Mirsky had landed himself and his newspaper in a mess. He could not deny he had made his comments, or even that they had been misinterpreted. What he had said was accurately reported. He thus had to substantiate his claims. This he proceeded to do. The Times, he noted, had not interviewed the Chinese dissident Wei Jingsheng when he visited London despite the fact that other broadsheets had done so. He also highlighted Stothard’s kowtowing to Beijing’s demand to know what questions he proposed asking President Jiang Zemin before an interview was granted, an action that had, in Mirsky’s inelegant expression, ‘lowered ourselves into our own toilet’.
Whatever the aversion to stoking an unseemly public squabble, Stothard had no option but to issue an immediate statement contradicting Mirsky’s allegations. ‘I have never taken an editorial decision to suit Mr Murdoch’s interests’ the editor declared, ‘nor have I ever been asked to.’ Spectators of the feud had to decide whether they trusted the editor’s word on this, given that he was hardly likely to announce he was the proprietor’s lackey, or the opinion of his China specialist who, having been several thousand miles away at the time, was not necessarily well placed to comment on office politics back home. Where Stothard was successful was in demonstrating where Mirsky lacked precision in his statement of the facts. His claim that The Times was downplaying stories about China and Hong Kong could hardly be made to fit the statistics. During 1997, the paper had run 218 articles on China (a figure that was comparable with the number published in the Telegraph). Of the 218 articles, Mirsky had written 124 and James Pringle, in Beijing, 94. Furthermore, The Times had run six leading articles on China or Hong Kong since May and not, as Mirsky asserted, none. There had also been no shortage of columnists on the Op-Ed page, most noticeably Bernard Levin, who had been unstintingly critical of the Beijing regime. Mirsky cited two occasions when he believed Stothard had personally spiked his articles shortly before he was due to meet Chinese officials in London.49 Yet, in the context of the great volume of copy filed, this hardly suggested a concerted attempt from on high to silence the South East Asia editor.
Where Mirsky was correct was in his observation that the paper’s coverage of Hong Kong’s politics had fallen off since the handover of the colony. To this there was an obvious explanation – it was no longer such a major news story. Mirsky, however, believed there was considerable evidence of Chinese bad faith in the months after the handover and questioned the journalistic values that decided otherwise. He was frustrated that Stothard, and Graham Paterson, failed to see the worth in the articles he was proposing. Nonetheless, he had forty-eight articles published following the handover and, as has been noted, The Times chose to respond to Mirsky’s retirement in November 1997 not with a sigh of relief but with a fresh contract for him to continue writing on an occasional basis on Chinese affairs. Meanwhile, James Pringle was continuing to file from Beijing.
Re-examining The Times’s editorial stance on China for this volume, it is difficult to find evidence to support Mirsky’s serious allegations although it is understandable that competitors, in particular the Telegraph, chose to give the claims top billing. Certainly, Mirsky had filed a considerable amount of copy that had never made its way into the paper. This was not unusual for foreign correspondents, most of whose dispatches are never found the space to be published. As Stothard, who had filed his fair share of unused copy during his stint in Washington DC, put it, most foreign correspondents ‘have moments when they feel isolated from office life and see imagined reasons why their rivals’ copy should be preferred to their own’.50 Mirsky was not only tremendously knowledgeable about his subject, but he was a noted journalist who had been named International Reporter of the Year for his coverage of the Tiananmen emergency. He could be forgiven for believing his unpublished copy had been spiked in deference to Rupert Murdoch rather than to the limitations of space. When even the literary editor, Erica Wagner, started turning down his offers to review books on subjects that he was eminently suited to write about, he had reason to suspect he had been effectively blacklisted. Stothard’s verdict was harsher. Most of Mirsky’s unpublished copy had not been used because the foreign desk and its subeditors thought it unusable. Whether this was a judgment on Mirsky or the editorial desks at Wapping was a matter of opinion.
It was an undignified end to Mirsky’s career at The Times. Despite the damage caused, George Brock did not want him to resign, not least because it would look as if he had been sacked. Nonetheless, go he did on 11 March, the day the paper’s board of independent directors met and concluded there was no substance in his allegations. Mirsky was rightly furious that they had come to this judgment without troubling to ask for his side of events. Brock had told him that he could not simultaneously stay on the paper while using its letters’ page to launch a frontal attack on its editorial integrity and so, when he was finally at liberty, the letters’ page published his rebuttal of Brian MacArthur’s claim that ‘he could not write in a journalistic manner’.51 He turned down a sizeable sum from the Sunday Telegraph to rubbish his former employers, opting instead for a better-mannered explanation in the Spectator. Nonetheless, for the vast majority who did not read the paper and assumed its writer on Chinese affairs was a whistle-blower, the episode did immense damage to The Times’s reputation as an independent organ and once again raised the spectre of supposed editorial interference from the proprietor. In fact, the paper’s level of Chinese coverage owed rather more to the personal interests of its editor than the business concerns of its proprietor. The Times rediscovered a more consistent and critical tone towards China and the space to give it justice after 2002, when Stothard was succeeded as editor by Mirsky’s Tiananmen Square Samaritan, Robert Thomson, despite there being no change in the proprietor or the extent of his Far East business interests.52
VII
It was not long before New Labour found its funding arrangements subjected to the same scrutiny that had sliced through the Tories’ layer cake of sleaze. In November 1997 the Government’s intention to exempt Formula One from the forthcoming ban on tobacco advertising was questioned when it emerged that Formula One’s owner, Bernie Ecclestone, had given £1 million to the Labour Party. Two days before Christmas 1998, Peter Mandelson, the Trade and Industry Secretary, was forced to resign over the revelation that he had received an undeclared £373,000 home loan from Geoffrey Robinson, the Paymaster-General, whose complicated business affairs with the late Robert Maxwell were the subject of a DTI investigation. Robinson also had to resign. In 1999, Stothard was particularly outraged that the BBC governors should consider appointing Greg Dyke as the new director general of the BBC. Dyke had helped fund Blair’s party leadership election campaign and, to Stothard, this fatally compromised his suitability. In this, The Times stood shoulder to shoulder with William Hague who made submissions against the appointment. The campaign was in vain and in June, Dyke was appointed.
The financial and personal relationships between what the press were increasingly dubbing ‘Tony’s Cronies’ contrasted with the efforts the new Tory leadership claimed to be making to clean up the Conservatives’ act. During the Major Government, the Sunday Times had been to the fore in criticizing the clandestine way in which the Conservative Party solicited funds from shadowy individuals, particularly foreigners. When he became Tory leader in June 1997, William Hague had made clear the party would no longer accept foreign donations. Issuing its report the following year, the Neill Committee into standards in public life grappled with the issue of what constituted an overseas donor (and decided it was someone who was ineligible to be a British-registered voter) and recommended tight rules on trusts, requiring that they be ‘genuinely UK-based’ to qualify as a ‘permissible source’.
Legislation was proposed that would put the Neill Committee’s findings on a statutory basis but doubts remained whether the Conservatives really were, as Hague suggested, complying with the spirit of the proposals. In May 1999, Tom Baldwin arrived at The Times as its new deputy politi
cal editor, having made a name for himself over the previous two years at the Sunday Telegraph were he had helped to expose Ecclestone’s funding links with Labour. He had not even settled into his new berth before he was called upon to investigate a story that would pitch The Times and the Tories into a five-month war of words, recrimination and the prospect of a gruelling court case that threatened to bring down either Peter Stothard or William Hague.
‘Massive donations make Tories “the plaything of one man”’ ran The Times headline on 5 June 1999. In the article, Tom Baldwin reported that ‘two authoritative sources’ within the Conservative Party had told the paper that the party Treasurer, Michael Ashcroft, had been bankrolling the party to the tune of up to £360,000 a month. Baldwin speculated (inaccurately) that this represented an investment of about £4 million a year. It was not difficult to see why such a man would have been welcomed with open arms by Conservative Central Office. Having ploughed resources into an unwinnable 1997 general election campaign, the Tories had posted an £11 million deficit in 1998. Political disarray had lowered morale and donations had collapsed, creating a yawning chasm. The party certainly needed the largesse of generous friends like Michael Ashcroft to help fill it. However, Baldwin’s article suggested that this level of reliance upon one man was not only unhealthy but also stood to get worse. An unnamed official was cited as complaining that the party Treasurer’s ‘abrasive style and controversial reputation within the City’ was a reason for the reticence of other donors to come forward. ‘For every penny we don’t receive,’ the official was quoted as saying, ‘he becomes even more powerful. We cannot let the party become the plaything of just one man.’53 The implication was clear: the once mighty Conservative Party had been sold at a rock bottom price to a person with a controversial business history who was known in the City as the ‘piranha’.
The Sunday Times had ranked Ashcroft Britain’s fourteenth richest man. Nonetheless, he spent much of the time out of the country. He was not only a resident of Florida and Belize but was the latter’s High Representative to the United Nations. Who was he and what was his motivation in bailing out the bankrupt Tories in Britain? So began a line of Times investigation that by its end had assumed the dimensions of a campaign or, to its critics, a witch hunt. At its heart were two questions. The first was whether Michael Ashcroft was using his role as Treasurer and principal donor to wield undue influence in the counsels of the Conservative Party. The Times never uncovered any evidence that this was the case. Indeed, those who worked at Conservative Central Office were certain that he did not.54 At most, his political ambition appeared limited to the personal aspiration of a peerage. This was hardly a scandal. There was a long tradition that major political donors ended up being ennobled sooner or later although Ashcroft’s prospects did not look good – the political honours scrutiny committee had already rejected him once. The second contention was the one upon which the paper chose to focus. Ashcroft was reckoned to be a billionaire and was viewed in the City by some with circumspection. As a Belize-based tax exile he lived in a country with notorious lax rules in financial matters. Attempts to tighten Belize’s rules had been thwarted by the country’s ruling People’s United Party which he helped fund. He enjoyed extraordinary concessions there. To Stothard, it seemed ‘a little odd to us that William Hague should appoint to the Tory party Treasurership a man who not only spent most of his time abroad and paid his taxes abroad but was a fully accredited official of a left-wing government’. It was, he later reiterated, ‘an absolute issue of public interest to pursue this’.55
Pursue it The Times conscientiously proceeded to do. Ashcroft’s route to extraordinary personal wealth had been a rocky one. Self-made and eschewing university or the social connections of the City Establishment (in itself, perhaps a reason why he was treated with some lofty suspicion), he had accumulated his first million by the age of thirty-one. Inevitably, such a man could not fail to make enemies along the way. He had been criticized by a Department of Trade and Industry report into the Blue Arrow affair and had aroused suspicions by basing his operations like ADT and Carlisle Holdings in offshore tax havens. The Times’s reporter, Damian Whitworth, was dispatched to Belize to snoop around. He was staggered by the extent of the Tory Treasurer’s business influence in the country and noted the general impression of the locals that he was ‘the big man in town’.56 The paper also sent Dominic Kennedy to Panama in the hope of uncovering further evidence of Ashcroft’s financial interests. Important leads started to come in from other sources. The Times was passed copies of official Foreign Office documents. These were published over the front page on 13 July. One, dating from October 1996, had been written by Charles Drace-Francis, who was then head of the West Indian and Atlantic Department at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. It stated that Ashcroft, ‘now has about $1 billion in cash and would obviously like to have his own bank to put it in – but cannot use the Belize Bank’. A second was a telegram the following April from the British High Commissioner in Belize referring to the difficulty of knowing whether to believe the ‘rumours about some of Ashcroft’s business dealings’.57
The Times now felt it was in a position to become more aggressive in tone. ‘Is it without significance that such a man would resist regulations intended to tackle crime because his own financial interests, albeit legitimate, might suffer?’ the leading article posed in relation to how Belize’s lax regulations made it conducive to drug- and money-laundering operations.58 David Mackilligin, the former High Commissioner to Belize, wrote a letter to The Times calling on William Hague to launch his Ethics and Integrity Committee enquiry into the activities of a man who ‘cannot escape responsibility for establishing a system that makes Belize a much more tempting target for drug-runners’.59 Hague was certainly in an unenviable position. The stream of criticism against his party Treasurer appeared to link the Tories in the public mind with the sort of sleaze that the new Conservative leader had stated was in the past. Yet, the party’s precarious finances would be further imperilled were he to ditch Ashcroft. Indeed, without the backing of Ashcroft’s millions, there were fears that the party’s line of credit would expire altogether. Hague opted to resist rather than succumb to the demands for an enquiry, choosing instead to echo Ashcroft’s claim that he was the victim of a ‘smear’. The Tory chairman, Michael Ancram, also went on the offensive claiming a ‘political campaign’ was being waged against the party and challenged the paper to divulge how many of its supposedly incriminating documents came from political appointees within the Government.60 Ancram’s anger was understandable. The other newspapers had started to follow The Times’s lead and, although the Daily Telegraph stood somewhat aloof, were generally supporting the call to probe further.
Worse was to follow. Independently of The Times’s probe, Toby Follett, a freelance journalist, had been working on an investigation for Channel 4. He contacted the paper suggesting they pooled their resources. He had a source in the US Drug Enforcement Administration. The first results appeared across the front page of the paper of Saturday 17 July, with the revelation that Ashcroft’s name was among those that appeared in four separate reports by the US Drug Enforcement Administration into possible drug smuggling and money laundering in Belize. Readers who persevered with the article, written by Tom Baldwin and Andrew Pierce, would have noted that Ashcroft had never even been interviewed and no charges had been brought against him. But the headline and its implications raised the temperature between the warring factions. For those for whom the slightest whiff of smoke necessarily pointed to a blazing inferno, this certainly sounded suspicious. The Times did, however, hold the presses and print Ashcroft’s furious rebuttal, ‘I make this categorical statement: I have never been involved in drug trafficking or money-laundering. My business affairs are entirely proper and no amount of smear, rumour or innuendo will alter that fact.’ He continued that he was adding The Times to his list of enemies and that having set up ‘Crimestoppers’ in 1987, an organization that h
ad been responsible for 29,000 arrests, ‘I clearly do not condone wrongdoing’.61
The Times, however, was beginning to mine a deep seam with the DEA’s reports on Belize. It showed a Labour MP, Peter Bradley, its DEA copies and on 21 July he used parliamentary privilege to cite their contents on the floor of the House of Commons. The Times published his speech verbatim. The imputation some wanted to make from the content was clear when another Labour MP with a more outspoken record, Dennis Skinner, caused uproar in the Commons chamber by declaiming without any concrete evidence, ‘The Tory Opposition are receiving a million pounds a year from one of the biggest drug-runners in the West.’62 That very day, Ashcroft issued a writ for libel against The Times, Stothard, Baldwin and Follett, accusing them of ‘perhaps the most one-sided, partial and coloured account of anyone’s affairs ever produced by a newspaper in a free country’. The most famous libel lawyer in the country, George Carman QC, accepted Ashcroft’s brief. Geoffrey Robertson QC stood poised and ready to defend News International’s corner. The legal and media worlds prepared themselves for what was immediately billed as ‘the clash of the titans’ and the most expensive libel trial in history. A figure of £100 million total costs was plucked from nowhere and was soon repeated as if it was the predetermined fee. Yet there was hardly a need for exaggeration. Whatever the final rate, either The Times or the Conservative Party’s Treasurer faced a massive bill and a ruined reputation.
The History of the Times Page 74