The Murdoch Archipelago

by Bruce Page

  The capture of The Times was part of a process, naturally, and Wyatt must have been pleased with the spread of ‘pro-Margaret’ editorial attitudes. The Sun offered no pretence of independence. Lamb in his latter period argued occasionally with Murdoch; his successor Kelvin MacKenzie said once that if the Boss told him to print the paper in Sanskrit he would readily do so.

  To be sure the Mail, Telegraph and Express papers were independent of Murdoch, and were constituted differently, their adherence to the conservative right due rather to conviction than to corporatist tactics. But it limited them no less in Thatcherite times as a source of countervailing opinion (they were better qualified ten years later, when Murdoch rediscovered social democracy). And partisan opinion anyway is not the critical item in the capacity of professional newspapers to challenge governments. Penetrative reporting – independent of editorial stance – is what matters, as examples from the Washington Post and the Melbourne Herald have shown. In the Telegraph and Express groups, for different reasons, that technical propensity was modest or declining. More existed at the Mail, but masked by Thatcherite commitment – the principle of judgment distinct from ideology never having been strong in Northcliffe’s old territory. The Independent, founded to restate it, was only preparing its launch during the countdown to Wapping.

  The Mirror was experiencing the saddest passage in its editorial history, and the Financial Times was sticking close to its specialist ground, avoiding investigative action as a board-level policy. A formal left–right analysis rarely describes newspapers adequately, but as a practical matter the potential for sceptical inspection of the Thatcher administration in the mid-1980s centred on the Guardian daily and the Observer weekly – that is, newspapers with a technical facility which partisanship had not disabled – and on television, insofar as its nonpartisan constitution was sufficiently strong.

  For a decade or more, the Sunday Times had generally been the most penetrative media outfit the government and its connections had to reckon with – which does not mean the Guardian and Observer were supine, or that there were not strong, independent minds elsewhere. But they were used to competing against a well-organised, determined, even dominant rival. Now, in situations concerning Downing Street or its allies, competitive pressures were replaced by an unfamiliar isolation. In few trades is competition a genuine comfort. But journalism which the government dislikes is certainly an example.

  Some energy has been spent denying that the Sunday Times during the Thatcher years ceased offering any serious check to the state power in Britain. The denial has particular vigour in Full Disclosure, the memoirs of Andrew Neil, the paper’s editor from 1983 to 1995. Neil’s account is one of being commissioned by Murdoch to restore a moribund, even corrupted, newspaper of slender investigative capacity. He briskly restores its health and soon has it ‘ruining the Sunday breakfasts of the rich and powerful’, Margaret Thatcher’s included. ‘Up to a point, Lord Copper’ is the response in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop when the proprietor of the Daily Beast drives reality from the field. More accurately, it was during Neil’s watch that this major newspaper changed character and would later become capable of spouting official propaganda – a transition certainly linked to the influence of Rupert Murdoch.

  The Sunday Times after two years under Murdoch was in professional trouble. Much of this was due to manipulation of its editorial structure (see Chapter 8 above). Still more harm had been done by the Hitler Diaries fraud – a shattering humiliation which requires separate discussion. More than any other British paper it depended on an investigative reputation to sustain the value of its brand and motivate its staff. Nobody had expected Frank Giles to succeed in that direction, and the attempt to generate a replacement by natural selection had failed. Andrew Neil was Murdoch’s deliberate choice once he was able to make it with an effective free hand – and it was a long-term success, in a role more complex than Lamb or MacKenzie were needed for. Many people would identify Neil as the most impressive journalistic figure to develop under the Murdoch aegis.

  Energy, physical and intellectual, was (and remains) his distinction. Having begun (after Glasgow University) as a Tory Party researcher, he progressed to the Economist and became a fluent television presenter in the 1970s. His first contact with Murdoch was as a television consultant, and a wide-ranging, forceful mind made him a good prospect to edit a Sunday broadsheet. But his experience was in opinion-dealing, rather than firsthand reporting and production technique. His conservatism he saw as rebellious nonconformity (at Glasgow, he refused to smoke hash), making him enthusiastic for Thatcher’s revolution: something which doubtless engaged Murdoch. But Neil could not become a tabloid cheerleader with selective targeting policies. The Sunday Times, if it did not seem to imperil the Prime Minister’s coffee-cups, would lose much of its value.

  Neil’s view of investigation was ideologically tinged: he thought the Insight team were left-wingers, so assumed they would have some ideas attractive to him. On inspection, he liked nothing, and disbanded Insight. The list of leftists bad at investigation readily disproves Neil’s assumption that politics directly generates the required talent – but it does not include Christopher Hird, the Insight editor of the time. Hird’s string of successes – pre- and post-Neil – suggests that Murdoch’s new editor began without much idea of what a nascent investigation looks like.

  Neil restarted Insight eventually with altered principles and results which we shall come to later. But in the meantime Mrs Thatcher denounced him in Parliament, and Neil presents this, with some enthusiasm, as the consequence of an ‘exclusive’ Sunday Times disclosure which opened the Thatcher family to criticism, as did the Welsh real-estate development in Chapter 10. It is his citation as that unusual creature, an independent Thatcherite. But it was only an exclusive up to a point.

  In 1982 Mrs Thatcher, visiting Oman, Britain’s Persian Gulf ally, used the moment to lobby for Cementation Ltd, a British firm bidding to construct the Sultanate’s first university. The bid succeeded – Britain meanwhile restoring certain cuts in aid – and the Prime Minister was once more ‘batting for Britain’. But nothing was said about Mark Thatcher, the Prime Minister’s son, visiting Oman simultaneously as a consultant for Cementation – and joining her in a reception at the Sultan’s summer palace, beyond media view. British officials disliked seeing mother and son jointly promoting a commercial cause – particularly as Mark just then was living at 10 Downing Street. Mark’s marketing company received a substantial payment for aiding Cementation, and during 1983 rumours began to reach journalistic antennae.

  But turning rumour to fact is usually arduous when it concerns the use of high, reflected power. This work was done not by the Sunday Times: it was David Leigh and Paul Lashmar of the Observer, who produced on 15 January 1984, after three months’ pursuit, a front-page lead which was indeed exclusive: ‘MARK THATCHER AND A £300M ARAB DEAL’. The paper’s editorial, headed ‘The case of Caesar’s son’, said Mrs Thatcher’s response to the story might cause more ‘disquiet’ than the story itself.

  This referred to the rage evoked (unattributably) when the Observer, in prepublication etiquette, asked Downing Street for comment or rebuttal. Nothing was said of the facts – only that reporting them would be treated as scurrilous partisanship. Donald Trelford, the editor, realised this was browbeating designed to deter all questioners, and choosing to ignore it gave him and his staff a lonely start to 1984: their story, for some weeks, grew more not less exclusive. Many editors, said Ronald Dworkin, Oxford’s professor of jurisprudence, were too ready to ‘down tools once someone powerful tells them that the public has no right to know’.

  The Sunday Times was silent till 12 February, when it interviewed Mark Thatcher. Under the heading ‘PUT UP OR SHUT UP’, Mark expanded on the government’s allegations of malicious trickery. Downing Street, said the Sunday Times, saw the Observer’s inquiries as ‘a politically inspired “psychological” campaign to get at the Prime Minister through her son’. T
his coverage conveyed sufficient flavour of privacy assaulted for Number 10 to circulate it to broadcasters. (Tastes vary on conflicts of interest. In the same issue a powerful leader on satellite television didn’t mention Newscorp’s Sky investment.)

  But the Sunday Times staff seem to have found Number 10’s embrace no more agreeable than being scooped on territory so often their own. And as the Observer persisted, so did the reporters of Mark’s interview, Barrie Penrose and Simon Freeman: eventually ‘a contact’ told them Denis Thatcher was signatory to the bank account of Mark’s firm. This addition didn’t turn Oman into a public-interest issue: plainly it always was. But this was an item the paper simply had to print. Otherwise – even if staff didn’t walk out – the story would do so, generating massive discredit. On 4 March Penrose and Freeman had a front-page headline: ‘DENIS SHARES MARK’S OMAN ACCOUNT’, with some acid quotes about the quality of Mark’s consultancy. (Nobody, in the Sunday Times or elsewhere, suggested the father’s involvement went beyond loyal counsel for a son’s unsteady business.)

  Unctuous editorialising mitigated this disclosure. The Sunday Times had not been among those ‘leaping on every excuse to keep the story alive’. It would not join such a campaign: Mark’s interview had been its sole earlier reference, and though there was now ‘embarrassing’ matter on page one, it probably came to ‘much ado about little’. The government had been too secretive. But frank disclosure would repulse the detractors.

  Ignoring this humble suggestion, the Prime Minister turned ferociously on the Sunday Times which – by tactical incaution – was offering an opportune diversion. Sourced to a nameless ‘contact’ the bank account story looked like traffic in personal data filched from financial institutions: a thing hated by the public. And use of a false name in the inquiry – venially, in truth – sanctified additional outrage. Now, Thatcher told Parliament, there was a matter of public concern: ‘methods of impersonation and deception’ had been used to gain ‘information about a private bank account which was subsequently published in a national newspaper’. (Mark’s business affairs were by contrast private and irreproachable.)

  Heavily – if unfairly – lacerated, the Sunday Times silently abandoned disclosure’s cause. The Observer, however, pressed on with new news of Mark’s doings in the Middle and Far East. And finally on 1 April its lead story was ‘MARK QUITS CEMENTATION, DOWNING STREET – AND UK’. He was leaving to become the American representative for Lotus cars, giving up his Downing Street flat. And claims that all had been beyond reproach were given up also. Mark had been ‘naive … not to see that people I regarded as friends would use an association with me for their own ends’. Now he would stand on his own feet. The Observer ran its story at some length. A paragraph in the Sunday Times said Mark regretted embarrassing his mother.

  Neil presents the episode as his Sunday Times pursuing truth, however disobliging to the great. Really, it came late to the pursuit, with manifest reluctance; operated with ineptness troublesome to those properly engaged; and withdrew with the outcome undecided. Neil tried far harder than MacKenzie or Douglas-Home to prove essential journalism possible within the Archipelago’s boundaries: his book gives every sign of genuine belief, and some of effect. But calling a counterproductive follow-up an ‘exclusive’ demonstrates the poverty of instances available.

  Mark Thatcher’s Oman deal was peripheral to the Murdoch newspapers’ dealings with the Thatcher administration. The Westland crisis and the controversy over Death on the Rock represent the main thread.

  If, as in the Murdoch case, political journalism consists of maintaining sympathetic relations with authority, then the Westminster lobby system has matchless attractions. It has been turned to account by skilful and diligent reporters, but it is a system designed to enable the government to write its own coverage and have it distributed with an independent appearance. It was set up by Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour government at the end of the 1920s, in response to the right-wing bias of the London press. It was based on the perception that to many humans comfort outranks prejudice. Thus if confidential arrangements were made to provide a restricted number of correspondents with non-attributable stories for easy collection, much of their content would insinuate itself even into hostile newspapers. (‘The best story,’ said Hunter Davies classically, ‘is one that gets you home in time for tea.’) Tory successors like Neville Chamberlain enhanced the system, and its role in mobilising the British press (not only The Times) for Appeasement is chillingly described in Richard Cockett’s book Twilight of the Truth.

  Similar practices exist, of course, in all media cultures. But in Westminster great attention was paid to making information unattributable and restricting journalistic membership. Rigorously unsourced stories suit both the government and its interlocutors, enabling the first to disavow unlucky fabrications and the second to apply any editorial spin thought useful. In the Westland dispute, which reached its crisis on the afternoon of 24 January 1986, when Mrs Thatcher found herself saying, ‘I may not be Prime Minister by six o’clock this evening’, both techniques showed to full effect.

  It is sometimes said that societies are vulnerable chiefly through their good qualities, and the lobby is a case: it draws on the British gift for trust within small, close-knit groups – colleges, regiments, clubs. In praise of the system Lord Howe once described a moment in his period as Foreign Secretary when he and his officials, in transit, forgot a small, essential statement. The lobby did not report – as they could have – a ‘gaffe’, but issued suitable sentiments in his name. An American or Australian reporter might see the amiable gesture as clearly as Howe did, but see also a relationship ripe for exploitation by Murdoch’s kind of newspaper.

  Naturally the lobby proper is not-for-profit (Appeasement’s artificers at least were not in it for cash). But by the mid-1980s the formalised, secret news-media lobby was – like every limb of government – encircled by a very commercial, half-visible penumbra of political consultants, public-relations operators and unregistered urgers. Some of these involved themselves in the Westland story alongside elected representatives, journalists and officials.

  By providing its staple food the Prime Minister’s press secretary dominates the lobby. Mrs Thatcher’s Bernard Ingham did so exceptionally because he had the News papers as core support, and only isolated challengers. The post is held usually by an able, not outstanding, ex-journalist and Ingham fitted the pattern: aged forty-seven on joining Thatcher, he had entered government service from the Guardian labour staff at thirty-five. He developed into one of the most flamboyant incumbents – reputed, in harness with the Sun, to be able to promote issues and terminate ministers at command.

  And he was a bold exponent of his great weapon of office – the right of selective display over the entrails of government. Britain’s Official Secrets law – born of a crackpot Edwardian spy scare, and still not decently reformed – supports a presumption that all official business is secret unless official exception is made. Other democracies have diluted or reversed this insane principle – and the courts have riddled it with holes – but it was potent in the 1980s and remains so today. ‘I regard myself,’ said Ingham, ‘as licensed to break that law as and when I judge necessary; and I suppose it is necessary to break it every other minute of the working day …’ The leak as political weapon essentially consists of selective disclosure. Protected by unattributable status and distributed by a complaisant press, it gave Ingham and his boss great – if not quite predictable – leverage.

  When chief executives of nations are rated for power, we sometimes forget to distinguish between gross and net: between the total power of the nation and the amount of it in the chief executive’s hand. Obviously the economic and military force of the United States is matchless, so the President is routinely considered the world’s most powerful individual. But America’s constitutional structure limits the extent to which the President’s will goes unchecked. A dictator in a fair way of business has in some respects mor
e liberty than America’s chief executive. Great Britain is an intermediate case.

  The Prime Minister is in charge of an economy which is about fourth largest in the world, and a society generally stable and resilient. Its experienced military force is capable of distant deployment. Outside America France is the only equivalent. And what power Britain has is close to the hands of the Prime Minister

  – more at the Thatcher zenith than now, because some Westminster business has gone to the assemblies of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and some to the European Community. Nothing moderates the sway of the British chief executive even as much as the Australian states modify the central authority of Canberra, and the distance from America’s federal and separated structure is enormous. Globalisation has not yet turned even the Anglophone societies into copies of one another. For such reasons the office of Prime Minister has been called an ‘elective dictatorship’ – though it is surely a ‘responsible’ one as well. But this invites the question: responsible where, via what machinery? And this returns us to the Westminster lobby.

  Of course the responsibility is to Parliament, but it is not owed by the Prime Minister individually – it is the collective responsibility of the Cabinet. Bagehot’s English Constitution cites Lord Melbourne as producing (dryly) a classic formulation: ‘Now, is it to lower the price of corn, or isn’t it? It is not much matter which we say, but mind, we must all say the same.’ The Thatcher Cabinet found that difficult. The principal bar to elective dictatorship is that a group of ministers, meeting regularly and minuting their discussions, agree to speak consistently to Parliament when their policy is scrutinised. It is, of course, fiction that they hold identical views collective responsibility rather is a statement of what the administration’s members can defend with varying enthusiasm. But it prevents government condensing into a single, arbitrary will.