by Bruce Page
Sunday Times: editorial trouble. Elaine Potter worked on the paper during this period, seeing the effect of the Hitler Diaries fake on her colleagues. Andrew Neil in Full Disclosure rightly says that mental energy was low, but attributes this to pre-Thatcherite social attitudes. A more realistic diagnosis would have been professional disorientation: to Magnus Linklater the impact of the Hitler blunder was intensified by Murdoch’s lack of apparent concern (personal communication). Neil first met Murdoch just after the fake collapsed. He gathered that Murdoch (a) had essentially imposed the Diaries on the paper, and (b) still thought it 60 per cent probable they were real. Neil doesn’t record any concern about the journalistic competence of the man who shortly afterwards made him editor.
Rebellious youth. Neil cites as evidence of rebel qualities his refusal to smoke cannabis as a Glasgow University student. Full Disclosure doesn’t disclose who sought to force the spliffs upon him.
Insight and Christopher Hird. In the period before his formal takeover Neil rightly studied the paper’s editorial pipeline, and says (Full Disclosure):
I asked Hird to let me see his file of current investigations; he did not need both hands to carry it. It consisted of a few slips of paper summarising a series of second-rate investigations that were going nowhere and a general disposition to ‘look at local government…’
Hird comments (11 October 2001):
This is quite untrue. I did not produce a ‘few slips of paper’ but a document of (I recall) about six single typed pages, which covered a number of proposed investigations, which had been drawn up following discussions with the senior execs … he did not – so far as I recall – express any disgruntlement at the proposed list of investigations.
In a separate discussion of investigative potential, Hird asked Neil whether he would publish a detailed, highly challenging study of Sir James Goldsmith’s finances, which the departing editor had kept on hold. Neil declined to say: this investigation by Charles Raw never was published. (Goldsmith died in 1997.) Hird says that on his first day as editor Neil disbanded Insight without commenting on its editorial plans:
On his own ideas of investigations, there is the notorious story of the two chauffeurs. On his appointment Rupert gave him two chauffeurs. Neil wanted two parking permits for outside his flat in Kensington and Chelsea but council rules only allowed one permit per person. So he wrote to the council asking if he could have two permits but – because the chauffeurs worked shifts – he could guarantee that there would never be more than one car parked outside his flat at the same time. The council refused his request. On their letter of refusal, he scribbled ‘Set Insight on to this’ and got his secretary to give it to me.
The letter reached Private Eye. Neil then rang Hird, whom he had just sacked, to say it was just a joke. Hird later founded Fulcrum TV, which ever since has produced successful investigative programmes for all major UK channels.
Response from Downing Street. According to Donald Trelford, then editor of the Observer, the Downing Street press officer, under Bernard Ingham tried to bury the story by (a) persistency refusing to discuss it in public, and (b) accusing David Leigh, Trelford and the Observer in off-the-record briefings of fabrication and ‘irresponsibility’. Dire, unspecified consequences were projected for papers which might follow the story up. Trelford received phone calls from a variety of senior Tories about the damage he was doing to himself and the Observer. Generally, Trelford says, publishing material the Thatcher administration disliked was a lonely business (interview, 20 October 2001). For several weeks there was no support from the Sunday Times or any other paper. A still more startling piece of misattribution occurs in Neil’s Full Disclosure with the suggestion that the Sunday Times revealed the Matabeleland atrocities committed by Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwean government. This disclosure (obtained by Trelford himself at some personal risk) was in the Observer.
Lobby set-up. Cockett’s thorough account in Twilight of the Truth gives no indication that journalists or their largely Tory bosses were at all concerned about MacDonald’s schemes. Hunter Davies’ remark, I like to think, was tongue in cheek.
I may not be Prime Minister. Howe, Conflict of Loyalty. But see below. Helping the Foreign Secretary. Interview with Lord Howe (15 February 2001).
Ingham and the law. Linklater and Leigh quote this in Not with Honour. But see below.
Elective dictatorship. Margaret Thatcher inspired some ironic smiles when just before the general election of 2001 (Daily Telegraph, 1 June) she warned that the Prime Minister’s office had such a potential. Lord Hailsham, she said, had pointed it out in 1975.
Collective responsibility. There are several variants of Lord Melborne’s remark, but all reflect his belief that actions rarely turn out well, and blame should therefore be equitably distributed. Many studies of Cabinet responsibility have followed in Bagehot’s track, but in this context a useful if unexciting one is Patrick Gordon Walker, The Cabinet: Political Authority in Britain. Published in 1970 on the basis of recent experience, it argues effectively that the institution was then in tolerable health. In a highly regarded standard text (The British Cabinet) John P. Mackintosh MP stated the responsibility principle neatly: ‘If a minister is doing too much on his own, or even if the Prime Minister is acting too often without prior agreement, it is in the name of Cabinet responsibility that his colleagues will venture to object and request that the matter be reopened.’
Leak-driven world. Howe, Conflict of Loyalty. Similar points are being made by senior politicians in almost every democratic system, with increasing frequency.
Revolutionary jacquerie. The words, quoted by Howe in Conflict of Loyalty, are those of Sir Oliver Wright (born 1921, Solihull School, Cambridge, Foreign Office 1945–86, Ambassador to US, various directorships, trustee British Museum etc).
Developed as an autocracy. Hugo Young describes the process in One of Us.
Westland story. This matter appeared to spring out of nothing in the midwinter of 1985–6, achieve a brief, ferocious intensity and then vanish. Only one substantial effort was made to put the facts on public record at the time: Not with Honour, by Magnus Linklater and David Leigh, then on the Observer. This summarised and extended the paper’s coverage (in which Leigh worked with Paul Lashmar). However, Woodrow Wyatt was making numerous entries in his journals as he joined battle on behalf of the Prime Minister, and on behalf of her ally Rupert Murdoch. My reconstruction chiefly draws on Lord Wyatt, on Not with Honour, and again on Lord Howe’s Conflict of Loyalty (amplified and confirmed by interview on 16 November 1999).
Tension racked up at Wapping. Linda Melvern’s The End of the Street gives a highly detailed narrative of the Wapping confrontation. The story was clarified by interviews with Baroness Dean (20 July 1999) then general secretary of the Society of Graphical and Allied Trades (SOGAT), Barry Fitzpatrick (8 September 1999), also of SOGAT, and Alf Parrish (3 September 1999) of the National Graphical Association (NGA).
She should tell Bernard Ingham. Wyatt, Journals, vol. 1.
Exchange of letters (‘material inaccuracies’). This sequence of events, down to the ‘LIAR’ headline, is based on Linklater and Leigh, Not with Honour. The general outline is confirmed by Michael Heseltine in Life in the Jungle, and in interview.
Provoke a conflict. Baroness Dean (20 July 1999).
Concessions on offer. Wyatt’s account in his Journals, vol. 1, suggests that Murdoch was turning well-waxed ears to anything Dean had to say.
TNT’s purchase. Linklater and Leigh, Not with Honour. TNT no longer exists and it has not been possible to trace Mortimore.
Courtiers. Andrew Neil in the Guardian, 2 March 1998.
Oxygen of publicity. Margaret Thatcher addressed the American Bar Association in London on 15 July 1985, and referring to the role of the media in the Northern Ireland conflict said that it would be necessary to starve paramilitary organisations of ‘the oxygen of publicity’. Drastic action to that end was taken on 19 October 1988, when the Home
Secretary Douglas Hurd used powers under the broadcasting licensing legislation to prevent transmission of interviews with paramilitary organisations and political groups deemed to be their allies. (The government of course had no such power to restrict press activity.) The ban did not apply to election communications. It had no discernible effect on support for paramilitaries of either side, and was an international embarrassment to Britain. It was lifted in September 1994. There are few equivalents to such a use of law in a free country, and there can be no doubt that the makers of Death on the Rock were operating in a climate of very serious official hostility.
At 3.30pm … The Windlesham-Rampton Report is used as the best guide to the sequence of events identified with the television documentary Death on the Rock. David (Lord) Windlesham PC was commissioned to investigate the making of the programme – its motivation and its accuracy – because he had been a Conservative Minister of State for Northern Ireland (later a Cabinet minister) in addition to having had a substantial career in commercial television (managing director, later chairman, of the ATV network, etc.). He brought in as co-author Richard Rampton QC, an expert in defamation law.
Thames Television developed … The Windlesham-Rampton report includes a complete transcript of the programme.
Press attacks. Windlesham-Rampton made a collection of press responses to Death on the Rock, but confined itself to items of a fairly orthodox type – though sometimes very hostile – in the Telegraph, Guardian, Mail and other papers. The more remarkable material in the Sun, some other tabloids and the Sunday Times was collected by Roger Bolton, producer of the programme. These he collected in his book Death on the Rock and Other Stories – which attracted surprisingly little notice when published in 1990.
UK Press Gazette. Rosie Waterhouse sent the same material to Windlesham and Rampton at the same time. Not surprisingly, their report gave no credence to the Sunday Times’ attacks on Death on the Rock. In his chapter ‘Ruining Sunday Breakfasts’, Neil says that in ‘a series of articles amounting to 16,000 words he amassed evidence to show that if the SAS had killed these bombers in cold blood Thames TV was very far from proving it’. Thames had never claimed to have done so.
13: PRESENT NECESSITIES Crisis of rule. Fears of a degeneration in the political process – one somehow connected with the media – have been acute in Britain since the 2001 general election produced a very low turnout. But a chronic ailment has been worsening since the 1960s. Trust Me, Fm a Politician (quoted in the epigraph) felt no need to prove the existence of a problem: description was enough. An article by Philip Stephens, political editor at the Financial Times (21 June 2002: ‘The
Lie at the Heart of Polities’), is representative of many others.
Public cynicism has rarely been greater. Relations between the government and swathes of the press have never been worse. The politicians blame the journalists, the journalists the politicians.
The people who matter, the voters, look on with disdain. Whichever way the question is asked, politicians and journalists are anchored at the bottom of every league table measuring public esteem. Used car salesmen rate more highly. Only estate agents compete … Ask leaders from around the world what most vexes them and the answer is likely to be the ingrained assumption of their domestic media that they are crooks and charlatans. Participation in elections is falling everywhere. Abstentions are the new protest votes.
Grade on ownership. Quoted by Matthew Horsman, Sky High. Grade also wrote to the Guardian, 24 May 1995:
Not only do we learn (from Rupert Murdoch’s Money Programme interview) that he will use the nation’s best-selling daily newspaper as a conduit for his own views at the next General Election, but also that Messrs Major and Blair are now on notice that he will be pondering the ‘difference’ between them before deciding which one to support … During the period of consultation which now follows the publication of the Government’s thoughts on cross-media ownership, Mr Murdoch will doubtless pay close attention to any ‘differences’ between them on ownership matters before deciding how to cast the Sun’s vote. Perhaps we should not be too surprised that the Green Paper has no views on his effective monopoly of encryption technology.
Doing and daring. Presentation by Rupert Murdoch to the European Audiovisual Conference, Birmingham, 6 April 1998.
Engineered by Labor’s enemies. John Fitzgerald, then editor of the Herald, to Bruce Page (27 February 2003): ‘I’m aware that people put about it was all a Liberal fix. That’s absolutely untrue. We deliberately kept clear of pollies altho’ once they got a whiff of our success a couple of them tried to get themselves into the loop.’
British Labour’s misadventures. Roy Greenslade (Guardian, 24 June 2002), citing his own observations and those of Andrew Rawnsley in the Observer and Matthew d’Ancona in the Sunday Telegraph, wrote that the New Labour campaigning of the 1990s had been shaped by a belief that tabloid antagonism had brought about Neil Kinnock’s defeat: ‘Everything about the way today’s Labour party handles the press grew out of a single, ferocious decade at the hands of newspapers.’
Art of lying. F. M. Cornford in Microcosmographia Academica (1922).
Feuding. Gavin Souter in Heralds and Angels says the now defunct National Times was loathed more than any other Fairfax paper, recording an occasion when Paul Keating, ‘after finding himself the unwilling subject of a detailed but inconclusive article in the National Times, said with characteristically vivid imagery: “It’s a jungle out there. And I’m a tiger. Where do you shoot a tiger? Between the eyes, that’s where. Well, they missed, they only wounded me.’”
But the Sydney Morning Herald offended also, as in a three-page survey of abuses in the NSW justice system:
At about 10 a.m…. the group general manager received a phone call from the federal Treasurer, Paul Keating, saying he was absolutely shocked by the first three pages of the paper … [Neville] Wran [Labor Premier of NSW] would go for it with a vengeance, and Federal Labor would put its back into his efforts to crush the company …
Wran shortly after rang to amplify the message: ‘Fairfax was going to pay the price for this. All of its interests at some time wanted something from the Government. He could assure Gardiner that he did not forget easily and that he would devote a lifetime to bring Fairfax and the [Sydney Morning] Herald down.’
More subtle than you think. Menadue in Things You Learn Along the Way.
Two airlines. This narrative is condensed from Menadue. A draft was shown to former Senator Evans (now head of the International Crisis Group in Brussels). He was kind enough to read and confirm the details, in spite of distressing events on the day of the interview (11 September 2001).
Telstra and Fox. Again set out with documentation by Menadue in Things TouLearn Along the Way.
Freddie Starr. Chippindale and Horrie, Stick It Up Tour Punter, make clear that the supposed incident was already three years old when it reached the Sun as a rumour.
Influence and privilege. Sun, 6 February 1989.
Hillsborough. Chippindale and Horrie, Stick It Up Tour Punter, say that MacKenzie, with a kind of caution, substituted ‘THE TRUTH’ for his first idea, ‘YOU SCUM’. Phil Scraton, Professor of Criminology at Edge Hill College, Ormskirk, who has produced two detailed studies of the catastrophe and its aftermath (No Last Rights, written with others, and Hillsborough: The Truth) suggests that some of the most inflammatory ‘briefing’ came from Police Federation officials. In Hillsborough he wrote of the Taylor Interim Report:
Sixty-five police officers gave evidence to the inquiry and Taylor found the ‘quality of their evidence’ to be ‘in inverse proportion to their rank’ … most senior officers ‘were defensive and evasive witnesses’ …
Taylor also recognised that there had been a police-led campaign of vilification against Liverpool fans. He listed the allegations [urinating on police, robbery and so on]. He concluded, ‘not a single witness’ supported ‘any of those allegations although every opportunity was afforded for any
of the represented parties to have any witness called … those who made them, and those who disseminated them, would have done better to hold their peace’.
Lord Justice Taylor’s findings caused shock and official surprise, indicating how confident the authorities had been of making their allegations stick. Ingham furiously denounced the judge’s work as a ‘whitewash’, but could produce no proof. Murdoch and MacKenzie suggested that the Sun had made an unusual mistake, but ‘THE TRUTH’ seems unusual only in the extreme gravity of the accusations it chose to accept. What remains unusual in Britain is for authority to make such ruthless use of press gullibility. See Lord Justice Taylor, Interim Report into the Hillsborough Stadium Disaster (1989), and Final Report into the Hillsborough StadiumDisaster (1990).
Sting. MacKenzie in the Guardian, 11 March 2002.
Development of Sky. Horsman, Sky High.
Professor Peacock. The Independent Review Panel (chairman Gavyn Davies) which examined the financing of the BBC in 1999 looked back in these terms:
The Government established the Peacock Committee in 1985 with the hope that it would recommend in favour of advertising on BBC television. [But] Alan Peacock wisely rejected the advertising option. He said that it would trigger headto-head competition for audience share with TTV, and that this would be ruinous to the UK’S broadcasting ‘ecology’. Instead, though, he predicted that technological advance would end the problem of spectrum scarcity, and with it the issue of market failure in broadcasting would largely disappear. Accordingly, he recommended that the BBC should become more dependent on subscription revenue in the new world of plentiful supply. This recommendation fell by the wayside, for various technical and political reasons … Nevertheless, a key watershed had been passed – the forces of radical change got bogged down … [and] the supporters of the BBC re-asserted themselves. Some of these, in the private broadcasting industry, were alarmed by the threat of advertising on the BBC, and therefore rallied behind the licence fee. But more generally, the public’s respect and affection for the organisation proved deep-seated … Even Mrs Thatcher, increasingly irate about the BBC, never felt able to overcome this silent force.