Читать книгу The History of the Times: The Murdoch Years - Graham Stewart - Страница 11

In 1967, William Rees-Mogg had left the Sunday Times to edit The Times and brought only three journalists with him from his old paper. But Harold Evans intended a far more dramatic exodus. His first thought was to bring Hugo Young across the bridge to replace the disappointed Louis Heren as deputy editor of The Times. Young, a serious-minded Balliol liberal, was the political editor of the Sunday Times and Evans thought him a suitable successor when, in seven years or so, he would want to stand down from editing The Times. But Frank Giles, the very embodiment of a Foreign Office mandarin whom Murdoch had – to much surprise – appointed as Evans’s successor, did not want to lose so capable a lieutenant and dug in his heels, appealing to Murdoch for protection. To Evans’s annoyance Murdoch backed his new Sunday Times editor. That Evans did not initially want a Times man as his deputy was resented and only after Murdoch, Hamilton and Rees-Mogg all advised him strongly did he agree to elevating Charles Douglas-Home into the position. It was a decision Evans would have cause to regret, but having someone the paper’s staff respected as deputy editor did much – at first – to calm the feeling that the new editor intended to surround himself with his own clique of non-Times men.

The turf war between Evans and Frank Giles continued for several days, the latter resenting what he regarded as his predecessor’s aggressive attempt to poach so many of his old paper’s best staff. Giles tried to hold on to Peter Stothard but Evans was adamant that his young protégé should join him. Despite another appeal from Giles to Murdoch, Evans got his way and Stothard became deputy features editor.[124] Features was one of the areas Evans wanted to see given more emphasis and it promised to be a key role in the new paper. Assisted by Nicholas Wapshott, Stothard would work with the new features editor, the thirty-two-year-old Washington correspondent of the Observer, Anthony Holden. After persuading Holden – a renaissance man whose interests ranged from poker to writing libretti for opera – to join The Times, Evans held out to him the prospect that he would succeed him as editor … in good time.

Other senior changes were also made. Fred Emery, who had been reporting from the world’s various trouble spots for The Times since 1958, became home news editor. In Douglas-Home’s place as foreign editor, Evans put the former editor-in-chief of Reuters, Brian Horton. Sir Denis Hamilton’s son, Adrian (who had been at the Observer), was brought in to run business news in succession to Hugh Stephenson who decided it was time to cut his losses and leave. The following year he became editor of the New Statesman. The other disappointed candidate for the editorship, Louis Heren, was given a ‘roving brief’ as an associate editor. This soon proved – to Heren’s distress – to be something of a non-job.

In the event of both Evans and Douglas-Home being out of the office, the acting editor was to be Brian MacArthur. Responsible for news content and its subediting, he was to be the bridge between the day planning and the night editing. MacArthur was already an immensely experienced journalist. Before Evans brought him over from the Sunday Times, he had worked at the Yorkshire Post, The Times (as news editor) and the Evening Standard. He had also been the founding editor of the Times Higher Education Supplement. These were precocious achievements that Evans admired in a man he thought vaguely resembled ‘one of those eighteenth century portraits of a well-fed Cardinal’.[125]

Another key addition to Evans’s kitchen cabinet was Bernard Donoughue. The son of a metal polisher in a car factory, Donoughue had gone on to be a policy adviser to Harold Wilson and James Callaghan and was part of the new meritocracy with which Evans felt most at home. Evans wanted Peter Riddell to join the political team under Donoughue’s direction. This would have been a powerful infusion of talent, but not even a generous salary could at that stage tempt Riddell away from the Financial Times.[126] However, ballast was added when David Watt, director of the Royal Institute of International Affairs and a former political editor and Washington correspondent of the FT, was hired to write a weekly column on political and foreign affairs.

It was also necessary to tickle the public. Evans brought in Miles Kington to write what he suggested should be a ‘Beachcomber-Way of the World’ column.[127] Located on the Court & Social page, the column, entitled ‘Moreover …’, began its Monday to Saturday run in June. Although only 450 words long, it was a tall order for Kington to maintain a daily output of whimsy and a tribute to his skills that he so frequently carried it off week in, week out, for the next five and a half years. It immediately attracted a devoted following, except among its targets. The Welsh trade unionist Clive Jenkins was not amused about a Kington joke that appeared to encourage Welsh Nationalists to burn his house down. Jenkins was furious, demanded an apology on the Court page and assured Evans, ‘My lawyers and the police do not think it is “a joke” and as a result we now have surveillance of my home and office.’ Evans advised him to stop drawing so much attention to the supposed incitement. But to Anthony Holden Jenkins fumed, ‘Who edits Miles Kington?… There are some jokes which are so off that they should never be published.’[128] Meanwhile, Mel Calman continued to raise a smile with his distinctive front-page pocket cartoons, as he had four days a week since 1979. But the editor was deluged with complaints when he put caricatures drawn by Charles Griffin at the head of the day’s prominent person’s birthday column. For some, a cartoon on the Court & Social page was further proof of The Times’s apostasy although many of those featured were delighted and asked if they could purchase the original.

The introduction of a resident political cartoonist caused more prolonged debate. Ranan Lurie was an Israeli born US citizen who had trained with the French Foreign Legion and been dropped behind enemy lines in the Six Day War. Having worked for Life, Newsweek, Die Welt and Bild, he was the world’s most widely syndicated political cartoonist. Like Vicky in Beaverbrook’s Express newspapers, Lurie’s cartoons often created a dynamic tension by taking a different angle on politics from that being proposed elsewhere in the paper. His draughtsmanship was excellent, his small, rotund figures especially suited to depicting ‘hard hats’ enjoying a bit of military brinkmanship. But inevitably he was not to everyone’s taste, particularly those who believed his art trivialized the news pages on which they were carried. Evans had far more consistent success with the appointment that also gave him the greatest satisfaction. This was the arrival of the relentlessly droll Frank Johnson as parliamentary sketch writer. When it came to material, the House of Commons of the early eighties was to provide Johnson with an embarrassment of riches.

Amid these arrivals came a major departure. Bernard Levin was the most famous columnist on the paper. One of the enfant terribles of the sixties satire boom (he was the subject of a famous attempted physical assault while presenting That Was The Week That Was, his assailant seeking revenge for a supposedly cruel review of his wife’s acting talents), Levin combined a sharp intellect, high-culture sensibilities and a talent for upsetting the full range of vested interests, be they union barons or barristers. Scarcely a week went by without Levin ‘going too far this time’. But he had the support of the one person who mattered – the editor. Rees-Mogg had persuaded him to become a Times columnist in 1971, ultimately taking the view that ‘he alone has the ability to resist the gentle English equity which sometimes drifts like desert sand from one column to the next’.[129] He was not really, therefore, a Times man in the established sense of the term and various of the offended vested interests got their revenge by blackballing him from the Garrick Club, where Rees-Mogg was a member.

Evans admired Levin’s vituperative prose, if not his ability to punctuate it. Comparing the length of his sentences to ‘the corridors of a Venetian palace’ Evans failed to persuade him to make more concessions to readers’ mental stamina.[130] But the greatest exertion fell upon Levin himself whose column appeared on Tuesdays, Wednesday and Thursdays (he also wrote for the Sunday Times). He needed a rest, or at least a lightening of the load. His decision to take a break suited Evans’s new features editor, Anthony Holden, who was keen to introduce new blood.[131] Nonetheless, in his final column, Levin helpfully reassured his readers:

My decision is in no way based on any disquiet on my part at the change of editor or proprietor, nor on any lack of confidence in the paper’s future, and anyone saying or writing anything to the contrary is, and for all material purposes should be treated as, a liar.

It would not be long before Evans would be pleading with Levin to return. But by then the trickle of famous names from the Rees-Mogg era departing the paper had turned into a flood.