The History of the Times

by Graham Stewart

  Yet, getting through to London was far from the greatest of Fisk’s problems. Various militant factions, most notably the pro-Iranian Islamic Jihad, began kidnapping Westerners. In March 1984, Jeremy Levin, bureau chief of CNN, was kidnapped. Five months later Jonathan Wright, a Reuters correspondent, also fell victim. Both men eventually managed to escape but the seizures continued. In March 1985, Islamic Jihad took Terry Anderson hostage. Others followed, including Terry Waite, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s representative, who had tried to negotiate their release. By the spring of the following year, forty-seven foreigners had been abducted over the previous twenty-seven months. Of this number, twenty-six had been subsequently released and five were definitely dead. The fate of the others was in doubt. Faced with this level of danger, all but the most hard-boiled reporters packed up and left. The number of Western journalists based in Beirut fell from more than seventy in 1984 to seventeen in 1986. By then, there was not a single American reporter still around. ‘Lebanese and Palestinian gunmen have now almost achieved what the Israelis could never have hoped for,’ reported Fisk; ‘much of the war in southern Lebanon is now reported only from Jerusalem, where correspondents are in no danger of being kidnapped.’5 Fisk had no intention of relying on the Israeli government for his information. He saw it as his calling to be a witness on the front line.

  Fisk’s obstinacy (some mistook it for a death wish) riled those for whom he was also a liability. The Times came under pressure from the Foreign Office to have him withdrawn from Beirut and relocated to a place of greater safety. Wilson, however, had a right winger’s natural disdain for the Foreign Office. He demurred and made it clear to Fisk that he trusted his judgment and would stand by whatever he decided to do. From a personal perspective, this was a courageous position to adopt since the editor was likely to face far less criticism for forcing his correspondent to leave than if he allowed him to be captured and killed. When Fisk replied that he was willing to go back and continue reporting, Wilson’s reply was characteristic, ‘Ok matey. Good luck.’6

  Back in Beirut, Fisk’s life was a misery. Shells continued to rain down on the city, frequently exploding close to him. Long hours were spent in the comfortless refuge of a windowless corridor. The prospect of being kidnapped was as much a probability as a possibility. If the Archbishop of Canterbury’s envoy was not sacred, it could be presumed that the life of a Times journalist was cheap. To avoid capture, he had to constantly alter his movements, give false names and even make false arrangements. He avoided meeting Western diplomats since this opened him up to allegations of being in cahoots with Western spies. A car circling his building was an extremely worrying occurrence. The prospect of betrayal appeared at every corner. One Lebanese employee at a press bureau asked casually which flight he was catching. Fisk told him. The man disappeared into what had been Terry Anderson’s office. Fisk loitered long enough to overhear him whispering down a telephone in Arabic. He was passing on the flight times and movements. Fisk opted not to go to the airport. What was particularly distressing was that his betrayer was the same employee who in 1978 had saved his life.7

  This was not the environment in which a roaming reporter could operate effectively. Nor was it conducive to embarking upon a relationship either, despite Fisk’s hopes of settling down to married life with the Financial Times journalist Lara Marlowe. Eventually, Wilson arranged for him to take up a new role as a Paris based features writer for The Times. Fisk accepted and enjoyed his new post, but privately he was in a quandary over whether to stay with the paper. He now considered its editorial stance so irksome that he found himself hesitant to mention who his employer was when the subject came up in conversation. The Times, he felt, had changed a lot from the liberal-minded journal he had joined in 1971. He disliked its coverage of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, being particularly upset that it had not probed more deeply into security service operations there as he had once done. He was horrified that the paper had urged the BBC and ITV to supply the RUC with film of the brutal murder of two British soldiers in Belfast. This Fisk regarded as a betrayal of journalistic integrity. He was equally opposed to its increasingly hard-line attitude towards the Middle East. He had been appalled by a leading article, ‘Death of a Terrorist’, that all but supported the Israeli assassination of Abu Jihad. Fisk had long questioned The Times’s promiscuous use of the word ‘terrorist’ when referring to Arab groups but not to Israeli or Lebanese Christian troops in the area.

  There was also the question of the proprietor, whose toughness Fisk had previously applauded. ‘I do not for a moment think that Mr Murdoch dictates our leaders or our op-ed pages,’ he assured Wilson, ‘but the organization is so powerful – and has shown itself so ruthless – that many on our editorial staff simply have no inclination to challenge what they think is the received opinion.’ The deciding moment came when the USS Vincennes, an American warship in the Gulf which mistakenly thought it was under attack, shot down an Iranian passenger jet, killing 290 civilians. The Times quickly postulated on why the Iranian airbus was so far off course and even pondered whether a suicide pilot was flying it. Fisk filed a report making use of air-traffic recordings he had heard. This did not tie in with the line the leading article had peddled and Fisk’s copy was edited accordingly. Four months later, Fisk resigned. ‘It is impossible for a reporter to risk his life under fire for a newspaper in which he no longer believes,’ he later explained. The Independent, he had came to the conclusion, was more like The Times he had happily joined in 1971. It was to the Independent he would now go.8

  Wilson was both horrified and hurt at the prospect of his most famous reporter’s departure. At a personal level they had always had mutual regard and – with the exception of the Vincennes incident – Fisk could certainly not claim that the paper had treated him, or his copy, without due respect. Wilson, however, was not prepared to let him leave without first putting up the sort of fight that between less strong-minded individuals would have been grounds for a terminated friendship. When a personal appeal failed, he threatened Fisk with breach of contract, claiming he would refuse to release him to the Independent. In fact, thanks to the Lebanese postal service which had become as dislocated as everything else in that country, the contract had never been received or signed but the editor was not prepared to let this detail stand in the way. Clearly the matter had to be settled and on 18 November 1988 Fisk came to see Wilson at his office. The meeting began in sorrow and ended in anger. According to Fisk’s account, Wilson pleaded, ‘You have to do your duty to The Times’, to which the reply came, ‘I cannot do duty to a paper which I no longer respect.’ Wilson snapped back, ‘I’m not asking you to respect it, I’m asking you to work for it.’ Fisk refused, saying simply, ‘The Times lacks honour.’ At this, Wilson, agitated and wounded in equal measure, rose to his feet. ‘That is personally insulting,’ he growled. Fisk explained that, as far as he was concerned, ‘some of its leaders are morally bad’. He particularly objected to the excoriating tone of a leading article entitled ‘His Infamous Career’, written to mark the death of Sean MacBride, the international human rights campaigner who had been the IRA’s chief of staff. Whatever the contradictory actions of MacBride’s life and work, there was clearly no prospect of a ceasefire in the editor’s office at Wapping. Finally, after further traded accusations, the meeting broke up. ‘See you soon,’ Wilson said. ‘No,’ replied Fisk, making for the door (which had been locked) and the end of almost eighteen years at the paper. ‘It’s goodbye, Charles, and good luck.’9

  II

  The disapproving chorus from those who believed The Times ‘was no longer the paper it used to be’ (an ad hoc community that appears to have existed since issue two on 2 January 1785) sometimes focused on superficial changes. They grumbled at the increasing size of headlines, the overuse of diagrams and the assumption that popular entertainers are household names even at exclusive addresses. Yet many, especially those who praised the Independent for supposedly turning the clo
ck back, felt that Charles Wilson had detached The Times from the liberal-Tory moorings to which it had been chained during Rees-Mogg’s fourteen years in the chair. For them, Fisk’s departure was evidence that the paper no longer tolerated alternative voices. In fact, Wilson was anxious to please. Indeed, he not only wanted to provide a wider forum for middle-of-the-road opinions but also sought to attract back some of the centre-left voices that had stopped writing for the paper at the time of the Labour Party’s boycott of the Wapping titles. With the lifting of the edict, attempts were made to reestablish links. During 1987 and 1988 Ben Pimlott wrote regularly for the paper while Jack Straw returned to write the fortnightly column from which he had withdrawn in January 1986. Whether employing Robert Kilroy-Silk as a weekly columnist aided or retarded the process of reaching out to those to the left of centre was perhaps more debatable. Militant activists had ousted him from his Liverpool constituency and The Times serialized Hard Labour, the account of his travails. His subsequent career as a daytime television host and increasingly populist maverick of the right clouded the image he had first brought to The Times in 1987 as a promising and charismatic, if somewhat polemical, voice.

  Where the claim that the paper had shifted politically to the right did have most substance was in the opinions emanating from the leader conferences (although the editorial line was not markedly more hawkish than in the days when it had been penned by Douglas-Home). John O’Sullivan – who wrote the Conservatives’ 1987 election manifesto – and Frank Johnson – who wrote the 1987 election day leading article commending a Tory vote – were among the leader writers moving the paper to the right at a moment when Max Hastings was attempting to redirect the Daily Telegraph away from this ground. In 1987, The Times gained a refugee from Hastings’s low tolerance for those who preached ‘the doctrines of Victorian Conservatism’.10 This was T. E. Utley. Universally known except in print as ‘Peter’, Utley had been blind since the age of nine and overcame the inability to read or type to become one of the great comment journalists of the previous twenty years. Dictating trenchantly argued copy to his secretaries, he had advocated Thatcherism back when Margaret Thatcher was a Heath supporter, personally encouraged a younger generation of Tory-minded journalists, and done as much as any man to invigorate the Telegraph’s intellectual traditions. His treatment by that paper’s new guard certainly demonstrated that there was little romance or gratitude to be dispensed or expected in the modern newspaper world. Wilson, however, welcomed him to Wapping and to the paper for which he had first worked at the outset of his career during the Second World War. The Times gained a new advocate for the Ulster Unionist cause on the Op-Ed page to replace Owen Hickey whose leader writing days Wilson had finally drawn to a close. Besides his closely argued essays on the Op-Ed page, Utley also became obituaries editor in succession to John Grigg. Utley appeared set to enjoy a lengthy Indian summer at The Times. Sadly, it was not to be; he died the following year, at the age of sixty-seven.

  Wilson’s switch of Grigg from the obits department to become a columnist was one of the signs that he was aware of the need to reclaim prominent liberal voices for the paper. Grigg was exactly the sort of Times man that it was popularly assumed had defected to the Independent. He was sympathetic towards the SDP and was, in several admirable respects, the embodiment of a generation described in his friend Noel Annan’s book, Our Age. His father, Sir Edward Grigg, had been ‘Imperial Editor’ of The Times before the First World War and, after the conflict, had successively advised Lloyd George, become an anti-appeasement Conservative MP and ended up as Lord Altrincham. John Grigg processed through Eton and Oxford (where he won the Gladstone Memorial Prize) and, during the Second World War, the Grenadier Guards. He had unsuccessfully attempted to become a Tory MP in the 1950s and in 1963 renounced the peerage he had inherited from his father in order to pursue his political ambition. It was to remain unfulfilled – possibly because constituency associations were unhappy with an infamous article he had written in 1957 criticizing the Court’s stultifying atmosphere. He had dared to describe the Queen’s public appearances as those of a ‘priggish schoolgirl’. At the time a passer-by in the street punched him in the face. Rudeness, though, was very far from being his stock in trade. A cultivated and engaging man, Grigg brought to The Times the historian’s erudition to the analysis of political events, focusing particularly on lessons from the period of Lloyd George and the Liberal collapse (perhaps Grigg’s greatest achievement was his multi-volume biography of the Liberal war leader who knew his father). The fortunes of the House of Windsor also provided plenty of scope for his historical insight. His column continued until 1995, after which he specialized in reviewing books for the paper. Sir Edward Pickering commissioned him to write volume six of the official History of The Times covering the years of Rees-Mogg’s editorship, 1966–81, which he completed in 1993. It was widely regarded as the most definitive of the series.

  Grigg embodied the understated but authoritative approach of an older generation. Attracting the freshness and vigour of younger voices was no less important. In 1965, the management of all national newspapers had succumbed to an NUJ edict banning the recruitment of any reporter direct from university. Instead, they would first have to work three years on provincial newspapers. This restrictive practice crumbled with the union that had promoted it. Under Peter Stothard’s direction, The Times was the first national newspaper to establish a trainee journalist scheme for graduates. Thus the paper became the first port of call for ambitious aspiring hacks who wanted to skip the supposed grind of the regional press. Traditionalists demurred at the consequences of this form of gentrification, believing that a stint on a local newspaper provided a far broader education in the basic journalistic skills than could be offered by a swift transition from student digs in Clifton or Cowley to a by-line on a national paper. The Times’s scheme however – which included a short spell with a provincial placement – proved a great success in luring intelligent and articulate graduates into journalism who, faced with the alternative of reporting on leaks from the parish pump, might have otherwise been tempted away by the increasingly lucrative alternatives of law, accountancy and the City. ‘We were the way in’ as Stothard put it.11 In consequence, he became the minder to a whole new Fleet Street kindergarten of talent.

  One who arrived in the guise of a trainee was Toby Young, a precociously witty, socially outgoing and, to all intents and purposes, untameable youth. Another was his Oxford contemporary Boris Johnson who had been President of the Union and a Classics Scholar at Balliol. Both proceeded to make their mark in the paper and, in doing so, encouraged a mailbag from those who felt misrepresented in the articles they penned. Whatever the doubts about the accuracy of their reporting, Young and Johnson could have gone on to become rich adornments of The Times. Unfortunately, they fell victim to a reluctance to take the risks involved. Young was sacked for writing freelance articles in the Mail on Sunday’s You magazine although not before he had hacked into Wilson’s confidential files on the database by making the inspired guess that the access codeword would be ‘Top Man’. Purporting to be the editor, he proceeded to send vernacularly phrased instructions to various colleagues and departmental heads. Next, he hacked into the database that listed everyone’s salary, which he mass copied to every computer screen in the building. In the circumstances, his dismissal was perhaps understandable. Boris Johnson’s career at The Times was even briefer. He was sacked for making up a quote in an article. He went on to become a star columnist at the Daily Telegraph, editor of the Spectator, enter Parliament and become the closest thing the fourth estate had to a genuine celebrity.

  The Times was better able to hold onto another high-profile journalist, Barbara Amiel. She had been a journalistic sensation in Canada where she had edited the Toronto Sun having gone to the country in her adolescence (she had been born in London to a Jewish lawyer and colonel who later committed suicide), fallen out with her family and graduated from Toronto University. By
1980, at the age of thirty-nine, she had already published her autobiography, Confessions. Returning to the land of her birth, by the time she arrived at Wapping in 1986 she was on her third marriage and had switched from Marxism to neoconservatism with all the zeal of the convert. Peregrine Worsthorne had turned her down for a job at the Sunday Telegraph in part because he mistook her fragrant and carefully coiffured appearance for a lack of seriousness. The Times thought otherwise. ‘She looks like Gina Lollobrigida and writes like Bernard Levin – and do get it the right way round,’ said a friend.12 Times readers of long standing might have thought this was slightly overegging it, at least in regard to the venerable Levin. She certainly had his spark and gifts for invective although could not reasonably be expected (who could?) to match the extraordinary breadth of his cultural range. Others believed her presence tilted the paper’s political scales too far to the right.

  Of all the appointments Wilson made, none was more surprising or inspired than when, in the autumn of 1988, he hit upon the idea of employing Matthew Parris in succession to Craig Brown as The Times’s parliamentary sketchwriter. The appointment was a risk. Aged thirty-nine, Parris had spent seven years on the Conservative backbenches before resigning his seat in favour of a television career which soon came to an abrupt halt when LWT axed Weekend World, the Sunday political programme he had presented – it was widely accepted – less adeptly than his predecessor, Brian Walden. Parris’s print journalism was limited to three one-off articles for The Times over the past six years and a few Sunday Times book reviews. There was no doubt that he had the requisite intellect. From a childhood spent partly in Rhodesia, he had gone up to Cambridge, won a fellowship to Yale, been a trainee diplomat at the Foreign Office and worked for Mrs Thatcher at the Conservative Research Department before becoming a Tory MP in 1979 at the age of thirty. After such early precocity, the resignation of his seat and the failure of Weekend World suggested talent unfulfilled. When Wilson telephoned him with the offer of The Times parliamentary sketch, Parris was even in two minds about accepting. ‘I was nearly forty,’ he recalled, ‘and I had never met with conspicuous success in any job I’d done.’ What was more, having been an MP, ‘this trudging back, a mere reporter, into a place I had quit as a Member with head held high to be a television star, was a kind of defeat. How could I return except with my tail between my legs? The job seemed a come-down.’13