These ruminations gathered momentum when, in March 2000, Stothard suddenly announced he was ‘taking time off to work on special projects’. It was suggested that he was going to look into internet operations. There was immediate speculation that this was one of Murdoch’s euphemisms for giving him the sack. Those who had been around in 1990 remembered when Charlie Wilson had been put in charge of East European acquisitions. An almost audible whoop of delight could be heard from Conservative Central Office whose denizens assumed they had claimed his scalp and that the final score in the Ashcroft affair was that Ashcroft remained as Treasurer and Stothard was sacked as editor. BBC Radio 4’s Today programme reported this claim as if it was established fact. Rival newspapers assessed the runners and riders for his job. The speed with which speculation was reported as fact ably demonstrated the unprofessional shortcomings of too much modern opinion-driven journalism.75 It did, however, force to the surface the truth. Having hoped to keep the matter to the privacy of his immediate family since being diagnosed in February, a reluctant Stothard was forced to stand on a chair in the newsroom and tell his stunned colleagues the truth. He had to undergo chemotherapy for a neuroendocrine tumour of the pancreas. He would be back.76
To his dejected staff Stothard offered a cheerful prognosis of his recovery prospects but the truth was that he was stepping into lightly chartered medical territory. The form of cancer was a rare one and opinion was divided on the treatment. Some specialists even counselled against chemotherapy in favour of a policy of wait and see. Stothard opted to risk a more proactive line of assault on the tumour. There was no certainty that he would recover. He was, at forty-nine, one year older than Charles Douglas-Home had been when a tumour claimed him. It was in such a situation that the editor of The Times could take comfort in the attitude of the proprietor. As Douglas-Home’s family could attest, Murdoch’s fidelity was at its most steadfast when assisting highly regarded colleague in such circumstances. Stothard also received the unwavering support of Les Hinton, News International’s executive chairman. The longer he was away from Wapping, the more important this was since it dampened down unhelpful and destabilizing speculation.
There was no favourable moment to be confronted by a potentially fatal tumour but the timing was particularly unfortunate given that Stothard had just embarked upon new ventures that needed paternal guidance. One was the launch on 13 March 2000 of Times2 (subsequently shortened to T2) a tabloid-sized features section modelled on the highly successful G2 section of the Guardian. Attempts to learn lessons from the Daily Mail’s appeal to women readers by improving the quality of features had met with mixed results. Christina Appleyard and Sandra Parsons had been hired from the Mail to improve The Times’s offering. Having learned her craft in the Mail’s abrasive environment, Appleyard’s style caused friction with her new colleagues and she departed amid some acrimony. Sandra Parsons, however, proved a popular and accomplished recruit whose infectious enthusiasm and natural talents were soon evident in the marked improvement in the features pages. Stothard believed that she needed a less cramped canvas to display her work. He envisaged a section that would become a new focal point for women readers (as the sports section was for men) while also providing the space for lengthier and more substantial essays and reportage – the sort of journalism that had a structured beginning, middle and an end – for which the news pages had never provided a sympathetic neighbourhood. This was a major and expensive innovation (it assumed yet greater significance when, four years later, the whole paper went tabloid) that involved new deadlines and printing arrangements. Unfortunately, it commanded little support from management. Not only did its launch coincide with a downturn in the advertising market, but the advertising department chose to concentrate its sales efforts elsewhere. In its first months and with Stothard hors de combat, Times2 struggled to assert its identity, unsure whether it was the depository of weighty storytelling or a conveyor belt for lifestyle features. Such indecision hampered attempts to hook a core readership. Preston did his best to support it, but the enormous range of responsibilities suddenly foisted upon him meant he could not devote as much energy to it as it needed. In this respect, Stothard’s absence in its crucial first months undoubtedly contributed to its unsettled infancy by denying Sandra Parsons the well-placed advocate she needed at a time when the new section faced indifference from many news-focused journalists and a management busy battening down the hatches as the advertising recession began to hit. This was the economic force that also meant that the old business and sport second section had to be integrated back into a single main broadsheet section. This was not a satisfactory solution, as the mounting number of letters from businessmen made all too clear.
These were new and serious structural problems that would have taxed even an editor of Stothard’s experience. Instead they fell to the acting editor, Ben Preston. Preston had only been deputy editor for a fortnight when Stothard had started disappearing for long and unexplained periods. No less alarmingly, Preston had barely enjoyed his new elevation for six weeks before he found himself running the paper outright. The role of acting editor would have been difficult even for a man with decades of executive-level familiarity. It involved all the responsibilities of the editor’s job while denying the opportunity to make major long-term strategic decisions. Murdoch certainly saw no reason to distract the new man at the helm. Indeed, Preston was several months into his period in charge before the occasion of the annual News International budget discussions provided him with an opportunity to discuss developments with the proprietor face to face. At any rate, his primary task was thus not to take the paper down new and exciting avenues or to recreate it according to his own perceptions so much as to keep it on an even keel until such time as Stothard might return. In the circumstances, he performed his task with remarkable assurance. The two men were different in so far as Preston’s chief focus was the news pages while Stothard’s great loves were books, leaders and comment. Yet, had they not been told, few readers in the twelve months between March 2000 and 2001 would have had any reason to suspect their paper’s fortunes was being directed not by its official editor but by a young deputy who had been thrown in at the deep end. Among his most important contributions, Preston impressed his journalists by a calm, unflappable demeanour that was an important asset during a period of uncertainty.
While Stothard had drawn a line under the Ashcroft affair, Preston presided over a period in which the Conservative Party battled in vain to regain the confidence of The Times, let alone the wider public. Hague continued to be dogged by questions over his judgment. With Lord Archer of Weston-super-Mare’s disgrace following false alibi claims, there was no shortage of commentators who asserted Hague had brought the disaster upon himself. The general view was that he should never have allowed a man over whom there had long hung such a cloud of suspicion to stand as the party’s London mayoral candidate. Liberal opinion was also unimpressed when, in April 2000, he responded to the jailing of Tony Martin – who had shot dead an unarmed intruder in his farmhouse – by calling for the law to be strengthened to support those defending their property. Four months later, Hague’s boast in GQ magazine that he regularly drank fourteen pints a day as a teenager was treated with the same derision as had been meted out to an earlier trip to the funfair for which the Tory leader had donned a baseball hat with his name on it.
In July 1998, The Times had set out its attitude to the party in a long leading article written by Michael Gove entitled ‘Mods and Rockers’. It made clear that, ‘If the Tories are to win office, then liberals must first win the battle of ideas within their party. In this conflict, The Times is a committed supporter of those who lead the liberal charge.’ A telling sign of which side MPs were on could be discerned by whether they supported an equal age of consent for homosexuals and heterosexuals, the article argued. On this, as in other areas, including the reform of the House of Lords, the party would be better engaged working to make change acceptable rather than b
eing sidelined in pointless opposition:
Wise Conservatives deal with the world as it is, not as it should be or once was. They respect the changing landscape and are sensitive to its contours. Having spent the Eighties telling other British institutions that they must adapt to compete the Tories must now make the same transition.77
The paper recognized that, however tentatively, Hague was nudging his party in a more modern direction. However, the great hope for revival was the subject of Gove’s biography, Michael Portillo. Since losing his supposedly safe seat in the most celebrated moment of the 1997 general election, the flamboyant Anglo-Spaniard had undergone a period of reflection and conversion, emerging as a liberal-minded figure well suited to the image-driven priorities of the media glare. When, in September 1999, Alan Clark died, creating a vacancy in the Tory’s safest and most sophisticated seat, Kensington and Chelsea, all eyes turned to Portillo. Three days later, The Times made an extraordinary scoop when in an interview, Ginny Dougray coaxed from him an admission that he had ‘homosexual experiences’ as an undergraduate at Peterhouse.78 The next day he put himself forward for the Kensington and Chelsea constituency. This was certainly a test of the party’s liberal sympathies and his subsequent election suggested the Tories might indeed be proceeding along the route that Stothard, Gove and Tim Hames hoped would ensure their recovery.
By then, the expectations invested in Portillo were all the greater because of waning confidence in Hague. The belief that the Tory leader was gradually shifting the party towards fresh and open-minded thinking had been dashed on the back of an apparent success. In June 1999 the Tories had gained the most number of seats in the European elections. It was not a portent of great things: only a third of Britons had troubled themselves to vote and those who did were assumed to be marking their dislike either as a mid-term protest vote against Blair or Brussels, or both. Nonetheless, Hague interpreted his party’s relative success in the poll as a sign that, by appealing to the core vote, the Tories could at least regain some of the ground they had ceded during the Major years. He reshuffled the Shadow Cabinet towards the right, sacking Peter Lilley and bringing in Ann Widdecombe as Health spokeswoman. Widdecombe had a following among some party members although her abrasive style was hardly atuned to winning over moderate opinion. When, in October 2000, she called for on-the-spot fines for casual drug users, even her fellow Shadow Cabinet colleagues torpedoed her policy by stepping forward to confess to youthful experiments with cannabis. A strategy of enthusing party members at the expense of the uncommitted multitudes was, in any case, a sign of limited ambition. In April, The Times revealed that Conservative Party membership had fallen to 325,000, a figure that was the lowest since the First World War.79
By the time Stothard was welcomed back into the editor’s chair, in March 2001, fully restored in health and vigour, the last embers of warmth for the Conservative Party appeared to have gone out from within him during his period of convalescence. Serious illness had softened his admiration for the practical and goal-getting Tory mentality. He appeared increasingly sympathetic to those who talked a more collectively minded language.
While the attack on the Government continued on the Op-Ed pages from the paper’s conservative columnists, Gove, Parris and Rees-Mogg, rival newspapers regarded the treatment Downing Street received on the news pages as perhaps the most generous in Fleet Street. Alastair Campbell appeared to be more comfortable trusting Philip Webster and Tom Baldwin with exclusive information than most of their broadsheet competition. Inevitably, this caused some inter-newspaper jealousy and it was not long before Webster and Baldwin were being accused of painting Government policies in a favourable light in return for scoops. Such was the supposed favouritism that when Webster was given the scoop that the Queen would be appointing Andrew Motion as the next Poet Laureate – a leak that did not amuse Buckingham Palace – rivals wrongly assumed that he had been fed the information directly from Downing Street.80
There was a long tradition of Prime Ministerial press officers showing partiality towards journalists with whom a rapport had been developed while cold-shouldering those who had been marked out as hostile commentators. The Blair administration, however, was the most adept – or shameless – exponent. The belief that Webster and, in particular, Baldwin, allowed themselves to get too close to Campbell in return for disclosures was a damaging accusation refuted primarily by the Downing Street press secretary’s complaints about the treatment the Government received in The Times’s reporting. This had started long before either Blair or Campbell had gained the keys to Downing Street. On the backbench, David Ruddock had frequently had to endure Campbell telephoning, often several nights a week, to complain about what he had just read in the first edition. Ruddock would explain that he would investigate the complaint and report back. Almost invariably, the story would prove accurate but this would not prevent a tirade of hectoring invective down the telephone line from Campbell. In the meantime, Ruddock would find PA wires being published announcing that The Times had withdrawn their allegations when the paper had done no such thing. ‘He was such a bore and a bully,’ Ruddock recalled of Campbell’s nocturnal menaces, ‘that I ended up refusing to speak to him.’81 The frequency and the vitriolic manner of expression were much worse than The Times experienced from any previous party press office. It far exceeded the efforts even of Bernard Ingham, the unabashed press voice of Margaret Thatcher, and bore no relation whatsoever to the muted tone occasionally emitted from Major’s team.
The impression that the Government was more spin than substance was fuelled when, in July 2000, The Times printed leaked documents between the Prime Minister and his pollster, Philip Gould. In the first extract, a memo of 29 April, Blair requested that he be ‘personally associated’ with ‘eye-catching’ initiatives to refute claims that the Government was soft on law and order and family issues. Naturally, this was given front-page treatment, the article by Andrew Pierce and Philip Webster stating that ‘it conveys the impression of a worried, interventionist Prime Minister, completely consumed by the importance of improving the Government’s message, and of his own image’. The day after its publication, another leaked memo was received in which Gould was quoted highlighting the extent to which ‘the New Labour brand has been badly contaminated. It is the object of constant criticism, and even worse, ridicule.’ This document was also sent to the the Sun. A third leak of Prime Ministerial correspondence was published on 27 July with a memo from Blair arguing that, having taken the political decision to join the euro, it was time to make the economic argument more forcefully if a referendum was to be won on the issue.82 These were embarrassing disclosures that provided ammunition for Blair’s opponents, within and without the Labour Party.
The contradiction at the heart of the Government’s legal and constitutional reforms was that power was being transferred with one hand but clawed back by another hand. Authority was being devolved, creating new checks on Downing Street. But the latter used its control of patronage to attempt to ensure loyalty from those it was entrusting with these new powers. The hereditary peers (save for a rump temporarily reprieved) were removed from the House of Lords, but there was noticeably less haste in reforming the upper chamber to strengthen its powers. In the meantime, the number of Labour life peerages was swelled by a huge expansion in appointments of those the Government considered its supporters. Having introduced devolution to Wales, Blair responded to the disgrace of Ron Davies, the First Minister, by enforcing the appointment of one of his own loyalists, Alun Michael, despite the Welsh Labour Party’s obvious preference for the more independently minded Rhodri Morgan. In a similar vein, Frank Dobson was cajoled into becoming Labour’s candidate in the elections for London’s new mayor, despite the support for the maverick Ken Livingstone among the party’s activists. Accusations of media manipulation – or ‘spin’ – and ‘control freakery’ abounded and the Government found itself defending these aspects of its record almost as much as the policies of its le
gislative programme. On The Times’s comment pages, an inflammatory article entitled ‘Third Way, or Reich?’ by the academic Max Beloff attempted to draw parallels between the methods in which Hitler and Blair removed the obstacles to their absolute power through blandishments towards Establishment dupes in order to remove the constitutional checks and balances. ‘Once in power, Hitler showed little interest in the details of policy – not for him files or Cabinet meetings, let alone parliamentary-style debate,’ Beloff declaimed. ‘A small body of acolytes acted as a buffer between Hitler and the world just as the Downing Street staff now protects Mr Blair’.83 This was an extreme interpretation and the Prime Minister was soon to discover that his power was not so absolute. In February 2000, Alun Michael stepped down as Welsh First Minister, having lost the confidence of his party who duly turned to Rhodri Morgan. In May, Frank Dobson, Labour’s shoe-in for London major, was humiliated by coming third in the election, behind the Tories’ Steve Norris and the winner, Ken Livingstone, who had stood as an independent and had been expelled from the Labour Party for his temerity. The low turnouts in the Scottish, Welsh and, especially, London elections suggested devolution had yet to interest a largely apathetic electorate.
The History of the Times Page 76