Howard and Trelford were an odd couple, and Howard never made much secret of the fact that he was not among Trelford’s greatest admirers. Given his ambition, having edited two weekly magazines (the New Statesman and The Listener), to be the editor of a national newspaper, it was only to be expected that one day he would try to find a way to take over the top spot at The Observer. He made his move in 1988, while Trelford was on holiday. But Rowland decided that he wanted to keep Trelford, and the putsch failed.
According to the Daily Telegraph, in an account published more than twenty years later:
Trelford took [Howard] for lunch and said: ‘Tony, you are the most political person I know. You must realise, after this, that either I go or you go.’
‘And are you going, Donald?’ said Howard.
‘No,’ said Trelford.
‘Then I’m going?’
‘I’m afraid so.’69
When it became known that Howard was leaving the paper, I asked him if he was considering a return to The World Tonight on Radio 4 (the ‘puff-puff radio’, as he called it), where he had been an occasional presenter during the 1970s. ‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘I don’t believe in going backwards. But why don’t you have a go?’
And so the seed of an idea was planted. I had become increasingly disillusioned with life at the paper as it became clearer over time that Lonrho’s influence was steadily growing. But, like a frog in a slowly heated pan of water, by the time I realised how much danger the paper was in, it was already too late to do much about it. The only option was to try to jump out of the pan. Others felt much the same way, and the crunch came just a few months later, first when a bitter row broke out over stories alleging massive corruption in a multi-billion-pound arms deal with Saudi Arabia, and then when The Observer published an unprecedented mid-week edition, carrying a leaked government report into the sale of Harrods department store to Rowland’s archrival, Mohamed al-Fayed.
The arms deal stories centred on the Al-Yamamah contract won by British Aerospace (now BAE Systems) that was said to be the most valuable export deal ever signed by a UK company. Tiny Rowland arranged for Trelford to be provided with a sheaf of documents claiming that huge bribes had been paid to win the contract – but several Observer reporters declined to touch the story because they knew that the material had come from Lonrho, which was linked commercially to one of British Aerospace’s fiercest rivals, the French arms company Dassault.
A number of stories were eventually published, however, leading a Labour MP to accuse Rowland in the House of Commons of causing ‘immense damage’ to the paper by using its columns to further his own personal commercial interests. Then came the mid-week edition of the paper with its front-page headline ‘Exposed: The Phoney Pharaoh,’ a reference to Mohamed al-Fayed, who had won a battle against Rowland for ownership of Harrods in 1985 and against whom Rowland had been waging an obsessive vendetta ever since.
The report by the government inspectors into the Fayeds’ purchase of Harrods was utterly damning (‘the image they created … of their wealthy Egyptian ancestors was completely bogus’), and a total vindication of Rowland’s campaign against them. But that was of little comfort to those of us who had come to hate the way the paper had been turned into what looked increasingly like a Rowland propaganda sheet. We appealed to the independent directors to adjudicate in the row over the Saudi arms deal stories, just as Trelford had done over his Matabeleland massacre story in 1984, but this time, faced with the editor’s insistence that he alone had decided to publish the Lonrho-related material, they ruled that they had found ‘nothing to substantiate the charge of direct proprietorial interference by Lonrho’.
They did, however, add a rider:
It is not enough that The Observer should be editorially independent. It must also be clearly seen to be so. We have to face the fact that the extensive coverage of Lonrho’s conflict with the House of Fraser and in particular the special mid-week issue, the timing of which seemed to serve Lonrho’s interests too well for the peace of mind of many readers and journalists, have tarnished the image of the paper.
My close friend and colleague David Leigh, who had done so much to establish The Observer’s reputation as a campaigning paper that carried out important and difficult investigations, immediately resigned.
I felt ashamed. This was not journalism as I knew it, and it was not the Observer I had originally gone to work for. I felt it had become a sick newspaper. How could I write stories exposing conflicts of interest in MPs and businessmen, when no-one seemed sufficiently concerned about potential conflicts of interest in my own newspaper?70
I knew that I would soon have to leave as well. I had been profoundly uncomfortable as the rows intensified, in part because by 1989 I had been appointed ‘assistant editor’, a largely meaningless title but one that entitled the editor to expect my loyalty in the face of mutinies from the ranks. As my sympathy was entirely with the mutineers, I was in an impossible position and, in September 1989, I handed in my notice.
I was not alone: the paper’s chief foreign affairs commentator Neal Ascherson and the literary editor and poet Blake Morrison both left at the same time. The Observer limped on under Lonrho’s ownership until 1993, when it was bought by The Guardian, and Donald Trelford stood down as editor after eighteen years in the hot seat.*
Tiny Rowland was ousted as chief executive of Lonrho in 1994 and died in 1998, aged eighty.
Looking back, I am surprised that The Observer survived as long as it did under Lonrho’s ownership, and that I survived as long as I did at The Observer. In the early Lonrho years, only the business pages seemed to reflect the interests of the owners and, as I never wrote for, nor had any interest in, the business section, I was able to write whatever I wanted to, subject only to the agreement of the editor. But, over time, the brutal reality of media ownership became impossible to ignore: no editor, however skilled, can withstand proprietorial pressure for ever. A newspaper is a business like any other, and ultimate power will always lie in the boardroom, not in the editor’s office.
The broadcaster Andrew Marr, who was briefly editor of The Independent in the 1990s, wrote:
The truth is that, except for editors who are highly influential in trusts or companies owning their titles, editors are hirelings. Proprietors regard their editors as talented and interesting servants … Tiny Rowland treated Donald Trelford … with cold brutality whenever his commercial interests were involved … Rowland was exceptionally nasty but Trelford’s plight was hardly unique.71
As for independent directors, appointed in the forlorn hope that they could turn carnivores like Rupert Murdoch and Tiny Rowland into cuddly pussycats, the protection that they offered turned out, predictably, to be illusory. They never paid the piper, so they never called the tune. Magnus Linklater, who by 1989 had left The Observer to become editor first of the London Daily News (owned by Robert Maxwell, so the words ‘frying pan’ and ‘fire’ inevitably come to mind) and then of The Scotsman, wrote after the independent directors’ Al-Yamamah adjudication:
To conclude, as they did, that The Observer’s coverage of the House of Fraser saga had ‘tarnished the image of the paper’ is probably the strongest political statement ever made in public by independent directors on their own newspaper. To have taken the matter any farther would have been to invite a direct confrontation with Mr Rowland, which they would certainly have lost. They might have gone out with guns blazing, but they would have gone out.72
To entrust press freedom to the whims of frequently megalomaniac media tycoons is far from satisfactory, but I have never been able to envisage a workable alternative. I am not a fan of statutory press regulation, on the grounds that any political involvement, however indirect, in deciding who publishes what must always be resisted.
There is a case for restricting media ownership to companies that do not already have a significant media presence, but in the rapidly changing world of global digital corporations that also create their own c
ontent, like Amazon and Netflix, it may well be that the days of the Rowlands, Murdochs and Maxwells are already drawing to an end. Whether what comes next will be better or worse, well, as that favourite journalists’ cliché has it, only time will tell.
As a stand-alone Sunday newspaper, albeit one published by the same group as a six-day-a-week paper, The Observer is especially vulnerable. So much of what used to be a Sunday paper’s unique offering – the long reads, the arts and books pages, and the colour magazines – are now offered by the daily papers as well, so it is hard to see why a Sunday paper is any different from its Saturday siblings. Even when I left The Observer in 1989, it was becoming ever more difficult to argue that we were providing our readers with something that they could not find elsewhere. These days, I spend far longer reading the Saturday papers than the Sunday ones, and I doubt that I am alone in that.
So will there still be an Observer in ten years’ time, or will it have become a Guardian on Sunday? There has never been an Observer presence online, as its digital content has always appeared under the Guardian brand, so I think it is highly unlikely that it will maintain its print identity for much longer. I shall shed a tear when it goes, for it was, in its time, a great paper. But even great papers sometimes die.
* In 2014, at the age of seventy-six, he became father to his sixth child, Poppy.
CHAPTER 11
ARE YOU JEWISH?
How odd of God
To choose the Jews.
Not odd of God
Goyim annoy ’im.
WILLIAM NORMAN EWER / LEO ROSTEN (ATTRIB.)
MY WIFE RUTH, WHO is Jewish, likes to tell people that I never knew I was Jewish until I met her. She is not entirely wrong. Even now, I do not really know how to answer the question: ‘Are you Jewish?’ I usually say yes, because it is easier than ‘Well, it depends what you mean by Jewish.’ The fact is that I was never asked the question, nor did I ask it of myself, until I was well into my thirties, which probably explains why I have not yet been able to come up with a satisfactory answer.
When we moved to Jerusalem after I was appointed The Observer’s Middle East correspondent in 1985, the question came up on virtually a daily basis.
‘Hi, I’m Robin Lustig of The Observer.’
‘Hello. Are you Jewish?’
I exaggerate, but only slightly.
I had always known, of course, that my parents were Jewish, or rather that the Nazis said they were Jewish. But during my childhood, and into my early adulthood, no one ever asked me if I was. I didn’t ask, either. If there were other Jewish pupils at my school, I was never aware of them, and the same applied when I went to university. As far as I knew, none of my friends were Jewish. Call it denial if you will – and I know some will – but I was brought up in an environment as religion-free as it is possible to imagine. The first time I entered a synagogue was the day I got married in one.
Ruth came from a much more traditionally observant family. They marked all the major Jewish holidays and fasted on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. It would have broken her father’s heart if his only daughter had not been married by a rabbi and, as I did not really mind either way, I was perfectly happy to go along with his wishes. There was a small problem, however: easy-going and progressive as our chosen rabbi was, he still felt the need to satisfy himself that I was, in fact, Jewish.
To do that, all that he required was some kind of documentary evidence that my mother was Jewish. (My father, in this context, was of no importance.) So I asked my mother if she had any piece of paper that said, in terms that would satisfy a rabbi, that she was Jewish. Fortunately, she did, and pulled from the back of a desk drawer an old German passport, issued by the Nazis and stamped with a large, and unmistakable, J.
J for Jew.
It was just what the rabbi needed, so, thanks to that Nazi document, I was able to get married in a synagogue. The first Jewish religious service of any kind that I had attended was my own wedding. I enjoyed both the irony and the inescapable conclusion: my best answer to the question ‘Are you Jewish?’ would be ‘Well, the Nazis said my mother was – does that count?’
The truth is, as I belatedly came to realise, that other people thought of me as Jewish long before I did. Jean-Paul Sartre was probably right when he suggested that the best definition of a Jew is anyone whom other people call a Jew. When I first grew a beard in my late twenties, a colleague remarked that it made me look like a trainee rabbi, which struck me at the time as a very odd thing for him to have said. When I first arrived in Rome, the correspondent for the Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv, who was also a prominent member of Rome’s Jewish community, asked me if I had any plans for New Year. As it was only early September, I was surprised to be asked so far in advance. Only much later did I realise that she was referring to the Jewish New Year, which falls in September or early October.
I had also been vaguely aware, after my appointment as The Observer’s Middle East correspondent had been announced, that there was some whispering behind my back to the effect that it might not be such a good idea for a Jewish correspondent to be sent to cover such a sensitive region. What puzzled me about that reaction was the unspoken assumption that I would automatically be sympathetic to Israel, a country about which I had no strong feelings either way and which I had visited only once before. I was obviously much more Jewish to the people around me than I was to myself.
My Jew-blindness, which is how I think of it, is easily explained. For both my parents, having grown up in Germany under the Nazis, being Jewish brought only danger and unhappiness. Once they escaped to the UK, being German while Britain was at war with Germany was similarly not a good thing to be. So it was much better to say as little as possible about their background and hope to blend in with their surroundings. As neither of them had come from a religious family, there was not a lot of Jewish baggage to leave behind and, to this day, my father always emphasises that the Nazis classed him as ‘non-Aryan’ rather than ‘Jewish’.
All of this obviously rubbed off on me, even though I was blissfully unaware of any of it until I was well into adulthood. I still think that it is to the great credit of my parents that they were able to raise both their sons in such a way that our heritage, problematic or otherwise, was simply never an issue. For better or for worse, we were who we were. When I have to fill out official forms, in the box asking my ethnicity, I write ‘white British’ and in the box for religion, I write ‘none’.
None of this makes me, as some Jews would claim, a ‘self-hating Jew’, for the very simple reason that I neither hate myself, nor do I hate all Jews, which would be absurd. I judge people on their merits (what Martin Luther King called ‘the content of their character’), not on their religious faith or even on the faith of their mother. In my naivety, I cling to the idea that the world might be a better place if others did the same.
My first experience as a journalist working in Israel was not an auspicious one. Ruth and I had flown out a few weeks before I was due to start work there to find somewhere to live. We were later joined by Donald Trelford, who had arranged for us to conduct a joint interview (together with my predecessor as Middle East correspondent, Colin Smith) with the then Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres. The arrangement was that we would meet Peres over breakfast at the King David Hotel, the grandest hotel in Jerusalem, record an interview and then publish it verbatim in the following Sunday’s paper.
The night before the interview, we all went out to dinner and consumed large quantities of wine. My two colleagues started swapping stories about their National Service exploits in, respectively, the RAF and the army. As I was unable to join in their tales of derring-do, Ruth and I bowed out early and left them to it. It was just as well that we did because the following morning both my colleagues were very much the worse for wear.
The interview went ahead as scheduled, however, and the tape was duly handed over to a commercial transcription agency to be transcribed and sent to Peres’s office for appro
val. Within half an hour, the agency phoned Colin with bad news.
The tape was totally blank.
Someone (not me, obviously) had forgotten to press the record button.
We decided that it would be far too embarrassing to admit this to Peres’s office, so we spent the next several hours reconstructing the interview as best we could from memory. We knew that it was a highly risky thing to do, given that what we came up with would be checked by Peres’s people line by line, and there was every chance that they would realise that we had not, in fact, recorded anything.
The point of the story is that they cleared it without raising a single query, which was testament not to our superhuman memory, but to the depressing fact that politicians rarely say anything new in a set-piece interview. We had been able to reconstruct Peres’s words so accurately because he had said nothing to us that he had not said a thousand times before. The genuine news value of our encounter was precisely zero, but we still published it at length, because an ‘exclusive’ interview with a Prime Minister is never to be sneezed at.
Ruth and I had hoped that we would be able to find ourselves a beautiful home in an old, stone-built house with an orange tree in the courtyard, but we ended up moving into Colin Smith’s flat in a modern apartment block in the part of the city that had been seized by Israel in the 1967 Six Day War, just next to the Hebrew University on Mount Scopus. It was far from ideal, on both aesthetic and political grounds, but we had been unable to find anything else suitable and it did have the benefit of a huge balcony with breathtaking views over the Judean desert towards Jericho and the Dead Sea. On a clear night, we could see the lights of Jordan, and after a thunderstorm, the desert would magically come alive with wild flowers. (Israelis like to claim that they have ‘made the desert bloom’; our evidence was that the rain could do it without any human assistance, Israeli or otherwise.)
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