The History of the Times

by Graham Stewart

  Few, including The Times which backed him, knew where Hague intended to take the party. All that was known for sure was that he was young, fresh, virtually untainted by the infighting of the Major years and, unlike Clarke, was no enthusiast for joining the euro. In the circumstances, this appeared to be a promising start. If he lacked stature then he had time, it seemed, to acquire it and develop some new policies along the way. Yet, escaping the shadows of the past five years of infighting and ‘Tory sleaze’ remained a daunting prospect. The day after Hague was elected leader, Jonathan Aitken’s libel case against the Guardian collapsed. Having been prepared to let his daughter Victoria provide him with a false alibi under oath, the former Chief Secretary to the Treasury faced charges of perjury and perverting the course of justice for which he would serve seven months in jail and be declared bankrupt. There were heavy clouds hanging over the bright Tory dawn. The Times was ready to look out towards a different horizon.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  NEW LABOUR, NEW JOURNALISM

  Living with New Labour; Devolution in Print and in Politics;

  the People’s Princess; Bernard Levin Takes His Bow; Pennington Street;

  Media Law, the PCC and Libel; China Calling; the Ashcroft Affair;

  the Editor Takes Time Out; T2; the Shine Comes off the Spin;

  Labour Endorsed

  I

  ‘Tony Blair will have to be a great Prime Minister if he is not to be a great failure’ wrote Rees-Mogg the day after the general election.1 The first weeks certainly promised that the new leader would live up to the high expectations created by a landslide that gave him untrammelled political authority. Six days after the election victory, Gordon Brown, Blair’s new next-door neighbour as Chancellor of the Exchequer, announced the first surprise: handing interest-rate policy over to an independent Bank of England. Socialists wondered why such an immediate and momentous change had not been included in the election manifesto and, indeed, why one of the first actions of a Labour Government after eighteen years in opposition was to denationalize an instrument of economic management. The Times was delighted. An independent central bank was a precondition of joining the euro but the move also weakened one of the single currency supporters’ stronger arguments – that British governments had long debauched sterling for short-term political ends. Whatever his feelings about the single currency, Brown had shown himself to be a decisive Chancellor in pursuit of a liberalizing policy that even the Tories had lacked the courage of their convictions to enact.

  Brown had the latitude of benign conditions in which to operate. During the summer of 1997, inflation stood at only 3.3 per cent while unemployment, at 1.55 million (5.5 per cent of the workforce), was far below the average on the European continent. This rosy economic prospect had been assisted by the legacy of the Tory reforms that removed rigidities in the labour market, reducing costs to employers of hiring – and firing – staff. Yet the easy employment prospects for the vast majority were matched by pockets of persistent unemployment for a few, who, having been jobless for long periods, had difficulty getting back onto the ladder of opportunity. The Blair Government’s ‘New Deal’ programme was designed to offer a training scheme from which they could get back into work, paid for by a – politically opportunistic – windfall tax on the profits earned by the privatized utilities whose very success had become as much a source of public anger as had their previous losses and ineptitude as wards of the State.

  For The Times’s political strategists the most momentous decision came on 27 October when, after mounting speculation, Brown informed the Commons chamber that Britain would not join the euro in the current parliament but would hope to do so in the following one. For Stothard, this was a huge relief. The prospect of Blair using the momentum of his election landslide to roll the country into precipitously scrapping sterling had subsided entirely. What happened in a subsequent parliament remained a distant prospect. In the event, Brown (or the failure of the opinion polls to show mounting popular enthusiasm) ensured that Britain would stay out of the euro during Labour’s second term too. When eleven members of the European Union welcomed in 1999 with the new currency, Britain would not be among them. The great moment in European unity was marked by fireworks in the sky rather than by a crisis at the shopping tills or money markets. The widespread disorder that some Euro-sceptics’ prophesied failed to materialize and the new currency’s adoption had an impressively tranquil passage in the period of transition. Yet, the pro-euro campaigners’ assertions that a Britain outside the euro zone would suffer from foreign investors deserting its shores and the City of London losing its primacy similarly proved to be scares without foundation. Equally adrift was their claim that a single currency would have an anti-inflationary effect by making price differentials transparent across the Continent. In fact, the new currency provided an opportunity to round prices upwards. Indeed, in the first years of operation the economies of the euro zone – and in particular of a Germany buckling under the costs of reunification and an expensive labour market – were outperformed by a Britain left to the protection of its own currency. Continuing economic growth buttressed Labour’s claims to competence and popularity with the electorate. It frustrated the Prime Minister’s attempts to convince the Chancellor or the general public of the urgency of joining the euro bloc.

  II

  The announcement in October 1997 that Britain would not – for the moment at any rate – boldly go into the euro zone came a month after the new Government had recast the political structure of the United Kingdom. On 12 September, 74.3 per cent of Scots voted in a referendum for their own Parliament with 63.5 per cent assenting that it should have tax-raising powers. In Wales seven days later the vote for a more modest assembly without the power to tax was won by the unconvincing margin of 0.6 per cent (a mere 6721 votes). Meanwhile, a post-general election ceasefire by the IRA was deemed sufficient to bring Sinn Fein into talks over Ulster’s future, raising expectations that a political settlement could yet be achieved on the basis of a power-sharing assembly at Stormont. Following in quick succession, these developments, taken together with plans to abolish the hereditary element within the House of Lords, appeared to be signs of a new radicalism in British politics, in which Blair dedicated his service to the reform and modernization of the constitutional settlement.

  The irony was that Blair appeared to be less excited by the reform agenda than many of his colleagues. In particular, the establishment of a Scottish Parliament created a rival power structure to the centralization of authority he appeared to believe was necessary to create the ‘New Britain’ of which he so frequently, and ambiguously, spoke. He had inherited the Scottish devolution agenda from his predecessor, John Smith, and during the election campaign had committed a rare and inexplicable gaff by insisting it would be little more than a parish council. When Stothard, accompanied by Peter Riddell and Anatole Kaletsky, had interviewed Blair in the last hours before polling day, the Labour leader denied that his constitutional proposals would be his greatest legacy, claiming ‘the improvements in education will be much more important than that’.2 There were those at Wapping who begged to differ. Given the scale of Blair’s majority and the period of introspection it forced upon the official Opposition, George Brock assumed that ‘the only interesting politics over the next few years will be in Scotland’.3 The question underlying the managing editor’s prophecy was how a London paper like The Times could make itself attractive to a Scottish readership whose lives would increasingly be determined by a legislature meeting in Edinburgh.

  The situation had been bad enough even before the first workmen arrived on the Holyrood site to build Scotland’s own Parliament building. Scots had long preferred their own broadsheet newspapers – in particular the Glasgow Herald and the Scotsman – to the clipped accents from distant Fleet Street. Sales of The Times north of the border were pitiful. As with the sale in Ireland, they numbered only a few thousand during the 1980s although circulation began to pi
ck up after 1993 with the commencement of the price war. Part of this long tradition of failure could be laid at the door of the paper being perceived not merely as an English product but one too closely associated with the closed world of Whitehall, the Establishment and the affairs of the Church of England’s General Synod. A decade of ownership by Murdoch or even five years with Charlie Wilson at the helm had failed substantially to shift this perception. In truth, it was not just a matter of anti-Home Counties resentment. Middle-class Scots in Edinburgh’s New Town or Morningside had their own professional hierarchy as might be expected in the capital of a nation that had always retained its own legal and ecclesiastical sovereignty. Political devolution now threatened to make The Times even more redundant north of Berwick-upon-Tweed. After all, Scots could hardly be expected to want a product that focused on issues of domestic policy that were no longer applicable to them while being denied more than occasional references to the laws that did affect them from Holyrood.

  A fleeting examination of the balance books suggested the Scottish market could be written off, yet this made no sense for a newspaper that considered itself a British product committed to the maintenance of the Act of Union. Furthermore, Scotland clearly had a readership profile that indicated there were converts to be won if only a London paper could speak to them in a broader brogue. Merely adding a few extra Scottish news items would not address this: they would never be enough for noncurrent readers to notice and turn to the paper. What was needed was a distinct Scottish edition. This involved considerable investment but, as the process of Scottish devolution got underway, Stothard and Brock drew up plans for just such an innovation. It would not be a completely new paper for certain features, like the comment, leaders, letters and obituaries pages, would remain standard on both sides of the border, but a new Scottish editor would be appointed to oversee the replacement of those news items that would have little resonance with Scottish readers with stories that were relevant to them. The sports pages could also be altered to provide fuller coverage of Scottish teams and individuals. Once it was launched, Scottish readers of this edition would get the best of both worlds – a full portrait of Scottish news combined with all the aspects that made The Times the sort of journal of world news against which the Herald or the Scotsman could never field the resources to compete.

  It was a far more complicated process than at first it appeared. Subediting a Scottish edition did not simply involve cutting out news about Eton and pasting in a tale about Fettes. The fact that health and education politics had passed to the Holyrood Parliament’s competence did not preclude the possibility that patients in the Edinburgh Infirmary might still want to know about health policies that governed the wards of Guy’s Hospital. Likewise, it was important that the Scotland edition did not become a sink estate for Scottish news to be tidied away from English eyes. The Home Counties were generously populated by parents with offspring up at Scottish universities. What was clearly needed was a Scottish editor with an eye for getting the balance right and such a man was found in John Mair. Born in the small clifftop fishing village of Portknockie, east of Inverness, Mair, an Aberdeen University graduate and a discerning lover of poetry, had joined The Times as a production sub in 1981 and spent the succeeding seventeen years taking increasing responsibility on the backbench, where he became deputy night editor. Assisted by a single sub, he would, as the new Scottish editor, continue to be based at Wapping. This was necessary for ease of access to Stothard and the rest of the editorial high command including those, like Michael Gove, who had a good grasp of Celtic affairs. The actual reporting, however, would be done from the paper’s Edinburgh office, from where Jason Allardyce and Gillian Harris operated, supplemented by Shirley English in Glasgow.

  Effective coverage of the Holyrood Parliament would be the most important division between the Scottish and English editions. For north of the border, Angus Macleod was appointed political editor. Aside from its committee work, the new Parliament had full sessions in the chamber on Wednesdays and Thursdays and Magnus Linklater – who had been a Times columnist since 1994 – became the sketchwriter for these occasions. As the son of Eric Linklater, the Orcadian-born biographer, soldier and comic novelist, he had a natural sense of place within the Scottish cultural Establishment although, as an Old Etonian, graduate of the universities of Freiburg, the Sorbonne and Cambridge and a member of the MCC, his attachment to the principle of Scottish devolution came with none of the anti-Sassenach baggage that sometimes accompanied the more strident exponents of Scottish exceptionalism. In any case, he had spent most of his journalistic career in London where he had worked with Harold Evans at the Sunday Times before moving over to become successively managing editor of the Observer and editor of the London Daily News. It was only with the collapse of Maxwell’s attempt to take on the Evening Standard that he moved up to Edinburgh as editor of the Scotsman between 1988 and 1994. Writing from his Georgian residence in the heart of Edinburgh’s New Town, Linklater was one of nature’s true-born Whigs. He was a man of liberal and humane sentiments who combined his journalism with a love of opera, fishing and antiquarian bookshops. He wished the Holyrood venture well without feeling obliged to ignore its shortcomings – except in the matter of the new Parliament’s construction costs, which he defended, confident in the belief that it would prove to be an architectural wonder capable of comparison with the Sydney Opera House. While his Holyrood sketches only appeared in the Scottish edition, his weekly column – usually on matters emanating from Scotland’s political adventure – appeared in the English editions as well. Like Brock, Stothard took the view that the Holyrood experiment was too interesting a development to be confined to a Scots only audience.

  The editions going north began to be re-edited with additional Scottish content in late 1998. Going to press at 6 a.m., the edition for 7 May 1999 carried the full results of the new Parliament’s first elections as the frontpage lead. A formally distinctive and branded Scottish edition hit the newsstands on 22 July. The first task was to make the best of a logistical problem. Increasing sales of the Sun (which already had a Scottish edition) had swamped any spare capacity at News International’s Kinning Park printing plant in Glasgow. Consequently, the new Times paper had to be printed from the company’s Knowsley plant in Merseyside. This created some difficulty for the first print run which went up to the north of Scotland without some of the late-starting Scottish sporting fixtures, although the second edition – which covered the vast majority of the readership in the ‘central belt’ – left late enough to provide a comprehensive service. Certainly, the product looked as professional as its English counterpart and, on average, contained only around six to twelve article alternations a day. Yet, judiciously selected, these were enough to satiate the target market – those Scots who wanted more home news within a newspaper that was still primarily British in tone and international in scope. Improvements continued to be made. In 2001, some of the more obscure London arts reviews were replaced with reports from Robert Dawson-Scott on what was showing in Scotland’s galleries and theatres. Helped by a special price cut, the effect on circulation north of the border was dramatic. The Times saw its Scottish sale soar and by 2000 its circulation had passed the thirty thousand mark. The Telegraph also launched a Scottish edition along similar lines and recorded comparable gains. Nonetheless, by 2002 The Times had opened up a six-thousand-lead over its rival and had become comfortably Scotland’s leading Fleet Street broadsheet. Perhaps surprisingly, the Independent and the Guardian (which might have expected a ready market in a part of the country whose employment patterns and politics favoured a strong public sector) opted only to increase the Scottish content in the editions they sent north rather than to follow The Times and Telegraph’s path of a full-blown Scottish edition. Their continuing failure to make headway in Scotland suggested they had missed their chance. In contrast, for a paper whose politics remained unionist, The Times had demonstrated great versatility in adapting to the new land
scape created by Scottish devolution. It was a costly endeavour but it reaped an important dividend.

  III

  Within weeks of taking office, Tony Blair had shown his faith in the future (whatever it might hold) by giving the go-ahead to the £750 million Millennium Dome, a project that it was hoped would embody everything positive and progressive about what style journalists had taken to calling ‘Cool Britannia’. In July 1997, a party hosted in Downing Street for some of the brightest and most recognizable figures in the arts was widely interpreted as a Prime Ministerial attempt to associate himself with the new mood of optimism that sought to be unencumbered with the weight of tradition and history. It was not just post-election triumphalism that gave the Labour Government a sense that 1997 was a year of renewal. On 30 June the story of the British Empire effectively came to a close in Hong Kong when, in a ceremony no less moving for being rain-drenched, the Prime Minister and the Prince of Wales attended the handover of the last significant colony to the People’s Republic of China. In The Times, a poignant leader article saluted Britain’s record there but questioned whether it was living up to its responsibilities for its remaining possessions, the ‘few small islands, once staging posts on the shipping routes to the colonies, that are either too small or too remote to make their way alone in the world’: