by Bruce Page
The Stock Exchange took ‘concert party’ suspicions seriously enough to recommend an investigation with official powers, and the Department of Trade and Industry’s civil service head agreed. His Cabinet boss, Paul Channon, ruled against it.
The unions fell into Murdoch’s trap blinded by two miscalculations. They did not believe the Wapping plant could produce the papers effectively – eventually, they proved to be half right about that – and they thought that if it did they could prevent distribution by their own physical presence. That meant picketing on such a scale as to become, in effect, obstruction and intimidation. The plant’s new machinery was highly efficient, and it met the demand – at the price of producing large areas of The Times and Sunday Times days ahead of their nominal publication date. There was a long-term effect on editorial character which in the immediate context was negligible.
The vast Metropolitan Police presence – like nothing before seen at a single industrial site – swamped the pickets and guaranteed passage for TNT’s trucks. It did not take long for the frustrated print workers and their allies to become involved in violence, often on a disgraceful scale. There were many tit-for-tat arguments about whether police or pickets were the more blameworthy, but the truth was that the mass-picketing tactic was one for which little public patience remained.
The unions were not much accustomed to being morally in the right, which like most things takes a certain amount of practice. If they had kept the strike weapon in reserve, and pursued Murdoch patiently through the courts – as Brenda Dean seems to have wished – they could have won a remarkable victory, which would have benefited many others besides themselves. As it was, they delivered Murdoch the financial bonanza which enabled him to pay for Fox and other conquests alongside it.
The Thatcher administration also seemed victorious, in that it escaped from the Westland crisis untouched by any effective challenge. But a consequence was that the practices which had caused the crisis continued in operation without modification, taking the Cabinet further and further away from collective process, closer to arbitrary rule – and thus becoming intolerable to its most substantial members. Margaret Thatcher’s personality was not one likely to find collective responsibility easy. But it was the presence of a grossly servile press which offered her the fatal option of evading it.
Michael Heseltine was only the first major figure in a generation of Tory leadership which had to expend most of its political capital in opposing a notion of government quite remote from the traditions of their party and deeply unattractive to the British electorate. What the Conservatives have since found is that collective responsibility is a habit easier to lose than to rebuild. It might be argued that the trade unions, who were Murdoch’s enemies in the Battle of Wapping, have not suffered as much long-term damage as those who supposed he was their friend.
The Westland–Wapping case was about the inactive, negative form of pseudojournalism. There is also the positive form, and the relationship to official propaganda. The Anglo-Irish relationship has had many bad years, but not many worse than 1988. In February, two British soldiers lost their way among a Republican crowd in Belfast; they were dragged out of their car, stripped and beaten to death. Distressing images of their naked bodies appeared on television. Mrs Thatcher and her ministers were appalled. The Prime Minister thought the media – television particularly – were sustaining terrorism by giving ‘the oxygen of publicity’ to Sinn Fein and the IRA. (Later that year it was made illegal to broadcast the words of spokesmen on the Republican side – an approach once used by the apartheid regime, and many communist dictatorships.)
At about 3.30 p.m. on 6 March 1988 in Gibraltar British SAS troops shot dead Danny McCann, Sean Savage and Mairead Farrell, members of the IRA who had arrived in the colony to mount a serious bomb attack. Fairly certainly it was aimed at the weekly guard-mounting ceremony and would have caused appalling slaughter. Prevention was a coup for the Security Service: it had penetrated the IRA’s plan.
The Foreign Secretary is responsible for Britain’s overseas territories, and Sir Geoffrey Howe (as he then was) described the incident to the House of Commons on 7 March. He was able to prove that the IRA trio had brought a bomb with them
– though not that it had been set up when they were killed. All three had been found to be unarmed, which raised the question of whether the SAS men had been right to shoot. Under the rules of engagement unarmed suspects should have been challenged and given a chance to surrender. No British government has ever sanctioned a ‘shoot to kill’ policy for dealing with Irish terrorists. In this case, the firepower employed left little to chance: McCann and Farrell were both hit repeatedly, and Savage perhaps sixteen or eighteen times.
The Foreign Secretary said they had been challenged verbally, and had made ‘suspicious movements’, not gestures of surrender. For many people, that was quite enough. Under the moral asymmetry of the Troubles, the IRA had no scruples about shooting to kill, and were cavalier or worse about civilian casualties. Nonetheless the asymmetry and the ‘yellow card’ rules restraining British firepower were intrinsic to Britain’s claim to be engaged in police action, and to refutation of the IRA’s claim to be at war. That unarmed people confronted by armed men should refuse to surrender was puzzling, and an editorial in the Daily Telegraph called the government’s account ‘contradictory’.
Unless it wishes Britain’s enemies to enjoy a propaganda bonanza it should explain why it was necessary to shoot dead all three terrorists on the street rather than apprehend them with the considerable force of police and SAS … deployed in the locality … It is an essential aspect of any successful anti-terrorist policy to maintain the principles of civilised restraint [otherwise] terrorism is succeeding on one of its critical aims: the brutalisation of the society under attack.
The question of challenges was a legitimate and urgent issue for news media. Like the Bloody Sunday story which the Sunday Times had taken up in 1972, it concerned deadly force used by the power of the state. It was taken up by the current-affairs team of Thames Television, holders of the London weekday franchise. In Gibraltar their researchers, led by an experienced reporter named Julian Manyon, found serious evidence inconsistent with the official facts. Claims that the security team had reason to think there was a device ready for detonation were thought unconvincing by a recently retired and highly decorated British bomb-disposal officer. More significantly, nobody who heard or saw the shooting heard any challenge.
Mrs Carmen Proetta said she had a clear view of the entire incident and insisted that what took place was utterly unlike the official account. It began with a police car stopping suddenly:
and the doors were open, all of them … three men came out dressed in jeans and jackets … guns in hand … They did not say anything, they didn’t scream, they didn’t shout … These people were turning their heads back to see what was happening, and when they saw these men had the guns in their hands they just put their hands up … but there was no chance. I mean they went to the floor immediately; they dropped.
Mrs Proetta was the witness with the most striking testimony, but others gave detailed evidence which suggested purposeful killing rather than legal arrest. Essentially they said that McCann, Savage and Farrell had made no threatening movements, and had been shot repeatedly when already down and past resistance.
Thames Television developed from this and other evidence a forty-five-minute documentary which was scheduled for the ITV network at 9.00 p.m. on 28 April. Its presenter was the highly experienced Jonathan Dimbleby – and, although it raised the possibility that the killings had been unlawful, it did not draw that conclusion. It made clear that the SAS team had been faced with a group of terrorists certainly intent on murder, and had eliminated them without any harm to the civilian community. It was entitled Death on the Rock.
The programme went out in spite of the dispatch to the Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA) of a strong letter in which the Foreign Secretary asked that
it be held over pending an inquest in Gibraltar. There is no doubt that Howe, Margaret Thatcher and other members of the government were passionately angry about the actions of both the producing company and the network authority, though they put their complaint in terms of massive risks to the legal system (which no independent lawyers could subsequently identify).
This outrage was amplified in the newspapers. “‘TRIAL BY TV” ROW OVER IRA KILLINGS FILM’, said The Times; ‘STORM AT SAS TELLY TRIAL’ said the Sun. Among dailies, only the Guardian reported it in another light: ‘IBA REJECTS GOVERNMENT GAG ATTEMPT’. The Daily Mail’s Geoffrey Levy said the film accused the SAS of cold-blooded killing under the personal direction of Mrs Thatcher, and that Death on the Rock itself amounted to ‘execution without trial – the very thing [it was] exposing to the world’. The programme, he said, should not have been transmitted. This was a forthright opinion, strongly argued, but not shared by all editorial writers: the Telegraph, the Guardian, the Independent and the Evening Standard all thought transmission justified. Some of the individual commentators spattered their rhetoric very wide: an ex-member of Mrs Thatcher’s private office wrote in the Evening Standard that most of the British people had ‘no time for the cringing, limp-wristed antics of the wet liberal pacifists in the TV establishment’.
The Sun’s attack, headed ‘BLOOD ON THE SCREEN’, was in a special class, and started on the ‘quivering, geriatric’ chairman of the IBA, George Thomson. But the overwhelming guilt belongs to the Thames company. They are supposed to be a British concern and they derive their income from British advertisers.
Their audience is made up of British men and women. If that audience is diminished in the next few months by bullets or bombs in Ulster or in the rest of Britain some of the blood will belong on their hands.
The Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary attacked Thames and the IBA in more restrained language, but with equally manifest anger. Mrs Thatcher was reported, privately, to be ‘beyond fury’, and comments recorded by Woodrow Wyatt more than support that estimate.
Action then intensified. Several tabloids picked up a freelance story about connections between Carmen Proetta, the most prominent Rock witness, and an escort agency called Eve International. ‘SHAME OF THE SAS SMEAR GIRL’, said the Star, and the Daily Express said ‘TRIAL BY TV CARMEN IS ESCORT GIRL BOSS’. The Sun, though, produced the most striking version of this common material, headed ‘THE TART OF GIB’. The text said that Mrs Proetta was an ex-prostitute with a criminal record in Gibraltar, and that she and Mr Proetta shared anti-British attitudes. Death on the Rock was in the Sun’s view simply ‘a piece of IRA propaganda. Its only purpose was to discredit our Security Services.’
So far all this, if not quite fair enough, was more or less what any programme critical of the government might expect from the government’s tabloid allies. But on 1 May the Sunday Times produced something quite different – a heavily displayed spread attacking the Thames programme with the full weight of its collective, talismanic Insight byline. It was headed ‘INADMISSIBLE EVIDENCE’, and its general thrust was that Rock was based on reporting which was deeply biased and in some respects fraudulent. It began: ‘Insight has investigated the documentary’s evidence and reports that the picture which emerges actually contradicts many of the programme’s claims. Indeed, vital witnesses are now complaining that their views were not accurately reported.’
The high scepticism applied to Thames evidence went with unattributed official information presented as credible, even triumphantly credible:
Insight understands that the government’s lawyers at the Inquest will have evidence that is expected to silence the critics and undermine This Week’s evidence. Whitehall sources with access to the official evidence are relishing the prospect. Insight has learnt that the Ministry of Defence believes it can contradict Carmen Proetta’s testimony with incontrovertible evidence … What started as a ‘trial by television’ may yet become a trial of television.
The Thames team, according to Insight, had manipulated and bullied witnesses. In some cases it had concealed facts detracting from the credibility of witnesses, and in others it had distorted what was said, by dishonest editing and by suppression of inconsistencies.
Three vital witnesses – Stephen Bullock, Josie Celicia and Lieutenant-Colonel George Styles, the explosives expert – had apparently been misquoted in Death on the Rock, to an extent that could only be deliberate. Celicia, according to Insight, considered Carmen Proetta’s evidence ‘ridiculous’. Bullock, a British barrister who had been close to the shooting, contradicted her claim that there had been no verbal challenge. If Dimbleby, Manyon and their team had been guilty of even part of the misconduct alleged in Insight’s indictment, they were clearly unfit for employment by any honest media business.
It was trenchant stuff. But it was not risky work in the sense of Insight’s reporting in this area during pre-Murdoch days. Neil includes it as an exercise in ‘Ruining the Sunday Breakfasts of the Rich and Powerful’, but ‘INADMISSIBLE EVIDENCE’ was distinctly agreeable to the highest breakfast-tables in the land, especially those of the Prime Minister and the Security Service. Indeed, Insight’s assertions about Thames and its witnesses strongly resembled the government’s own briefings.
To suggest that Thames Television in 1988 was a dangerous power spunkily invigilated by the Sunday Times is grotesque. They were in the ordinary way evenly matched media contestants. In the particular Rock context Thames was suffering the furious anger of a powerful government – and its executives were feeling understandably exposed. Of course, if a television company or a newspaper lies about the government and its servants, it must be legitimate to report the fact. But the action should not be represented as sticking up for the little fellow, and especial care should be taken with research and interpretation – not because other media professionals are sacred, but because the official capacity to dictate history is an endemic danger.
And there was also the interesting question of Murdoch’s own television interests. Sky Television had just been launched, and Andrew Neil was doubling as its chief executive while editing the Sunday Times. Murdoch wanted the television market deregulated totally, and the skies opened to commercial satellites. The Independent Broadcasting Authority was an obstacle to his ambitions. The Sun, the News of the World, The Times and the Sunday Times were all denouncing the IBA as a barrier to entrepreneurship and enterprise. And now it was not even able to insulate the public from IRA propaganda.
The day after the Sunday Times’ demolition of Death on the Rock Murdoch called Wyatt to suggest how the political lesson could be drawn:
Monday 2 May … Rupert rang from Venice yesterday. He said she [Mrs Thatcher] oughtn’t to attack the IBA in the way she did because it let all the left-wing people say she is too authoritarian, trying to censor everything … He said, ‘The real answer is to have lots and lots of channels and no authorities overseeing them and let them all get on with it. It would be like newspapers with different voices and should be the same for the news as well.’
Newspapers with different voices?
The Sunday Times took a similar editorial line the next Sunday, 8 May along with repeated allegations of evidence-faking by Thames. In September, one witness withdrew the evidence he had given to the programme. On 25 September Wyatt discussed with Mrs Thatcher:
the appalling situation about Thames Television putting out the programme with bogus evidence making trial by television over Gibraltar. It had been revealed last week that the witness who said he saw the SAS man murdering an IRA terrorist on the ground was lying … He said he was pestered to give false evidence by Thames …
I said, ‘Typical of Ian Trethowan, Chairman of Thames Television, trying to defend the action of the programme team which went out there to find things to discredit the SAS and the government.’ I went on, ‘And as for the IBA, they are a disgrace in allowing that programme to go ahead when you and Geoffrey Howe were asking them to postpone it �
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She said, ‘We have to think of who is going to take over from George Thomson at the IBA.’ The inquest didn’t in the final analysis fulfil the Sunday Times’ prediction. It found the killings lawful, but this was reversed, by a narrow majority, on appeal to the European Court of Human Rights. Carmen Proetta’s evidence was never shaken, and the vanishing witness proved peripheral. However, years of complex litigation preceded the appeal: it did nothing immediate to relieve the television team from official outrage, and lacerating assault in the Sunday Times and the Sun. Under this pressure Thames asked Lord Windlesham, formerly a Tory Northern Ireland minister, to investigate Death on the Rock’s investigation. He had been a television professional, admired for fairness: still, this seemed to admit a prima facie case against those who had questioned the authorities.
Then in 1989 the Sunday Times’ fierce, long-sustained campaign abruptly blew up. On 2 January 1989 the UK Press Gazette ran a letter from a journalist named Rosie Waterhouse: ‘Now that I have resigned from the Sunday Times I would like to set the record straight, belatedly, about my involvement in the Insight investigation into … Death on the Rock.’
She had interviewed two witnesses, Josie Celicia and Stephen Bullock. Their account of my interviews with them was inaccurate in the Sunday Times and had the effect of discrediting parts of the documentary and the evidence of another witness, Carmen Proetta.
In brief, Josie Celicia did not dismiss all of Proetta’s evidence as ‘ridiculous’, only one aspect of it. Stephen Bullock has only one quarrel with his interview on Thames – that he was portrayed as saying no warnings were given before the SAS fired, when in fact he said he told the reporters that he was not in a position to hear if a warning was given. However, Bullock stressed to me, and I quoted him as saying: ‘Nothing I saw was inconsistent with what Carmen Proetta said she saw.’