Did The Times have its own agenda, as Ashcroft and Ancram alleged? Day after day, the paper was giving massive coverage to its investigation. Those who had been on the paper in 1982 might have recalled the moment when Rodney Cowton challenged the then editor Harold Evans that he appeared to be running a ‘campaign’. The issue then had been lead in petrol. Seventeen years on, the attack launched by Stothard, Evans’s protégé, was far more personal. The prominent role in the reporting taken by Tom Baldwin was commented upon adversely by those with partisan suspicions. Whatever his well-established talents as a news bloodhound, he was known to be unsympathetic to the Conservatives. Ben Preston, the son of the former Guardian editor, Peter Preston, had taken over as news editor and was also assumed to be no Tory die-hard. An official in the Foreign Office was supposed to have leaked documents to the paper. Where there political forces at work behind the scenes? And why was the paper sharing some of its documentation with the Labour Member of Parliament for The Wrekin? Whatever Baldwin’s links with the Downing Street press office, the evidence that The Times was doing the Labour Government’s bidding was, however, hard to sustain. It had just endorsed voting Tory in the European parliamentary elections and had vehemently opposed Greg Dyke, a man who helped fund Blair’s leadership campaign, being appointed as the BBC’s directorgeneral.63 Those who assumed the campaign against Ashcroft was a politically-motivated assault on the integrity of the Conservative Party might have been surprised to learn that the initial motivation appeared to come not from Wapping’s New Labour admirers but from those with Tory leanings. The domestic politics leader writer, Tim Hames, and George Bridges, a young recruit to the leader team who had been a speechwriter for John Major, were among those who had mentioned the concerns they had heard about Ashcroft’s role as the party’s banker of first and last resort. They were reporting worries expressed to them by senior Conservative contacts, not from anyone on the left. Nor were they alone. Stothard remained on good terms with leading Conservative politicians on the modernizing wing of the party. Whether from a high-minded opposition to the party becoming ‘the plaything’ of a wealthy businessman or from a political desire to undermine Hague, they voiced to the editor their concerns about the Tory Treasurer. Stothard fully recognized that the campaign would damage the Tory leadership and that this might help Labour in the short term, but he believed that in opposing an overconcentration of power in one man, the paper was doing the Tories a favour in the longer term. This assumed that kicking the party when it was down was the best way to restore it to its feet.64 Yet, aside from the journalistic urge to get to the truth, it was not hard to understand why Stothard pursued the matter. Ashcroft was not the only one over whom a cloud of suspicion hung. Ignoring the rumours, Hague was also standing by Lord Archer of Weston-super-Mare as the party’s prospective candidate for the London mayoral election. ‘The role of kept woman is never dignified but the Tory party is playing particularly fast and loose in its choice of sugar daddy,’ added Michael Gove in his column, proceeding also to admonish the influence of Archer as another ‘opportunist who gave the Tory party a whiff of the casbah’. It saddened Gove that, ‘The party once ruined by Mandy Rice-Davies is now behaving like her.’65
Not everyone at The Times was happy with the manner in which the campaign was developing. Having been present when the match was lit, Tim Hames increasingly occupied himself on issues that allowed him to stand well back from the coming explosion. The deputy editor, John Bryant, had early on decided that the paper was becoming fixated with its anti-Ashcroft campaign and was losing a sense of proportion in its attempts to get him. In particular, he was uneasy about relying on Toby Follett for information. Stothard, however, would not be reined in. Any hope that the paper might call off its attack had already collapsed. Acting in a private capacity, the PR guru Lord (Tim) Bell had arranged for Stothard to meet Ashcroft over breakfast at the Savoy. The meeting had been civil, with the Tory Treasurer explaining how he was seeking to introduce financial prudence into the free-spending environment of Conservative Central Office. Yet, essentially a man with a shy manner, he did not handle his case with much subtlety. He was reluctant to give The Times an on-the-record interview. When the paper asked the Conservative Party questions about financing, its requests were forwarded to Ashcroft’s lawyers. Not only did this appear suspiciously defensive, it tended to re-enforce the allegation that the Party was indeed his personal fiefdom.
Probing by The Times caused the Conservative Party further embarrassment in November when the paper revealed that the party bank account was receiving around £1 million a year in direct transfers from funds in Ashcroft’s Belize Bank Trust Company. The Neill Committee had ruled that this means of payment fell into the category of a foreign donation and a draft bill was being drawn up to make it illegal. It was certainly at odds with the statement the party had made to the Neill Committee the previous year when it claimed it had not received any foreign donations since the general election. The Times’s revelation forced Conservative Central Office to admit it was using different guidelines to those set out by Neill. Whether the Neill Committee had grasped that the Tories were using their own different criteria when they made their original boast that they were complying with a no-foreign-donations policy was another matter.66 What especially alarmed Michael Ancram was the question of how The Times had gained access to information on private Conservative Party bank account details. Claiming that it ‘appeared to be the latest of a series of dirty tricks being perpetrated by those who will stop at nothing in order to keep this government in power’ he asked the Metropolitan Police to investigate who had hacked into the bank accounts.67 Stothard denied the paper had been involved in any such impropriety. This was, technically, true. To help its defence against the libel suit, it had hired private detectives to investigate Ashcroft and had not chosen to get involved in the methods by which they obtained results.
Ashcroft appeared to believe that The Times – lacking hard information to accuse him of being a money launderer or drugs trafficker – was instead printing titbits from Drugs Enforcement Administration files in a manner intended to create a climate of guilt by association. Rejecting Ashcroft’s interpretation, The Times’s defence was that it was reporting facts and matters about which the public had a right to know. It was merely and quite properly drawing attention to questions that needed to be answered by a person in his position. Yet stating that he had been named in four separate DEA reports had little meaning if the references did not include specific allegations. What The Times did publish certainly looked like scraps: a drugs dealer, Thomas Ricke, had channelled some of his ill-gotten gains through the Belize Bank that Ashcroft controlled; Ashcroft had been seen boarding a plane that the DEA believed had been used in drugs operations (although he had innocently hired the plane from a leasing company). The question remained whether these apparent coincidences merited the extensive billing the paper was giving them. Ashcroft asked The Times to print the DEA files unedited and in full. The Times failed to do so.68
Whatever the eventual verdict, a court case was going to be cripplingly expensive. The risk of defeat for The Times was a terrifying prospect while Ashcroft could only win after a lengthy period in which every aspect of his business empire – no matter how innocent – would come under detailed scrutiny. It was not as if winning hundreds of thousands of pounds in damages – which he described as ‘petty cash’ – was vital to him. He was, after all, a billionaire. What was important for both his business and personal interests was for his name to be cleared of the serious imputations contained by The Times’s leaking of DEA files. The allegations were, it seems, putting business pressure on him from banks reluctant to roll over loans until his name had been cleared. There were other pressures on him, including his desire for a peerage, which demanded a compromise solution rather than risk more in the public glare of the High Court. Hague’s loyalty towards him was steadfast – or, as The Times saw it, unquestioning. As Ashcroft later confirmed, Hague
‘made clear a newspaper was not going to hound me out. He never put pressure on me.’69 Yet it was certainly not in the Conservative Party’s interest for courtroom claims and counterclaims to keep the story in the news, stretching (with George Carman’s temporary indisposition) towards the next general election. The party already had enough bad courtroom publicity to contend with from Jonathan Aitken, Neil Hamilton and Lord Archer of Weston-super-Mare. Allegations of sleaze had contributed to one general election humiliation and Hague did not wish a second election campaign to be similarly derailed. Murdoch too had no more desire than anyone else to fight a long war of attrition that risked the reputation of his flagship newspaper when a propitious and satisfactory truce could save all the combatants a great deal of hardship. One possibility was to get the respective legal teams to thrash out a compromise. A cheaper and perhaps less protracted alternative was to find an honest broker who would bring Murdoch and Ashcroft together as two men of the world having a tycoon-to-tycoon discussion about how the unfortunate matter might be settled amicably. Jeff Randall, a former Sunday Times executive who was editor of the Sunday Business, offered himself in this role and it was he who brought Murdoch and Ashcroft together. Preliminary positions established, Murdoch referred a formula to Stothard for his comments and approval and their respective fax machines rumbled into life. Stothard was hosting a reception for Times colleagues at the Reform Club when a waiter arrived with a card marked ‘urgent message’. It announced that a Mr Michael Ashcroft, in New York, wished to speak to him on the telephone.
Peace was declared in time for Christmas. On the paper’s front page of 9 December 1999 ran a 347-word statement under the headline ‘The Times and Michael Ashcroft: Correction.’ Three brief paragraphs – including the statement that ‘the issues raised by The Times have resulted in a substantive and useful debate on foreign donations to political parties’ – built up to the denouement: ‘The Times is pleased to confirm that it has no evidence that Mr Ashcroft or any of his companies have ever been suspected of money laundering or drug-related crimes.’ The paper applauded the announcement that the Tory Treasurer would be reorganizing his affairs in order to return to live in Britain. Ashcroft recognized ‘the public concern about foreign funding of British politics’ while ‘the openness and accountability of political funding by all parties will remain a central issue for investigation and comment by The Times’. The notice ended, ‘With this statement, The Times intends to draw a line under the “The Ashcroft Affair”. Litigation between the parties has been settled to mutual satisfaction, with each side bearing its own costs.’70
‘To draw a line’ was an interesting phrase. As was quickly spotted, there was no word of apology or retraction. Ashcroft was dropping his litigation for damages and an order for his legal costs. The declaration that the paper had no evidence of criminality was, after all, no more than a statement of fact. It was the perceived hint of innuendo that had provoked Ashcroft into issuing a writ. Those looking for a victor were better advised to conclude that neither of the protagonists had lost. With consummate diplomacy, Jeff Randall declared it ‘an honourable score draw’.71 Surprisingly, this was not quite the end of the matter as far as The Times was concerned. Follow-up investigations started before the settlement in December were only finally put on hold after the Tory Treasurer threatened to sue for breach of contract. In the short term, Ashcroft’s reputation recovered: when news broke that he had settled with The Times, shares in his public company Carlisle Holdings leapt, making him £36 million richer than he had been the day before. In the longer term, he made other gains. In March 2000, he was finally cleared for a peerage after agreeing to move to Britain and renounce his post as Belizean ambassador to the UN. In October he took his seat in the House of Lords as Lord Ashcroft of Belize. Three years later he gained access under the Data Protection Act to fifty-six files held by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Department for International Development which included derogatory and unfounded comments. The departments issued a formal apology and agreed to pay considerable costs.72 Others fared less well. Following an enquiry, Drace-Francis departed from the Foreign Office and subsequently got a job in an Edinburgh kilt shop. Jonathan Randel, a US drugs agency analyst working in Atlanta, was charged with selling classified documents to Toby Follett (who then passed them to The Times; the paper admitted paying Randel’s expenses) and in 2003 was sentenced in an Atlanta court to a year in jail.73
How the reputation of The Times emerged from the imbroglio was hotly debated. In the sense that it had never directly alleged anything that it had to retract, its investigation could not be faulted. It had shone a light on an important and – until that moment – underanalysed figure in British politics, asking valid questions about the manner in which he related his Conservative Party role with his financial arrangements and commitments to another government. The investigation had commenced with genuinely proper motives. The speed with which it uncovered information of an interesting and at times headline-grabbing nature (especially in regard to the DEA references) had, however, encouraged what, from a more objective standpoint, appeared to be a less than appropriate tone. Indeed, the coverage developed a hectoring tendency that gave the impression the hunt was being pursued with a sense of gleeful expectation. Articles by Tory-minded journalists and by the editor himself explaining that the motives were high-minded and not politically partisan were lost amid this raucous tenor. The Times had published eighty-one articles relating to the Ashcroft affair in the forty-seven days between the paper making its first foray and its report that Ashcroft was suing for libel. By the time a legal settlement had been reached in December, the tally had almost reached 170. More than thirty of these articles had been splashed across the front page. This was a lot of coverage for a man who had not been charged with any crime and, but for the paper’s campaign, was not a publicly well-known figure.
Critics felt that the sheer ferocity with which Ashcroft was pursued smacked of the worst excesses of ‘attack journalism’. They believed the patient sniffing of the bloodhound had given way to the snarling aggression of the Rottweiler. There were a small number of examples in the paper’s history where it had adopted this approach with the intention of exposing wrongdoing, but, generally speaking, the Ashcroft affair was a noticeable departure from the paper’s tradition. Once the paper was under threat of a potentially crippling legal writ, the determination to look under every stone overwhelmed other considerations. Information had been shared between Tom Baldwin and Government and parliamentary sources in a manner that made The Times look as if it was in cahoots with a Labour conspiracy against the Tory Treasurer. A major problem was that The Times had less experience than some other newspapers in running this kind of personal investigation and found itself relying on private investigators and other third parties. They employed methods of gathering information that risked tarnishing – by association – the name of a reputable newspaper. It certainly was not consistent with the measured reporting of established fact associated with being the journal of record. Those who believed this tag had long prevented the paper from fulfilling its proper role to search out truth through disclosure and investigation were delighted. To them, the old reticence had merely made it the lapdog of the powerful. Stothard was named the 1999 Editor of the Year and The Times the Newspaper of the Year at the What the Papers Say awards. It was a high note upon which to end the century. Applauding its ‘world-class credentials’, the judges commended it for getting ‘a taste for setting the news agenda’. The Ashcroft saga was part of this, the citation stating admiringly: ‘having got the story, The Times just wouldn’t shut up. Even when Ashcroft issued a writ for libel, the paper and its editor carried on.’ The result had been to give the Conservative Party ‘a bloody nose’.74 Trying to affect an air of congratulation was the award’s presenter, William Hague.
VIII
Stothard had certainly shown the courage of his reporters’ convictions in pursuing the Ashcroft story in the face
of the threat of legal action that, had Ashcroft won, could have cost News International (or, rather, its insurers) tens of millions of pounds in damages and costs. Such a result would have ensured not only the abrupt termination of Stothard’s editorship but, more importantly, it would have inflicted a wound to his paper’s integrity (and its parent company’s interest in continuing to bail it out) from which it would have difficulty recovering. That he remained the undaunted journalist in pursuit of the story despite these pressures was a testament to his extraordinary audacity and tenacity. Had The Times lost in the High Court, this courage would have been decried as criminal recklessness with the fate of a great and famous newspaper.
Instead, The Times faced the new century with confidence, producing an outstanding edition for the millennium complete with a section in which the paper’s senior writers cast their eyes over the circuitous march of civilization, the point reached, and, more speculatively, the path ahead. It was the Whig interpretation of history writ large. It was also an exceptionally impressive product.
Stothard returned to his office in January 2000 with every reason to feel confident. Those outside the inner circle wondered how much longer he would last in the chair. Murdoch’s previous Times editors had lasted one year, three years, five years and two years respectively. Stothard was now in his eighth year. The impression that the deal to end the Ashcroft affair had been done by the trio of Murdoch, Jeff Randall and the Tory Treasurer without final reference to the Times’s editor led rival newspapers to assume there had been a proprietorial withdrawal of confidence. Nothing could have been further from the truth, as Murdoch assured him. It was on the assumption that he had a lengthy future ahead, rather than through any intimations of mortality, that he reshuffled his inner cabinet. The great casualty was the deputy editor, John Bryant. A man of wide-ranging interests and great professional competence, Bryant’s heart had not been in the Ashcroft affair and this may have rankled with Stothard. It was an abrupt end to ten years of stalwart service. Stothard, however, felt that it was time for a change. Like Rees-Mogg before him, he was not the sort of editor who believed it necessary to hover around the backbench until midnight. Instead, he had been content to concentrate on the argumentative rather than strictly factual parts of the paper and to leave the office shortly after, or even before, the first edition had gone to press. Thus, much of the task of organizing and bringing out the news pages of the paper had been in the hands of David Ruddock and John Bryant who worked late into the night. The recent departure of Ruddock had prompted Stothard to express the desire to ‘take back control’ of the paper and his decision to sack Bryant can best be understood as part of this process. The young, calm and collected home news editor, Ben Preston, ascended into Bryant’s vacated position. In Preston’s place, Michael Gove, now thirty, became home news editor and Graham Paterson stepped into Gove’s shoes to run Op-Ed. Invariably there was gossip that Stothard was attempting to set up the succession with either Gove or Preston emerging to take the crown according to how they performed with their new responsibilities. Both were still extraordinarily young to be in such positions of seniority. That Preston, aged only thirty-six, was to be deputy editor after only seven years with the paper (initially as an education reporter) was a clear sign of favour. Others read the reshuffle differently and believed Stothard was giving Gove – a strategist at home in the officers’ mess environment of the leader writers and columnists – the opportunity to earn his campaign medals commanding the infantry battalions of the news room.
The History of the Times Page 75