by Bruce Page
Murdoch knew enough to be a deadly kibitzer in a tabloid set-up run by skilled people long inured to deference. There is a strongly held belief among tabloid journalists that making up a broadsheet is easy. So it is if the ambition is nothing more than grey vertical columns and minimal illustration. The kind of active and flexible broadsheet Evans wanted for The Times is far more difficult, because the text has equal rights with the display. ‘Murdoch proved to be much less of a technician than I thought he would be, unsure of type-faces and liable to mix up off-the-stone time (printers finished) and set-plate time (foundry finished, and on the machines ready to roll).’
He found Murdoch adept in discussing the marketing of new publications and sections, but less effective on the question of content for them. He was not ‘an ideas man in that sense’, and lacked ‘the pure editorial flair of Denis Hamilton, who was always dreaming up handsome and ambitious series for the Sunday Times review front and colour magazine’. None of this need have mattered in the case of a non-interventionist proprietor and a smoothly running product. But this was a proprietor carrying a charismatic editorial reputation – and with whom the editor needed to interact minutely about the reconstruction of a famous but dangerously sick newspaper.
Evans had to overcome inertia accumulated over decades in The Times. His deputy and his managing director scarcely understood the task, and were flawed characters; his Sunday Times colleague was a decent man under destabilising attack. He intended to apply some perfectly orthodox and sensible criticisms to the ruling policy of the government without being aware that he was committing blasphemy. His cell in the prison-house was likely to be chillier than ReesMogg’s.
10
CASES OF CONSCIENCE, 1981–1982
When I Want Your Opinion, I’ll Give It to You
RONNIE SCOTT, title of jazz recording
There is no such test of a man’s superiority of character as in the well-conducting of an unavoidable quarrel …
SIR HENRY TAYLOR, The Statesman Whatever his surrounding constraints The Times was an exhilarating experience for Harry Evans for most of the first half of 1981. His last three or four years at the Sunday Times had not been ones in which much new ground could be broken, and after Ken Thomson’s decision to pull out there would have been no way to remain without a bruising and principally defensive battle.
In the first few months at The Times there was nothing from Murdoch but encouragement and praise, even when Evans himself was distressed by the paper’s performance. When not absent in New York, Murdoch was preoccupied with the Sun, which was being out-down-marketed by the newborn tabloid Star. His counter-attack was to bring the Mark II Sun into being under Kelvin MacKenzie. It’s worth remembering that those of the great and good who welcomed or reconciled themselves to Murdoch’s acquisition of The Times had yet to see that remarkable publication.
There is every reason to think Murdoch genuinely saw in Evans a pliant technician ready to project the proprietor’s political desires effectively. Something like it had been his experience with Larry Lamb – and his old mentor Pickering simply saw the Beaverbrook–Christiansen relationship revisited. Differences, it seems, were overlooked – such as that Larry Lamb was authentically Thatcherite (agent, indeed, of Rupert’s conversion). Lamb actually thought it was for his sake Mrs Thatcher had given Rupert The Times – for which he would have left the Sun very cheerily. Instead he was transported to the Australian.
To Shawcross Murdoch said that Evans’ entire attitude to him was one of ‘Tell me what you want, and I’ll do it.’ If so, each misread the other, setting up an unavoidable quarrel. Evans was capable of misplaced enthusiasms, and his presence at The Times proved that. He had a huge over-investment in believing Murdoch was not the political camp-follower he had been warned about – and he had some personal propensity for telling people what they might like to hear. But all this was as superficial as the vanity Rupert’s father had hoped to exploit in General Monash. Beneath it, Evans was a dedicated professional journalist with a formidable record owing nothing to Murdoch.
All the same, matchmaking was tried. Evans received a gold-embossed card inviting him to dinner at 10 Downing Street with the Prime Minister in honour of the French President, Francois Mitterrand. ‘I told Murdoch, expecting that he would be there. No, but he seemed to know already about my invitation. “She likes you,” he said of Mrs Thatcher.’ The editor of The Times was courteously received on the Prime Minister’s own table. But if she felt a strong affection for him she managed to control it. Handsome is as handsome does, she probably said to herself.
The near-assassination of President Reagan on 30 March 1981 was the new editor’s first big night. His handling of it was highly successful, but it challenged the paper institutionally, sowing a resentment easy for Murdoch to cultivate when he realised matters were not going to plan. A chief rubric of Times conservatism called it a (or the) ‘newspaper of record’, with an equivalent proposition that ‘Nothing is news until it has appeared in The Times’. If the idea was that a newspaper should range widely, should not leave stories hanging and should have an index, there can be little complaint. But essentially it begged all the questions of what should be recorded and how, with looming beyond them the problem of ‘how it should record what others insisted on concealing’. At its worst, a ‘newspaper of record’ formula justifies indiscriminate accumulation, repetition and contradiction. (The method is ancient: ‘I have made a heap of all that I could find,’ wrote Nennius of his ninth-century collection of Celtic lore, and it was obsolete even then, for Bede in the seventh century had been criticising sources and synthesising narrative.)
On the night of, the Reagan story Evans threw away the ‘normal’ front page (framed before the news broke) and gave its whole area to Reagan. Inside, he created a second ‘front page’ for the routine news. The Reagan coverage used a picture sequence six columns wide, and ruthlessly divided narrative from explanation; wherever possible repetition was cut out or dealt with by crossreference. It was a hectic project, disconcerting to everyone who still thought one front page excessive.
Murdoch, phoning from New York, said his intelligence system told him The Times had outdone all other papers – had been ‘the best in the Street’. Evans circulated this widely, which was perhaps natural, but it was also unwise. Letters arrived in some profusion complaining of the unTimes-like character of the ‘Reagan special’, and Evans was left in no doubt that many of his staff agreed. Illustration had caused special offence. ‘Some people on The Times regarded photography as a black art of tabloid journalism.’ To be sure there were minor errors. The headline ‘HONEY, I FORGOT TO DUCK’ perhaps over-estimated the British currency of Reagan’s witty quote from the Dempsey—Tunney fight. But what mattered to the Times conservatives was not the impact of the coverage on readers – which turned out to be beneficial to the paper when the evidence came in
– but the fact that its production involved skills they didn’t possess, admire or understand. And if the Sun’s proprietor liked it, so much the worse. They did not realise that Murdoch scarcely understood any more than they did. Anyway, neither he nor they would care about each other’s motives when the time came to combine against Evans.
As accident dictated in that year, events followed each other in a procession vivid enough for Christiansen himself. There were the fierce inner-city riots of Brixton and Toxteth; near-disaster for the Columbia space shuttle; the Israeli airattack on Iraq’s nuclear reactor; the shooting of the Pope; an intruder in the Queen’s bedroom; the assassination of Sadat of Egypt; the introduction of martial law in Poland. Amazement created by the news was multiplied by the spectacle of the editor creating:
pages myself, working with the subs into the small hours … I am sure I made errors which were gratifying to all who observed them [but] I was sure there was a better way than doing what The Times would naturally have done, which would have been to assign separate headlines to stories that were not distinct, but simply
came from separate sources [that is, from different agencies and correspondents] so producing overlap and repetition …
These subs were not the elite assault-troops of popular Fleet Street, described in Chapter 3: they were humble non-corns who looked up to an officer-class of leader-writers, area editors, specialist writers. And The Times at some time past had come to resemble those regiments in which ‘Carry on then, sar’nt-major’ covers many unglamorous operational necessities. Generally the officers lived a daytime life, leaving the non-corns to carry on through the night without their participation or supervision. Very frequently, parts of the ‘record’ simply went missing.
Central to Evans’ achievement at the Sunday Times had been making use of the display-language derived from Christiansen’s Express – without the corruption in which subs treat reporters’ work as raw material for freestanding invention. Often, advantage was taken of a five-day deadline to allow his staff to switch between the two roles, or perform them in parallel. Active display, honestly run, does not create news. But it creates a propensity to look for it – provided the system has resources enough to handle the accidents coming its way.
Like Adrian Deamer, Evans was a meticulous text-handler, who rarely made errors except through exhaustion or lack of support but that was a most serious contingency. The paper did not really have enough subs to check, edit and organise its fifty columns of text in routine mode, let alone enough to seize exceptional opportunities. ‘It was something Murdoch affected never to understand, giving a sardonic chuckle as he surveyed the troglodytes and asking when I was getting rid of them; and perhaps he did not understand it, since all his experience had been of tabloids with a tenth of the text.’ Evans was too charitable, for a large part of Murdoch’s experience had been with the broadsheet Australian. And in that case too his eye had not been accurate.
Human resources apart, much of the physical layout was inadequate the sign of a newspaper which had passed long years in passive mode. People who needed to work close together were far apart. Difficult as it might be to credit, there was no intercom system; even more extraordinary, internal phone numbers were unlisted.
I thought at first that the [news]room layout, sanctified by a decade, would have some logic … But … finding there was none, I asked for the room to be reorganised … one or two senior people, however, had the same attitude to change as the readers who resented the invention of the camera … It took me four months of shuttle diplomacy to have the desks at The Times sensibly grouped.
Machiavelli today might say that moving executive furniture is a Prince’s riskiest venture. Certainly the reservoir of ill-will deepened.
Newsroom routines – and sometimes their absence – showed traces of ‘newspaper of record’ doctrine in its corrupt, circular form. Late copy was appended to existing stories, rather than incorporated through rewrites. And there was no procedure for regular comparative checks on competing news media and agencies. A doctrine that nothing is news till it has appeared in The Times easily becomes a doctrine that it need not appear first in The Times – and then, in the last hermetic stage, need not appear at all. Journalists should scan opposition sheets with well-hidden dread. At The Times, Evans found, there was a tendency to do so with contempt, which presented itself in a suit of intellectual rigour, deceptively tailored:
‘The story in another newspaper is not a scoop; it is a shallow misinterpretation, a base fabrication, and if it is neither of them, it is something we had months ago but the night staff had failed to realise its importance.’
The news trade always contains enough fakery, sensationalism and plagiarism to give the ploy some effect. A paper’s specialist writers, armed with expertise in particular subjects – law, medicine, science, education and so on – can employ it with deadly effect against an editor who has no spare time to investigate the background. Specialists should be a newspaper’s most dependable source of unique material, but they can most easily become creatures of routine, and prisoners of their expert sources. When Evans discovered, though, that his science correspondent was unavailable to cover the scheduled re-entry of a Columbia mission known in advance to be at risk, he decided the syndrome had gone too far.
Fred Emery, an energetic reporter, was given the task of eliminating passivity from the specialist writers’ group. He was unpopular with Murdoch, because in covering the takeover he had asked questions judged over-energetic. Now he grew unpopular internally for demanding that the specialists work a Sunday roster and that some of them change jobs. Evans says he was told that specialist appointments on The Times were made for life. It is difficult to believe, but some of the incumbents held views no less remarkable. “‘From the readers’ point of view as distinct from specialised people in the field,” one of them commented to Emery, “it is difficult to see the importance of scoops. The quality of writing is more important.”’ This states the pseudo-newspaper principle in almost ideal form: implicitly asserting that, once the normal has been dealt with, all duty is done. It inverts plain truth, for in any field the ‘specialised people’ are mostly the local chapter of the governing class and, as Keynes suggests, their lust for scoops is indeed tiny: those they like are internal messages irrelevant to the governed classes. What does matter to the unspecialised – the readers, the governed – is what people in the field do save us from most of the time: rogue pharmaceuticals, rising pollution, collapsing buildings, officials being pressurised. Scoops are all that matters – the other stuff is there to determine how much they matter. But unreadiness is all. Scoops are not found by those who know better than to look.
Clearly, said Douglas-Home, there was a gap between old and new at The Times, and he added, ‘I pledge myself to be the bridge.’ There were undoubtedly two newspapers in one office, as there had been at the time of the White Swan letter. But which was old and which was new? Arguably, what Evans was doing was releasing a very old one – the still-powerful idea of The Times – from a pseudo-newspaper top-hamper. It certainly seemed to come alive quickly, to the detriment of Murdoch’s hope that cordial relations would grow from the Downing Street dinner.
Seven days after that dinner the excessively energetic Emery produced a copy of a letter written on 10 Downing Street letterhead and signed by Mrs Thatcher’s husband Denis. It was addressed to ‘Dear Nick’ Nicholas Edwards, the Secretary of State for Wales. It had been written in 1980, and asked for a planning appeal over a housing estate in the Snowdonia National Park to be accelerated. Mr Thatcher declared an interest as an adviser to the developers. Passing this letter on to his officials, the Secretary of State had written, ‘The explanation had better be good and quick, i.e. this week.’ Thatcher’s clients had since won their appeal, and the result was still in 1981 a focus of disquiet in Wales, because Whitehall had overruled the Snowdonia National Park authority.
Evans and Murdoch were dining at Woodrow Wyatt’s house when the first edition arrived containing the story. Murdoch ‘looked miserable and said nothing’. Every other newspaper followed up The Times – which had not for some time been a familiar event. Indeed, Lord Shawcross wrote to suggest that The Times once would not have stooped so low. The government spin was that everyone could write to ministers from their homes, and 10 Downing Street was Mr Thatcher’s. He had not used crested, Prime Ministerial stationery. The Times wrote a leader saying that Caesar’s husband must rise above suspicion. The only way to avoid publishing the story would have been to avoid finding it. Lord Shawcross was right to say that The Times in recent years had managed that omission with ease.
The big running story was the state of Britain and its economy. And whatever its internal tensions, The Times was making progress there. Ivor Crewe, a distinguished psephologist, produced a study of the government’s mid-term position which showed Mrs Thatcher as the least-popular Prime Minister since polling began – indeed, as the leader of a minority in power. It also reported Michael Foot as the least popular Opposition leader, but that did little to improve the way T
ory politicians felt about Crewe’s piece. And this was not passively ‘reporting the news’. It was probing under the skin of events and looking for changes in norms. The same was true of a series on attitudes among young people which took many weeks to complete. It was founded on scepticism about the government’s argument – a central plank in Thatcher’s platform that unemployment resulting from the recession of the late 1970s was socially neutral, and did not affect the fabric of the nation.
Serious inner-city rioting enhanced such scepticism and made The Times’ work timely.
The conclusion was that unemployment was breeding a lumpenpro-letariat in unique and dangerous isolation. Young people sympathised with the difficulties of the police. Nearly half of them thought they had been too soft with the rioters, only 12% too tough. But no less than 30% thought violence was sometimes justified to bring about political change. They were depressed at not being able to find work … Mrs Thatcher was disliked by 70% …
Even if the government did not agree about the effect of the recession, they wanted it to be over.
Sir Geoffrey Howe, Mrs Thatcher’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, had prophesied at the beginning of 1981 that mid-year would see an upturn in the economy. It did not arrive. David Blake, the economics editor, analysed data from the Central Statistical office showing that output had fallen for the sixth successive quarter. This was an embarrassment for the Chancellor, Blake wrote. Brian MacArthur – Evans had promoted him from news editor – was in charge of the paper on the night, and he made it the lead story: ‘RECESSION GOES ON WITH SIXTH DROP IN OUTPUT’.
Failure of the upturn to materialise did not enable the Labour Party to damage the Tories, but the framework was shifting, with the formation of an alliance between the old Liberal Party and the new Social Democratic Party (the origin of today’s Liberal Democrats). Running the resonantly named William Pitt in a byelection at Croydon North-West they triumphantly ejected the Tories (demoting Labour to third).