The History of the Times

by Graham Stewart

  With the loss of Hong Kong, Britain, which once administered the biggest Empire the world has ever seen, now has responsibility for fewer than 180,000 people in the remaining dependent territories. France still has three times as many citizens in its overseas departments, and has long given them full integration with metropolitan France. For these remaining few, Britain retains political and moral responsibility. Sadly the record here is poor. Drug-taking and money-laundering in the Caribbean, arguments over sovereignty in the Falklands and Gibraltar and the most appalling neglect of St Helena, Britain’s Atlantic Alcatraz, betray official irritation at being saddled with these pinpricks from a bygone age. There will be no more transfers of sovereignty. It is time now that the old ideals of Empire were properly applied to the small territories where Britain still holds sway.4

  Eight weeks later, on 31 August, came news that genuinely staggered the world. Diana, Princess of Wales, and one of her lovers, Dodi Fayed, were killed along with their driver in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel, Paris. Seven freelance photographers had been in pursuit and were arrested on manslaughter charges by French police (and later acquitted). Stothard was spending the weekend with Michael Portillo on the estate adjoining Balmoral when the news broke. He raced back to London with a leader written on a British Airways breakfast menu. In the meantime, Brian MacArthur who was editing the Sunday for Monday paper, had already begun masterminding the operation and, by common consent, pulled off a remarkable achievement. Over the next few days newspapers became, as Simon Jenkins observed, more like magazines as they sought not only to piece together the events that caused her death but also to assess her life and the extraordinary reaction to her premature demise. On the Sunday, the BBC provided all-day coverage. There were more than enough eulogies to fill it. No one else in the history of broadcasting had received this level of distinction.

  Although some found it excessive, the saturation media coverage appeared to encourage an outpouring of public grief that was far removed from the decorous respect that had marked the passing of King George VI or Sir Winston Churchill. About sixty million flowers – more than one for every person in the kingdom – were laid at makeshift shrines at the west end of The Mall and, more especially, around the late Princess’s former home at Kensington Palace. This spectacle of contagious grief also contained a vengeful element intent on blaming both the press for hounding her to her doom and the royal family, first for stripping Diana of her royal title when, on her divorce, she ceased to be royal, and for failing to display publicly the sense of contrition and show of mental distress that was convulsing the millions of people who had never met her. Some republican sentiments were expressed and a potentially serious display of disloyalty towards the Queen and the Prince of Wales was possibly avoided only by a belated loosening of protocol – the royal standard was lowered to halfmast above Buckingham Palace and the Queen was persuaded to make a television broadcast the day before the funeral in which she spoke of Diana’s great gifts.

  Noting the prevalence of young people among the grieving crowds, Simon Jenkins mused that:

  The young seek role models not among the contented but among those before whom the world has dangled every pleasure and yet snatched it away … People seem to take comfort in watching the famous find life as hard as they do themselves … The word used time and again by those queueing at St James’s yesterday was that she represented ‘comfort’.5

  In his funeral oration, Earl Spencer expressed the views of the vengeful, attacking not only the press which had hunted her, but, in an extraordinary display of lèse-majesté, the royal family. He had ensured that no tabloid editor was invited to the funeral. Given his late sister’s reliance on the ‘red tops’ to print information she leaked to them this insistence bemused those in the media who had first-hand experience of her modus operandi. In contrast, the broadsheet editors, with whom she had dealt far less frequently, were admitted to Westminster Abbey, even though in The Times’s case this meant receiving a stiff cream envelope from the Lord Chamberlain addressed to someone called Peter Pennington Esq – as if the editor had, like a peer of the realm, assumed the name of his territorial domain.

  Certainly, those seeking to chronicle each twist of the Prince and Princess of Wales’s matrimonial break-up would not find The Times to have been Fleet Street’s primary source. For Peter Stothard, the most insightful episode in his relations with Diana had occurred the first time he had been granted a private lunch with her in a Park Lane restaurant on 18 May 1994. He was astonished by her forthrightness and ability to impart so much information in so short a period. Within the first five minutes she had already slipped into the conversation a damaging observation about her husband. ‘She was as charming that day as everyone always says that she is. But she did not move outside the lines that she had most clearly defined,’ Stothard recalled in an article about that first lunch, published three days after her death:

  Inside those lines were the very aspects of her life which most people keep outside in discussion with newspaper editors – her husband, his mistress, her in-laws, her own fragile sense of herself. Within minutes I felt I was talking to someone I knew. By the time that she had toyed her way through her foie gras and lamb, I knew things about her that I did not know about my closest friends.

  Stothard had not until that moment taken an interest in what he considered mere royal gossip and had assumed that much of what had been printed in the popular press was ‘misleading, false, fourth-hand, or worse’. It suddenly became clear to him how much of it was directly attributable to its royal source. To Stothard’s unease, the Princess began to tell him a story about how she had helped a tramp who had fallen into the Regent’s Park Canal and that she was going to visit him in hospital in the afternoon. What was Stothard supposed to make of – or with – this story? ‘I had missed enough “royal exclusives” in my life to be far from sure that I had not just somehow missed this one too,’ he later related. ‘That prospect obviously worried her as well. I did not seem interested enough. Some bits of her story did not fit together as well as a true story should. Yet it seemed churlish to cross-examine a Princess.’ With paparazzi gathering outside the restaurant, the editor and the Princess slipped away in the Times limousine so that she could be conveyed to the hospital without attracting any media attention. Later that day, Stothard received a letter from Diana thanking him for the ‘rescue’ adding, ‘Today of all days it meant a great deal to me not to be photographed.’ Yet, intriguingly, the following morning the newspapers carried full accounts of how she had saved the tramp in the canal. The Times also carried the story even although Stothard had not mentioned it to anyone.6

  Predictably, the reaction of readers when Stothard related the occasion of his lunch with the late Princess was divided. Those who found the outbreak of national hysteria unsettling were delighted to have their suspicions confirmed that she had been a manipulative figure, ready to brief the press one moment then affect hurt at the intrusive publicity the next. Other readers felt that the editor of The Times ought not to be telling tales before her body was even formally laid to rest. In any case, she was hardly the only member of what she had memorably called a ‘crowded’ marriage to have briefed the press. Many of the hostile observations about her in the press during her life had derived from sources within the Prince of Wales’s circle of friends. The Times was not the first port of call for either side of the warring couple to leak a story. The Sun and the Daily Mail were regarded far more fertile ground. For The Times, the issue had been whether to repeat what was appearing elsewhere and risk accusations of publishing royal tittle-tattle or ignore it and miss stories concerning two of the world’s most famous people, one of whom was destined to be Britain’s Head of State. Stothard related that, ‘The problem was that my perception that the stories were mostly true was at odds with the perception of most Times readers that they were mostly false and were being presented either as just selling newspapers, idle gossip or in pursuit of some republican ag
enda.’ This last point was a particularly invidious charge given Murdoch’s personal republican leanings. Any Times report or comment that showed the House of Windsor in a less than perfect light could be accused of being prompted by the proprietor’s supposed views on the subject. In fact, Murdoch did not even raise the subject of The Times’s approach to monarchy with his editor. ‘I never ever had a discussion with him about that at all,’ Stothard stated after his retirement from the editorship.7 While reserving its right to find fault with individuals, The Times remained true to the coat of arms on its masthead and loyal to the concept of monarchy.

  For its part, the monarchy appeared to be relaxed about the occasionally irreverent treatment it received from The Times. ‘That’s Mr Hamilton. Don’t talk to him; he’ll only write terribly rude things about you,’ the Queen once instructed a Nigerian in full tribal costume who she spotted about to engage in conversation Alan Hamilton, The Times’s royal tours veteran, in the garden of the British High Commissioner’s residence in Abuja. The admonishment delivered, the Queen turned to Hamilton and gave him a knowing, sympathetic look before bursting into a smile. ‘I took this as a compliment,’ the sardonically droll Scotsman reflected; ‘at least she reads the stuff.’8

  IV

  With each successive Times editor, Bernard Levin, perhaps the nation’s most famous columnist, had developed an affectionate rapport. He would not depart for a holiday without leaving several articles already written to cover his absence. From distant parts, he would send the editor amusing mementos. From one trip to California in 1993 he sent Stothard a headline cutting from the Santa Barbara News-Press proclaiming, ‘Suit says newspaper editor “went berserk”’ to which he appended his own pithy leg-pull. Levin was genuinely loved by those who knew him and revered by those who did not. He had become as much a fixture of The Times as the crossword at the back. Yet, as the decade wore on, he presented Stothard with a problem. His memory was beginning to fail. There were occasions when he would attempt to file again on the same subject he had written about at length only days before. There remained flashes of the old brilliance but as he started a long and cruel battle with senile dementia so the quality of his column became uneven. Neither Stothard nor Bryant wanted to confront the issue, although letters from concerned readers were beginning to arrive in the editor’s office suggesting that releasing Levin from his twice-weekly obligations would be an act of mercy. Both the editor and deputy editor admired and revered a man whose many acts of quiet thoughtfulness were witnessed by all who felt themselves privileged to be counted among his friends. Yet, for most of the inmates of Wapping, Levin appeared self-contained to the point of being withdrawn. He would spend long hours in his small glass cell of an office, peering out with sad eyes, his lugubrious expression fleetingly met by those hurrying past on their way to talk to someone else. Although he was initially reluctant to speak about it, he knew his mental powers were starting to fail him and at times appeared distressed to the point where colleagues feared he would end it all with tablets and champagne. Instead, he chose to struggle on until Stothard grasped the nettle and persuaded him that he must scale down his output. Levin filed his last regular column on 10 January 1997, a lament for the declining quality of new plays and the impact this would have on the West End, without which there would be ‘a great hole in the fabric of our land’.9 It was suggested he should write more at his leisure for the weekend section and this he did for the rest of the year, criticizing the Chinese government, the persecutors of smokers and, finally, in 1998, his reflections on the Court of Appeal’s posthumous quashing of Derek Bentley’s conviction for murder – a cause célèbre he had long championed. It would prove to be his last piece. After it, the efforts of memory proved too great and the country was denied any further observations from a man who had bestrode his profession. His battle with dementia lost, he died in 2004.

  There were changes of location as well as personnel. In March 1998, The Times moved its address for only the fourth time in its history. On this occasion, the move could not have been shorter, since it merely involved crossing from the south side of Pennington Street to the north side. The Napoleonic rum warehouse was too small to contain all the paper’s departments and decamping across the road to the newly built six-storey office block was a matter of necessity. Despite its undistinguished architecture, some had come to appreciate the old building’s bunker-like qualities and the fact that its long, open-plan interior allowed a virtually unobstructed view of everyone in the office at the same time. While journalists toiled on tomorrow’s copy, all the past editions were stored, leather-bound, under their feet in the catacombs of the brick vaults below. Its unusualness had become its principal charm and, for some, the hassle of moving a matter of metres away to a new building that lacked a decent sense of history hardly seemed worth the effort. How much of an improvement the new building was quickly became a matter for debate. Despite moving from a largely windowless shed to new glass and brick office block designed by the fashionable architect Rick Mather and rejoicing in the preposterous name of ‘La Lumière’, many journalists were unimpressed by their new residence and soon rechristened it ‘La Gloomy Air’. The building was quickly given an official rebranding as ‘Times House’. Before long, however, the welcoming air turned stale as the extent of the drainage problem in the lavatories and a rat infestation became apparent. Some, of course, joked that from a professional standpoint this was appropriate.

  Aesthetically, the new residence was less than exciting, representing the styleless architectural interlude that followed the exuberant if tacky postmodernism of the 1980s. The newsroom was successfully accommodated in one large, open-plan ground floor. The leader writers enjoyed greater seclusion on the floor above where the various associate editors were given small glass compartments in which to pretend they enjoyed privacy. Stothard fared better and was able to move into an office that was finally large enough to hold small conferences and accommodate his extensive personal library of historical and biographical tomes. He, at least, was given wooden bookshelves. Elsewhere in the building they were made of metal, fitted with fold-down shutters and painted blue to resemble outsized deposit boxes. There was no reason to believe their designer had any acquaintance with the shape and dimensions of a book. This was not the least of the disappointments. A dank central courtyard became the equivalent of the school bike shed for the paper’s resident smokers. On higher levels, steel gantries and a metal staircase that resonated with the constant clinkety-clank sound of its users’ feet conveyed the sights and sounds of being on a Panamanian registered oil tanker. Deeper within the building, even the carpeted zones appeared to have been designed for steerage class. Some of the connecting corridors were so narrow that it was impossible for two people to pass each other without doing a forty-five-degree twist of the pelvis. This militated against hanging the treasures of the past on the walls and it was not until 2004 that oil paintings of the Walter, Northcliffe and Astor owners were hung in the entrance foyer as a first and much needed concession to decoration. An enclosed glass footbridge was constructed over Pennington Street and the old warehouse in order to link The Times ‘s new residence with the facilities – including the reference library, restaurant and gym – that it shared with the other newspapers in the group above the print hall. The design of the enclosed bridge ensured that it funnelled scorching heat in summer and arctic chill in the other three seasons. Oddly, the new home’s peculiarities invested it with a welcome, if unintended, degree of eccentricity.

  Meanwhile, the old rum warehouse The Times left behind became the repository for various News International departments, including the Archive and Record Centre. The Times’s archives had first been opened to historical researchers on a limited basis during Rees-Mogg’s editorship. The driving force behind improving the conditions in which they were kept and making them more readily available to the public came from the venerable Sir Edward Pickering who, at the age of eighty-six, remained one of Murdoch’s
most trusted and respected executives. With ‘Pick’s’ backing, the company invested in new temperature-controlled storerooms for the paper’s documents in an archive that filled over a kilometre of shelving space. At last, a proper budget was assigned to conserving the paper’s heritage and even to procure further relevant material at auction. With Eamon Dyas as chief archivist, The Times became in June 1998 the first national newspaper to offer outside researchers free and comprehensive access to its historic collection. ‘Pick’ had made many contributions to the paper’s welfare since his appointment as Times Newspapers’ executive vice-chairman in 1982. In particular, he had been a sagacious source of advice to successive editors and enjoyed the trust and indeed admiration of Murdoch who considered him his ‘first great mentor’. There were, after all, no other 1950s Fleet Street editors still in senior management positions as the twentieth century drew to a close. Indeed, Sir Edward came to the view that he was too old to retire, stayed at his post and died in harness at the age of ninety-one in 2003, an acknowledged giant of Fleet Street. Of his many services to The Times, his support for the ongoing project of writing the paper’s official history and the creation of a properly endowed Archive Centre were among the tangible monuments. The access provided to scholars greatly enhanced The Times’s claims to be the historian’s paper of record.