Mortgage payments dominated the explosion in personal credit. Second mortgages were becoming common and unsecured lending was on the rise. Home ownership leapt from 57 to 68 per cent during the 1980s. Council-house building programmes were run down (a description that also fitted the estates that remained while local government fought vainly for funds). The ‘right to buy’ had proved one of the Thatcher Government’s most popular policies with the working class, allowing 1.75 million council tenants to buy their homes between 1980 and 1997. For the first time manual, semi-skilled and clerical workers found themselves able to own their own homes, a prospect unthinkable to previous generations. Renting accommodation, which had been the norm for most working-class households, started to be seen as a mark of failure and many of the council estates that remained deteriorated into ‘sink’ estates of deprivation and hopelessness. While the majority made the most of their new-found opportunities to prosper through property, the social division evident for those left behind frightened and depressed the critics of Thatcher’s ‘Home Owning Democracy’.
Part of the problem was that, while the Government took action to dismantle local authorities’ grip on housing provision, it was slower to encourage a rejuvenation of the private rental market. Private rent controls had existed since the latter stages of the First World War and were not relaxed until the end of the 1980s. The American libertarian Janet Daley, who began writing for The Times in 1988, maintained that it was ‘curious that a party devoted to the free market should commit itself so heavily to a system that rewards investment in property (which stultifies the economy), as opposed to investment in industry (which helps it grow)’. The Tories’ Mortgage Income Tax Relief had discouraged mobility, she argued, by tying down home owners while Labour’s security of tenure for tenants had wrecked the private rental market. The result was a workforce immobilized by the restriction of mortgage or council house.39
For most Times readers though, the priority was either to get onto the property ladder or stay on top of it. Households’ paper value soared. Some looked at the soaring prices and surmised that the boom was unsustainable. But the steeply rising gradient only encouraged those determined to invest yet more heavily before the price went up again. It was a busy few years for The Times’s property correspondent, Christopher Warman, who held the post between 1983 and 1991. Warman had joined the paper in 1965 and, having been ‘glassed’ during the 1986 printers strike, was revered among fellow journalists as the Holy Martyr of Wapping. Yet, while he busied himself with separating genuine property opportunities from the stately piles of estate agents’ propaganda that awaited him each morning, the paper, inconceivably, failed to add any extra chairs to the property desk. In doing so, it allowed itself to play third violin behind the FT and the Telegraph’s property pages. Like travel journalism, the property section was an obvious target for advertising, and this was an avenue the commercial arm of the paper never properly exploited during the 1980s boom. Even the property supplement that began to appear in the Saturday section had a temporary feel about it, being written largely by freelances. Yet, the soaring property prices were central to the Thatcher revolution and its aspirations for a home-owning democracy. While householders believed they held an ever-appreciating asset, their consumer confidence was buffeted. The Times’s core readership in London and the Home Counties was exactly where the property boom was most evident. In particular, City bonuses fuelled the speculation yet it was many months after ‘Black Wednesday’ before talk of a collapse became widespread. In the meantime, Warman was left alone to report on the seemingly ever-expanding opportunities.
Credit cards were also fuelling consumer aspirations. In 1980, banks were lending £934 million of a £2093 million turnover on credit card accounts. By the end of the decade, the figures were £6600 million and £20b million. When the Thatcher Government had come to power in 1979, three million Briton’s (7 per cent of the population) owned shares. A decade later the figure stood at nine million (25 per cent). Many had bought into the privatized utilities like British Telecom and British Gas and, while most pocketed a quick profit, by the end of the decade BT was still 20 per cent-owned by private investors. More importantly, it was offering a far better service to its customers. The Times met the growing market for personal financial advice more successfully than it did the property boom and on Saturdays a family money section was edited by Jon Ashworth.
Critics viewed the economic and social changes of the 1980s as a mirage built on nothing more substantial than rising house prices and deepening personal debt. Yet these were consequences not causes. The increasing share in employment and wealth of the professions and the service sector at the expense of manual labour was profoundly changing the country. Assessed by the job of the household’s head, a third of Britain was middle class in 1980. By 1989 that figure had passed 40 per cent.
In his Budget of March 1988, Lawson cut the standard rate of income tax to 25 per cent. It had not been this low since before the Second World War and was now almost 30 per cent lower than it had been when Mrs Thatcher first took office. Amid squeals from the Opposition benches that it was socially divisive to cut it, the upper rate of income tax was reduced from 60 per cent to 40 per cent. The Prime Minister was convinced this was a moral as well as an economic policy. In May 1988 she outraged her opponents by addressing the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland with a ‘Sermon on the Mound’ that pointed out that no one would have remembered the Good Samaritan if he had only had good intentions. It was because he had money that he could help.
On the desks of the City’s counting houses, The Times had ceded supremacy in business and financial coverage to the Financial Times in the 1960s. However, the economic boom of the mid-1980s provided it with an opportunity to regain ground. Wilson had long wanted to produce a two-section paper that would be split between a first section of news and comment and a second section of business and sport. Expanding the latter two almost necessitated creating two sections of equal length. The move to Wapping and its less restrictive practices offered the chance to realize his aim. He flew to Hollywood to show Murdoch the proposed redesign. Murdoch approved the decision and the extra expense it involved. Here, it seems, was a mechanism in which the paper could expand its coverage on all fronts. But when the two-section paper was launched the reaction was extraordinarily negative. ‘I got more letters than I had ever had before,’ recalled Wilson. ‘I was very worried.’ Flying over to New York, he went to explain to Murdoch that he believed the two-section paper was the right idea but the reader response had been almost universally terrible. Murdoch told him to do whatever he felt right in his bones, promising to back him in that decision. Over the course of the next decade and the various perceptions of three different editors, The Times demonstrated remarkable inconsistency in making its mind up whether to arrive daily on the newsstands as a single fat paper or a couple of slim ones and, if the latter, which bits should go in which section. None of the presentational forms ever quite seemed entirely satisfactory.
For Wilson, it certainly appeared to be the right moment to be expanding the business pages. At their head was the debonair figure of Kenneth Fleet who had joined the paper in 1983. He was a well-rounded man, born in 1929 and educated at grammar school and the LSE, who was as impressive at the crease as on the ballroom floor and was particularly interested in the theatre (he was director of the Young Vic from 1976 to 1983 and chairman of the Chichester Festival Theatre from 1985 to 1993). He had pioneered a style of financial journalism that was accessible to the ordinary reader at the Daily Telegraph before going on to succeed Nigel Lawson as the City editor of its Sunday sibling. However, he was the sort of editor who reserved his thoughts for his column rather than provide managerial leadership for his department. This was unfortunate since the time for strategic thinking on how to regain the paper’s business profile had clearly arrived. During the mid-eighties, the City was engulfed by takeover mania. The biggest attempt came in December 1985 with Ha
nson Trust’s £1.9 billion bid for Imperial Group (which eventually succeeded). ‘Big Bang’ took place on 27 October 1986. Within a decade, ‘gentlemanly capitalism’ would be no more. American and German banks became predominant while one by one the old family names succumbed. The City of London began to bear comparison to the Wimbledon Lawn Tennis tournament – Britain provided the desirable venue in which foreigners came to compete and win the trophies. It was nonetheless a process that helped ensure London’s eminence as a world financial sector. To chronicle this, The Times had the largest team of financial journalists outside the FT but ever since the decapitation of The Times business news in 1982 it was an accomplished fiddle player straining to gain recognition besides the virtuoso first violinist of the ‘pink ’un’. Nothing The Times produced could, for example, equal the FT’s impressive forty-eight-page ‘Big Bang’ survey of what it rightly called ‘The City Revolution’. This was despite the fact that Wilson wanted his paper to get in on the act and to prioritize financial over industrial coverage. ‘Charlie was a typical bull market investor,’ reflected Graham Searjeant, a financial editor who had seen it all before.40
In the autumn of 1987, Britain was hit by two global forces. On Thursday 15 October, great storms were unleashed upon an unsuspecting southern England. With equal surprise, on the following Monday the stock market experienced the greatest crash of the twentieth century.
After the event, the signs were of course clearer to read than beforehand. On Wall Street, the Dow Jones Index had reached a peak of 2772.42 in August after which it had been sliding. When the New York markets opened on 19 October, the index nose-dived 508.32 points to 1738.41. This represented a decline of 22.6 per cent that compared unfavourably with the 1929 crash of 13.2 per cent. By chance, Christopher Warman had flown out by Concorde to New York to meet the property developer Paul Reichmann on the day of the collapse. Reichmann was financing the Canary Wharf development in London’s Docklands and wanted to show Warman what he had achieved in the Battery Park financial district of New York. The view The Times property correspondent was given of the Merrill Lynch trading floor that morning did not give him great confidence in Reichmann’s financial future.41 As it did with everyone else, the collapse caught Kenneth Fleet off guard. He was at a dinner at the Savoy as news of events on Wall Street came through. With his usual composure, he telephoned through his copy from the dinner before returning to Wapping, still in his dinner jacket, to finesse his response for the late editions. When the City awoke to do business, it followed in Wall Street’s wake, dropping 10.6 per cent and wiping £50 billion off share prices on what became known as ‘Black Monday’.
The losses were staggering and even those who could not yet calculate the full economic implications could grasp that a cultural phenomenon, the yuppie, was in the process of being killed off. Charles Bremner filed from New York, where brokers in their familiar red braces and horn-rimmed spectacles stood around in the evening ‘trying to come to terms with the unthinkable – the roaring Eighties, the years of easy prosperity, could be over’. A mixture of bewilderment, gallows humour and defiance appeared to be carrying them through towards the uncertainties of the following day’s trading.42 Some estimates put a figure on the paper loss of the stock market crash at a trillion pounds (£1,000,000,000,000). Only Tokyo escaped the share collapse unharmed. At Wapping, Kenneth Fleet soon became one of the casualties. Wilson felt the business editor had lost his former sharpness, although he stayed on to help in the area where he had come best to perform, as a columnist on the City pages, until 1990. In place of Fleet as business editor, David Brewerton was brought in from the Independent. Progress was made with support from John Bell, who provided extensive City news coverage. For some, however, these improvements were not without cost and the atmosphere on the business desk became less agreeable. Seriousness was confused with joylessness. In this respect, the City orientated focus continued to be at the expense of a more rounded survey of a business community that, after a brief renaissance, was about to batten down the hatches for another recession.
V
In editing newspapers, Charles Wilson was a firm believer in the former England manager Alf Ramsay’s doctrine that winning teams were those that got it right at the back. In The Times’s case, this meant improving the sports pages. Wilson looked to the Daily Mail for expertise and found it in that paper’s much admired sports editor, Tom Clarke. Hiring Clarke proved one of Wilson’s shrewder appointments. Despite the quality of its writers, the paper’s sports desk had long been constrained by decades of under-investment. Norman Fox had run a tight ship and necessarily so. When in 1985 his deputy, Richard Williams, was seconded to help set up the move to Wapping, Fox had spent the last months before his retirement with a new deputy, John Goodbody. It was symptomatic of the paper’s attitude that Goodbody initially held a position of such responsibility while on a freelance contract and was still filing copy on football and athletics for the Guardian. Wilson recognized the need for The Times to invest more full-heartedly in Goodbody’s talents and, in recognizing his versatility, encouraged him to find sports stories that had the characteristics necessary for front-page treatment. Among other changes made, Richard Evans switched from the parliamentary lobby to the other inside track of the Turf. Evans, indeed, ran a syndicate of Times journalists – that included Wilson and Clarke – behind a racehorse named (appropriately for sporting hacks) Sunday for Monday. Sadly, it did not prove to have much by way of winning form, a fact that at least ensured there was no ethical dilemma over tipping it on the racing pages. With Wilson’s support, Clarke was able to innovate. Leading figures from the sporting world were commissioned as pundits and commentators with an ‘End Column’ provided as their forum. Previously, the paper had not taken seriously the idea that players might become columnists. Among those called upon to provide expert analysis was the Aston Villa (and soon to be England) manager, Graham Taylor, for the 1990 World Cup. Only in one area did Wilson want to see less coverage. Those who thought the editor was one of nature’s born pugilists were taken aback when he went so far as to suggest The Times should cease reporting on boxing, a sport for which he had distaste. After a discussion, Wilson gave way. It would, for instance, have been difficult for the paper to pretend an Olympic sport was not taking place, particularly if one of its famous – or British – exponents was in the ring. An editorial decision of this kind had last been taken in 1982 when Harry Evans had, after a similar period of consultation, decided The Times should provide match reports of Graham Gooch’s rebel cricket tour of South Africa despite the fact it breached the sporting boycott of the country.
Despite the improvements made by Clarke, two of The Times’s own sports writers who made the deepest impression during these years had been recognized and appointed by Fox back in 1983. One was Simon Barnes who conveyed the unshaven and rather casual demeanour of the Barbour jacket-clad countryman but was a consummate professional and able – to any sports editor’s joy – not only to fill large spaces with well-honed prose at short notice but to file before deadline. Within a short period, Barnes had moved from covering the dog races and pigeon fancying to expatiating knowledgeably on almost every aspect of modern sport (except boxing – where he shared Wilson’s opinion). He also had the greatly prized ability to write about sport in terms that made it of interest to those who avoided recreational activity if they could possibly help it. The other all-purpose sports writer of the period was David Miller. Miller was a prolific journalist, majoring in football, but with a speciality as one who appeared actually to understand the intricacies of Olympics politics. This manifested itself in 1992 with an admiring (and consequently controversial) biography of Juan Antonio Samaranch, the IOC president he esteemed as the Olympic movement’s saviour. Like Samaranch, Miller led a peripatetic lifestyle and thought nothing of hurtling around the British Isles and Western Europe at the wheel of a Mercedes in a manner that suggested no sporting fixture could legitimately begin before he had taken his sea
t in the grandstand.
The end of amateurism in sport’s higher reaches meant that winning really did become everything – the players’ wages depended upon it. In his first article for The Times, Miller examined the consequences of the growth of professionalism. Twenty years previously, he wrote, amateurism had demonstrated not only its inadequacies but also its inequalities: the ‘shamateur’ status preferred by the All England Club and the ‘odious separate door for Players at Lord’s’. Even when money was involved in the game, players usually saw little of it. Until 1960, footballers had been subjected to a maximum wage that ‘humbled the genius of a Matthews or Mannion with a clerk’s wages’. Amateurism’s death had put an end to these wrongs, but professionalism had caused a wholesale corruption of sporting values. It had created ‘the percentage player and the professional foul’, on-court obscenities at Wimbledon, drugs and consumer placement in athletics, match-fixing allegations in Test cricket and ‘the most morally corrupt World Cup yet’. To Miller, professional sportsmen had lost sight of ethics that made their endeavour noble: ‘Sport at its pinnacle is foremost about glory, and nowhere does the dictionary definition of that word mention winning, only honourable fame. More often than not it is the quality of the loser which determines the fame of the winner’.43
By the mid-1980s, professionalism had come to dominate sport. Athletics held out as a pastime for amateurs until 1981 and rugby union until 1995, when the pressures created by the sums to be earned elsewhere – including in rugby league – and the momentum set in train by the belated inauguration of the World Cup in 1987 finally proved too great to resist. The final shoves were given by Kerry Packer and Rupert Murdoch. Packer, who had transformed cricket in the 1970s, was aiming to establish a rival professional World Rugby championship that would lure players away from the amateur game with the prospect of large payments. News Corp.’s £370 million agreement with the Australian, New Zealand and South African authorities for a ten-year television rights’ deal meant that the money existed to pay the southern hemisphere’s players a competitive salary. ‘Yesterday in Paris the nettle was grasped by the International Rugby Football Board,’ wrote David Hands, The Times’s seasoned rugby correspondent on the decision to endorse professionalism, adding, ‘now we await the rash.’44 Hands foresaw that at the highest levels the sport would change ‘from being a player’s game’ into ‘part of the entertainment industry, to be bought and sold by those who dabble in the sporting marketplace’. By becoming ‘a weapon in the television ratings war’ it would also depend upon ‘the cash that only television can inject’.45 So ended the Five Nations as the British Isles’ most important amateur championship.
The History of the Times Page 45