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Editor

I was 41 and had not, until very recently, really imagined this turn of events. Peter Preston – unshowy, grittily obstinate, brilliantly strategic – looked as if he would carry on editing for years to come. It was a complete surprise when he took me to the basement of the resolutely unfashionable Italian restaurant in Clerkenwell he favoured, to tell me he had decided to call it a day.

On most papers the proprietor or chief executive would find an editor, take him/her out to lunch and do the deal. On the Guardian – at least according to tradition dating back to the mid-’70s – the Scott Trust made the decision after balloting the staff, a process that involved manifestos, pub hustings and even (by some candidates) a little frowned-on campaigning.

I supposed I should run for the job. My mission statement said I wanted to boost investigative reporting and get serious about digital. It was, I fear, a bit Utopian. I doubt much of it impressed the would-be electorate. British journalists are programmed to scepticism about idealistic statements concerning their trade. Nevertheless, I won the popular vote and was confirmed by the Scott Trust after an interview in which I failed to impress at least one Trustee with my sketchy knowledge of European politics. We all went off for a drink in the pub round the back of the office. A month later I was editing.

‘Fleet Street’, as the UK press was collectively called, was having a torrid time, not least because the biggest beast in the jungle, Rupert Murdoch, had launched a prolonged price war that was playing havoc with the economics of publishing. His pockets were so deep he could afford to slash the price of the Times almost indefinitely – especially if it forced others out of business.

Reach before revenue – as it wasn’t known then.

The newest kid on the block, the Independent, was suffering the most. To their eyes, Murdoch was behaving in a predatory way. We calculated the Independent titles were losing around £42 million (nearly £80 million in today’s money). Murdoch’s Times, by contrast, had seen its sales rocket 80 per cent by cutting its cover prices to below what it cost to print and distribute. The circulation gains had come at a cost – about £38 million in lost sales revenue. But Murdoch’s TV business, BSkyB, was making booming profits and the Sun continued to throw off huge amounts of cash. He could be patient.

The Telegraph had been hit hard – losing £45 million in circulation revenues through cutting the cover price by 18 pence. The end of the price war left it slowly clawing back lost momentum, but it was still £23 million adrift of where it had been the previous year. Murdoch – as so often – had done something bold and aggressive. Good for him, not so good for the rest of us. Everyone was tightening their belts in different ways. The Independent effectively gave up on Scotland. The Guardian saved a million a year in newsprint costs by shaving half an inch off the width of the paper.

The Guardian, by not getting into the price war, had ‘saved’ around £37 million it would otherwise have lost. But its circulation had been dented by about 10,000 readers a day. Moreover, the average age of the Guardian reader was 43 – something that pre-occupied us rather a lot. We were in danger of having a readership too old for the job advertisements we carried.

Though the Guardian itself was profitable, the newspaper division was losing nearly £12 million (north of £21 million today). The losses were mainly due to the sister Sunday title, the Observer, which the Scott Trust had purchased as a defensive move (against the Independent) in 1993. The Sunday title had a distinguished history, but was haemorrhaging cash: £11 million losses.

Everything we had seen in America had to be put on hold for a while. The commercial side of the business never stopped reminding us that only 3 per cent of households owned a PC and a modem.

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But the digital germ was there. My love of gadgets had not extended to understanding how computers actually worked, so I commissioned a colleague to write a report telling me, in language I could understand, how our computers measured up against what the future would demand. The Atex system we had installed in 1987 gave everyone a dumb terminal on their desk – little more than a basic word processor. It couldn’t connect to the internet, though there was a rudimentary internal messaging system. There was no word count or spellchecker and storage space was limited. It could not be used with floppy disks or CD-ROMs. Within eight years of purchase it was already a dinosaur.

There was one internet connection in the newsroom, though most reporters were unaware of it. It was rumoured that downstairs a bloke called Paul in IT had a Mac connected to the internet through a dial-up modem. Otherwise we were sealed off from the outside world.

Some of these journalist geeks began to invent Heath Robinson solutions to make the inadequate kit in Farringdon Road to do the things we wanted in order to produce a technology website online. Tom Standage – he later became deputy editor of the Economist, but then was a freelance tech writer – wrote some scripts to take articles out of Atex and format them into HTML so they could be moved onto the modest Mac web server – our first content management system, if you like. If too many people wanted to read this tech system at once the system crashed. So Standage and the site’s editor, Azeem Azhar, would take it in turns sitting in the server room in the basement of the building rebooting the machines by hand – unplugging them and physically moving the internet cables from one machine to another.

What would the future look like? We imagined personalised editions, even if we had not the faintest clue how to produce them. We guessed that readers might print off copies of the Guardian in their homes – and even toyed with the idea of buying every reader a printer. There were glimmers of financial hope. Our readers were spending £56 million a year buying the Guardian but we retained none of it: the money went on paper and distribution. In the back of our minds we ran calculations about how the economics of newspapers would change if we could save ourselves the £56 million a year ‘old world’ cost.

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It would be nice to claim that I had seen the future and would urgently toil night and day to make it happen. But an editor’s life isn’t like that, as I was discovering. For one thing, we were never out of court.

The English defamation law in the late 1990s had not developed from its eighteenth-century roots in seditious libel as much as one might imagine. Britain had no first amendment enshrining the importance, never mind the supremacy, of free speech. If someone rich or powerful sued you, a) the onus was on you to prove the facts and b) you had to be prepared to risk very large sums of money – often, millions of pounds – in the defence of your reporting. As a country we paid lip service to Milton, Hazlitt, Wilkes, Junius, Delane, Barnes, C.P. Scott and others who – over three centuries – had helped the press gain its comparative freedom. But, in reiterating the importance of a free press, people usually manage to insinuate a qualifier. As in, ‘I stand second to none in my belief in the Freedom of the Press, but . . .’

Libel confrontations were a spectator sport. They ended up as pitched gladiatorial battles in the gothic revival splendour of the Royal Courts of Justice at one end of Fleet Street. Each side would be represented by ranks of lawyers. The press benches would be packed. These were fights to the reputational death.

I knew little about media law at the time beyond what I had studied at Harlow Technical College as a cub reporter. In 1995 the Guardian did not employ a single in-house lawyer: complaints were handled by a retired foreign editor, and farmed out to external solicitors if they became unwieldy.

So serious investigative journalism in London – the so-called ‘libel capital of the world’ – was never easy. For an editor, these confrontations took up vast amounts of time and nervous energy. I inherited what was to turn into a marathon case over allegations that Neil Hamilton, the MP for Tatton, together with another MP, Tim Smith, had accepted cash from the owner of Harrods department store, Mohamed Al-Fayed, in return for asking questions in the House of Commons. Smith didn’t contest the charges and eventually left politics. Hamilton claimed it was all lies and – together with a prominent political lobbyist, Ian Greer – launched a protracted libel suit against the paper.

There was an obstacle: parliamentary privilege prevented MPs from suing. But Hamilton succeeded in changing the British constitution, amending the 1688 Bill of Rights in order to be free to fight his action. There was a scarcely concealed fury among many MPs that a newspaper should vigorously attack corruption in parliament – just as they vented their wrath on the Sunday Times (and, later, the Daily Telegraph) for their own work in the same area.

In September 1996 – on the eve of the High Court hearing which could have cost the Guardian several million pounds – the Hamilton/Greer case collapsed with nine minutes to spare. ‘A Liar and a Cheat’ was our blunt front-page headline the following morning. There followed another five years of inquiries, committees, further libel actions (thankfully, not directly against the Guardian) and appeals. At one stage we were almost certainly in contempt of parliament, for publishing an embargoed copy of the official report into the allegations of parliamentary sleaze we had uncovered.

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The Hamilton action coincided with another marathon successful defence of a case brought by five police officers based at Stoke Newington police station in North London, who were caught up in a corruption inquiry and could have been awarded £125,000 each if they had won.¹ The point was this: robust, inquiring journalism was time consuming, difficult and expensive. It was knotty, hard and often exhausting to do; and usually laborious, labyrinthine and prohibitively costly to defend. A single journalist on their own could be picked off and silenced. A journalist doing brave work needed to know their organisation would defend their reporting. In the absence of that defence, journalism meant nothing. The institutional strength of the media was all.

The next gargantuan battle – with the Cabinet minister and Conservative MP Jonathan Aitken – was hardly typical. But within three months of becoming editor I was plunged into yet another drawn-out gladiatorial battle over a series of articles questioning the minister’s involvement with assorted figures, including arms dealers, in the Middle East. There were unanswered questions about who had paid his hotel bill when staying at the Ritz hotel in Paris while a government minister. Was it the Saudi businessmen who were also staying there or was it, as Aitken claimed, his wife?

We had taken up this questioning where my predecessor, Peter Preston, had left off. One day in April 1995 a colleague rushed into my office and told me to switch on the television. There was Aitken broadcasting live to the nation: ‘If it now falls to me to start a fight to cut out the cancer of bent and twisted journalism in our country with the simple sword of truth and the trusty shield of traditional British fair play, so be it.’

He was going to sue us – and, in an act of supreme bravado, had announced the fact live on television to the nation. I experienced a sensation that had previously just been a figure of speech: my stomach turned over. This was going to be an unforgivingly public fight. Alongside us in the dock would be Granada TV, who had made a parallel programme, Jonathan of Arabia. They were insured for costs. We weren’t.

We had – as in previous trials – the solicitor Geraldine Proudler and the QC George Carman running our case. Carman – a diminutive, chain-smoking, by then semi-alcoholic in his late 60s – was perhaps the most famous barrister in Britain, with a reputation for pulling legal rabbits out of the hat at the last minute.² We were going to need one. The requirement that a defendant has to prove the truth of everything they have written (the opposite of the law in most parts of the world)³ meant the onus was on us to determine who had been where, when; and who had paid what.

That was only possible by exhaustive and expensive disclosure of Aitken’s financial records, which was never going to be easy. In the run-up to the trial Aitken’s supporters in the media anticipated with lip-smacking relish the impending humbling of the Guardian. Political loyalties – with some notable exceptions – trumped journalistic solidarity.⁴ At this point Aitken was still seen as a future prime minister – handsome, charming, intelligent and well-connected. His £8 million,⁵ six-bedroomed house at 8 Lord North Street – barely five minutes’ walk from the House of Commons – had a private ballroom and was the perfect venue for political soirées and intrigues. His only serious mistake to date had supposedly been to break the heart of Margaret Thatcher’s daughter – a romantic crime for which he had to serve considerable time in the political wilderness.

A newspaper article, once it ends up as an exhibit in a High Court action, becomes cadaver for repeated dissection. Every sentence – every word – is excised and held up to the light. Was it precisely right? What did it mean? Was it balanced by other words or sentences? By this stage it is useless for the journalist to argue what they intended by their words. A judge will decide the meaning. You may end up having to defend a judge’s decision about what a sentence meant, rather than what you actually meant.

The case was multi-pronged. On some prongs, we knew we were right but would struggle to prove it. Sources will sometimes tell you things they know to be true, but would run a mile rather than appear as a witness on oath in court in the full glare of the world’s press. On some allegations we knew we were right, but – without full access to the movements and financial records of Aitken and his family – we lacked the killer proof. With other prongs we could defend our meaning of our words, but not a judge’s view of what he thought we meant to say.

Aitken’s subsequent autobiography showed that he, too, had internal turmoil about the ordeal ahead. But, as he observed our exhaustive and expensive attempts at discovery of paperwork, he shrewdly, if recklessly, deduced that we were far from home and dry.

About a month before we were due to lock horns in the High Court I tried a last-ditch effort at resolving the case through Aitken’s friend, the advertising magnate Maurice Saatchi, who duly suggested a lunch with Aitken at Wilton’s, an old-world fish restaurant near Piccadilly. Saatchi was optimistic he could broker a deal that would save face all round. I turned up at the agreed time: Aitken didn’t. He was out campaigning for the impending general election and obviously felt sufficiently confident he was going to trounce us.

The trial paperwork was mounting up. Aitken’s witness statement alone ran to 280 pages. He had 80 witness statements to bolster his case: we had 70. Between them, they ran to 1,800 pages. On top of that there were a further 1,450 documents that might be needed during the course of the High Court hearing. Over the months the 255 pages of pleadings were (in legal jargon) amended, re-amended, re-re-amended and even re-re-re-amended. Every amendment took time. Time was money, and this case was already becoming eye-wateringly expensive for whoever lost.

Every hour I spent locked away with lawyers was an hour away from learning the ropes of editing; or from thinking about the digital future; or from planning the Guardian I wanted to shape.

Aitken’s QC, Charles Gray, secured a trial without a jury. This was a blow. In the police federation case, the common sense of 12 fellow citizens had saved us from defeat. Trial by jury was the norm for libel actions, and we’d hoped that the Aitken case would be heard by one, too.

But our fate now rested in the hands of Sir Oliver Popplewell, a 70-year-old patrician figure whose own attitude to journalists was perhaps betrayed by his memoirs, which appeared to dismiss them as ‘scribblers’. Doubtless, Popplewell would have put his feelings to one side but one reason we had chosen Carman was because he was a supreme jury advocate. His down-to-earth mix of bluntness and twinkly charm might not be so effective in a trial by a judge alone.

Two days before the case started Proudler had suggested a mission so apparently desperate I was at first disinclined to take it seriously. She suggested sending a reporter to Switzerland to see if they could obtain the relevant hotel records to show the whereabouts of Lolicia Aitken at the time the Ritz hotel bill in Paris had been settled. I had little faith that a reporter would be able to gain access to individual client records, but eventually agreed to send Owen Bowcott, a reliable and experienced journalist, on the trail.

The trial opened to a packed court 10 on 4 June 1997 – more than two years after the action had been launched. Gray told the court how the Guardian had ‘butchered’ Aitken’s personal, political and professional reputation. In addition to claiming Aitken had lied about who had paid the Ritz bill, he listed the other prongs of the case: we’d said that he was in the pockets of the Saudi royal family; had been dabbling in the arms trade; and had been pimping for prostitutes to entertain rich Arabs on their visits to the UK.

There followed eight days of Aitken in the witness box. I popped in from time to time to watch him, my heart sinking as (it seemed to me and others in court) he established an easy-going rapport with Popplewell. The judge later wrote that he found Aitken a ‘very convincing witness’ even though he had simultaneously seen through his lies. He concealed his scepticism about Aitken’s story well, perhaps because the plaintiff was a consummate master of detail. He was understated, but confident. He had an attractive self-deprecatory wit. He told convincingly of his ‘pole-axing’ pain and sleepless nights at reading some of the Guardian allegations – the equivalent, he said, of a heart attack. The coverage, he said, had had a devastating impact on his wife, Lolicia, and their three children. Carman later said he was the best-prepared witness he had ever encountered in court.

Carman had Aitken on the stand for five days of cross-examination. Aitken was evasive about the precise details of how or when his wife (rather than the Saudis) had paid his hotel bill in Paris (‘I can’t even now grip it – exactly who did what where – I wasn’t there’) but Carman struggled to lay a knock-out blow. The onus was on us to demonstrate exactly what had happened. All we knew was what Aitken said had happened: that his wife had been staying at the Hotel Bristol in Villars, Switzerland, before travelling to Paris on the Sunday morning, whereupon she had paid the Ritz bill in cash.

Aitken’s story felt impossible. Everything about the supposed Ritz payment pointed to the fact that he was lying, but we still lacked the documentary evidence to prove it. From Aitken’s point of view the case was going very nicely indeed. He and Popplewell were both cricket lovers, and Aitken would later deploy the game’s imagery, saying: ‘I was on a good wicket, finding myself largely untroubled by Carman’s bowling.’ He heard distant trumpets of victory.

In the course of one slightly gloomy meeting in Carman’s chambers off Gray’s Inn Road to discuss the fact that we had been forced to withdraw part of our pleas on grounds of ‘meaning’, we learned that Granada TV’s insurers were pulling the plug. If the TV executives didn’t settle now, they would refuse to be liable for any subsequent costs. The TV executives themselves wanted to hang in.

All eyes were on me: would the Guardian also fold?

The answer was no. To have said otherwise would have been a terrible betrayal of the reporting that had gone into this story. The journalism had, we felt, been overwhelmingly right, even if we were struggling to defend every single sentence in court under the arcane procedures of English libel cases. I knew I had the backing of our managing director, Caroline Marland, and of the Scott Trust under Hugo Young. But we had to prepare for the possibility that this trial could end in expensive disaster. Unless, unless . . .

. . . unless Carman could, for one last time in his long career, produce a legal rabbit out of the hat. The only chance now was a forlorn one – Bowcott’s mission impossible. And, yet, with that doomed adventure, there was a twist. Bowcott had arrived at the Hotel Bristol and – what were the chances? – found it had recently gone into receivership. He was granted permission to descend into the deserted hotel’s basement to sleuth his way through thousands of shoeboxes containing the old records. And . . . he eventually found something that could conceivably look like a rabbit – Lolicia Aitken’s reservation. It meant little to him so he faxed the paperwork back to Proudler in London.

Proudler began her own forensic examination of what these newly acquired records showed. They seemed to suggest that Lolicia – at the very time when Aitken had said she was having a bath in their room in Paris – had in fact been tucking into a breakfast of cornflakes and apple juice 570 kilometres away in Villars. Proudler was even more interested to see that Lolicia had settled her Bristol bill with an American Express card that had never been disclosed to the defence in the libel trial. Proudler began an investigative journey of her own, demanding all the relevant financial statements from Aitken’s solicitors. We were not to get sight of them until 12 June, more than a week into the hearing.

From those records – car rental, airline tickets, etc. – Proudler was able painstakingly to piece together Lolicia’s movements. It took time. British Airways’ own microfilm archive was held in a warehouse near Heathrow. The airline estimated it could take more than a month to provide the clinching evidence. Proudler offered them help. The detective trail was moving agonisingly slowly.

Back in court, Aitken was by now so confident of success he played one last daring card. Thursday 19 June was so-called ‘Ladies’ Day’ at Ascot races – the day punters dress up to the nines to watch the Gold Cup. In a break in court proceedings the previous day Aitken’s solicitor, Richard Sykes, tipped off the press that it would also be Ladies’ Day in court. Aitken was putting Lolicia and his 17-year-old daughter, Victoria, into the witness box to confirm his story once and for all.

Victoria, then studying for her A levels in Switzerland, had signed a witness statement supporting her father’s version of events with an entirely fabricated story he had drafted for her. Aitken later described this as his ‘worst and most shameful mistake’ but, as he typed out the document of lies, his only thought was: ‘That will do nicely.’ This, surely, would destroy our case and leave his path clear for re-entry into politics . . . and maybe, one day, Downing Street. The humiliation of the Guardian would be complete. My editorship could have been a very short one.

The two women were saved from having to perjure themselves in court.

Shortly before adjournment on 18 June, Carman produced his rabbit. And what an extraordinary rabbit it was. I sat at the back of the court, heart racing, as our QC handed the judge a sworn witness statement from a British Airways investigator, Wendy Harris, showing that Lolicia had never been anywhere near Paris on the relevant dates. She had flown in and out of Geneva. The entire story had therefore been invented by Aitken. Even I (who knew in my heart that his story couldn’t possibly be true) found it barely credible that he would have risked so much – his career, his marriage, his home, his freedom – on such a bare-faced lie.

Popplewell took a moment to absorb the significance of the documents before handing them to Aitken’s QC suggesting, in mild but deadly legal shorthand, that he might wish to consider his position overnight.⁶ I watched Aitken’s features as the realisation sunk in that the case was lost and his life ruined. But his face was a testament to a privileged upbringing of masks, concealment and reserve – the same semi-amused insouciant smile on his lips. In reality, he later admitted, his head was pounding, his confidence was ‘exploding into tiny pieces like flying shrapnel’.⁷ He had, as he put it, ‘been caught red-handed’ and in that moment of disaster knew he had lost his whole world. He had unsheathed the ‘simple sword of truth’ only to be impaled upon it.

For Carman, it was the most sensational ending to any trial in his 44 years at the Bar. In Popplewell’s judgement, it had been one of the bitterest and most enthralling libel actions ever heard in an English court.

We adjourned to Proudler’s office for an overnight negotiation of the terms of the settlement. In the middle of the evening the Press Association published a brief story announcing that Aitken and his wife had separated.

Word leaked out that, in place of Ladies’ Day, there would be surrender in Court 10. Both inside and outside the gothic cathedral of justice there were jostling throngs of reporters and camera crews. Aitken was nowhere to be seen: he had donned a Washington Redskins baseball cap and slipped out of the country before dawn – flying to New York via Paris in an attempt to avoid the press.

The hearing was brief, almost anti-climactic. Popplewell – shocked by Aitken’s behaviour, if not (he said in his memoirs) surprised – took the rest of the day off at Lord’s cricket ground, discussing the case with the former prime minister John Major. Peter Preston and I emerged blinking into a wall of flashbulbs to pronounce on the verdict. Barely two years earlier I would have been on the other side of the cameras, notebook in hand. I had unwittingly, and to some extent unwillingly, become a public figure.

The emotions were feverish on all sides. There was, for us, relief, exhaustion, exhilaration: for Aitken, hollow emptiness and remorse. He knew he now faced the wreck of a marriage and career as well as jail for perjury and probable bankruptcy,⁸ with costs nudging £2 million.

Win, lose or draw, there was nothing remotely enjoyable about fighting libel actions. Ben Bradlee, editor of the Washington Post at the time of Watergate, said he would rather be publicly whipped than lose one. He added, of one battle fought on behalf of two reporters, that if he’d known in advance what would be involved: ‘I would have told them both to go piss up a rope.’ He wouldn’t, of course.

We drew some criticism for reporting Aitken’s perjury to the Attorney General, though the judge would almost certainly have been bound to do so himself. For us, it was a matter of principle that libel shouldn’t be seen as some sort of high-stakes gamble. I didn’t rejoice at Aitken’s subsequent downfall, but the defence of a free press did require the law to defend the truth and punish lies. I was unable to shrug the past two years of slog and anxiety off and behave as if it had all been a game.

Aitken subsequently served six months of an 18-month prison sentence, and was released in January 2000. The following year another prominent Conservative politician, (Lord) Jeffrey Archer, was jailed for four years for an even more egregious act of perjury in successfully suing the Daily Star in 1987.

The two cases signalled that libel cases had extremely serious consequences. Together, they were the high-water mark of defamation. The number of high-profile contested cases fell off over the next decade and – after some brilliant lobbying by human rights groups and lawyers – the law was eventually reformed.

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Aitken found God, or God found him. His book, Pride and Perjury, is the story of a religious journey as well as a public downfall. In 2005 he was invited to talk at the Hay Festival, a jamboree of books and ideas in a little town on the Welsh borders, then sponsored by the Guardian. By mischievous design or accident he had been booked to stay in the same bed and breakfast as me, and we found ourselves sharing a polite cup of tea in the garden of our slightly discombobulated hosts. All bitterness and passion had, on both sides, melted away. I had great respect for the way he rebuilt his life with considerable humility and integrity. He remained very active in the cause of prison reform. When I eventually stepped down as editor in 2015 he came to the farewell party.