The History of the Times

by Graham Stewart

  This assault on the Guardian had at least one bonus for The Times – it allowed it to overtake the Guardian’s circulation and move into second place in the daily broadsheet market. But the Independent’s strengths were there for all to see and few were surprised when it won the What The Papers Say ‘Newspaper of the Year’ award. Aside from the quality of the prose, the design was also crisp. The photographs were by far the best of any newspaper even if there was some truth in Wilson’s observation that an addiction to brooding clouds meant they could be described as ‘an accumulation of cumulus’. After celebrating its first birthday, its sales began to surge forward again and by late 1988 it was heading towards 400,000. The Guardian and The Times were now within reach.

  The Independent’s success was phenomenal. By the spring of 1988 it was making a profit (something The Times had proved incapable of sustaining in a century of trying to get it right) and it was even in a position to repay half of the £18 million with which it had been launched. Two years after the Independent’s arrival, The Times’s sale was still down 32,000 and the Guardian had slid 82,000. The Times, however, faced another threat that was less worrying to the Guardian. Conrad Black’s Daily Telegraph, led by an aggressive editor, Max Hastings, and Andrew Knight’s management team, was taking the painful medicine that the previous Hartwell ownership, without the salutary threat of a Wapping manoeuvre, had felt unable to administer. At last it had managed to cut almost 2400 print union employees and reap the benefit of the investment in new presses in Docklands. During 1987, the Telegraph moved out of danger, declaring a £580,000 pre-tax profit. The following year its profitability soared to £29 million. Meanwhile, in 1988, the Guardian showed it too had awoken to the need to adapt to survive with a redesign that featured a new, distinctive, sans-serif typeface. The improvement in its appearance was marked, although there was no immediate reward in circulation gains, despite the decision of its three rivals, including The Times, to increase their sale prices from twenty-five to thirty pence.

  New print works, fewer print workers, the regaining of management’s right to manage and a boom in advertising revenue on the back of the economic recovery drove the national newspapers’ surge into profitability in 1987 and 1988. In the year following Murdoch’s commencement of the Wapping revolution, the profits of the Mirror Group doubled, the Express trebled and even the long-troubled FT, ‘the pink ’un’, announced it was £40 million in the black. The pundits had argued that the Wapping revolution’s consequence would be to increase the number of newspapers, but in the immediate aftermath, only Today and the Independent survived (in the case of Today because it was bought and saved by Murdoch), while the Sunday Today, the left-wing News on Sunday and Maxwell’s London Daily News all suffered cot deaths. Yet, the market did increase, with a net rise of newspaper sales. The Independent in particular managed to generate sales to customers who had previously avoided the broadsheet market. Thanks largely to Whittam Smith’s brainchild, the broadsheet market expanded by 11 per cent at the expense of the mid-market titles.

  Easily overlooked amid the tumults of congratulation about its journalism, the Independent made one serious error from the first: it failed to pursue classified advertising, which was essential to help balance its books. Initially, it only employed six people to attract classified ads.14 This was madness. The market had jumped 20 per cent in the first six months of 1987. An opportunity to lure business away from the Guardian (which, with its attraction to the public sector, led the classified market) was squandered. Advertising revenue also poured into The Times. Assisted by the new flexibility offered by Wapping, it was able to add advert-driven supplements with relative ease. It was an area in which The Times found itself let off the hook by its new rival. Later, in 1990, at the moment when his paper was poised to overtake The Times’s circulation, Whittam Smith would make a far more serious commercial error. By venturing into the Sunday market he would shake the financial foundations of the company, inflict great damage on his original creation and give The Times an opportunity to make good its escape. All this, however, looked an improbable outcome in 1988.

  III

  The scale of the Conservatives’ 1983 election landslide and the manner in which Margaret Thatcher conducted her Cabinet were not conducive to an active parliamentary scene. Yet, Westminster reporting remained a central aspect of The Times’s political coverage. Much of the work continued to be done by the team scribbling in shorthand the transactions of the lower chamber from the Press Gallery. This was not the only vantage point. The paper’s onsite office was a cabin, precariously but perfectly perched on the roof of the Palace of Westminster, between the clock tower of Big Ben and the Commons chamber and accessible only by passing through the Press Bar.

  In April 1985, the blast at the Chernobyl nuclear reactor in Ukraine pushed the safety of the nuclear power industry sharply towards the top of the political agenda. In Britain, the Sizewell and Sellafield nuclear reprocessing plants were already a focus of concern. In December 1985, a member of the all-party Commons Select Committee on the Environment leaked to Richard Evans, a new Times lobby reporter, the draft of its chairman’s report on the disposal sites for radioactive waste. It stated that the sites were ‘primitive in the extreme’. Evans wrote up the story and it was published on 16 December. It informed readers that the Report expressed such ‘deep reservations’ about the handling of spent nuclear fuel ‘that the basis of the processing operation must be called into question’.15 There was an outcry, but for The Times the most serious response came from within the Palace of Westminster. In their private deliberations and proceedings, select committees enjoyed parliamentary privilege. This, Evans had knowingly breached. At Westminster, there was a strong view that he and the paper for which he worked should be punished.

  Preparing to face the storm, Evans enjoyed the full backing of his editor and of the Press Council. The Times pleaded the well-worn journalistic justification of acting in the public interest. Although it was true that rules had been broken, they were ‘now almost invariably unused and in general disrepute’ the leading article argued. The Times was striking a blow against ‘archaic, self-serving secrecy’.16 As far as both John Biffen, Leader of the Commons, and his Labour shadow, Peter Shore, were concerned, it was The Times that was being self-serving. By printing the leak, it had undermined the confidentiality that was essential to the private deliberations of select committees. The atmosphere in which the committees’ members, coming from the various political parties, could examine evidence impartially had been damaged. Furthermore, it was not up to a newspaper to decide which parliamentary rules to obey or what constituted public interest. How was the public interest served by publishing a draft report when two weeks later the official report could have been analysed? The once reliable Times, it was argued, had been indulging in nothing more lofty that the commercial self-interest of a ‘scoop’. In May 1986, the parliamentary Committee of Privileges voted (with only one vote against, that of Tony Benn) to recommend Evans’s expulsion from the Commons for six months and to prevent The Times from replacing him because of its ‘serious contempt of the House’.17 It would be the first time such a punishment had been carried out since 1832.

  To The Times, the reaction appeared disproportionate. The point of publishing the draft rather than waiting for the published version was to show how strong the original fears were before they were potentially watered down – possibly for political reasons – for the final version. Since it was an MP who had been responsible for the original leak, it could be maintained that the Privileges Committee would have been better searching more closely for the perpetrator rather than seeking revenge on a young journalist, a case, if ever there was one, of shooting the messenger. On 20 May, the Commons debated the Privileges Committee’s recommendations. Sir Ian Gilmour and Michael Foot provided strong support for The Times’s case, demanding to know why it was acceptable for journalists to try to discover what went on in Cabinet meetings but not in the deliberat
ions of select committees. The House agreed, dividing by 154 to 124 not to enforce the ban on Evans and The Times. Significantly, Margaret Thatcher, the party chairman Norman Tebbit, and four other Cabinet ministers voted against punishment.18 This led some conspiracy theorist to ponder whether the Prime Minister wanted not only to keep in with The Times but that she was also keen to trim the burgeoning authority of select committees’ scrutiny of the Government.19

  The Prime Minister certainly was in need of all the Fleet Street friends she could muster. Michael Heseltine, the Defence Secretary, had emerged as the most flamboyant and charismatic figure in the Cabinet. That he was no Thatcherite and had developed an alternative philosophy that borrowed from Japanese corporatism and emphasized the need to regenerate inner cities made him an ideological as well as a personal challenger for the leadership. Whenever the Prime Minister appeared vulnerable to the possibility of electoral defeat, Tory faint hearts began to contemplate turning for salvation to the Defence Secretary instead. The conflict came to a head over his opposition to the efforts of the American company Sikorsky in its bid for a sizeable stake in Westland Helicopters. Heseltine favoured a European consortium and, when Mrs Thatcher demanded he seek Cabinet Office approval before restating earlier pronouncements on Westland’s future, he dramatically walked out in the middle of a Cabinet meeting.

  The Times was sceptical from the first over Heseltine’s role in opposing the Sikorsky bid (which was later accepted by the company’s shareholders). Contrasting his attitude with his gung-ho display against CND campaigners at a cruise missile base, The Times noted that, ‘the flak-jacketed hero of Molesworth was not as determinedly pro-American as he appeared’.20 Even before his resignation, the paper’s editorial line had cast doubt on his conduct and motives: ‘It is hard to escape gracefully from Mrs Thatcher’s shadow but it is a journey which all aspiring successors will have to take at some time. The party will prefer not to choose its new organ grinder from its old monkeys and Mr Heseltine knows it.’21 Three days later he made his dramatic Cabinet walkout. The resulting crisis found the editor and his chief political correspondent at loggerheads. Tony Bevins had developed good contacts with Heseltine and on the news of his resignation assured Wilson, ‘She’s finished.’ Wilson begged to differ. Bevins resented his judgment being dismissed in this fashion and his differences with the paper widened. Surprisingly, Heseltine took heart from The Times’s leading article on his resignation, claiming in his memoirs, ‘it comes as close as any newspaper of such authority ever would to supporting what a rebel minister had done’.22 The article, entitled ‘A Very Good Resignation’, was actually referring to why his walkout might be good for his own leadership chances, rather than endorsing his attempts to interfere in Westland’s future ownership.23 The Times was far from being ready to abandon the Prime Minister, preferring instead to shift the blame onto her press secretary, Bernard Ingham, and the Trade and Industry Secretary, Leon Brittan, who leaked a letter by the Solicitor General referring to ‘material inaccuracies’ in Heseltine’s case against Sikorsky. The leading column called on Brittan to resign in order to save Mrs Thatcher’s blushes and when he did so (later that day following a hostile meeting of the backbench 1922 Committee) commented dismissively, ‘unlike Mr Heseltine, he has not left a political hole around the cabinet table. And like Mr Heseltine he has no well-prepared hole in the backbenches to which he can rest.’24 The immediate consequence, though, was that Mrs Thatcher had seen off her most deadly internal enemy – at any rate, for the time being.

  By then, Julian Haviland, the paper’s political editor, had already departed (he subsequently helped ghost Heseltine’s Where There’s A Will) while the paper’s failure to get behind the Tory Jacobite challenger brought forward Tony Bevins’s defection to the Independent. Philip Webster was promoted to chief political correspondent, Ivan Barnes became parliamentary editor and Robin Oakley became political editor.

  Oakley had spent his childhood in Northern Rhodesia (subsequently Zambia) where his father was a civil engineer. At prep school in Surrey and at Wellington College in the 1950s he had dabbled in amateur dramatics and athletics (a back injury blighted his otherwise promising javelin throwing). At Brasenose College, Oxford, in the early sixties he had also followed the horses and, enjoyed a flutter (a passion he would subsequently share with Charles Wilson). It was the desire to gain experience away from London and the Home Counties that led him to turn down a job with the Thomson Group in favour of a graduate traineeship as a subeditor in the Liverpool Daily Post where he found himself working alongside Tony Bevins and John Sergeant. He became a parliamentary lobby correspondent for the paper in 1967, moving to the ‘Crossbencher’ column of the Sunday Express three years later which involved mixing and liquid lunching with his political informants. It was also his first experience of working under an invective-peddling Scotsman (John Junor) as editor. Between 1981 and 1986 he found himself working under another strong editor in the shape of David English at the Daily Mail. Oakley had built up a reputation as a Westminster insider who was noted for his non-partisan skills as a straight reporter. As such, he began to feel that too long an association with the outspoken Daily Mail was damaging his deserved reputation for impartiality. He leapt at the opportunity to succeed Julian Haviland when Wilson offered it to him over breakfast at the Waldorf in September 1986. ‘I had dreamed of being Political Editor of The Times since my starting days on the Liverpool Daily Post’, Oakley later recalled, adding that it was ‘one of the best jobs in British journalism’.25

  Unlike Bevins, Oakley valued the workings of the ‘lobby’. The term took its name from the members’ lobby in the House of Commons where a select group of journalists was permitted to enter and approach or be approached by parliamentary contacts. Talking on ‘lobby terms’ meant that the conversation was, for the purposes of a newspaper report, non-attributable. For this reason, note taking was discouraged. Lobby correspondents were a small proportion of the total number of parliamentary journalists and, naturally, their privileges generated suspicion. Critics believed The Lobby operated as an exclusive club in which favoured journalists became part of the process by which politicians manipulated the media. One fear was that they were told information in return for pulling punches. In fact, soliciting in the members’ lobby was only one means of sharing insider information. Another principal source was the Downing Street press office, led by Bernard Ingham, which provided twice daily non-attributable briefings to political correspondents. The Independent and the Guardian withdrew from these, believing that they were designed more to mislead than illuminate. The Times, however, continued to make the most of the existing channels. Oakley believed that so long as journalists were tenacious in cross-referencing what they were told, the press office was important and that the newspapers that had excluded themselves from Ingham’s briefings wasted a lot of time catching up with what had been discussed there. Furthermore, if such briefings did not exist officially, they would inevitably manifest themselves unofficially – and with even less accountability. Indeed, the great benefit of the lobby system was that it allowed MPs of all parties to plant information in newspapers without being identified as the source. Critics regarded this as another invitation to mischief making in which self-interested individuals could bend the ear of a journalist without taking the personal responsibility of making the statement themselves. Inevitably, the device of ‘Lobby Terms’ was most useful to those MPs who wanted to harm a fellow politician or policy from within their own party. Wilson’s successor, Simon Jenkins, was wary about having The Times quote disparaging remarks about individuals without quoting the source and, consequently, this practice was cut back.26 Oakley, however, believed that if attribution were mandatory, politicians would be far more guarded – and less honest – in their conversations with journalists. The result would be a newspaper with diminished responsiveness to the political undercurrents and the creation of a barrier between politicians and journalists in which conversation was r
estricted to press statements and platitudes.

  In October 1986 the Conservatives analysed polling evidence that suggested the public believed the Government was running out of steam. They responded with a variety of new initiates with which to go into the following year’s general election. Rearranging the provision of local services was at the core. They put forward proposals to allow schools to opt out of local authority control and council tenants to choose private-sector landlords. Rates, the property-based tax levied by local government, would be replaced by a poll tax of the whole electorate. The privatization programme would also continue, the water and electricity utilities being next for sale. In December, The Times started planning for an assumed general election in either the following May or October. In the event, Mrs Thatcher announced that she would go to the country on 11 June. First there would be the endurance test of a month on the campaign trail.

  One who was not surprised by the timing of the election was Robin Oakley. With Labour highlighting Britain’s social and economic divisions, he pointed out that ‘Mrs Thatcher was determined to rob Labour of the chance of exploiting the conspicuous consumption at the Ascot race meeting in the week of June 18’. This was not as frivolous an observation as might be imagined. The emergence of the young upwardly mobile professional – or yuppie – had become the cultural phenomenon of a period of rising salaries and house prices. It was not just socialists who regarded them with loathing. Bizarrely, The Times got involved in a spat with Peregrine Worsthorne, the elegant apostle of High Toryism and editor of the Sunday Telegraph, who accused the Conservatives of supporting this ‘bourgeois triumphalism’. A Times leading article written by Peter Stothard was incredulous, noting, ‘It has been remarkable how a few young men have only to make a few hundred thousand pounds in the City and spend it on youthful pleasures for people to start saying that we are witnessing a dangerous exhibition of “bourgeois triumphalism”.’ Worsthorne responded by writing to The Times to condemn it for not urging Mrs Thatcher to disassociate herself from such displays.27 In its manifestation of heady optimism and growing opportunity – without yet a sense of noblesse oblige – Worsthorne had identified the fresh energies that Thatcherism was unleashing. It was certainly a force knocking upon the doors of a closed Establishment and, contrary to its past reputation, The Times had become more sympathetic towards prising the portals open. The paper’s 1950s advertising slogan, ‘Top People Take The Times’ had come in for much pillorying over the years. But its less well-remembered follow-up, ‘Tomorrow’s Top People Take The Times’, now appeared strangely prescient.