The History of the Times

by Graham Stewart

  It was, as he later came to accept, his making. Yet so unsure was he initially that he suggested doing it for only twelve months (it ended up being thirteen years). He also agreed to do a weekly Op-Ed column on Mondays. His sketch writing got off to a shaky start. Dispatched to the Liberal Democrats’ conference in Blackpool, he filed for the first day. It had to compete with the rather more interesting news of Ben Johnson’s drugs shame. The following day Parris did not bother filing at all – unaware that Wapping was expecting daily copy, regardless of whether there was anything worth reporting or not.14 Within weeks, he had established himself as a crucial feature of the paper. Many of his greatest fans appeared to be his targets for ridicule. Indeed, it was generally his impression that, regardless of their politics, most MPs were so desperate to be noticed and to feel they were important, that they enjoyed a mention in a Parris sketch, almost regardless of how much fun was being had at their expense. In this respect, they were different from peers of the realm. Parris’s occasional sketches from House of Lords’ debates sometimes provoked personal notes from the close friends of peers (never from the peer personally) writing to let him know how much hurt his jests had caused their target. Working peers toiled long and hard for little public acknowledgement and no proper salary. They did not see why their devotion to public service should be a matter for satire.15 Disliking causing unnecessary offence, it was little wonder that Parris preferred to look down from the gallery upon the self-promoting politicians of the lower chamber. He was the first columnist to have his handiwork reprinted in the New Oxford Book of English Prose.

  There were other arrivals. In 1989 a cost-cutting plan that, in everything but the comment section, merged the Daily and Sunday Telegraph into a seven-day paper caused chaos and resentment within the ranks of Conrad Black’s empire. The Times benefited from refugees from this miscalculation that included Martin Ivens and Graham Paterson. Wilson might have been presiding over a newspaper that was losing some of its most famous journalists, but he was also responsible for ensuring that it gained new ones who would add lustre to it in the years ahead.

  III

  Thatcherism’s domestic agenda was blown off course by three ill winds: the poll tax, the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s faltering grip on the economy and Britain’s relations with Europe. The last two became interconnected. After pushing through the legislation to create a single European market, the Prime Minister became much more uneasy about the European Community. She became personally antagonistic towards Jacques Delors, the French socialist who was the European Commission’s president. Where Thatcher envisaged the single market as an end in itself, Delors saw it as the prerequisite for an extension of Brussels’ competences in other areas, including social legislation. He dared to suggest that, in the future, 80 per cent of legislation would emanate from Brussels. Thatcher had fooled herself into believing the expressions of support for European economic and European monetary union (EMU) that accompanied the Single Act were windy rhetoric. On this she was soon disabused. Europe’s idealists were more practical than she realized. The Delors Report set June 1989 as the date for agreement on commencing the process towards EMU. Forewarned that the Prime Minister was about to make her opposition explicit, The Times ran for cover, its leading article warning her against making a speech that would give the impression to the country’s partners that Britain wanted to be a disruptive player, a notion that would deny ‘Mrs Thatcher an unusual opportunity to take a leading role in Europe as it approaches its single market in 1992’.16 The Prime Minister, however, was not in the mood for such equivocation. Later that day she addressed the College of Europe in Bruges and delivered a speech that would become one of the most important of her career. In it she reaffirmed her belief in nation states and warned that at a time when central control was being seen to fail in Eastern Europe the future lay not with Delors’s socialist utopia: ‘We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain only to see them reimposed at a European level.’ She wanted the completion of the single market in 1992 to ensure deregulation not centralization and monetary union. These Euro-sceptical shots across the bow were widely resented. Reporting from Bruges, Nicholas Wood quoted a senior European official as calling her remarks ‘outrageous and unrelentingly negative’.17 The Times was left to sigh ineffectually, ‘she is honest where our partners are idealistic. Their point is that there is a place for ideals.’18

  The Times was not yet a Euro-sceptic paper although it failed to have the strength of conviction to make clear exactly what sort of a European Community it did envisage. The prospect of creating a single European currency, however, meant that the period for prevarication had passed. The precursor to signing up for the new currency was to stabilize sterling’s exchange rate with those of her partners in the Exchange Rate Mechanism. The Prime Minister’s problems were compounded not only by Cabinet colleagues who favoured joining the ERM because they wanted to sign up to the single currency but by those – including the Chancellor of the Exchequer – who thought the ERM’s anti-inflationary disciplines were the overheating British economy’s only hope of salvation. During May 1989, interest rates were pushed up to 14 per cent. The following month inflation hit 8.3 per cent, the highest for seven years. In August, the trade deficit substantially worsened. Despite knowing Nigel Lawson’s intentions, Sir Alan Walters, the Prime Minister’s personal adviser, described the ERM as ‘half-baked’ in an article for the American Economist. There was an outcry and Mrs Thatcher faced calls to dismiss her adviser. Instead she stuck by him. She lost her Chancellor instead.

  Nigel Lawson’s resignation was the greatest blow to Mrs Thatcher’s Government since Michael Heseltine’s dramatic walkout three years earlier.

  Given Lawson’s position, it was altogether more serious and the issue was of rather greater magnitude than who owned Westland helicopters. The following morning the news was splashed across the front page with a large Richard Willson cartoon of Sir Alan Walters falling out of Lawson’s collapsing Budget briefcase. Thatcher’s decision to stick by Walters had not even saved his skin. His continuation as her adviser would have made life for Lawson’s successor all but untenable and he too opted to resign on what Philip Webster and Richard Ford’s report described as ‘a night of sensation’. ‘At 7.45 p.m. in one of the most astonishing scenes enacted in the Commons, Sir Geoffrey Howe, Deputy Prime Minister, told MPs of Lawson’s resignation,’ the report continued. John Major was promoted to fill Lawson’s shoes, despite the fact that he had only been made Foreign Secretary the previous month. Webster described Major as ‘one of the most respected Chief Secretaries in recent years’.19

  Analysing the Lawson resignation, Robin Oakley wrote that although the immediate issue had concerned the differences between Howe and Lawson who supported ERM membership and Thatcher and Walters who did not, it had its roots in

  Mrs Thatcher’s way of doing things. It is not a case of two people who had stuck together for the sake of the party finally being unable to bear the strain. Lawson was one of the group of four musketeers who used to work with Mrs Thatcher back in opposition days, feeding her the ammunition with which to make an impact at Prime Minister’s Question Time. Like Norman Tebbit, another of the four, he was a Thatcherite by conviction, a genuine soul mate.

  They had come to find that ‘when things go wrong, they feel, she detaches herself from her ministers and talks about them as if they work for somebody else’. Now she had been forced to make Douglas Hurd Foreign Secretary. Given that he did not share her growing hostility to the European project, she would either have to concede political ground to him or retreat further ‘into the bunker with that small team of advisers’.20

  In its leading column, The Times put loyalty to the Prime Minister before sensible analysis of what had happened. Minimizing the scale of the crisis, it suggested that Lawson’s departure solved the divisive cohabitation on economic policy. Praise for Lawson’s achievements was muted: ‘His strength of mind was admir
ed, but he has yet to be forgiven for relaxing the fiscal reins last year and allowing the economy to overheat. To that extent his departure will actually strengthen the Government’s position.’21 Three days later, the leading column, entitled ‘Panic Over’, went so far as to assure Tory backbenchers that ‘the drama is over’.22

  With a challenge to her leadership on the horizon from the backbench ‘stalking horse’, Sir Anthony Meyer, Mrs Thatcher was interviewed by Robin Oakley and Nicholas Wood in The Times in November 1989. She implied she would fight not only the 1992 election as leader but also the 1997 contest ‘by popular acclaim’, as she put it (although she would be seventy-two by then). Her eventual successor, she hinted, would probably come from a younger generation (which, if she stayed on beyond 1997, could hardly be doubted). It was, as Oakley and Wood pointed out, ‘an astonishing move which can be expected to goad her opponents within the Conservative Party’.23 In the short term, however, it did not fail. On 5 December, she saw off the ‘stalking horse’ without having to break into more than a canter. It would take someone altogether more substantial than Sir Anthony Meyer to see her off.

  IV

  In December 1988, The Times asked its foreign correspondents to speculate on what 1989 held in store. Roger Boyes came closest: ‘Romania and East Germany will have leadership crises this year. East Germany is particularly sensitive since there is real pressure for change from below on Herr Erich Honecker, age 75.’ As for Romania’s even more dictatorial ruler, Nicolae Ceausescu:

  This may be the year of transition as the limits of his power are becoming evident and he has destroyed the machinery of succession …The real risk takers are Poland and Hungary, which are trying to run faster and faster to keep up with the rising expectations of their people … Hungary is galloping into the new world, with talk of a multi-party system and much else … the political implosion of neutral Yugoslavia will become a political factor in the rest of the Balkans; and debt-servicing will be a problem everywhere.24

  Boyes was certainly well placed to observe a transforming moment in world history. It was Mikhail Gorbachev’s attempts to liberalize the Soviet Union that gave the peoples of Eastern Europe hope. Amazingly, The Times had been without a correspondent in Moscow for almost a year due to foot-dragging over giving a visa to Mary Dejevsky, who was Wilson’s choice to succeed Christopher Walker. Dejevsky’s record of writing critically about the Soviet regime told against her. Yet, if the Soviet authorities believed their stalling tactics in issuing a visa would encourage The Times to offer up a more amenable journalist instead, they were much mistaken. Wilson refused to play games, insisting that the choice of correspondent would not be a matter for the Soviet government. Undaunted, he even began planning during the summer of 1988 to send a team of Times writers over to the USSR to study the changes that were unfolding. Unusually, Mrs Thatcher intervened to secure The Times an interview with Gorbachev, her Private Secretary, Charles Powell, speaking to the Soviet Embassy on the matter with ‘the Prime Minister’s personal instruction’.25 In April 1989, Wilson was among those Thatcher invited for dinner with Gorbachev.

  Getting an inside perspective on the unfolding drama in the Soviet Union was, however, a difficult assignment. Briefly in Moscow in the summer of 1987, Mary Dejevsky had met up with Jewish refuseniks via intermediaries who would arrange to meet her in a specified carriage of a metro station before taking her to their whereabouts. Each had a story of persecution. For eighteen months between May 1988 and November 1989, The Times vainly attempted to get Dejevsky a visa. A one-month visa, granted as a goodwill gesture, was issued in December 1988, the words ‘only the truth’ written above the signature of the Soviet diplomat who issued it. On arrival, even her private telephone was audibly tapped. She had brought with her a Bible that she was going to give to a Moscow worker in a car plant who had written to The Times asking for one. ‘I handed him his Bible in an opaque, unpatterned carrier bag and we walked down the street, he marvelling that he could meet a Western correspondent without immediate arrest, I that so many precautions still had to be taken. Then we both heard the camera click from a shop window above us.’26

  When Dejevsky finally got to take up residence in Moscow she still had little idea how long she would be allowed to stay. She was there at the sufferance of the Soviet authorities. Angus Roxburgh, the Sunday Times correspondent, had been expelled shortly before her arrival. Dejevsky pondered whether the authorities had deliberately deported Roxburgh so that she would not have a near colleague to compare notes with and in order to break all continuity in News International’s reporting operations. Taking up residence in the deserted Times flat in the security-enclosed foreigners compound in Moscow, Dejevsky added Gibbons’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire to the bookshelves. She sensed its contents might have contemporary resonance. In the event, she only got halfway through the first volume. The pace of reporting the Soviet empire’s implosion left her no time for perusing history books.

  During the spring of 1989, the first Soviet multi-candidate elections for the Congress of People’s Deputies were held and Gorbachev rid the Soviet Central Committee of many of its old guard. His efforts to produce a new mood of openness in Soviet society were watched with the keenest interest. It had already made possible an extraordinary improvement in relations with the United States. In July 1987, the Kremlin had offered to dismantle medium- and short-range missiles from the USSR’s Asian states. The following month, Reagan had responded, suggesting a summit in Washington to ban intermediate nuclear weapons. On 8 December, agreement at Washington was signed, eliminating medium- and short-range nuclear missiles. It was the first mutually agreed disarmament treaty in history. The world appeared to be stepping away from the spectre of nuclear destruction.

  Gorbachev, however, was concerned not only with extracting his country from the crippling cost of a nuclear arms race in which it was clear the Soviet Union could no longer compete. In May 1988, he began withdrawing Russian troops from their disastrous campaign in Afghanistan. The last of them was pulled out ignominiously in February the following year. By then Gorbachev had told the UN of his proposals to cut his armed forces by half a million men and to withdraw fifty thousand troops and five thousand tanks from Eastern Europe.

  Yet, not everywhere Gorbachev went was he able to foster a new spirit of peace and harmony and those who thought the world was engaged in an overnight embrace of liberalism were about to be rudely jolted. Martial law had been declared in Peking (as The Times was still calling Beijing) on 20 May. However, the first serious attempt to enforce it had ended in embarrassment when five thousand inexperienced and nervous soldiers had failed to disperse a crowd of students and other protestors that appeared to be swelling towards 100,000 people. The massed demonstration in Tiananmen Square was particular embarrassing for the party leaders. They had become a focus for the world media, providing an extraordinary spectacle of nascent democracy. Art students had even erected ‘The Goddess of Democracy’ which consciously resembled the Statue of Liberty in the heart of the square. It was a mortifying spectacle for China’s leaders at a time when Gorbachev was visiting for talks. They decided they could tolerate it no longer.

  On 5 June, The Times splashed its front page with the terrible consequences, ‘Peking protesters massacred: Thousands feared dead as tanks crush heroic resistance’. A photograph showed the tank-crushed corpses of students beside the twisted wreckage of their bicycles. The paper’s stringer in China, Catherine Sampson, had lain flat on her belly with her notebook from her position on the Peking Hotel’s balcony, from where she had watched the atrocity unfold before her eyes. Her report began, ‘The people of Peking last night continued their heroic but doomed resistance as some of the tanks and heavy artillery that had crushed the student protest movement less than 24 hours before patrolled the capital.’ Unofficial estimates of the death toll had passed one thousand. In the suburbs, university campuses and around the diplomatic quarter there were sporadic bursts of gunfire and
resistance. In the darkness, chaos and panic, it was difficult to establish the exact course of events. ‘According to one account, tanks and armoured personnel carriers had driven on to the square, indiscriminately crushing the makeshift tents with students still inside. Another report said that when the students had filed out of the square, holding hands, troops had fired at them, felling the first row of 100, and then the second.’ The Goddess of Democracy was brought smashing down. Official news reports spoke only of the suppression of a ‘counter-revolutionary’ riot, without listing casualties.27 Later, independent estimates suggested around 2600 had perished although nobody was ever really able to speak with authority on the final toll.