In fact, while Routledge was sympathetic to the miners’ plight and respected hard-left union leaders like the Scottish Communist Mick McGahey, he had little time for Arthur Scargill who he regarded as a self-serving egoist. When an article in the Daily Express identified Routledge as one of Scargill’s ‘tried and tested cronies’ who ‘flit, almost unnoticed, in and out of the union’s Sheffield headquarters, giving their advice and help’ and ‘flattering and applauding him’, both Routledge and The Times sued. Not only did the article wrongly state that he was ghost writing the NUM leader’s autobiography, it implied he was misusing his position at The Times to ‘keep the Scargill show on the road’. The Express ended up printing an unqualified apology and writing Routledge a cheque (some of the proceeds of which eventually found its way to miners’ causes).41
If any one publication did most to undermine the belief that The Times was an editorially independent newspaper, it was Harold Evans’s account of his period in Gray’s Inn Road, Good Times, Bad Times. Published in late 1983, a year and a half after its author’s sacking, it was precisely the ammunition Murdoch’s critics sought. There were those who thought it inappropriate that Evans should rush into print against a man who had just given him what all agreed was a very generous pay-off.42 But given the gravity of the book’s most important claim – that Murdoch had wielded the knife because Evans would not bow to his ways, even involving the Prime Minister in a ruse to get Evans an alternative job at the Sports Council – there was no shortage of interested readers. It was launched to a fanfare of publishing hype – embargoes, a press conference and a largely supportive one-hour Channel 4 programme, Bad Times at The Times, presented by Melvyn Bragg. It led to demands in the House of Commons for a debate on whether the terms on which Murdoch had bought the paper had been breached. Many were happy to accept it as the authoritative account of the fall of Britain’s most celebrated editor and, with him, the integrity of an illustrious newspaper. In contrast, the protestations of those Times staff who did not recognize Evans’s portrayal were easily dismissed as the self-serving statements of those still on the News International payroll. Aware that its failure to give Evans’s book adequate publicity would lend credence to its claims, The Times did not stint on reporting the furore it created and Good Times, Bad Times was dispassionately reviewed on the books page by Gordon Newton. A distinguished former editor of the FT, Newton took the view that ‘the life of an editor on a daily paper with its remorseless day by day fight against time is intolerable without the full support of staff and management’ and – echoing what Murdoch himself had told staff from the first – the only sure way to a newspaper’s independence was in its ability to return a profit. Newton concluded that, ‘the story Evans tells is a sorry one from which few if any emerge with credit’.43 It was certainly bad press for the paper.
It was not just the political slant of the paper that many believed was influenced by the owner. The launch of an upmarket form of bingo in The Times in 1984 provided further ammunition for those who felt Murdoch was having a cheapening influence on the newspaper’s demeanour. The bingo war in the tabloid press had started in 1981 with the Daily Star and had been sufficiently successful to panic the Sun and its great rival, the Daily Mirror, into following suit. Before long, the Daily Express and the Daily Mail had entered the fray. Three years later the bingo war was renewed with added ferocity, each of the tabloids promising regular £1 million winners. Not all could prosper in a circulation battle determined by competitive prize money inflation and Murdoch’s Sun triumphed over the Mirror. It seemed a propitious moment for his other most famous title to be the first broadsheet to try something similar.
The principal objective was, of course, to boost circulation, but The Times risked undermining its reputation by offering bingo cards wedged between Bernard Levin and business news. For the gimmick to work, it had to be portrayed as something more highbrow. In the previous three years, various half-baked ideas had been floated. Harold Evans had passed onto Murdoch a number of these, including the outline for a competition in which readers would send in their opinions on various subjects together with a £1 fee that went into a kitty payable to the reader ‘who, on the same form, has most nearly forecast what British public opinion thinks. The ingenious point of this is that one gets an opinion poll for free and a competition at the same time.’ The ingenious point was lost on the proprietor. Apart from anything else, Murdoch ‘felt uneasy about The Times taking money from readers in a competition’.44 Evans, however, had another idea to pass on. In July 1981 he wrote to Murdoch to tell him that a solicitor friend who acted for the football pools ‘suggests that we run an investment pool in The Times business news in which we ask people to predict the performance of various shares over the week’. By October, a putative and decidedly non-bingo-style title for the game had been devised – ‘portfolio’. But with the crisis in Gray’s Inn Road intensifying, the idea was put aside. It was not until the summer of 1984 that the name was resurrected for what would be a different share price-based competition. By then, Britain’s improving economy and rising stock exchange index ensured it suddenly appeared to be cleverly in tune with the national Zeitgeist.
Portfolio was launched on 25 June 1984. Readers were issued with a game card with eight numbers on it, the idea being to match the numbers with the share movements of a list of forty companies listed on The Times’s prices page. Prizes of £2000 would be given away, with a £20,000 bonus on Saturday to lift sales on the day of the week when circulation was traditionally at its lowest. There was no certainty that the concept would appeal to readers, or, more importantly, potential readers. The paper’s executives were nervous and it was launched only on a thirteen-week trial basis. Some £1.5 million was invested. Publicity and promotion were paramount. Television advertisements were broadcast featuring a pinstripe-suited and bowler-hatted Mel Smith, one of the comedians on the popular Not The Nine O’Clock News sketch show. Two million game cards, designed and shaped to look like a credit card, were distributed. The Sunday Times for the day before the game’s launch carried extensive advertising together with the first game cards in an envelope, ensuring that the majority of Sunday Times readers who did not normally read The Times were directly targeted. Cash prizes for the newsagents who supplied the winners encouraged shopkeepers to push Portfolio upon their customers.45
The unease among Times executives over whether it would capture the public’s imagination was matched by disquiet among journalists over the very idea of running such a gimmick. Following a meeting of the NUJ chapel, it was decreed that no journalist was prepared to write any ‘news item’ promoting it. In the event, the first winner proved suitably newsworthy and ideal for the paper’s attempts to stay ‘upmarket’: Erik Feldman, a seventeen-year-old at Harrow School. The front page showed him being held aloft by fellow pupils waving their boaters and the accompanying (unattributed) article informed readers that The Times was the most read newspaper among current Harrovians.46 This was exactly the sort of puff dressed up as news that many sceptical journalists feared.
Much of the rest of Fleet Street reacted to The Times’s descent into City bingo with a mixture of amusement and faux head shaking that a once great newspaper had sunk so low. ‘It is too painful even to discuss what has become of “The Thunderer” ’ opined the Daily Mail. ‘Let’s just say it’s a good top people’s comic.’ With a little more mirth, the Observer drew attention to The Times’s attempts to dress up the game as if it was something respectable and wondered when the paper would be launching a ‘Spot the Grouse’ competition or a new page three ‘Legal Lovelies’ (complete with their briefs, of course). In fact, The Times had rather more form in the area of promotional gimmickry that those who put it all down to the supposedly populist tastes of the Australian owner realized. Throughout the 1970s, the newspaper had dreamed up competitions inadequately masked by an embarrassing veneer of literary pretence: in 1970 it was ‘Rhyme for The Times’; in 1972 there was a competition
to write a Christmas carol that mentioned six of the advertisers featured in the paper’s festive gift guide (the commercialization of Christmas came early that year) and, most contrived of all, a ‘teaser’ to nominate an appropriate present for three members of the March family in Little Women while selecting a quotation from either Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations or the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations that best summed up the choices. Given this pedigree, Portfolio appeared refreshingly honest.
Perhaps surprisingly, the two newspapers that refrained from a full-scale assault on Portfolio were The Times’s principal rivals, the Guardian and the Daily Telegraph. They were perhaps conscious of the danger of giving it publicity and aware of the possibility that, if it worked, they might end up having to try something similar themselves. The Times had been closing its circulation gap with the Guardian over the course of the past two years. Yet Guardian readers did not desert in droves in order to play a bowler-hat version of bingo and sales of the left-leaning paper were dented by only seven thousand in the first six months after Portfolio’s launch.47 Where the game did help The Times gain ground was against the market-leading Daily Telegraph. This emphasized a trend that was already apparent before the promotion was launched. Indeed, The Times had been slowly gaining ground almost continuously since Murdoch had bought the paper and in the summer of 1983 had benefited from a £1.5 million television advertising campaign. In the year to June 1984 (before the launch of Portfolio), The Times’s circulation rose 13 per cent against a broadsheet average of 3 per cent. This surge was well timed to take advantage of the improving economic health of the country. Net advertising revenue was up 31 per cent with display advertising volume increasing by more than a third. Times Newspapers was still trading at a post-tax loss but the gap was closing and, for once, it was partly due to improved finances at The Times.48
The Times’s average daily sale in the six months before Portfolio’s launch was 381,000. In the first six months after the game commenced, the average soared by 20 per cent to 457,000. In the first half of 1985 it rose further to 480,000 where, despite the decision to continue with the game, it reached a plateau. This was an extraordinary achievement, particularly since it augmented what was already a period of sustained improvement in the paper’s circulation. The result was that, three years after Douglas-Home assumed the editorship, the paper had gained nearly 180,000 extra sales, an increase of 60 per cent on the position he inherited in the autumn of 1981. Having been first overtaken by the Guardian in 1962, The Times was back in second place in Britain’s broadsheet sales. Indeed, its circulation was now at the highest in its two hundred year history. Even those who disliked the manner in which the increase had, in part, been attained could not hold back from a measure of rejoicing at this simple fact. Nonetheless, there was room for caution: it remained to be seen whether ‘Portfolio’ was gaining readers for the paper who, impressed by the accompanying journalistic content, would convert permanently once the game was dropped. What, if there was one, was the paper’s post-Portfolio strategy?
In planning ahead, The Times found itself asking a familiar question – should it push for more readers and challenge the Daily Telegraph for dominance of the broadsheet market, or refrain from stretching itself further and entrench itself around its core readership and its historic role as the journal for predominately London-based ‘top people’. The latter option had the advantage that it would involve less change to the essential character of the newspaper and took account of the fact that the more lucrative advertisers preferred to target papers whose readers had the most disposable income. Unfortunately, from the 1960s onwards, this A-B social category had been targeted with increasing effectiveness by the FT. But there were problems too with the going for growth option. When Roy Thomson bought The Times in 1966 he had decided that the answer lay with expansion. Policies were enacted that ensured circulation duly rose from just over 250,000 in 1965 to 430,000 in 1969. Financially, the consequences were disastrous. Advertisers were not interested in targeting the nation’s undergraduates. Thus, while the advertising rates failed to generate the anticipated return, higher promotion and production costs ensured that each 6d copy of The Times cost Thomson two shillings to produce. This was an unsustainable policy and the paper had to be allowed to fall back towards a third of a million daily sales. Unfortunately, this switch did not ensure a return to profitability either and Murdoch was not the sort of proprietor who was content to act merely as custodian of a crumbling monument. While acknowledging the problems Thomson had met when he attempted expansion, the paper, it seemed, had little option but to go once again for growth. Portfolio was the motor for this, but it was accompanied by a decision to attract additional custom by keeping the cover price low. In 1980, Thomson’s sale prospectus for The Times had suggested that the paper would have a cover price of thirty-five pence by April 1983. Yet, News International opted to hold it at twenty pence until February 1985 when a modest three pence was added to the price.
The Douglas-Home Times sought to maintain traditional standards, but with sharper news focus, broader coverage and a popular game all for a below-market price. This was clearly a growth rather than retrenchment strategy. The problem was that Gray’s Inn Road had hit a production ceiling set by technical difficulties and union restrictive practices that resulted in terrible distribution. Unless these issues could be sorted out, further expansion was impossible.
Ironically, it was a decision to modernize that had made matters worse. Since its first edition in 1785, The Times, like all successive papers, had been typeset in hot metal. In 1975, Thomson had taken the decision to move to computer-set photocomposition. Six years elapsed attempting to put that decision into practice. The process finally got underway during Harold Evans’s editorship and, by the time Douglas-Home took the chair, almost all the paper was computer-set. On the night of 30 April 1982 and accompanied by the strains of a bagpipe, the last page ever produced by hot metal received its ‘banging out’. The Times duly became the first national broadsheet to have an entirely electronic composing room. In this it was four years ahead of the Telegraph and Guardian and six years ahead of the FT.49
The results were dire. By the summer of 1982, ten thousand copies a day were being lost due to the problems photocomposition created. During May, not a single paper caught the 10.45 p.m. train to the Northeast while Scotland and Wales received an intermittent service and the sight of a copy in Belfast or Dublin before mid-morning became a unifying spectacle of rarity. On some days, the entire distribution for Europe (nine thousand copies a day) had to be cancelled due to the lateness of the papers leaving Gray’s Inn Road. It was a shambles. The unions had retained their ‘closedshop’ control over those who keyed in the text. Despite a full programme of training, many proved to be not overly dexterous. There was little attempt to accommodate management’s requirements. One hundred and fifty-five typesetters were employed in the composing room and in August fifty-four of them were simultaneously on holiday.50 Even at other times those that were at their keyboards were supposed to proofread what they were keying in, but they were getting so late in finishing that their only chance of meeting the deadline was to skip the checking stage. Hiring additional proofreaders to stand over the typesetters would have turned the ‘new technology’ into a yet more labour-intensive one. The result was that only a quarter of the paper was being properly proofread, with the law reports, leaders, court and features getting priority and the news pages coming last.51 Bill O’Neill had to be recalled to sort it out. In the meantime, readers had to put up with an extraordinary number of spelling and other mistakes in the paper, all of which undermined its reputation for accuracy. If The Times was to be believed, the Chancellor of the Exchequer was someone called ‘Sir Howe’, the Prime Minister regularly ‘mad a statement to the Commons’ and her Education Secretary was a ‘Fellow of All Saints’.52 These embarrassing errors were compounded by ongoing production problems in the print hall that left some editions so far out of register th
at text and pictures were blurred. It was all a bit unfortunate for a paper being promoted with the advertising slogan, ‘The Times puts it all in focus’.53
The History of the Times Page 27