The History of the Times

by Graham Stewart

  The next morning, Murdoch, looking somewhat embarrassed, told Wilson that Andrew Knight wanted a change – he wanted to make Simon Jenkins editor. What was more, Knight wanted Jenkins in Wilson’s chair with immediate effect. Wilson was able to extend this to the end of the week, a minor dignity that was the least he was owed. Murdoch wanted to offer more. The fall of the Berlin Wall had opened up seemingly tremendous business opportunities in the former Eastern Europe. There were newspapers with huge circulations that were – it was reasonably assumed – ineptly run and in need of the Murdoch touch. He wanted to make Wilson his East European emissary, or ‘International Director’. It appeared to be an intriguing opportunity but if it did not work out by the end of the year he assured Wilson that it would not harm his remaining three-year contract. Murdoch had a reputation for the presumptuous manner in which he sacked long-serving officers, but he also had a record for generosity and consideration in devising the financial terms of the divorce. Wilson stepped over and shook on it. He was back at Wapping in time for the morning conference where he announced he would be stepping aside and that the new editor was Simon Jenkins.

  For Wilson, life after The Times took some unforeseen twists. It quickly became apparent that News Corp. was in mounting trouble and having difficulty rolling over its debts. One consequence was that fresh investment dried up. Wilson’s mission to Eastern Europe increasingly resembled a posting to Siberia. He did not have the budget to make major acquisitions. Murdoch’s mooted purchase of Pravda was out of the question. Wilson considered buying another Russian paper, Argumenti i Fakti, which had a 33.5 million circulation, the largest in the world. ‘We could have bought it for peanuts,’ he lamented, but the cash was not forthcoming even for that level of investment. When Robert Maxwell telephoned and offered him the editorship of the Sporting Life, allowing him to pursue his great love of the Turf, he accepted. Wilson began a new life as an executive in Mirror Group newspapers, becoming managing director in 1992. Some of his old Times colleagues raised their eyes to the heavens, murmuring that the appointment only showed what an inappropriate choice he had once been to guide the fortunes of The Times. Yet Maxwell was to provide a path back into the broadsheet press. In 1995, the Independent that had caused him so much anguish during his Times editorship appeared close to collapse, battered by a price war unleashed by Murdoch and ailing from the costs of subsidizing its unprofitable sister, the Independent on Sunday. Its new co-owner, the Mirror Group, appointed Wilson to spend six months as the Independent’s de facto editor with a remit to cut costs before passing onto the thirty-six-year-old Andrew Marr. Inevitably, some who had loved the Independent in its glorious early days saw Wilson as a terrible nemesis, brought in to wreak havoc upon his one-time tormentor.

  Under Wilson, The Times had become less of an institution and more of a newspaper. Its future would have been far more precarious if its editor had pursued any other course. Wilson had Harold Evans’s flair for breaking news – clearing the top half of the paper for a dramatic photograph of the space shuttle exploding even before the image was available, for example. Indeed, he was at his best when disasters struck. On these occasions he immediately assumed total mastery of the situation, deploying people to specific tasks with almost military self-assurance. It was typical of him to see things clearly in a crisis. This skill turned out to be an important asset, since his editorship coincided with some terrible disasters: in May 1987 the Herald of Free Enterprise sank off Zeebrugge drowning 188 and in December a Philippines ferry sank with 1500 on board, the twentieth-century’s worst maritime disaster; the following year the Piper Alpha oil rig exploded killing 166, an Armenian earthquake killed 70,000 and two weeks later Pan Am flight 103, with 258 passengers on board, was blown up by a bomb over Lockerbie, killing a further eleven on the ground. Philip Howard regarded the moment Wilson unsentimentally jettisoned several pages of carefully prepared pre-Christmas quality writing in order to make way for fast and comprehensive coverage of the Lockerbie disaster to be the defining moment when the old Times – careful, judicious, slow to judge – died. The observation was not wholly intended as a criticism.55 ‘He was the very best kind of tabloid journalist,’ commented Richard Williams, ‘and when he was able to bring this to bear on the paper’s news coverage it was just what The Times needed.’56

  On the debit side, Wilson had driven away key intellectuals, losing some of the paper’s weight in the process. The leader writers were no longer privately referred to as the college of cardinals. Wilson was not someone who conveyed an air of spiritual benediction. But he had brought to the paper new talents, like Matthew Parris and Mary Ann Sieghart, who soon came to be seen as essential. Yet, while some of the old guard may have taken offence, Wilson’s dragging The Times, kicking and screaming, to places it had little natural inclination to go was not necessarily proof that he was a bad parent to the paper. ‘Unless you broadened the audience of The Times,’ he made clear, ‘the paper was going to die.’ He taught The Times to ‘recognize that half of the people who walk round the cities of this country are women’.57 Married to the magazine editor Sally O’Sullivan, he had a better sense of what women wanted and this was recognized in the way features developed during his editorship. Fashion was given a higher profile and news was not restricted to party political subject matter – which had preoccupied so much of the paper’s column inches in the past. Like Harold Evans, he was criticized by those who believed The Times was, or ought to be, the home of the crafted essay rather than the ticker-tape machine for breaking news. Sir John Junor in the Mail on Sunday and Edward Pearce in the Guardian wrote articles defending him from what they saw as the snobbish sentiments of those who believed he had never been cut from The Times cloth. He had, they wrote, helped to make the paper more professional and freed it from the cult of deference. These were important achievements.

  Much though Wilson had wanted to soldier on, his sacking came at an opportune moment. Although formalities had not been concluded, the Cold War had been won and with it the comment pages of The Times needed to adjust to a new era. Similarly, on the domestic front the Thatcher revolution in which Wilson had played his part was collapsing amid the rancour and ruin of the poll tax; the Prime Minister only had eight more bruising months left in Downing Street. At home and abroad, a more emollient style appeared to be required for the future. By contrast, Wilson appeared too closely identified with the decade of struggles – epitomized by the siege of Wapping – that had now drawn to a close. It was time for a change. What was more, he was leaving the paper at an opportune moment in other respects too. News Corp., its parent company, was plunging into a dire financial crisis. During 1990, it looked as if the whole empire might collapse. Cuts would be needed across the board. It was Simon Jenkins who would have to wield the axe.

  CHAPTER NINE

  SIMON JENKINS

  Taking on the Independent; Thatcher to Major; War in the Gulf;

  News Corp. on the Brink; Redesigning The Times;

  the Jenkins Experiment Cut Short

  I

  ‘The chattering classes will love it’ was Murdoch’s verdict on his choice of Simon Jenkins as the new editor of The Times.1 This was not meant as a barbed observation. The excesses of the tabloid press – and not least of the Sun – had alienated sections of the public and the Government. There was even the prospect of legislation to tighten the fetters on press freedom. To this possibility, Murdoch was vehemently opposed and his appointment of the urbane and Establishment-minded Andrew Knight as News International’s executive chairman reflected a desire to emphasize the company’s commitment to quality journalism. Knight had been editor of The Economist between 1974 and 1986. For the last seven of those years, Jenkins had been the journal’s political editor and Knight had formed a high opinion of his skills.

  Many senior journalists would have made strenuous efforts to publicize their suitability to edit The Times, but Murdoch and Knight were drawn to Simon Jenkins precisely because of his ambivalence
towards the paper. This was not because of any unworldliness or lack of drive. Born in 1943, the son of a Welsh Congregationalist minister, the Revd Daniel Jenkins, who was one of the most acclaimed nonconformist theologians of the twentieth century, Simon Jenkins had graduated from St John’s College, Oxford, with ambitions to be either a politician or an academic. Journalism, he decided, was the best way of being both. After spells at the Times Educational Supplement, the Evening Standard and the Sunday Times, he became editor of the Evening Standard in 1976. Thirty-three was a precocious age to take the helm of a paper that was battling against a hostile takeover from its London rival, the Evening News. Jenkins saw off the predator and, in large part, saved the Standard’s existence. His reward was to be sacked by the paper’s new owners, Trafalgar House. By comparison, The Economist proved an agreeably monastic environment but in 1986 he swapped it for the besieged stockade of Wapping, joining the Sunday Times as a columnist and as creator and editor of its relaunched books section. In late 1989 he decided to quit in order to become a columnist for the Independent instead. It was the decision that was to make him The Times’s editor. When Murdoch heard the news that Jenkins had been poached by the Independent he asked him to call round for a chat. To Murdoch’s questioning as to why he wanted to leave the News International stable, Jenkins replied that he thought the Independent was a paper that was making great strides forward and the one he most admired. Murdoch asked what was wrong with The Times. Jenkins was unsparing in his analysis. The fault, he claimed, was not with Charles Wilson but rather with the strategy Murdoch had set out for him – which was to go after the Daily Telegraph’s market. This had been a mistake and, given that circulation was gently sliding, it was not even commercially sensible. The only future for The Times was to be like itself, or rather, its former self. This had become more difficult because, while it had been busy focusing on the Telegraph, it had left itself open to attack on its flank from Whittam Smith’s new paper. Disastrously, the Independent was now claiming all the traditional Times territory and was increasingly taking its readers too. The Independent, therefore, was the paper for which Jenkins wished to be a columnist. Murdoch was not unreceptive to the points being made, even though they represented a critical judgment on his long-standing strategy to target the Telegraph’s market. The Independent had indeed seized the opportunity to occupy some of The Times’s ground. Partly this had been a by-product of the legacy of Wapping – which made starting new newspapers like the Independent a much less expensive proposition while simultaneously dumping public opprobrium on Murdoch whose image, in return for making this revolution possible, was now associated with violence, mass sackings and callous Thatcherite zeal. Clearly, he was not going to persuade Jenkins to jilt the firm offer of a column in the Independent for one in The Times, so he decided on an altogether higher pitch. He suggested Jenkins turn The Times into the sort of paper for which he would want to write a column – by becoming its editor. It was a rare journalist who was offered an editorship on such complimentary terms. Nonetheless, Jenkins made clear he would only accept on the condition that Murdoch left him alone to do it his way even if, in the short term, circulation continued to slide. He demanded absolute carte blanche. ‘Give me two years,’ Jenkins requested. Murdoch consented and the deal was done. That evening, Jenkins returned home to talk matters over with his wife, the Texan-born actress Gayle Hunnicutt. He explained the hard task that lay ahead and the conditions upon which he had agreed to work. ‘After three years that will be it,’ Jenkins assured her, ‘because after three years it’s either the paper I want to write a column for, in which case I want to write a column for it, or I will have failed.’2

  II

  Few editorial appointments could have been greeted with greater pleasure from journalists, even those writing their tributes in rival newspapers. Almost all agreed that Simon Jenkins was the man to restore The Times’s authority. The news crossed the Atlantic. The writer Julian Barnes assured readers of the New Yorker that Jenkins’s appointment was an appropriate metaphor: ‘He first made his name in the early Seventies as a journalist campaigning to save bits of London from the property developers, and helped found an organisation called Save Britain’s Heritage. Now he has been handed the biggest heritage-saving job of his career.’3

  Jenkins was a son of the cloth. His love of ecclesiastical architecture (he was subsequently the author of England’s Thousand Best Churches which became a bestseller in 1999) was matched by an interest in making The Times once again the paper of choice, from the bishop’s palace to the provincial vicarage. He considered Whittam Smith to be an editor exuding ‘Episcopalian’ rectitude. Yet, the problem was not confined even to the Established religion. ‘It was significant to me,’ he later recalled, ‘that the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, Basil Hume, had told all his people that henceforth he would write letters to the Independent not The Times if he wanted to communicate something.’ Jenkins set himself a mission to reconvert such backsliders. Recommunicating with the more godless opinion formers was equally pressing. ‘I hadn’t realised quite how much The Times was hated,’ he confessed. ‘The way the BBC treated the Murdoch press at that time was simply outrageous.’ This was not paranoia. The BBC had all but ceased citing The Times on round-ups of the morning’s papers and Times staff were rarely invited onto any programme. This was not a verdict on them or their writing, as Jenkins discovered whenever he complained and received a long and politically tendentious monologue about ‘the Murdoch press’ in response.4 The BBC, it seemed, was still implementing the siege of Wapping ‘boycott’ a full four years after the print unions had abandoned it.

  The two main types of reader Jenkins wanted to attract back to The Times were those he considered core not only to its circulation but also to its soul. The first was ‘the London administrative Establishment’. This group read the paper more for the valuable information it contained than for any particular pleasure. The second group were readers who were generally right of centre in their political views but who were not employed by Government institutions. They nonetheless considered themselves more literary, metropolitan and cosmopolitan than those who subscribed to the Telegraph. Attracting them back, without losing readers who liked Wilson’s more news-orientated paper, would determine whether circulation held up. This matter could not be disregarded in the headlong race to appeal to a relatively small elite. There were only twenty thousand sales separating the Independent, The Times and the Guardian. The latter was two thousand sales a day ahead of The Times while the Independent was hard on The Times’s heels. Becoming the fourth best-read broadsheet in Britain (with a consequent fall-off in advertising rates) was not an accolade Jenkins wanted to win for his new paper, but unless he could provide dramatic results there was every likelihood that this would be its fate. On his arrival at Wapping, Jenkins summoned his staff onto the news floor and explained to them where he was seeking to position the paper. His speech was short on complacency. Certainly there was a threat on news coverage from the Telegraph and on arts and opinion in the Guardian. ‘But,’ he maintained, ‘there is only one paper which, five years ago, put its tanks on our lawn and that is the Independent … the Independent is our prime target.’ The Times would respond by going back upmarket. An impulsive cheer rang out along the length of the building.

  The new editor had very clear ideas about what ‘going upmarket’ involved. It meant less sensationalism. This would involve reducing the size and temper of the headlines as well as writing that was phrased in a more considered and overtly objective style. It would mean fewer but longer articles rather than journalists’ copy being hacked into bite-sized morsels. The latter had become all to prevalent over the previous years and was exemplified when David Watts, the paper’s Tokyo correspondent, was asked to file two hundred words on the subject of one-hour ‘love hotels’, a cultural phenomenon related to Japanese society’s absence of privacy that demanded the sort of long, reflective 1500-word examination for which space had rarely
been forthcoming.5 Jenkins was particularly concerned by what he considered the deteriorating standard of English in the paper. The Times had once been held up to schoolchildren as a model for grammatical correctness. This tradition had ceased due to what the new editor put down to simple sloppiness. He told his staff that he demanded writing that ‘will lift the hearts of readers … we can more or less correct bad writing; we can edit it down. We cannot correct bad [sub]editing and we have got to pay particular attention to the presentation of writing in the paper. There simply must be no excuse for misprints, misspellings, stylistic errors, solecisms in The Times.’6

  This, indeed, was to be the launch of a crusade that in the months ahead was to do more to cause ructions between editor and staff than possibly any other decision from the chair. Jenkins’s announcement that it would be a disciplinary offence for any journalist – sub or otherwise – to let a major error pass into print was to cause much discontent and even fear. Some felt that the editor’s definition of a major error included many examples that justified a groan and a quick verbal rebuke rather than a formal written warning. Slang or casual sentence construction was regarded as well within the danger zone. When Jenkins asked Clifford Longley to send a formal warning to whoever wrote ‘disintering’ in an article he had just spotted four months after the event, Longley wrote back pointing out that the author was none other than Simon Jenkins, adding, somewhat cheekily, ‘in the circumstances I see no point in asking you to regard this memo as a rebuke, despite your instruction’.7 The threat of disciplinary action against anyone responsible for an error was particularly poor for morale on the backbench and on the subs’ tables generally. Jenkins did not especially care if this made him unpopular, seeing it as his duty to save the paper’s reputation rather than to win the bonhomie of his subs. Yet, what the reader gained in better and more accurately written prose was sometimes lost on occasions when so much time was spent scanning for mistakes that deadlines for the foreign, Scottish and West Country editions were missed.