Is Anything Happening?
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While writing this book, I submitted a Freedom of Information request to Scotland Yard to try to get some answers. I learned that Sergeant Hamilton of the Special Branch was dismissed as a result of the disciplinary hearing for his ‘failure to disclose a business interest’. I also learned that guidance to the Scotland Yard press office at the time to help them deal with any inquiries contained the instruction ‘NPTD’ as the required response to any questions about where Mr Hamilton worked or what his work entailed.
NPTD? Not Prepared To Discuss.
So, thirty years later, I am still none the wiser.
Telephone calls became the bane of my life. One weekend, we were planning a story about a corrupt police officer in Northern Ireland who had been taking bribes. On the Saturday night before publication, he phoned to say that he was sitting in his home with a loaded revolver and would blow his brains out unless I gave him an immediate assurance that the story would not be printed. I had no wish to be responsible for a man’s death, but nor did I have any way of knowing whether to believe him, so I asked our Belfast correspondent to rush round to his home and see what was going on.
‘There’s an empty whiskey bottle on the table and he is very drunk,’ our correspondent told me. ‘He does have a revolver but I don’t think it’s loaded.’ We decided to go ahead with the story, and the policeman did not shoot himself. But it was a tough decision.
What I had not expected when I took on the news editor job was that I would soon be involved in coverage of Britain’s first major military conflict since the Suez crisis. When Margaret Thatcher dispatched a Royal Navy task force to retake the Falkland Islands after they had been seized by Argentina in April 1982, few people expected that Britain would soon be at war. Even so, like all the other papers, The Observer had to prepare for all eventualities, so we arranged for a young reporter, Patrick Bishop, to be included among the accompanying press corps who sailed with the task force from Southampton on board SS Canberra. He wrote later that one of his editors bade him farewell with the words: ‘See you in a week.’64 It may well have been me.
The only way the reporters could get their copy back to London was by using the military’s own communications network. Their dispatches were transmitted direct to the Ministry of Defence in London, where military censors then combed through them and deleted anything that they deemed sensitive before releasing them for publication. Sometimes what was left was so threadbare as to be almost unpublishable, which posed a huge problem for a Sunday newspaper like The Observer which had only one opportunity each week to run the material. For the military, it meant that they had total control over what was reported from the front line. I was reminded of the military’s traditional attitude to media relations down the ages: ‘Tell ’em nothing till it’s over, then tell ’em who won.’
It felt as if the country had slipped a hundred years back in time. Here we were, fighting what seemed like a colonial war over a couple of islands that not one British voter in 10,000 would have been able to find on a map. The Fleet Street papers happily dusted off their uniforms, unfurled their flags and started singing the praises of ‘our boys’. Even The Observer, no fan of imperial adventures or of Mrs Thatcher, supported her decision to resort to military action. A Fascist dictatorship had seized British territory by force; even the wishiest and washiest of liberals found it difficult to oppose her, and the left-wing leader of the Labour Party, Michael Foot, was among those who backed her decision to go to war.
I photocopied a map of the Falklands and stuck it to the top of my desk. If I had had access to a wall chart and coloured pins, I would have used them too. But I hated the outpouring of jingoism that resulted from the Falklands crisis, which seemed to me to suggest that too many people relished the opportunity to relive the ‘glory days’ of the Second World War. On the other hand, I was involved in covering a huge story, if only from a desk in London, and no journalist really objects when a big story comes their way, no matter how grim it may be.
Editors were periodically summoned to the Ministry of Defence for off-the-record briefings from senior officials, at one of which, as the task force neared the Falklands after six weeks at sea, we were told categorically that there would be ‘no D-Day landings’. The very next day, the British army stormed ashore at San Carlos, exactly as Allied troops had done on the beaches of Normandy in June 1944. So much for ‘no D-Day landings’.
‘We did not tell a lie, but we did not tell the whole truth,’ explained Sir Frank Cooper, the permanent secretary. It was not a ‘D-Day landing’ because at San Carlos the troops had been unopposed.
His explanation was nonsense. He had lied to us – perhaps in a good cause, but he had lied nonetheless – and then he lied again to a parliamentary committee about not having lied in the first place. I readily accept that in a time of war, the military are not obliged to disclose their advance planning in detail – that would be absurd. But nor do I see the need for lies: why not simply respond to media inquiries: ‘We’re not going to get into that now’?
For The Observer, there was one additional major difficulty while the nation was at war: our defence correspondent, Ian Mather, had been arrested in southern Argentina, together with our photographer Tony Prime and Simon Winchester of the Sunday Times. They had hoped to persuade the Argentine air force to fly them to the Malvinas, as Argentina called the Falklands, and get a world scoop by landing there several weeks before the task force was anywhere near. But having been told by the President’s press secretary, no less, that they could go wherever they liked, the mood changed when they got to the southern city of Ushuaia, and they were taken into custody with the words ‘For you, the war is over’ ringing in their ears. They were to spend a total of seventy-seven days in prison, and they never made it to the Malvinas.
CHAPTER 10
TINY VS TINY
It is the unpleasant and unacceptable face of capitalism.
EDWARD HEATH ON LONRHO, WHICH BOUGHT THE OBSERVER IN 1981
JUST AFTER 6 P.M. on Wednesday 25 February 1981, an ashen-faced Donald Trelford emerged from his office to announce to the handful of journalists, including me, who were still in the newsroom: ‘We’ve been sold.’ It was a bolt from the blue, and the start of a tumultuous twelve years in The Observer’s history. Atlantic Richfield, who had been welcomed by the staff when they bought the paper in 1976, had sold us down the river, behind the backs of both the board and the editor, to a company that we regarded as irredeemably hostile to everything we stood for. It was as if we had been hurled into a piranha pool. The new owner, the international mining conglomerate Lonrho, and its controversial chief executive, ‘Tiny’ Rowland, for whom the label ‘buccaneer’ could have been invented, represented everything The Observer most disliked: an unbridled capitalist ethos and a reputation for bribery and corruption in both commerce and at the highest reaches of government, especially in Africa. In 1973, a group of Lonrho directors had tried, and failed, to get rid of Rowland after allegations that he had bribed African leaders and broken international sanctions imposed on what was then southern Rhodesia.
The day after the deal was announced, The Times commented in an editorial: ‘The secrecy, the complete absence of notice or consultation with the staff of the newspaper, or even with its board of directors, betrays an attitude more appropriate to the conveyance of a property with vacant possession than the purchase of a newspaper. It was a humiliation for the staff.’65
But it was a humiliation that the staff decided to suffer, although definitely not in silence, on the grounds that alternative buyers – Sir James Goldsmith, Rupert Murdoch or Robert Maxwell – were unlikely to be any more to our taste, and may well have been even worse than Rowland. Representations were made to the Monopolies and Mergers Commission, which had to give its approval to the sale, and I was part of a delegation of Observer journalists who went to a late-night meeting at the Department of Trade and Industry at which we were expected to reach an ‘understanding’ with our new owners.
‘Do you know what your trouble is, Mr Lustig?’ he purred. ‘You worry too much.’
I had already had some dealings with Rowland, although we had never met face to face. In 1978, I had written a series of articles about the busting of oil sanctions against Rhodesia by British oil companies. The articles were based on confidential documents that were being leaked to The Observer by Rowland, and he would phone me at home late at night to check that the documents had reached me, slipped beneath the front door of my flat in a large brown envelope. It was excitingly cloak-and-dagger, but it did not exactly fill me with confidence that he was an appropriate proprietor.
The truth was that once the Astors had sold it, The Observer, like any loss-making newspaper, had become the plaything of tycoons, a bauble to be enjoyed, boasted about, shown off to friends and business partners, and then tossed aside. The paper’s finances were always in a parlous state, and Atlantic Richfield had got bored with us after discovering that, plaything or not, we had minds of our own. They had not approved of the paper’s editorial backing for the Labour Party in 1979 and had been irritated by the refusal of the board of directors to approve their candidate to be vice-chairman of The Observer Trust. The paper had lost something like £8 million in five years and there was little prospect of its commercial position improving. Enough was enough.
Like Murdoch and Maxwell, Rowland was an outsider. He had been born during the First World War in an internment camp in India, to a German father and an Anglo-Dutch mother. His original name was Roland Walter Fuhrhop, and he spent much of his childhood in Germany. In 1934, he and his mother had moved to England, and he briefly became a pupil at a boarding school in Hampshire, where, according to his biographer, some of his contemporaries remembered him expressing Nazi sympathies.66 After the outbreak of the Second World War, he changed his name to Roland Rowland and enlisted in the British army. In 1940, both his parents were interned on the Isle of Man; he joined them there in 1942 after his discharge from the army (‘services no longer required’) when he was detained under the notorious Defence Regulation 18B, as a suspected Nazi sympathiser. His mother died on the island in 1944; he and his father were not released until the following year.
Rowland earned the nickname ‘Tiny’ because of his impressive size: he was well over six feet tall and cut an undeniably imposing figure. The contrast between him and the ‘small but perfectly formed’ Trelford could not have been starker in physical appearance, although they turned out to be remarkably well matched when it came to survival skills. If Lord Goodman had been right to pay tribute to Trelford’s facility for staying upright in a shipwreck, it was not difficult to imagine that Rowland would also stay upright beside him, no matter how severe the storm. Even though Trelford had vigorously, and publicly, opposed the sale of the paper to Lonrho, once the sale went through, the two men somehow managed to work out a form of mutually suspicious co-existence. It was a dangerously fragile base on which to rest an already fragile newspaper, and it was always likely to succumb at some point to the inevitable stresses.
One of the conditions attached to the sale of The Observer to Lonrho was that five independent directors would be appointed to safeguard the paper’s editorial independence. A similar condition had been attached to Rupert Murdoch’s purchase of The Times and Sunday Times, but there was never any real confidence that the independent directors would be of much use if push came to shove. Something was better than nothing, however, so they were duly appointed: William Clark, former press secretary to Sir Anthony Eden; Geoffrey Cox, former editor and chief executive of ITN; Derek Mitchell, former Treasury mandarin; Rosemary Murray, former vice-chancellor of Cambridge University; and Lord Windlesham, former member of Edward Heath’s government.
Their mettle was soon tested when, in 1984, Trelford directly challenged Rowland’s pledges of editorial independence by reporting in detail from Zimbabwe on massacres being perpetrated by President Mugabe’s forces in Matabeleland. Lonrho had major interests in Zimbabwe (the company’s original name had been London and Rhodesia Mining and Land Company, later abbreviated to Lonrho), but Rowland had been a long-time backer of Mugabe’s main rival, Joshua Nkomo. Since Mugabe’s election as Prime Minister in 1980, Rowland had been keen to build bridges, and Trelford’s reporting seriously threatened Lonrho’s commercial interests.
It was not until the Saturday evening before publication that Trelford told Rowland about his story. According to Rowland’s biographer, the following conversation then took place:
Rowland: You’re trying to destroy my business in Zimbabwe.
Trelford: I have my job to do: to tell the truth as I see it.
Rowland: You have your job and I have mine. You must expect me to protect myself.67
The following morning, Rowland issued a statement condemning his editor’s actions as ‘discourteous, disingenuous and wrong’. He described Trelford as ‘an incompetent reporter’ and said he would be sacked. Trelford responded by calling Rowland’s accusations ‘ludicrous, defamatory, and inaccurate’, and challenged the independent directors in an editorial to protect the paper from its own proprietor.
I watched the drama unfold from 4,500 miles away, in Amritsar, northern India. I listened to the BBC’s reporting of the crisis on my trusty shortwave radio and, when I heard that Rowland had met Robert Maxwell to discuss selling the paper to him, I decided to catch the next flight home. If the paper was going to be sold again, or shut down, I wanted to be there when it happened.
Eventually, ‘Tiny’ and ‘tiny’ patched up their differences. Trelford wrote a letter to Rowland praising the ‘generous help’ that Lonrho had provided to The Observer and waved an olive branch: ‘Should we not agree to differ on this matter, and respect our right to disagree?’ If they could not reach an accommodation, Trelford said, he would resign. Rowland responded by calling their row a ‘lovers’ tiff’, adding: ‘I support your editorship and I refuse to accept your resignation.’ In reality, he was bowing to the inevitable, because the paper’s independent directors had done their stuff and condemned what they called ‘improper proprietorial interference in the accurate presentation of news and free expression of opinion’. In other words, Rowland had broken his word and breached the conditions under which the government had allowed the acquisition of the paper. He was shrewd enough to understand that he could afford to lose this battle and still win the war, since Trelford now knew the lengths to which his proprietor would be prepared to go to protect Lonrho’s commercial interests.
Trelford was editor from the day I started at the paper until the day I left, and for much of that time he was a great editor to work with. He was a consummate professional, with an instinctive feel for what made a great front page or which stories were worth pursuing. Even though his interests and mine were very different – he was a devoted sportsman, which I have never been, and I was far more interested in foreign affairs than he was – we worked closely together over many years. I doubt that any other editor could have done much better in withstanding the relentless pressures that came from a buccaneer tycoon owner, but as those pressures steadily increased, they inevitably made themselves felt lower down the food chain, and I was no more immune from them than anyone else.
Much to my delight, my old friend and mentor Tony Howard rejoined the paper in 1981 as deputy editor, following the departure of John Cole to the BBC. Like Cole, Howard was steeped in Westminster politics and had excellent political contacts – and Trelford knew that for a paper like The Observer, it was essential to be plugged in to the Westminster scene. Howard also had a great knack for spotting talented young writers and while editor of the New Statesman he had recruited many who would go on to great success, among them Martin Amis,
Julian Barnes, James Fenton and Christopher Hitchens.
Howard was a great gossip and an inveterate schemer, usually over lunch or a glass of red wine, puffing away at an evil-smelling miniature cigar. He was invariably kind to colleagues whom he respected, but could be cuttingly rude about those whom he did not. ‘He’s got a tin ear’ was a favourite put-down for anyone whose prose style did not impress him. I was fortunate to be regarded as part of what less favoured colleagues called ‘Tony’s A-team’, although knowing how he spoke of some of our colleagues behind their backs, I was pleased that I never found out what he said about me when I was out of earshot.
He was oddly old-fashioned in many ways; he attached great importance to good manners – he was always impressed by what he called Tiny Rowland’s ‘exquisite courtesy’, although he never made the mistake of being taken in by it. On one occasion, he described Rowland as ‘incredibly good-looking … like [the film-star] George Sanders … had beautiful manners – but was thoroughly sinister’.68
Howard also had several turns of speech that were uniquely his. Robert Harris, whom Howard recruited to The Observer from the BBC to be the paper’s political editor, and who went on to become a bestselling novelist, parodied them perfectly in his eulogy at Howard’s funeral in 2010. ‘I can hear his voice now, as he stands at my shoulder, looking down at what I’ve written: “Call this a eulogy? You must be off your toot. You clearly haven’t done a hand’s turn. Even Trelford would have done a better job than this…”’