The History of the Times

by Graham Stewart

  Moving to Wapping certainly helped to secure The Times’s survival, but it was not just a victory for it, News International and its shareholders. Before Wapping, the print unions had a stranglehold over the management of all Britain’s national newspapers. After Wapping, they had a toehold. As Hugo Young, the Guardian journalist who was no admirer of Murdoch’s politics, nonetheless conceded in 1993, ‘What he did for the economics of newspaper publishing, by killing the power of the worst-led trade unions in modern history, has benefited every journalist, advertiser and reader.’120 At the moment when the siege of Wapping began, The Times’s rivals had been attempting to move to new print premises in Docklands but were frustrated by their unions refusal to accept terms that would make the move economic. Wapping enabled them to turn the tables on unions who, overnight, awoke to discover the price for not being shut out entirely was to concede much of their old bargaining power and workforce. The management at the Daily Mail’s owners, Associated Newspapers, accepted that Wapping ‘was a great help to us. When that happened, if there was any reluctance of our people to come along with us, it disappeared.’121 Consequently, the company was able to cut its workforce by half without any loss to the production of its papers. Similarly, when the Daily Telegraph moved from Fleet Street to Docklands, its management was able to cut the print workforce from 1650 to 678, a wage bill saving of £24 million. The FT also made huge economies when it moved its printing works to Docklands in 1988. Its chief executive, Frank Barlow, had argued that the move was essential because of the ‘huge cost advantage’ that Wapping had given Murdoch.122 In fighting for his own papers, Murdoch had won a victory for all national newspapers. Of course it might be argued that these results could have been achieved without the Wapping gamble, but the failure of Eddy Shah’s innovative and brave venture, Today – which eventually had to be rescued from collapse by Murdoch – suggests the process was far from inevitable. The Independent would have been launched regardless, but – without Wapping – its founders would have been confronted by many of the industry’s old problems. There is no certainty the little infant would have prospered under such rough midwifery. In the opinion of Ivan Fallon, its chief executive eighteen years later, ‘The Independent would not have been possible without the move to Wapping.’123

  The battle of Wapping won a larger war for all Britain’s newspapers. But it is worth contemplating an imaginary scenario where, despite being in a weaker position, other newspaper proprietors did eventually manage, somehow, to overcome the grip of their unions, leaving Murdoch hamstrung in the old world of Fleet Street industrial relations. In this eventuality, it would have been The Times that would have found itself plunged into a perilously uncompetitive position, smashed to pieces between a new unencumbered Independent and a Daily Telegraph rejuvenated by its chief executive, Andrew Knight, both newspapers able to deploy the ways and means to consign ‘The Thunderer’ to the scrap heap. Wapping also prevented this contingency. It ensured a newspaper that was bigger, quicker, sharper and with fewer mistakes. It offered the prospect of a paper that could even become profitable. It was certainly hard to argue with the most easily measurable consequence – in the decade before the move to Wapping, The Times had lost 96.5 million copies through industrial action. In the decade following the move, it lost none.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  INDEPENDENT CHALLENGES

  Competition from the Independent;

  the High Tide of Thatcherism; Business; Sport

  I

  On 7 October 1986, while The Times was still under siege at Wapping, a new direct rival struck at its heart. The Independent was the first national quality daily to be launched since the First World War. Funded by more than a hundred investors, it had no single proprietor. Its name, backed by a Saatchi & Saatchi advertising campaign based around the slogan ‘It is, are you?’ emphasized its refreshing freedom from the traditional world of press barons and private agendas. This was something that appealed to those who had never cared for Rupert Murdoch, the man or his methods.

  There were good financial reasons why nobody had started a national broadsheet for so many years and the venture was, to put it mildly, a risky one. Max Hastings, the editor of the Daily Telegraph, sent the Independent a launch present of a wreath. Charles Wilson was not so cocky. On its first day, the Independent sold 600,000 copies – 130,000 more than The Times had been selling in the preceding days. A desperate fight for circulation would now commence. Just when it looked as if moving to Wapping and cutting costs was going to deliver The Times from decades of losses, a rival had arrived that risked taking away its market altogether.

  The Independent was the brainchild of Andreas Whittam Smith, the Daily Telegraph’s City editor and two Telegraph leader writers, Stephen Glover and Matthew Symonds. Whittam Smith had long been talked about as a future Telegraph editor but, as time passed, a feeling that he was being passed over and that the Hartwell family were running the paper towards bankruptcy encouraged him to look to new horizons. With Glover and Symonds he had begun to plan a new paper in 1985. Given the lax regime at the Telegraph (leader writers were not expected to grace the office until well into the afternoon) Glover and Symonds were able to devote large amounts of their day to planning the new paper. It was impossible not to admire the daring of this gang of three. They were accomplished journalists, but had no experience or knowledge about how to finance, produce or distribute their product. Yet, there was no need for them to mislead potential investors about their experience because nobody in the City thought to press them on the matter. They were taken on trust. ‘The truth is,’ Glover wrote later, ‘that the world will nearly always take you at your own apparent estimation of yourself. We were engaged in a glorious bluff.’1

  The three visionaries were assisted by two enormous strokes of good fortune. The first was that by the time they were ready with their product, they could learn from the mixed performance of Eddy Shah’s mid-market Today which had been launched seven months earlier in March 1986. They certainly would not be seeking to reproduce the technological hiccups that marred Today’s early editions. The Independent was not, in any case, troubled by Today’s position in the newspaper market since its own primary focus was to gain disaffected readers from the three main broadsheets. The far greater stroke of good fortune was Murdoch’s Wapping revolution that (coincidentally) got underway shortly after Whittam Smith, Glover and Symonds announced their own intentions to launch their paper. By destroying the bargaining power of the print unions and clearing the way for the introduction of new technology, Murdoch slashed the cost of starting up rival newspapers. In consequence, the Independent was launched on the back of a mere £18 million with a £3 million overdraft. This was less than a third of the start-up cost of the Mail on Sunday in the pre-Wapping environment of 1982.2 In common with Today, the Independent contracted its printing out to four (later three) separate companies. Although these still employed union labour, the Independent refused to employ any print union members itself, despite the attempts of the NGA to secure a roll in electronic page make-up. As if reducing the cost base and dismantling the union stranglehold was not enough, Murdoch’s Wapping battle assisted the Independent in a further, more negative, respect. The hardships and ill feelings created by having to work in siege conditions behind barbed wire and the scorn of other journalists ensured that there was a ready supply of disaffected Times and Sunday Times journalists looking to be tempted into Whittam Smith’s feathered perch.

  All national newspapers have a continual turnaround of staff but during the Wapping strike the number seeking to depart increased sharply. The first wave bore up the dozen refuseniks who had declined to cross the picket line from the first. They were soon augmented by a continuous trickle of those who subsequently found the courage of their convictions (especially when there were other journalistic jobs offered them) and by those who hated the torment of crossing a battle zone every day to get into work and saw no immediate likelihood of peace breaking out. Wilson
was a galvanizing and inspiring figure whose personal courage was recognized by all those who saw him work to bring the newspaper out under the trying conditions of a vicious siege. He was not always so good at recognizing that many members of staff were less keen to spoil for a fight. This was evident from his upbeat assessment that working from behind the wire at Wapping ‘had about as much effect as whether or not it was raining’ for the life and work of the journalists trapped there.3 Even for those content to be spat on while making their way through the front gate to work, Wilson’s fighting talk was clearly overoptimistic. The Labour Party’s refusal even to talk to Times journalists and the wariness with which many of those of a left liberal sensibility treated those associated, however indirectly, with Rupert Murdoch did make journalists’ lives more difficult. In the first six months of the Wapping siege, 150 journalists left the four News International titles based there. More than thirty of them had worked for The Times. When in June 1986 the company placed an advertisement in the UK Press Gazette soliciting applications for ‘opportunities for general and specialist writers and production staff to add to our success’4 the appeal read rather more like a desperate plea.

  Among the Wapping refuseniks, the loss of Paul Routledge was the highest-profile casualty. Routledge had not wanted to resign, telling the press that he had always had ‘a strong feeling for The Times. It was the paper I always wanted to work for, and I still do.’5 But he resolutely obeyed the NUJ’s instructions not to work at – or file to – Wapping until the dispute was settled on satisfactory terms. Wilson was reluctant to sack him. Instead Routledge was suspended without pay but with modest expenses to sustain him at his posting in Singapore where Douglas-Home had installed him as South East Asia correspondent. The dispute’s prolongation frayed tempers and when Routledge, having left Singapore without permission, chanced to see a Tamil Tiger outrage at Colombo airport and filed an eyewitness report for the Observer, Wilson’s patience snapped.6 Sacked, Routledge proceeded to heckle former colleagues on their way into Wapping, an act that cost him several friendships. After toying with working for Maxwell’s short-lived London Daily News, he defected to the Observer where The Times Diary editor, Angela Gordon, had also set up shop.

  It was the number of his journalists being poached by the Independent even before it had been launched that especially worried Wilson. Why were they leaving good jobs on one of the world’s most famous newspapers for positions on a paper that did not yet even exist? At Easter, Wilson managed to escape with his family for a brief holiday in Lanzarotte, the first break he had felt able to take in eighteen bruising months. No sooner had he arrived than Mike Hoy, the managing editor, started telephoning him to say defections to the Independent were beginning in earnest. By the Friday of his supposedly relaxing family holiday, nine had departed. That day, Wilson was distracted from his sun lounger by a call from the proprietor. ‘Hi, Rupert, how are you?’ he said, vainly trying to sound upbeat. A growl down the line answered, ‘Frustrated. Frustrated because you’re there and I’m here.’7 Murdoch had arrived at Wapping to find his editor absent and the office filled with rumours of defections. It looked bad.

  In the end, seventeen Times journalists directly defected. Wilson was not concerned by some of the departures, but he was sorry to lose Anthony Bevins, the political correspondent who had been an important factor in The Times’s Westminster reporting since 1981. Bevins’s leaving was not a surprise (he had clashed with Wilson over the paper’s anti-Heseltine handling of the Westland crisis) but it was a disappointment. An LSE-educated Liverpudlian, he was the son of Harold Macmillan’s Postmaster-General. (Reginald Bevins had been the only working-class member in that Government and had put up with a lot of condescension for his troubles.) This treatment and two years of voluntary work in Bengal had given Tony Bevins a valuable sense of detachment from the ruling few. His dogged style had been a boon to The Times and his disrespect for the hypocrisies of the lobby system and its non-attributable briefings ensured he fitted in well as the first political editor of the Independent. There, he was reunited with the former Times industrial affairs staff, Don McIntyre, David Felton and Barrie Clement, all of whom had opted to refuse to work at Wapping from the first. Wilson was deeply concerned when told that Miles Kington was also thinking of defecting to the Independent. He personally met him at the airport and whisked him away for lunch at the Savoy Grill as a desperate ploy to dissuade him. He failed. After nearly six years of writing his ‘Moreover’ column five times a week for the paper, it was the first time Kington had actually met Wilson.8

  There were other high-profile defections. The fashion editor, Suzy Menkes, departed for the Independent. Sarah Hogg, the economics editor for the past three years, left to become the new paper’s business and finance editor. She told Wilson that she had not felt she was part of his inner circle. Married to the Tory politician Douglas Hogg, she later became head of the Downing Street Policy Unit to John Major in 1990. In truth, Wilson’s inner circle was momentarily contracting. Colin Webb announced his intention to resign the deputy editorship in order to become editor-in-chief of the Press Association. With Webb’s departure, Wilson decided to create two deputy editors. One was Peter Stothard who had fulfilled the promise that his mentor, Harold Evans, had first detected in him. His priorities continued to be comment and leading articles. The other was John Bryant. This was an appointment that led to a marked cooling in relations between Wilson and Mike Hoy who, until that moment, had worked amicably with Wilson and might have thought himself a contender for the post. Bryant, however, proved to be an excellent choice. Brought up in the West Country and grammar school-educated, he was, like Wilson, a highly professional ‘news man’ who, following an apprenticeship at the Edinburgh Evening News, had worked at the Daily Mail. Both editor and deputy shared a love of sport. While Wilson loved racing, Bryant was an Oxford athletics Blue and a close friend of Roger Bannister, Christopher Chataway and many of the great figures of British track and field. Knowing that Bryant was trying to extract himself from the Mail in order to join the Independent, Wilson acted fast to bring him to Wapping instead.

  While Bryant would prove a worthy replacement for Webb, it was a bad time for Wilson to be falling out with other members of staff. Whatever the bullish persona he attempted to portray on the outside, Wilson was privately deeply worried about the imminent launch of the Independent. He knew that Wapping and its accompanying violence had tarnished The Times’s image and that Murdoch – painted as an editorially interfering monster by rival newspapers – was the unspoken target of the Independent’s title and advertising campaign. It was annoying, given the extent to which Murdoch’s Wapping revolution had made the self-regarding ingénue possible, but there was never likely to be much love lost in the circumstances of a circulation war. Bruce Matthews told Wilson he was overreacting.9 Many industry insiders still thought the new newspaper would quickly implode. The Financial Times’s Raymond Snoddy predicted ‘Rupert Murdoch will strangle it in its cot before it gets a chance to wave its rattle’.10

  II

  When the Guardian’s editor, Peter Preston, held the first edition of the Independent in his hands he breathed a sign of relief and observed, ‘It looks a bit like The Times of five years ago.’ It was rather as he had suspected. In April 1986, John Biffen, the Leader of the Commons, had told a lunch held by Guardian editorial staff that he had been the guest to lunch at The Times the previous week. They had been apprehensive about the Independent’s launch although they had no need to be while he found the Guardian laid back even though they ought not to be.11 In the event, Preston’s first response was both right and wrong. He was wrong to be relaxed about it. Within eighteen months of the Independent’s launch, the Guardian had lost 10 per cent of its market. By 1988 the new rival had, from nothing, come to within 100,000 of the Guardian’s diminishing 474,000 circulation. Yet, Preston was right to the extent that it had the feel (although with far better print reproduction) of William Rees-Mogg’s Times. T
hose who preferred that product were part of its new market and this was a worrying development for Wilson. The attack on The Times’s territory came not only in the breadth of the Independent’s foreign reporting (with twelve correspondents posted around the globe) but also in the strength of its obituaries and law reports. Many Times journalists resented Rees-Mogg’s decision to be an Independent columnist, seeing it as a slap in the face to his old paper. Others thought it an indictment not on the past editor but on the current paper.

  Inevitably, the Independent could not keep all the readers that turned to it out of curiosity on its first day. By November, its sales had fallen back to 275,000. The Times had lost about ten thousand copies since the arrival of the new competitor and was selling 478,000 a day.12 In the circumstances, the old paper was holding up surprisingly well against the new, making some of the criticisms of Wilson’s editorship appear disingenuous. Wilson, too, began to regain his confidence. He felt the Independent’s refusal to report on the monarchy was an own goal – ‘well, for Times readers that’s a nonsense!’13 The Independent’s founders believed the Telegraph had weaknesses and that they could take a large share of its readers. It was easy to understand why they worked on this assumption. Not only had their own experience of working at the Telegraph made them especially aware of its shortcomings, the statistics markedly pointed to its vulnerability. Between 1980 and 1986, the Telegraph had lost almost 300,000 readers while The Times had added 172,000 and the Guardian 150,000. Vast though the Telegraph’s circulation might be, it was one that was visibly ebbing with each month that passed. Oddly, this was the respect in which Whittam Smith, Glover and Symonds miscalculated. The Telegraph proceeded to suffer the fewest losses to the new paper. Indeed, by the time of the Independent’s first birthday, the Telegraph’s circulation was actually higher than it had been twelve months previously. The FT was also undamaged. It was Peter Preston who had the least grounds for passing on birthday congratulations. The crusade for the centre and centre-left readership proved to be the real battleground and it was from the Guardian that the Independent made the most gains.