Romantic about the rumble of the presses and the smell of the printers’ ink I may have been, but there was nothing at all romantic about the way the printing unions regularly held the paper’s management to ransom. If there was something in the paper that they took exception to – even an advertisement – they simply refused to start the presses. Unless the management conceded to their demands, an entire week’s edition would be lost.
At The Times and Sunday Times, it got so bad that in 1978, the papers’ then owner, the Canadian media tycoon Ken Thomson, shut down both papers for nearly a year in an attempt to break the unions’ power. The tactic failed utterly and cost him an estimated £40 million. In 1981, he bailed out and sold the papers to Rupert Murdoch, who was very much more successful at breaking the unions, even if his overall influence on British journalism has been mixed at best and pernicious at worst.
While the Sunday Times was off the streets, sales of The Observer rocketed. But as soon as it returned, our sales fell back again, and for most of my time on the paper, we had such an inferiority complex (commercially rather than journalistically) as the Sunday Times expanded into a multi-section behemoth that we even ran an advertising campaign with the tagline ‘The Observer: not as thick as the Sunday Times.’ It was not exactly the best marketing strategy ever devised. (By 2015, sales of The Observer had dropped to around 200,000 copies a week, while the Sunday Times was still selling more than 800,000.)
When Murdoch bought Times Newspapers, he shifted the hugely successful editor of the Sunday Times, Harold Evans, to edit The Times, and I was sent to interview him and write a major profile. This was more than daunting: Evans was probably the most respected editor of his day, and to write something that I knew he would read first thing on the following Sunday morning had me hesitating over every word.
I should not have worried. Uniquely of all the people whom I profiled – and I wrote quite a few profiles at that time – he sent me a friendly note a few days after publication. I had reported that some of his colleagues at the Sunday Times had complained that he was sometimes indecisive, which in the circumstances was a risky thing to write, given that The Observer’s former editor and owner, David Astor, had been so notorious for his inability to make decisions that the phrase ‘the editor’s indecision is final’ was coined especially for him.
Evans responded with great style on a scribbled postcard:
Please name the people who think I can be indecisive and I will hound them. I think I will. Perhaps – well, on the other hand…
For a period, I was, in the medieval terminology of the Fleet Street craft unions, father of the National Union of Journalists chapel at The Observer, in other words, the elected representative of the editorial staff in all matters relating to pay and conditions. That meant I was entitled to attend joint meetings of all the unions that had members at the paper, the so-called imperial chapel (why did it sound as if we had all enrolled as freemasons?), but on the one occasion when I did so, and dared to say something, I was roundly mocked by my colleagues in the print room for foolishly presuming that the views of the journalists might be of any interest to them. Trade union solidarity was a laudable principle, and I have never to this day crossed a picket line, but the print unions often made it a very hard principle to abide by.
A much more pleasurable encounter was the regular Wednesday morning editorial meeting, at which all the paper’s senior journalists would gather to discuss what should go into the following Sunday’s paper and, nearly as importantly, how to put the world to rights. As well as the editor and his deputy – first John Cole, who became a nationally known figure when he was appointed the BBC’s political editor in 1981, and then my old friend and mentor Tony Howard – there were the best of the Astor old guard, all of them with wisdom and experience by the bucket-load. And when Atlantic Richfield appointed Conor Cruise O’Brien as the paper’s editor-in-chief – not an appointment wholeheartedly welcomed by Trelford – there were often fireworks.
O’Brien was another man of significant accomplishment: as an Irish diplomat in the 1960s, he had served as a UN envoy in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo; he was later appointed vice-chancellor of the University of Ghana, and then entered Irish politics and became a government minister in the early 1970s. By the time he joined The Observer, he had become an outspoken opponent of Irish republicanism and an equally outspoken supporter of Israel, both of them positions that were guaranteed to provoke lively debates among the paper’s senior editorial staff.
According to his biographer, in the early ’70s, Conor had been ‘simultaneously the most hated man in Ireland and the most admired outside of it’. In 1977, the Irish Times commissioned an opinion poll to establish who voters would least like to see running the country: Conor topped the poll. He was a man who delighted in vigorous debate and who was, at least by the time he joined The Observer, not much inclined to see merit in any views other than his own. On the subject of Britain’s nuclear deterrent, for example, ‘if the conventional wisdom among the British intellectual elite was in favour of unilateral disarmament, then he, virtually automatically, would be marching in the opposite direction’.33
His views on Northern Ireland meant that he had little time for The Observer’s well-established and highly regarded Ireland correspondent, Mary Holland, who had written with great distinction about the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland and whom Conor regarded as unacceptably sympathetic to Irish nationalism. In 1978, after Holland wrote a piece to mark the tenth anniversary of the start of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, he told her in a memo:
I deeply regret and feel personally ashamed that this piece should be published in The Observer … I think that it is a serious weakness in your coverage of Irish affairs that you are a very poor judge of Irish Catholics. That gifted and talkative community includes some of the most expert conmen and conwomen in the world and in this case I believe you have been conned.34
When Mary’s contract expired the following year, it was not renewed. She did, however, return to The Observer fold after Conor’s departure in 1985.
I had little direct personal contact with Conor during his time at The Observer, although I was always an admiring onlooker during his editorial sparring jousts at the Wednesday conferences. On the one occasion when I was able to spend some time alone with him – in a car on our way to catch a plane during the 1979 general election campaign, when he wanted to see Margaret Thatcher in action – I failed to take full advantage of the opportunity. My difficulty was that Conor had a gentle, lilting voice and was generally much better at talking than listening, and I have an unfortunate habit of tending to fall asleep in cars. To nod off while being talked at by the editor-in-chief is not usually a good career move, but if Conor even noticed, he seemed not to mind – and my discourtesy went unremarked.
Trelford managed the awkward relationship with an editor-in-chief who had been appointed over his head with consummate skill. The two men could not have been more different: Conor was bulky and often somewhat dishevelled; Donald was, in the words of Private Eye, ‘small but perfectly formed’, not an intellectual heavyweight but a master of the art of survival. Lord Goodman, chairman of The Observer and in his day the best-connected lawyer in London, said of him: ‘Donald Trelford is the vicar of Bray. He has a remarkable facility for staying upright in a shipwreck.’35
After Conor’s departure from The Observer, Trelford was asked why he had fired him. His reply spoke volumes: ‘I fired Conor because I realised that if I fired him, Conor would survive – and that if I didn’t fire Conor, then I would not survive.’36
In July 1977, just two months after I had joined the paper, I found myself at the Old Bailey, reporting on a trial that seemed to belong in the Middle Ages rather than in the latter part of the twentieth century. The anti-permissiveness campaigner Mary Whitehouse had brought a private prosecution for criminal blasphemy – the first such case for more than fifty years – against the newspaper Gay News and
its editor, Denis Lemon. Their crime, she alleged, was to publish a poem imagining the lustful thoughts (and actions) of a gay Roman centurion as the body of Christ was taken from the cross after his crucifixion.
As they took him from the cross
I, the centurion, took him in my arms –
the tough lean body
of a man no longer young,
beardless, breathless,
but well hung.
(When The Observer published an extract from the poem, the last two lines of that passage were omitted.)
The trial was a gloriously anachronistic piece of theatre, as it was bound to be with John Mortimer defending Denis Lemon and the then young and upcoming Geoffrey Robertson, now one of Britain’s most eminent human rights lawyers, defending Gay News. The judge, Alan King-Hamilton, was also a gift to any court reporter, a man with a penchant for making outrageous comments and who made little attempt to conceal his own personal view of the legal proceedings over which he was presiding.
When he died in 2010 at the age of 105, The Guardian recalled in its obituary that in one case, ‘on hearing that Germaine Greer was to give evidence, he remarked, “Oh, God,” and then put his finger to his lips saying to the solitary press representative “Ssshhh”’.37 During the Gay News case, when discussing the merits of a review of a sex manual for gay men that had appeared in the paper, he remarked: ‘What I don’t understand is why homosexuals need help in this way … It’s all quite beyond me, I’m afraid. Wouldn’t you expect that any reader of Gay News already knew?’ To his credit, the columnist, critic and TV personality Bernard Levin, who was giving evidence on behalf of Gay News, explained that gay men needed no more help from sex manuals than straight men, and that there were ‘a great number of such manuals available to cater to heterosexuals’ needs’.38
Perhaps King-Hamilton’s most notorious outburst from the bench came in 1979, just before he retired, when the jury in a trial of alleged anarchists decided, to his fury, to acquit them. He ordered the jurors back into court the following day to hear him sentence the one defendant who had pleaded guilty and said: ‘Now you know what you have done, I pray to God that none of you will ever have occasion to regret it.’ The Sunday Times called it ‘a disgraceful epitaph to an undistinguished judicial career’.39
The jury in the Gay News trial were more to his liking: they found both the paper and its editor guilty of criminal blasphemy and he imposed fines of £1,000 on the paper and £500 on Denis Lemon, in addition to a suspended nine-month prison sentence. It was to be the last gasp of a common law offence that had survived for far too long, even though it was not until 2008 that the offence was finally abolished.
One of the many oddities of the Gay News case was that no one had attempted to define criminal blasphemy for more than half a century. Judge King-Hamilton was well up to the task and, although he was himself Jewish, he set out his understanding of the law exclusively as an offence against Christianity:
The offence of blasphemous libel occurs when there has been published anything concerning God, Christ or the Christian religion in terms so scurrilous, abusive or offensive as to outrage the feelings of any member of or sympathiser with the Christian religion so as to tend to lead to a breach of the peace.
He later wrote in his memoirs that his summing-up in the case was ‘the best, by far, that I have ever given. I can say this confidently without blushing because, throughout its preparation, and also when delivering it, I was half-conscious of being guided by some divine inspiration.’40
Another oddity was that during the six-day trial, I got to know, and like, Mary Whitehouse. We met in the Old Bailey canteen every lunchtime, and although each of us loathed what the other stood for – she regarded The Observer as only very marginally better than Gay News – we got on extremely well. Not for the last time, I discovered that being a reporter gave me a unique opportunity to meet people whom I would never otherwise have encountered. The Gay News case also infected me with a lifelong weakness for courtrooms and the law, although I soon came to realise that not every case contains as much drama as an Old Bailey trial with a cast including John Mortimer, Judge Alan King-Hamilton and Mary Whitehouse.
Some, on the other hand, are even more dramatic – and when I found myself back at the Old Bailey two years later, it was to report on a trial that really could have been labelled, in the words of that tired old tabloid favourite, ‘The Trial of the Century’. In the dock of Court Number One was John Jeremy Thorpe, former leader of the Liberal Party and one of the most colourful politicians of his time. The charge: conspiracy and incitement to murder Norman Scott, who claimed to have been his gay lover.
It was one of the most convoluted, bizarre, and frankly unbelievable, tales in British political history. But what it boiled down to was a simple story of love and betrayal – Scott believed that Thorpe had loved him and promised to look after him, and over a period of more than fifteen years was obsessed with making people believe his story: that they had been in a relationship, and that Thorpe had behaved extremely badly towards him. Eventually, fearing public exposure (homosexual activity was illegal until 1967), Scott said, Thorpe had arranged for the hiring of a hitman to kill him. The gunman had driven Scott and his dog Rinka onto Exmoor, had shot the dog, turned his gun on Scott, but the gun had jammed.
By the time the case reached the Old Bailey in May 1979, I had been researching and reporting on the life and times of Jeremy Thorpe for nearly two years. I had started when The Observer engaged the services of two former BBC journalists, Barrie Penrose and Roger Courtiour, who had interviewed the former Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson about his suspicion that South Africa had mounted a dirty tricks campaign against anti-apartheid figures in the UK. The trail led them first to Thorpe, who had always been in the forefront of the anti-apartheid campaign, but then to the explosive story of the plot to kill Scott.
The Observer, however, was nervous – so I was dispatched to try to stand up their story by re-interviewing some of the people from whom they had obtained their information. It was a thankless task that resulted in little more than me having several front doors slammed in my face. The Observer ran their material nonetheless and, from then on, I was the paper’s designated Thorpe reporter.
When the alleged hitman, a former airline pilot called Andrew Newton, emerged from prison in April 1977 after having served a sentence for illegal possession of a firearm and an intent to endanger life, he sold his story to the London Evening News, claiming that he had been paid by people acting on behalf of ‘a leading Liberal’: ‘I was hired to kill Scott: gunman tells of incredible plot’. The former Liberal MP Peter Bessell, who was now living in California, was also talking of having been involved in a murder plot to deal with the Scott ‘problem’.
Thorpe had responded by holding a press conference at the National Liberal Club.41 With him were his wife Marion, his lawyer John Montgomerie, and his fellow Liberal MP, the raconteur and broadcaster Clement Freud. There were more than eighty of us crammed into the room, waiting to hear how he would deal with the flood of salacious allegations that were now threatening to engulf him.
First came the prepared statement:
Anyone expecting sensational revelations is likely to be disappointed … Not a scrap of evidence has been produced to implicate me in any alleged plot to murder Norman Scott … He is neither the only nor the first person I have tried to help, but a close, even affectionate relationship developed from this sympathy. However, no sexual activity of any kind took place.
Then it was time for questions. Keith Graves of the BBC, who later became a neighbour of mine when we were both Middle East correspondents and lived in the same block of flats in Jerusalem, detonated the bomb: ‘The whole of this hinges on your private life. It is necessary to ask you if you have ever had a homosexual relationship.’
Marion Thorpe exploded: ‘Stand up and say that again.’
Keith, who was not easily intimidated, did so, at which point the lawyer
, John Montgomerie, stepped in to say that he would not permit his client to respond.
The police got busy, however, and in August of the following year, Thorpe was arrested and charged, together with three alleged accomplices: his former friend and ex-deputy treasurer of the Liberal Party, David Holmes, who had been best man at his wedding; John Le Mesurier, who was a carpet dealer and business acquaintance of Holmes; and George Deakin, a fruit machine salesman who was alleged to have been brought into the conspiracy because it was thought that he would know where to find a hitman.
The whole story sounded preposterous, but if Andrew ‘Gino’ Newton’s gun had not jammed that night on Exmoor when Rinka the Great Dane lost her life, Norman Scott would also have died. Gay sex, a murder conspiracy and politics is about as combustible a mix as any headline writer could ever hope for – so when Thorpe and his co-defendants appeared for their committal hearing at Minehead Magistrates’ Court in Somerset, there were so many reporters that the modest-sized courtroom was bursting at the seams.
The usual practice at committal hearings was that reporting restrictions confined media reports to little more than the name of the defendants, the nature of the charges, and whether or not bail was granted. So we were expecting just to get a good look at Thorpe and write down what few details we were allowed to divulge. We knew there was a theoretical possibility that one or more of the defendants might apply to have the reporting restrictions lifted, but why would they? Thorpe’s lawyer, Sir David Napley, had already made it clear that he was most unlikely to make an application, and no one had any reason to suppose that Thorpe’s co-defendants would be any keener to see the story given the full Fleet Street treatment.
Day One. Bombshell in court. Deakin’s lawyer applies for reporting restrictions to be lifted. Application granted.
Is Anything Happening? Page 19