by Bruce Page
He called Murdoch in New York and said he could not edit the paper without a budget, and refused to go to Long to get approval ad hoc for routine editorial decisions. This démarche produced only a brief, disjointed reassurance: ‘Sure we’ll get your budget in place. This is temporary until we do … Talk it over with Gerry. What’s [Tony] Benn up to?’ And so Evans did go on without a budget – and without seeking cost-approvals from Long. He realised almost at once that this implicated him in the budget fiasco, but he still believed that the guarantees gave him security against dismissal. By this time, serious alarm was infecting most of the staff – subject to rumour and counter-rumour about ‘intolerable’ costs and their consequences.
When a dispute with one of the print unions briefly closed the paper the trading losses of The Times were estimated by some people at £10 million annually and others at £20 million, with variations between. At the start of November Evans asked Long for monthly indicators, even if they were only sketchy. But no – the real information was in the chairman’s hands and the managing director, again, could not demand it. Long could only report on Murdoch’s own requirements: ‘Rupert says he wants 30 per cent off staff all round immediately. 30%! He’s in great form by the way, says The Times is doing very well.’ The compliment was perhaps Long’s addition: he believed in keeping up morale. It was months since Evans had heard a kind word for The Times from Murdoch himself, and in December radical discontent became apparent.
Long and Evans were commanded to dinner with Murdoch and the advertising and circulation bosses. The project under discussion was raising the sale of The Times to 400,000 without delay. It was straightforward, said the chairman: expand sport; start bingo; kill the Diary; cut back business news; throw out the women’s features. Nigel Grandfield, the group advertising director, followed up by suggesting a new approach to leaders: short and snappy, with harder views. The approach – perhaps a rough copy of the Daily Mail without its skilful appeal to women – struck Evans as insane. Long seems to have kept his own counsel, though by now he was calling the executive floor a ‘madhouse’.
Next day Murdoch resumed his offensive, comprehensively attacking the business section in a meeting with Evans and Mike Ruda, the TNL advertising director. A swift, unprofitable redesign of the paper took place as Murdoch chopped out space for sport. ‘What do you want this crap for anyway? Two pages is plenty for business news.’ Ruda had many times told Evans that the business pages generated revenue which the paper would otherwise lose. Now, under pressure from Murdoch, and licking his lips nervously, Ruda retreated from his previous – obviously truthful – real view. Evans concluded that the discussions were really about having the editor of The Times take arbitrary instruction in front of witnesses. At the first available moment he sent Murdoch a handwritten note saying he would not accept such behaviour. In retrospect Evans thought that Murdoch’s basic resolve to dispose of him formed shortly after. And this seems likely.
In early January 1982 Evans made a personal visit to America, returning on the 7th to find that the chairman had been complaining about ‘leftist’ headlines, and was demanding to see him. Murdoch was in full, very characteristic attack mode. He accused Evans of going absent without leave, and of lacking all political conviction. The administrative and the moral deficiency were pursued equally, though it must have been plain that the first could only be trivial and the second, if true, devastating.
Evans eventually had to photocopy the memo giving notice of his trip, which had somewhere been overlooked. Political amorality could not be so easily disposed of. Murdoch seems to have conceded that Evans had been stubborn about monetarism, but something else emerged: the editor lacked all convictions, because now there was only one conviction which mattered. This involved arguing for all hostility short of war against Moscow – there must be no tolerance for dealings with a government which oppressed its own people and the peoples of nearby states. As this became, over the following weeks, a principal strand in Murdoch’s complaint against his editor, it should be made clear that Evans and his chief foreign leader-writer Richard Davy took no remotely pro-Soviet view. They argued only that limited co-operation with Moscow would better serve Western interests.
Ideological dispute rumbled on in a context of rising panic over costs and redundancies. Late that January Long produced an accountant’s report saying that editorial spending was over budget by £2 million: it was £9,710,600 ‘compared to Mr Murdoch’s budget of £7,723,000’. The excess must be immediately cut out. The appearance of a 25 per cent budget overspend of course did heavy damage to the editor – but what astonished him was to hear that a ‘budget’ did after all exist.
Gradually, in the small print, facts emerged. In 1980 the budget had been £7,364,000, which would have been £8,615,880 in 1981 prices (inflation was 17 per cent). So the £7,723,000 which Murdoch had set at some time – in secret – represented a large cut in real money. It then turned out that £600,000 of the £9,710,600 were group costs never previously charged to The Times. Increased editorial spend in real terms was £400,000, which was extremely modest for a newspaper being extensively remodelled. Evans says he was glad to have some real figures to work with at last. But he must have had some sense of an endgame getting under way.
In January the guarantees were twelve months old, and now Murdoch struck decisively against them – dropping entirely that persona with which the vetting committee had discoursed on family tradition and old Oxford days. There had been no new insurrection at the Sunday Times. But neither had there been any emergence of a natural representative for Murdoch, despite liberal use of creative tension.
Frank Giles had been appointed with two joint deputy editors, of whom the more promising Murdoch at first took to be Ron Hall, editor of the magazine section. The other, Hugo Young, was a political analyst who had visibly criticised the government. Hall, once a Mirror sub, was reputedly a good example of an apolitical technician, the chimera Murdoch was always seeking. Hall had been told by Murdoch – with emphasis from Long – that if he ‘used his elbows’ to achieve practical dominion over his colleagues he would be seen favourably – and might hope for substantive rank. Somehow Hall had not seized the Darwinian moment, and Giles was relying considerably on the suspect Young.
However, Murdoch had a good feeling about Evans’ Times discovery Brian MacArthur – ‘bushy-tailed’ and keen to please. He decided to put MacArthur in as senior deputy editor at the Sunday Times, demote Young and fire the toofastidious Hall, with Peter Jackson of the News of the World put into the magazine. Of course he had undertaken that ‘4(b)(iv): The editor of each newspaper shall retain control over the appointment, disposition and dismissal of journalists’, and Biffen had entrenched it as law, to be supervised under his authority by the national directors of Times Newspapers. When Evans learnt about MacArthur he did not see how it could be done. Grinning, Murdoch said, ‘I’ll tell the National Directors … Frank Giles has asked for it all.’ On 13 January the directors were to meet for lunch. The day before Giles was sent for and ordered to make the announcements, presenting them untruthfully as his own.
This might seem a perilous series of inventions – the editor of the Sunday Times had not even met one of the recruits ‘asked’ for. The straightforward course for Giles would have been to reveal to the national directors that the chairman was conspiring to procure a breach of his statutory obligations. The result for Murdoch might not have been terminal but it would have been damaging. But after a wretched night Giles decided to sacrifice Hall – a colleague of many years’ standing, but not a friend – and keep some face. He would insist on meeting Jackson nominally – before announcing the discovery of his talent. And he would insist on keeping Young as first deputy.
Giles tried to see Murdoch before the directors’ lunch, but the chairman was engaged. Long offered to go in and mediate. He emerged to tell Giles that he could have lunch with Jackson right away. But MacArthur as first deputy was compulsory. And demotion must
be conveyed to Young as his, Giles’s, personal idea. Otherwise, the chairman would say Giles himself must be fired, for impeding a vital commercial decision. It appears that something could have been cobbled up about promotional matter in the magazine. To Giles this made it a matter of saving his own head. Certainly he saved no face, for the fabrications paraded were unimpressive, produced with deep reluctance, and did not convince either victim. The quarrel was not one Giles could have avoided – he had been ambushed with it. He cannot have thought he conducted it well. But he got a call from Murdoch thanking him for being helpful on a difficult day.
As one reflects on Murdoch putting this business through, it is worth looking back to his father Keith and the 1918 plot over the field command of the AIE Doubtless the fate of an army and a battle is more than the fate of a newspaper (even a famous one) and the will of Parliament. Does it seem likely, however, that either Murdoch would have anything but discreet respect for the other’s bold technique – irrespective of the outcome sought or the result achieved?
With the guarantees made out to be (in Murdoch’s words) ‘not worth the paper they were written on’, it took only another two months to wrap up the Evans editorship. Technical success was not denied at all. News Corporation’s annual report called the circulation turnaround ‘extremely gratifying’ and celebrated the achievement in detail. The accusations which were developed were budgetary incompetence, political vacuity with varied emphases for variant audiences – and defective leadership skills. This last was manifest, said Murdoch, because the staff were ‘up in arms’: many were hostile to the editor, and very few supportive.
Of course this could not have been otherwise. Probably Murdoch himself vaguely knew that the resentment incurred in turning around a paper like The Times could not yet have dissipated. It was perfectly in line with Machiavelli’s Law of Newspaper Reform – ‘the initiator has the enmity of all who would profit by the preservation of the old institutions, and merely lukewarm defenders in those who would gain by the new ones’ but some of the national directors seem to have been much alarmed. Collectively, they were themselves rather lukewarm about novelty – they had not, after all, been appointed for their radical sentiments. Three had taken part in the Vetting Procedure in January 1981 – the historian Lord Dacre, the banker Lord Roll and the trade unionist Lord Greene; Lord Robens had been a Cabinet minister, widely thought to have been a possible Prime Minister; John Gross was a literary journalist of great intellectual repute; and the Murdoch appointee Sir Edward Pickering had never shown any appetite at all for modernisation.
In any case, the mood was not left to itself. Both Murdoch and Pickering made extensive morale surveys among staff – the more readily after some clearing of the way by Evans’ deputy Charlie Douglas-Home. When discussing his appointment as deputy, Douglas-Home had impressively stated to Evans the view that Murdoch (whom he called a ‘monster’) always seized power over an institution by separate dealings with its leaders. To protect The Times, therefore, they must neither of them initiate a meeting with Murdoch without forewarning the other. It was his condition of acceptance, and they shook hands on an agreement to act always in unison.
Late in 1981 Douglas-Home took leave to work on a personal project, but he learnt from Evans of the situation developing at the office. In February 1982 he returned a day early – without contacting the embattled editor – and conferred with Murdoch. His thought was that much good would be done if the chairman spent more time on the editorial floor. ‘Rupert,’ said Douglas-Home, ‘you’re a warrior king who should lead us from the front.’ Not surprisingly, Evans’ view of his deputy changed abruptly, but of course too late. Feedback soon disclosed the theme of Murdoch’s interchanges with the staff: ‘Harry doesn’t know how to lead, does he?’ The warrior king’s own answer seems to have been easily visible to those he questioned.
Journalism’s essential insecurity was racked up to a specially high notch in that place and time. For many years, the pseudo-newspaper principle had been dominant in The Times – ‘normal’ journalism and its routines had protected many of its staff from the accidental, unpredictable character of their profession. This produced a degree of personal assurance complacency, some might say – even if the paper’s entire financial structure was fragile. Evans, for the best part of a year, had been tearing all that up, and moving the people of The Times back into the world of competition, scoops, accident and uncertainty.
But the new personal challenge and stress had not been compensated for by any new structural assurance. On the contrary, the paper was losing more money than ever before – how much no one quite knew – and this allegedly was due to or connected with the frantic and unwelcome activities of Evans. If survival were possible, it would be at the price of many people’s jobs. It was quite untrue that the financial disarray was the editor’s fault, but its sheer existence would have taken effect whatever the cause. Where a newspaper is well run and tolerably profitable, the intrinsic professional stress can be kept within reasonable limits. Where two types of stress are present together, they potentiate each other, as psychoactive drugs will do.
In the circumstances of The Times Murdoch was unlikely to receive many challenging answers to his propositions about leadership and the popularity of the editor, or to his repeated direct complaint that ‘The paper has no conscience.’ The context of this was intense and continuous news about the great test of will in Poland, where nationalism was reasserting itself against Soviet tyranny. ‘Conscience’ was a kind of coded banner under which the Anglo-American right – Reagan and Thatcher supporters – claimed the ownership of freedom’s struggle. Of course support for Polish and East European liberation was practically universal among the Western democracies – there were no substantial voices in favour of appeasing the totalitarians, only differences about means. ‘Conscience’ was a claim to exercise monopoly of morality in respect of foreign affairs.
Occasionally Murdoch drew an unwelcome response. ‘Harry’s fine,’ the business news editor, Denis Hamilton’s son Adrian, told him. ‘The paper’s fine. It’s the management that’s the trouble. It doesn’t know what it’s doing.’ The usual thing in this kind of drama – specified perhaps in the Handbook of Corporate Skulduggery – is for the target figure to fall briefly sick. He or she then receives affectionate phone calls at home, advising a solid break in order to get properly well. This happened with Evans in the first week of February and he went home leaving Douglas-Home to supervise a story which to him was exactly representative of the new Tames journalism he wanted.
Its core was a letter written roughly twelve months earlier by the government’s chief medical officer of health, during a secret dispute about lead in automotive fuels. Concern over brain damage to children from atmospheric lead pollution had long been growing, and America, Australia and Japan had decided to ban altogether use of lead in fuel. But the British government, without public discussion, had decided that a reduction would suffice. Sir Henry Yellowlees’ letter – to all the departments concerned – said that the research behind that decision was out of date, and seriously understated the risk from lead. The latest work, Sir Henry thought, showed that its use at any level exposed several hundred thousand British children each year to significant chance of brain damage.
It was a story of breakdown in the Quetelet world. Naturally the old projections showed that lead-induced brain damage did not normally occur – occurred, that is, but at a tolerable rate. For the oil industry, the motor trade and their Whitehall regulators this was how things should be. But new surveys had convinced’ three major Western governments that normality was not, after all, acceptable. What had been thought normal was actually a situation where something quite serious, bad and avoidable was happening. Circulated confidentially, the letter had not modified policy. (There is a difficulty in feeling the sickness or death of several hundred thousand children – not named, generally not born. One might hear at this point Christiansen saying, ‘It is our duty to inter
est them in everything.’)
It was Sunday 8 February. Douglas-Home was running the paper. He chose as the main story a routine dispatch about the American Budget. The Yellowlees letter was also on page one, but at the next day’s conference the old Times values were applied to the question of following it up. For Evans the letter was just the start of a process which should uncover the research which had changed Yellowlees’ mind and the new research that might now be under way. What was now happening in America, Australia, Japan? What political input had there been in deciding against a ban? All this, without doubt, would mean some arduous inquiries, addressing questions to important people which they would find painful and perhaps impossible to answer. Was the story of lead pollution a campaign, the news editor wanted to know. Douglas-Home asked him what he meant. ‘I mean, do we go beyond normal news values?’ ‘No, we don’t.’ The story of lead pollution faded out of the newspaper of record while Evans was indisposed. Britain continued using leaded fuel until 1990 when it was entirely prohibited.
For most of February the survival of The Times was in public doubt, Murdoch saying that unless 300 staff – including 46 journalists – were removed the paper would close. Evans returned to his office to find that other newspapers were speculating about his imminent departure. Ritual denial was circulated by Times Newspapers: ‘Reports … that Harold Evans is about to be replaced as editor of The Times are malicious, self-serving and wrong. Mr Evans’s outstanding qualities and journalistic skills are recognised throughout the world …’