid of “stars” but believe me Hennessy, Berthoud and Berlins they mention were all bone idle. So are many of the others who have gone or are going. It is another part of the old-Times brigade not wanting to work, Louis Heren stirring it up a bit.’183 The unfortunate tone of this letter tended to support Douglas-Home’s contention that Evans was not always the bulwark for liberty and defender of his staff that his supporters protested him to be.
In fact, if Evans’s tone had been intended to please his proprietor, he was to be sorely disappointed. Two days later, ‘Dear Chairman’ was how he began a huffy note that objected to the ‘cursory comment on the detailed report of our first year which I volunteered to you’. To Murdoch’s criticism that the editorial line had lacked consistency, Evans shot back, ‘You have not, as it happens, made this criticism on several occasions to me but only once (7 January 1982) though I have been made aware of what you have said to other members of the staff when I have not been present.’184 When it came to the embattled editor, the proprietor’s heart had turned to stone.
Tuesday 9 March marked the first anniversary of Harold Evans’s appointment as editor. It was hardly a soft news day appropriate for distracting him. It was Budget Day and Evans ensured that The Times covered, reported, reproduced and analysed Sir Geoffrey Howe’s measures in an impressive level of detail. ‘The Chancellor of the Exchequer,’ Evans crooned justifiably to Murdoch afterwards, ‘has gone out of his way to say that the Budget coverage of The Times had restored The Times as a newspaper of record for the first time for many years.’185 Written by Donoughue, the leader took a measured view although the front page headline ‘Howe heartens Tories: a little for everyone’ was certainly more positive than the previous year’s assessment. Rab Butler’s death was also front-page news and together with the obituary was accompanied by an article by his one-time acolyte, Enoch Powell. Powell was as insightful as he was admiring of the man thrice denied the opportunity to become Prime Minister. It ‘was mere chance’, he noted, that Butler’s childhood injuries prevented him from serving in either war, ‘but to some of us it was a chance that seemed to match an aspect of his character. He was not the kind of man for whom any cause – not even his own – was worth fighting to the death, worth risking everything.’186
Having only recently returned from his own father’s funeral, Evans was back at Gray’s Inn Road and was just preparing to listen to the Budget speech when he was summoned upstairs to see Murdoch. The proprietor announced he wanted his immediate resignation. He had already asked Douglas-Home to succeed him and Douglas-Home had accepted. According to Evans’s account of the conversation, Murdoch had the grace to look emotional about the situation. Nonetheless he stated his reasons – ‘the place is in chaos’ and Evans had lost the support of senior staff. Evans shot back that it was management’s decisions that had created the chaos and reeled off a list of the senior staff that remained loyal to him. He had no intention of accepting this summary dismissal. Instead he left, refusing to resign, with Murdoch threatening to summon the independent national directors to enforce his departure.187
The independent national directors were supposed to ensure that the proprietor did not put inappropriate pressure on his editor. Instead, Murdoch was threatening to use them as an ultimate force to ensure the editor was removed from the building. Evans had taken the drafting of the editorial safeguards extremely seriously. The following morning he went to seek the advice of one of the independent directors, Lord Robens. The two men met in the Reform Club, Evans confiding his predicament to the ageing Labour peer above the din of a vacuum cleaner engaged in a very thorough once over of their meeting place. Robens considered the matter and suggested that, rather than staying on for six more months of this torture, Evans should go away on holiday. According to Evans’s account, Robens advised, ‘Don’t talk to Murdoch. Leave everything to your lawyer. Relax. We’ll stand by you.’188 The meeting concluded, Evans strode out from the Reform’s confident classicism into St James’s Park, continually circling the gardens like a yacht with a jammed rudder while he tried to decide whether to fight for his job and the paper’s integrity or to go quietly. Eventually he compromised. He would go noisily.
Back at the office, Evans was received by the unwelcoming committee of Murdoch, Searby and Long who pressed him to announce his resignation before the stand-off created yet more appalling publicity for The Times. But believing there were higher issues at stake, making an issue was precisely Evans’s purpose. The television cameras massed outside Gray’s Inn Road and Evans’s home. His admirers and detractors organized further public demonstrations of support and disrespect while those inside the building tried to put together the paper, unsure whether to take their orders from Evans or Douglas-Home.
The headline for 12 March ran ‘Murdoch: “Times is secure”.’ His threat to close down the paper had been lifted by the agreement with the print and clerical unions to cut 430 full-time jobs (rather than the six hundred requested) and cut around four hundred shifts. Taken together with the savings from switching to cold composition, the TNL wages bill would shrink by £8 million. There would now be one thousand fewer jobs at Gray’s Inn Road than had existed when Murdoch had moved in. This was an extraordinary indictment on the previous owner’s inability to overcome union-backed overmanning. At the foot of the news story appeared the unadorned statement: ‘Mr Harold Evans, the Editor of The Times, said he had no comment to make on reports circulating about his future as editor. He was on duty last night as usual.’189
In the leader article he wrote, entitled ‘The Deeper Issues’ (some felt this referred to his own predicament), Evans surveyed the panorama of the British disease: the human waste of mass unemployment, the crumbling inner cities, ‘idiot union abuse’, the ‘bored insularity’ of Britain’s approach to its international obligations and the failure of any political party to find answers. There was a scarcely repressed anger from the pen of an editor who had just buried his father – an intelligent and encouraging man for whom the limits of opportunity had confined to a job driving trains. But there were also pointed references to Evans’s own finest hour (the Thalidomide victims) and an attack on ‘the monopoly powers of capital or the trade unions, or too great a concentration of power in any one institution: the national press itself, to be fair, is worryingly over-concentrated’.190 There was no need to name names.
Saturday’s Times gave an accurate picture of the situation at Gray’s Inn Road – the report was utterly incomprehensible. Murdoch was quoted as stating ‘with the unanimous approval of the independent national directors’ that Evans had been replaced by Douglas-Home. Lord Robens described this statement as ‘a bit mixed up’. Evans was quoted claiming he had not resigned and his staying on was ‘not about money, as alleged. It is and has been an argument about principles.’ Gerald Long claimed that the independence of the editor had never been in dispute. Holden said it was. Douglas-Home said it wasn’t, going on the record to state:
There has been to my knowledge, and I have worked cl
osely with the editor, absolutely no instruction or vestige of an instruction to the editor to publish or not to publish any political article. There has been no undue pressure to influence the editor’s policy or decisions.191
Times readers could have been forgiven for believing they were looking not at a news report but at a bleeding gash running down the front page of their paper. During the day, the Journalists of The Times (JOTT) group passed a motion that they released to the press calling for Evans to be replaced by Douglas-Home. They found fault with the ‘gradual erosion of editorial standards’ and Evans’s indecision: ‘The way the paper is laid out and run has changed so frequently that stability has been destroyed.’ Geraldine Norman had been to the fore of getting this motion accepted, much to the disquiet of many of the two hundred subscribing JOTT members whose approval she had not canvassed.192 A pro-Evans counterpetition was circulated and also attracted support. Nobody wanted another week of this madness.
Meanwhile, Fred Emery had telephoned from the slopes in order to find out what was happening in his absence. Douglas-Home asked him to come back immediately, particularly requesting that he be back in time to edit the Sunday for Monday paper. Emery raced back and found the journalists had become even more polarized during his absence. He also discovered the reason Douglas-Home wanted him back to edit the paper on the Sunday evening. The editor-in-waiting was singing in a choir that evening. In the circumstances, this was a high note of insouciance.
The denouement came the following day, Monday, 15 March, in a series of remarkable twists and turns. Nobody seemed to know whether the editor was staying or going. However, he did periodically emerge to give the impression that he was still in charge. Taking inspiration from a photograph of himself playing tennis, he swung a clenched fist in the air and assured Emery, ‘I play to win!’ Half an hour later, he had tendered his resignation in the curtest possible letter addressed ‘To The Chairman’. It read in its entirety:
Dear Sir,
I hearby tender my resignation as editor of The Times.
Yours faithfully,
H. M. Evans
His colleagues found it easier getting accurate news from the far Pacific than from within the building. All they knew was that Evans had overseen a statement in the early editions of the paper reporting that he had not resigned. They were thus surprised when at 9.40 p.m. he curtly announced to the rolling cameras of News at Ten that he had indeed quit. His decision to give advance warning to ITN in order to maximize the publicity but not his own journalists dampened the send-off he might otherwise have been accorded.193 Instead, when he was sure the cameras were in position, he walked out of the building, stopping only to shake hands with the uniformed guard at the reception desk (unsurprisingly, there was no sign of his secretary). Stopped by a television reporter as he got into the back seat of a waiting car, he refused to make further comment beyond observing, with a weary expression, that it was a tale longer than the Borgias.194
VII
Harold Evans came home to a party organized by Tina Brown, his wife. His stalwart supporters came to rally round. Anthony Holden had already created a stir that evening at a function for authors of the year (of which he was one). Seeing Murdoch in the corner of the room he stormed over, almost elbowing the Queen to the ground in the process, and proceeded to harangue the newspaper proprietor. The exchange ended with Murdoch assuring him he would never work on any of his papers again and Holden telling him where he could stick them. Such was the excited gravitation towards this verbal brawl that the Queen found herself momentarily deserted and ignored by the room’s inhabitants.195 Holden resigned from The Times with immediate effect without taking a penny of compensation. This was a principled stand that impressed Murdoch. Evans, meanwhile, negotiated a pay-off in excess of £250,000. After only one year’s employment, this sum was at the time considered so large that it almost (but not quite) dented Private Eye’s preening glee at his departure in its 26 March edition, unpleasantly entitled and illustrated ‘Dame Harold Evans, Memorial Issue. A Nation Mourns’.196
The generous severance terms did not stop Evans writing Good Times, Bad Times, an account of his struggles at Gray’s Inn Road which was published in 1983. Inevitably, not everyone liked and some did not recognize the picture he painted. His successor as editor, Douglas-Home, refused to read it. He did, however, see enough of the extracts in the press to pronounce, ‘that it presented a quite insurmountable question of inaccuracy’.197 The most damaging charges Evans brought both in his book and in subsequent allegations concerned his relations with the proprietor, especially in matters of editorial independence. Evans believed he had incurred Margaret Thatcher’s displeasure and that, in sacking him, Murdoch was enacting a tacit understanding with the Prime Minister as a result of her pressure to ensure his bid for Times Newspapers was not referred to the Monopolies Commission. Perhaps, as Sir John Junor had prophesied to Tina Brown, Murdoch had always intended to sack Evans after a year as soon as he had been the fall guy for unpopular changes Murdoch wanted forced upon the paper.198 Such was the regard Evans was held in at the Sunday Times, Murdoch would have had difficulty removing him from that editorship, but switching him next door suited his purposes perfectly.199 Many of the changes Evans effected were those Murdoch had himself wanted to see brought about: redundancies, the paper redesigned with new layout, sharper reporting, more sport and less donnish prevarication as a cover for laziness. On this interpretation of events, Murdoch had used Evans and then flung him overboard.
In Good Times, Bad Times, Evans stated that early in 1982 Murdoch had visited Mrs Thatcher suggesting that she find for Evans a public post so that he could be levered out of the editorship. According to Evans’s account, the Prime Minister had asked Cecil Parkinson, the Conservative Party chairman, to cast around for a job for him and Parkinson had come up with the post of chairman of the Sports Council. Mrs Thatcher, it seemed, was keen to assist Murdoch in finding an easy way to be rid of his turbulent editor.200 Evans had caused annoyance by running on his front page a story concerning a letter from Denis Thatcher to the Welsh Secretary written on Downing Street paper (though since this was where he lived, it was not clear what other address he could have given) concerning the slow pace of resolving a planning application made by a subsidiary of a company to which he was a consultant. Most commentators considered undue prominence had been given to a rather minor indiscretion (Mr Thatcher had made clear ‘obviously nothing can be done to advance the hearing’) and even the Times leader on the subject placed it third, where it belonged, below Liberal Party defence policy and political developments in Chad.201 There was also the question of why Evans had printed a letter that had been stolen from the Welsh Office and touted around by a Welsh news agency. But it hardly necessitated a Thatcher – Murdoch conspiracy to do away with him. Under Evans, The Times had opposed the Government’s obsession with narrow definitions of monetary policy but, as Tony Benn and Michael Foot could attest, it was far from being an outright opponent of the Conservatives. On most issues and in particular on trade union reform, it was supportive. Indeed, had Rees-Mogg continued as editor, it might have been every bit as sympathetic towards the SDP as the measured approach adopted by Evans. And Evans would later make clear both that, had Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands during his watch, The Times would have been stalwart in its support of Britain’s armed liberation of the islands and that the paper would probably have endorsed the Conservatives in the 1983 general election.202 If the Prime Minister wanted the removal of a Fleet Street editor it is hard to see how Evans of The Times could be top of her list. Murdoch asserted that the conspiracy theory was ludicrous, maintaining that he ‘never ever’ discussed getting rid of Evans with Mrs Thatcher. Asked about it in 2004, Cecil Parkinson stated, ‘I cannot remember this incident. I certainly have no recollections of searching for a job for Harold Evans.’203 Murdoch doubted that Thatcher and Parkinson had conjured up the Sports Council chairmanship as a way of facilitating Evans’s departu
re on the grounds that ‘they were not Machiavellian enough’ and adding, ‘I don’t think they cared about The Times. She didn’t.’204
Did Murdoch interfere in editorial policy? Donoughue disliked hearing that Murdoch thought his leader articles were too generous towards Tory ‘wets’ or Social Democrats.205 Evans chose to disregard the proprietor’s expressed hope that The Times would take a critical line on the Civil List.206 Although he certainly gave vent to uncompromising opinions when the conversation turned to political matters, Murdoch always maintained that he had never instructed Evans to take any line in his paper other than one of consistency – a steady course the proprietor claimed was lacking. Douglas-Home was incredulous that Evans could not tell the difference between Murdoch ‘sounding off’ as opposed to giving orders. In Douglas-Home’s experience, Murdoch ‘didn’t object to anyone standing up to him on policy issues’. Of course it was easier for the more robustly right-wing Douglas-Home to find this to be the case. But he went further, claiming that it was Evans who had endangered his own editorial independence by constantly ringing Murdoch for reassurance.207 No subsequent Times editor ever claimed undue pressure was applied by Murdoch on editorial policy. Murdoch did not prevent Frank Giles from pursuing a far more ‘wet’ political line at the Sunday Times, also a paper whose direction Mrs Thatcher might have been expected to take a keen interest in. Murdoch did not stop Giles from being sceptical about Britain seeking to retake the Falklands by force or from being overtly sympathetic towards the SDP in the 1983 general election. It was not for his politics that he was eventually replaced by Andrew Neil, an outsider whom Murdoch believed would breathe new energy into the Sunday title as he had once hoped Evans would do with the daily.
The History of the Times Page 16