by Bruce Page
Practitioners often repress the harsh fact that journalism’s significance is so intermittent. But there is an up-side: when a newspaper does contrive to distinguish itself in abnormal circumstances, the impact on readers will be greater, and more enduring. This explains the durability of some media titles – ‘brands’ if business terms work better – and their place in communal memory. To illustrate by the extreme, any educated sense of British citizenship eventually includes traces of The Times, Peterloo and voting reform; similarly, histories of the Presidency will always include the Washington Post.
A real newspaper depends on having resources over and above its ‘normal’ requirements, but nobody knows quite how large they need to be. How frequently should the New York Times expect aircraft to crash into the Empire State Building? was Max Frankel’s question in the 1950s, before anyone had to ask whether they might be aimed at it (see Chapter 2 above). Classically, editors and publishers fight about the size of the margin, but not about its existence. As the optimising theories of orthodox business offer little real help, the problem has to be solved empirically – by hunch plus experience.
Costs at least can be controlled by empiricism. Major outcomes in general can’t be. Effective use of resources in decisive, accidental moments depends on quick, independent decision-making by reporters and editors subject only to such rules of truth-finding as they have learnt. Time spent trying to estimate the consequences of inquiry must be kept to a minimum, or it will clog the process. For this reason the absolute quantity of resources is less important than how they are organised emotionally. We defy augury, says Hamlet, when at last doubt is replaced with action: if it be not now, ’tis not to come, yet it will come. The readiness is all.
Murdoch’s distinction, displayed in his reflection on New York, is that he expects to run newspapers on a ‘normal’ basis: if there are a few things missed, what does it matter? For this reason Newscorp papers are frequently run with stripped-down news staffs and massive use of agency copy. In the tabloid market, the lack of any real journalism can be filled by chequebook journalism and staged pseudo-events (such as the News of the World’s endless ‘stings’). These may be quite expensive, but such expenditure is predictable, and therefore easily managed, both financially and politically – give or take an occasional Profumo misjudgment.
A few days before Harry Evans took office at The Times, William Rees-Mogg wrote a valediction in which he called Rupert Murdoch a ‘newspaper romantic’ – he has always fancied a piquant phrase, and sometimes more than the available evidence justifies. More realistically, he saw ‘the shades of the prison house close round Mr Harold Evans (and even cast a somewhat fainter shadow over Mr Rupert Murdoch) …,’ suggesting that his own fourteen-year editorship had not quite been a barrel of fun.
It made Rees-Mogg himself into a national figure, by exhibiting his talent for controversy, which was eccentric – but more so than his substantive views. Most of his positions were those of a liberal conservative – he was a swift enemy of Enoch Powell’s attempt at racial politics – only spiced with economic fancies. Even before going to The Times Rees-Mogg ‘took the position that a government which had responsibility without sufficient power was decisively worse for society than its opposite. He thought [a serious] paper should reflect this view … should be ready to offer government its support in the never-ending struggle to prevent events sliding out of control.’ This was support over explicit policies, and it could include trenchant criticism (Rees-Mogg’s estimate of George Brown, deputy to Prime Minister Harold Wilson, as a better man drunk than Wilson sober put many respectable eyebrows into spasm). But his basically conventional outlook made him the wrong person to remedy the ailments of the world’s archetypal newspaper.
These were connected not with policy debates, but with a definition of journalistic purpose infecting the core of its staff, a notion that The Times’ essential function was ‘to serve the governing class of Great Britain’ (not even the elected administration!). Members of the staff wrote just those words in rebuke to consultants who suggested the paper ought to think more about service to the reading public. That was in 1957, during a lastditch defence of the news-free front page, but the attitude remained manifest up to the time of Murdoch’s takeover. (It was in principle his own view of a newspaper’s relationship with the governing class, though he came to it from his own direction.) Of course a newspaper designed for people who believe – according to Keynes’ testimony – that nothing really serious ever happens will be near to the ideal type of a pseudo-newspaper.
Rees-Mogg’s attempts at modernising The Times were denounced in a tone very similar to that of the front-page diehards, in a round-robin letter drafted by the famous leader-writer Owen Hickey. It said of some fairly mild (and perhaps confused) attempts to alter the paper’s organisation that the:
general effect of what has been done, and of the manner in which it has been done, has been to diminish the authority, independence, accuracy, discrimination and seriousness of The Times. These are chief among its essential values. To the degree that they are lost The Times departs from its true tradition and forfeits the principal editorial factor in its commercial success.
Reaction might be defined as conservatism in defence of the non-existent, and the content of the ‘White Swan’ letter, as it became known, made a fine example. The Times had at that point (1967) not enjoyed real ‘commercial success’ for at least a generation, which was exactly why it had fallen into the Thomson Organisation’s arms. Its special ‘authority’ was confined within its own hermetic world.
But the list of signatories (at the White Swan pub off Fleet Street) was a rather different matter. Rees-Mogg’s fury at the patronising tone seems to have stopped him asking why it should be signed both by Robert Jones, one of the country’s pioneers of financial investigation, and by ‘Sandy’ Rendel, the old-style diplomatic correspondent whose ‘authority’ had moved NATO from Brussels to London and made a bad joke of The Times’ first news front page. The Times was still host to an idea not yet dead, and two quite different newspapers were represented among the White Hart signatories: one which had just published a groundbreaking account of corruption at Scotland Yard; another which considered such things, if true, unlikely to please dwellers in ‘the top tier of the machine’.
It was Rees-Mogg’s task to close one down and revive the other, but he was essentially a leader-writer when The Times needed an expert in the organisation and management of news systems. Rees-Mogg left the system essentially unchanged, and for Evans to change. Evans had formidable production skills, but he had long been running a well-oiled weekly operation with the aid of first-class specialists like Ron Hall and Don Berry. Though The Times had more good reporters and analysts than it deserved, there was nobody remotely in the Hall– Berry class to support an editor running a six-day operation and needing off-line time to reconstruct it. Of the two closest companions he did have, one was his own choice, the other that of his ‘romantic’ boss. Both were disastrous.
His deputy, Charles Douglas-Home, Evans selected from a somewhat limited field. He had not tried at the Sunday Times to teach himself the tricky art of working with a strong deputy, and was content to have in the role Frank Giles, an easygoing man with strong conventional values but little notion of how to defend them against conventional attack. This had been, until the Murdoch crisis, a reassuring, gentlemanly relationship, and The Times provided a candidate with some resemblance in terms of social exterior.
Douglas-Home had been the candidate of the Times traditionalists as ReesMogg’s replacement, though with no chance of success against Murdoch’s need to transplant Evans. He was the nephew of an aristocratic minor Prime Minister, with a professional record bright alongside Uncle Alec’s, but not dazzling. Most of it had been spent on The Times, lately as home affairs editor. Untroubled by retrospective loyalty to a regime in which he had been a principal, he plied Evans with details of deficiencies he claimed to have seen in Rees-Mog
g.
His talent for detraction went beyond gossip. Four years earlier he had given a startled subordinate (Brian MacArthur, the news editor) a secret dossier on the private lives of the Times reporters. One of its subjects found the investigative craft to uncover it, and read such things as his own complaint about depression due to working conditions being ascribed to ‘chaotic’ sexual activity. DouglasHome apologised and promised to destroy the files – remarkably, there was nothing about this on his own record, and Evans only learnt of it months later, when the dossier turned out still to exist. Sex was not its only subject, for another reporter was classified ‘not a gentleman’. Timelier disclosure might have set Evans reflecting on Surtees’ rule that ‘the man who talks about being a gentleman never is one’. On the face of it Douglas-Home – who died in 1985 seems an absurdly unsuitable senior executive. There are friends who fiercely defend his memory but the basic facts are hard to smooth away.
Murdoch’s appointment of Gerald Long as managing director of Times Newspapers was based on the assumption that Long had wrought the economic miracle of Reuters – particularly where it rested on the solution of labour problems by applying computer technology to the news business. Long, who had a bristling and macho style, was – or presented himself as – an authority on French cheeses, wine and gastronomy generally, about which he lectured his new colleagues at ostentatious length. Murdoch, brought up on the usual upper-class notion that the wine ought to be good but you shouldn’t fuss about it, endured this in the belief that he had got the industrial-relations genius to revolutionise the production of his newly acquired broadsheets.
Being Murdoch, he reacted adversely once fact demonstrated otherwise some months later. Long devoted much energy both to gastronomical journalism and to refining TNL’s boardroom cuisine. When in February 1982 he published a treatise on rare French cheeses during a painful struggle for company-wide redundancies, Murdoch shut the kitchens down completely.
The assumptions about Long seem to have been over-hasty – whatever his part in converting Reuters from news agency to financial-data bonanza, it had little to do with labour relations. The official history of Reuters says that early in his period as general manager he handed over staff management to Brian Stockwell, ‘a quiet, popular man, responsive without being weak … Brian joined in 1938, and acquired wide experience as a journalist and manager in London and overseas … Stockwell began by negotiating the introduction of a graded salary structure of all employees. This suited both management and trade unions …’ Stockwell also negotiated joint manning of computer installations, and by his retirement in 1976 Reuters’ industrial relations seem to have been as solid as TNL’s were flaky. John Lawrenson, who wrote an unofficial history of Reuters, describes Long as a bully with a gift for sycophancy and self-promotion, the bristling manner a cover for insecurity.
As sycophant, Long made it his business to promote the general proposition that Murdoch was a ‘much misunderstood man’, rendered impatient only by delays in the pursuit of excellence. As bully, he dumped on individuals held to be maintaining the roadblocks. Conspicuous examples were Thomson–TNL grandees whose exit was not complete. Evans was disturbed to watch the growth of a double act in which Murdoch designated targets and Long brought down abuse or humiliation on them. Denis Hamilton was supposed to remain as chairman of the TNL holding board and as a national director: Murdoch groaned at Hamilton’s ‘long-windedness’; Long promised in schoolboy language to ‘bag’ him. The routine went into action at Rees-Mogg’s farewell dinner:
It was the first time I had been with Murdoch and Long together. It was bad news. They egged each other on in cynicism and mockery …
That night Tina wrote in her diary: I was disconcerted by Long with his Lucky Lucan moustache and impenetrable inward stare, and I was unhappy about the savagery with which he and Murdoch rubbished William Rees-Mogg and Denis Hamilton. I stuck up for Hamilton by saying he had good taste in people and once had the courage to appoint Harry. Murdoch ruggedly conceded this. Long just reiterated, ‘He’s a bloody pompous old fool.’
The gastronome’s weapons were ready. When Hamilton wanted to work through lunch in his seventh-floor office and sent for a tray, Long decreed that service should stop at the sixth floor. Many such small humiliations were added until Hamilton was ‘bagged’ late in 1981. Animosities, Evans recognised, were hardly new to the media industry, but here they were ‘cultivated like tropical plants’ – with a devotion even greater than in the old Fleet Street jungle.
The third person critical to Evans’ prospects was his own replacement as editor of the Sunday Times – co-beneficiary of the ‘guarantees’ supposedly entrenched as law. These would hardly work unless they were applied in an equal spirit at both papers. It quickly emerged that the Sunday Times as a whole was classed fair game. Long stalked its premises in Murdoch’s wake, diagnosing epidemic excellence-blockage, and a product judged ‘flabby’, ‘unexciting’ and lacking the ‘element of surprise’. ‘Rupert says so and I agree.’ Rupert, however, had agreed the choice as editor of Frank Giles, who embodied just the qualities of which he furiously alleged himself to be the nemesis. Giles was a traditional diplomatic journalist: public school and Oxbridge by mould; entirely decent by aspiration; upper-middle class by birth, marriage and connection, with only modest technical grasp and a visible dislike of stories apt to frighten the horses.
This was like Dirty Harry denouncing a squad of cops for being insufficiently ruthless and street-wise after placing them deliberately under the command of one of those gentleman-detectives who populated 1930s novels. It was an irrational choice to succeed Evans. There were several sensible prospects – Don Berry, and the late Hugo Young most obviously for the Sunday Times was not the demoralised part of TNL. But exactly so: its staff had shown resistance. And while the guarantees remained credible, any chance of a recurrence had to be eliminated
– a priority easily outranking editorial momentum. Just how well candidates such as Young or Berry might have turned out is hard to say. What is sure is that any one of them would have been stronger than Giles, whose professional vulnerability offered every opportunity for ruthless manipulation.
Both Long and Murdoch would turn up in Giles’ office to apply the standard editor-destabilising techniques – zapping through an edition, tossing surly, random questions. When Giles’ executives were present some care had to be taken over the instructions-to-journalists rule, but impact could be enhanced by insulting manners, as when Murdoch arrived for the celebration of Giles’ first issue: ‘Giles asked Murdoch if he would like a drink and went on his knees to the low refrigerator by the door … “Bitter lemon” said Murdoch irritably, striding over the kneeling body of his editor’
Loutishness during the courtship phase – rather than Murdoch’s natural good manners – would of course have aborted the whole deal. Long, led by Murdoch, followed up diligently by insulting staff members as ‘lead-swingers’, ‘expensepadders’, ‘Trotskyites’ and ‘communists’. Any properly qualified editor for the paper would have tuned up its work-ethic – which just then had slipped a few notches (without Leon Trotsky’s intervention). But Long’s campaign was intended to show that the editor actually chosen could not protect his staff from abuse. Frank Giles, Murdoch bizarrely claimed, was a communist. And worse, said Long, his knowledge of wine, gastronomy and the French language was lacking. Giles’ French accent was probably the better, but it was not a point he saw fit to trade.
Murdoch spoke gleefully of ‘terrorising’ Giles: in a world of guns and bombs, we need some care with the language of office-warfare. There was of course no physical terror involved, nor need one suppose Giles short of the courage to face that. Most of the destructive effect was gained by crude discourtesy – that is, by use of tactics Giles would never consider using in return. The parallel is that armed terror also works by exploiting restraints which its victims consider binding. The result, anyway, was effective softening up of the other guaranteed e
ditor. At this point it’s relevant to notice that Murdoch had nominated to the national directors his old mentor from the last dark days of Beaverbook, Ted (Sir Edward) Pickering.
Under Rees-Mogg The Times’ leader column had not shown overall Thatcherite enthusiasm, but because of his personal view it approved of monetarist economics – thus counting as friendly if not One of Us. Evans set out to make the theme of his own leader-writing a ‘weaning’ of The Times away from monetarism. The implications he did not fully grasp in advance, and even in retrospect they may be hard to imagine.
Economics had been Evans’ university subject and he had maintained a detailed interest. He saw the subject in technical terms rather than quasi-religious, ethical ones – that is, he shared the outlook general among the field’s professionals. But the true Thatcherite monetarism which ruled Britain in the early 1980s was of a fundamentalist purity seen almost nowhere else – certainly not in America, where it had originated in the technical scholarship of Milton Friedman. In America monetarism was influential, but a technique among techniques. It never became the loyalty test it did in 1980s Britain (Friedman himself grew troubled by Thatcherism’s total absorption in the quantity theory of money). That pure faith is now forgotten like the beliefs of the Albigensians, and economic policy debate once again is largely a pragmatic discussion of means. To reproduce the monetarist zeal the editor of The Times walked into, one should think of today’s globalisation debate.
Quite swiftly Evans realised that Murdoch’s technical editorial skills were not just less than his own, but far from being in the same league. Apparently he had believed the famous story of the shirt-sleeved creator of the amazing Sun – which of course had been a copy of the Daily Mirror assembled by its former chief sub Larry Lamb. He seems not to have looked closely at the New York Post, and never saw the lamentable pre-Deamer Australian.