Читать книгу The History of the Times: The Murdoch Years - Graham Stewart - Страница 15

At best, The Times survived the September crisis with a stay of execution. But there was little cause for celebration. Sales continued to be up on the same month the previous year and, while the royal wedding-fuelled circulation surge of July was always likely to be a one-off, new readers were continuing to outstrip the dead and disaffected. In normal circumstances the improvement would be considered to be excellent but Evans’s reputation had created an unrealistic level of expectation that detracted from the gains that were made. The editor himself was concerned by a disturbing fall in reader subscriptions.[224] But whatever angle was taken on the sales figures, the more important statistic was that, between July and November 1981, the paper was losing between £250,000 and £374,000 every week. None doubted that Richard Williams had done an excellent job with Preview, the new arts listing tabloid section, but it was expensive to run, failing to attract much advertising, and market research showed few signs that it was raising the paper’s circulation. When Ken Beattie, the commercial director, circulated a paper at the TNL board meeting calling for Preview to be scrapped, Evans did not mince words in a note he sent Beattie: ‘I really do think that you have an obligation to consult me as Editor first before the Chairman. You put me in an impossible position if the Chairman is persuaded against the project which is close to my heart and was, I thought, to his. I tell you frankly that I could not continue to edit The Times in circumstances like this.’[225]

While Evans was determined to defend – seemingly with his professional life – an innovation like Preview, he was less staunch in support of the arts coverage he had inherited in the main section of the paper. He had a succession of disagreements with John Higgins, the arts editor. One battleground was the failure to take television reviewing seriously. Another concerned Higgins’s enthusiasm for giving so much space to opera staged outside Britain. Higgins had greatly improved the arts coverage in the Financial Times but Evans was less impressed by his efforts in Gray’s Inn Road, threatening, ‘I will have to see a marked improvement or consider different ways of covering the Arts.’[226] He proceeded to take the Saturday Review section out of Higgins’s hands but mishandled the appointment of Bevis Hillier who, having been half-promised various competences, was left in a semi-employed limbo. Hillier was so dissatisfied with his treatment that when he was finally given the Saturday Review section to edit in January 1982 he resigned a month later with six months’ severance pay.

Hillier was not alone in becoming exasperated by the editor’s swings between drive and indecision. The political commentator Alan Watkins claimed that Evans would offer him a job whenever they ran into one another, the details ‘about which I would hear nothing until we met a few months later, when he would suggest lunch, about which I would likewise hear nothing’.[227] But the journalist Evans most wanted in his paper was the star columnist he had allowed to take a sabbatical – Bernard Levin. ‘Not a day goes by,’ he told Levin in September 1981, ‘without the Editor of The Times, in advanced years, being accosted on the streets, in clubs and society dinners, and racecourses and parlours and, in his bedroom before his shaving mirror, about the absence of Mr Bernard Levin from the columns of the newspaper.’[228] Evans’s pleading became desperate. He suggested Levin could return as a television critic, a music critic or even a parliamentary sketchwriter (despite the fact that Frank Johnson was winning such acclaim in this role).[229] Evans even suggested that Levin should pay a visit to Gray’s Inn Road to ‘satisfy yourself that the place is still inhabited by reasonable men’.[230] Levin kept his distance.

Indeed, the trickle of departures among the editorial staff was turning into a torrent. First out of the door was Hugh Brogan, the respected Washington correspondent, who resigned shortly after Evans’s arrival in protest at what he anticipated would be Murdoch’s certain destruction of the paper’s integrity. But Evans soon found himself at loggerheads with the paper’s New York correspondent, Michael Leapman, as well. Exasperated by the frequency with which Brian Horton, the foreign editor and French restaurant lover, spiked his copy, Leapman assumed the worst and accused Evans of political censorship.[231] One of Horton’s techniques was to unsettle Leapman by sending him dismissive comments about the quality of his grammar. Not that Horton knew better. He covertly obtained the judgments from the literary editor, Philip Howard, who innocently thought Horton was seeking advice on grammatical matters as a form of self-improvement. [232] Leapman, meanwhile, continued to express dissatisfaction and when Evans demanded an assurance of a ‘reasonable’ attitude from him he resigned,[233] preferring to become ‘William Hickey’ in the Express instead.

As Evans’s closest colleague, Anthony Holden, the features editor, became the lieutenant most closely associated with the drive to introduce new blood – by which was also meant the determination to sack old favourites. Marcel Berlins took voluntary redundancy.[234] With this, The Times lost a distinguished and authoritative commentator on legal affairs. The leader writer, Roger Berthoud, also packed up and left. Another to seek redundancy was the paper’s Whitehall correspondent, Peter Hennessy. This was a grievous blow for Hennessy was, as Patrick Marnham has pointed out, the first journalist to persuade senior civil servants to talk regularly about what was really going on in the corridors of Government.[235] Evans was sorry to see him go but was unable to dissuade him from doing so.[236] In the course of Evans’s opening year as editor, more than fifty members of the editorial staff left with redundancy payouts.

Too much was happening all at once. Familiar faces were leaving, less familiar ones arriving. The paper was riddled with mistakes due to the delays caused by switching to cold composition, a change that was not even improving the print quality of the paper. This was not the best moment to reorder the contents, but the editor did so all the same, deciding that, instead of constantly having to shift around the various news, sport and law sections of the paper in order to keep the centre of the paper fixed, the centre pages should float instead. At one stage he even considered the sacrilege of moving leaders and letters to pages two and three. Even without going that far, floating the paper’s philosophical core a few pages either way succeeded only in giving the impression that editorial policy was adrift. Readers were not impressed. Nor were the leader writers, increasingly airing their doubts about the editor’s variable decisiveness. Owen Hickey, the chief leader writer, tackled Evans directly, assuring him that readers did not want to turn to the centre of their paper and find obituaries on the left and badminton on the right.[237]

The Times was not used to being in a state of perpetual revolution. But this was now the inevitable tension in a paper stretched on the live wire between the two electricity pylons of Rupert Murdoch and Harold Evans. Recognizing his desire to be closely involved, the backbench would try and track Evans down when news broke during the course of the night. Calls would be made across London to establish his whereabouts. Eventually, he would be discovered subbing a sports report elsewhere in the building. The problem was that, called away from his handiwork, he would then forget to return to it, leaving the subeditors unable to ascertain which bits had been sent. They were left with no option but to unpick his work and start again from scratch. No matter how helpful – how the master of the paper – Evans thought he was being, subs did not always welcome his attempts to steer every boat in the paper’s flotilla from early morning to late at night. The Times had long published the Oxford and Cambridge exam results, but the editor decided to extend the service to all the universities. Compiling these graduation lists involved an enormous amount of extra work done after the London edition had been put to bed. On one occasion, around midnight, Tim Austin was working on them when Evans arrived back from a dinner in his black tie. Seeing it was Durham, his alma mater, Evans volunteered to do the subbing himself. Unfortunately, he got the style wrong and the whole section had to be redone. ‘He just did not know when to stop,’ concluded Austin; ‘he was not the best at delegating.’[238]

The editor’s insistence on making his mark in almost every possible part of the paper might have been a tolerable if irritating eccentricity had it only affected his relations with colleagues. The problem was that his interventions were wrecking the paper’s deadlines. The Times was becoming increasingly unobtainable in Scotland because the train at King’s Cross would not wait while Evans held up production in order to make some needless alteration. This was a question of priorities and the editor appeared to have lost sight of the commercial imperatives at work. The leader writers would deliver their copy on time only for Evans to announce that he would run them through his own typewriter. Aware that another deadline was being missed, Fred Emery would race over to the editor’s office to find its occupant kneeling on the floor with a pair of scissors in his hands. He would be cutting up the original copy and trying to insert some extra lines of his own on scraps of paper with glue. Emery did not even believe the editor’s additions improved the sense of the original. ‘Rhythms and disciplines are crucial to a daily newspaper’s morale and professionalism,’ Emery believed. When they were destroyed, ‘things fall apart’.[239]

There was a journalistic maxim that ‘you can edit with a typewriter or a calculator, but not both’.[240] This was exactly the problem at The Times in the dying days of 1981. The editor led with the typewriter while his managing director and the proprietor attempted to rule with the calculator. Famous names were departing and, as so often with voluntary redundancy, it was those most marketable to an alternative employer who were going while those who feared leaving the life raft clung on. Yet, Evans persisted in hiring new journalists, often at higher salaries than those they replaced. Each appointment became a battleground, particularly since, in the short term, even the redundancy programme was adding to the paper’s costs. One of many disputes concerned finding a replacement for Michael Leapman. Murdoch maintained that The Times could not afford its own correspondent in New York in addition to its office in Washington DC. Instead it should seek a saving by using News Group’s New York bureau instead. Ignoring both this opinion – which he felt was an attempt to see copy in The Times written by employees answerable to Murdoch rather than to himself – and that of Brian Horton, Evans sent out Peter Watson, formally of the Diary column.[241] Evans simply did not see how he could satisfy the proprietor’s instruction to improve the paper without being left alone to hire whoever he felt could best achieve it.

At the heart of the matter was Evans’s complaint that he was not given a clear budget allocation. A memo from Gerry Long demanding that all company executives seek written authorization for ‘any proposed action’ was understandably resented.[242] Evans insisted that this was no way to run a newspaper. ‘I am a little shaken,’ he told Murdoch with restrained anger. ‘I do find it difficult to accept the principle of day-to-day approval for detailed items. I can’t honestly edit the paper properly without having discretion … It makes life difficult and erodes authority if I am not to be the sole channel for your instructions.’[243] It was demeaning for the editor of The Times to have to scurry up and down stairs to the proprietor or managing director every time he wanted to spend money. In May 1981, John Grant, the managing editor, had drawn up a £9.1 million budget on inherited staffing levels for the next eleven months.[244] The redundancy programme was supposed to cut that budget substantially and when, on 20 January, Evans was presented with a spending limit – £7,723,000 – along with the warning that he had already crossed it, it was clear there would have to be further job cuts. Evans’s defence that ‘in terms of real as distinct from money costs, The Times’s editorial budget is less than at any time in recent years’ fell upon deaf ears.[245] Times Newspapers lost £8 million between June and November 1981, wiping out News International’s summer profits. Worse, this came at a time when the finances of News Corp., the parent company, were already being drained through the New York Post’s costly circulation war with the rival Daily News. In these circumstances, The Times really did look like a luxury the increasingly transatlantic Murdoch could ill afford.

There was little by way of Christmas cheer. Evans injured himself putting up decorations and took time off to recover. With Charles Douglas-Home away on sabbatical, the paper was edited by Brian MacArthur and Fred Emery. It was at this moment that Evans committed an act that infuriated Murdoch. The proprietor knew that Evans had taken time off to recover from his spell of concussion but, long after he assumed that the editor was back at his desk, he was aghast to discover that he was, in fact, mysteriously in the United States. Evans had intended to keep his transatlantic mission secret but his secretary had forgotten to tell either MacArthur or Emery that this was the case. Hours before Murdoch was due to fly over to London from New York, he telephoned The Times expecting to speak to Evans, only to discover he was unaccountably in America. The proprietor was furious and perhaps not a little suspicious. When Evans hurried back to the office (having been tracked down by MacArthur and warned to return to London immediately), it was to find a bitter letter from Murdoch waiting for him, berating him for the time he had taken to convalesce. Given how manically hard Evans had worked since his appointment, this was unfair, although, in the circumstances in which the paper found itself, the furtive trip to America certainly looked peculiar. Indeed, the letter read more as if the proprietor was issuing a written warning, putting on record that he was distancing himself from his chosen editor. This was ominous. Evans fired back a six-point rebuttal of Murdoch’s charges, reasserting his acceptance of the necessity for hard work and pleading, ‘I love The Times. We have until now, I thought, had an extremely close liaison.’[246]

From this moment on, suspicion governed Evans’s attitude to Murdoch. He began to suspect Murdoch was complaining about him behind his back and that one of those listening was Paul Johnson, whose media column in the Spectator was giving Evans critical reviews. Unless he was there in the room to monitor possible interference, Evans was nervous about Murdoch sounding forth on politics to Times journalists. On his return from his Christmastide absence, Evans discovered that Murdoch had expressed a preference for economic sanctions against the USSR while chatting to Owen Hickey. Hickey, who was not likely to compromise his intellectual self-certainty to anyone, did not feel Murdoch was leaning on him. But Evans went out of his way to write a leader condemning the policy as a ‘romantic notion’ and, worse, an ‘apocalyptic strategy’.[247] Whether this could be considered an overreaction depended upon how narrowly the proprietor’s guarantee not to direct editorial policy could be reasonably defined. To assume he had to take a Trappist vow whenever a conversation touched upon the modern world was clearly ridiculous. The problem was, did all journalists have the strength to put from their mind Murdoch’s stated opinions when they filed copy he might read and note?

Evans’s predicament was that tensions were now running high not only with Murdoch but with Gerry Long as well. Scarcely anyone had missed The Times’s decision to cancel its detailed coverage of the European Parliament but Long also wanted to cut costs by scrapping the paper’s Westminster gallery staff and rely on PA reports instead.[248] This would certainly undermine the paper’s claims to be offering something more than its competitors and Evans would have none of it. It was not just Evans who had difficulty relating to Long. Frank Giles, the Sunday Times editor, also felt ‘to describe his nature as complex is about as observant as pointing out that Schubert’s Eighth Symphony is unfinished’.[249] Shortly before he assumed the editorship, Evans had a foretaste of Long’s eccentricity when he went to the latter’s house for dinner. When the discussion turned to how The Times’s reputation should be restored, Long became animated, telling Evans, ‘The man you need for authority is Penning-Rowsell of the Financial Times’ and reached from his bookshelves the proof – a copy of Penning-Rowsell’s The Wines of Bordeaux.[250] This proved to be a portent of his priorities. Although Long proceeded to demonstrate his readiness to sacrifice good journalists in pursuit of cutting costs, he was never prepared to compromise gastronomic standards at The Times. On one occasion when Sir Geoffrey Howe, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, came to lunch at Gray’s Inn Road, roast lamb was on the menu. When Howe asked for mint sauce, the waitress pulled rank, grandly announcing, ‘Mr Long does not allow mint sauce on the fifth floor.’[251]

Evans could not unseat Murdoch, but he could try and undermine Long. The easiest way of doing this was to provide Long with a public platform for self-immolation. Long had suggested the financially imprudent idea of importing a French and a German food critic to eat their way round Britain’s most famous restaurants as part of a forthcoming Times series of articles on expensive foods.[252] Discovering that the managing director had been in acrimonious correspondence with the leading restaurateur Albert Roux, Evans persuaded Long that publishing the exchange would be a wonderful opening salvo to start the series. Long had dined at Roux’s celebrated Le Gavroche restaurant and had asked for the ‘farmhouse cheeseboard’. But, horror of horrors, he suspected that one of the cheeses, a St Paulin, was industrially produced, a fact confirmed upon consulting his trusty Androuet Guide du Fromage. ‘This met at first with an indignant response from your waiter,’ Long informed Roux. Perhaps unwisely, the waiter retaliated with the flip put-down, ‘if Monsieur knows cheese better than I do, then of course Monsieur is right’. This remark appeared to have straightened the bristles on Long’s Lord Kitchener-style moustache. Roux wrote to assure him that the offending cheese was a product ‘made by craftsmen on the scale of a cottage industry’ thereby generating a fresh debate on Long’s second major hobby – semantics. Long replied at great length, also finding fault with the turbot and making clear he was sending the correspondence to Michelin who had recently given Le Gavroche the only three star rating in England. Despite the provocations, Roux attempted to bring the argument to a close, somewhat incredibly assuring Long, ‘the fact that you have taken so much trouble to write about food leaves me with endless pleasure’, and inviting him and his wife to dine with him. Boorishly, Long declined the offer.

The unintentionally hilarious correspondence appeared in the paper on Saturday 6 February, suitably illustrated with a Calman cartoon of a French waiter intoning, ‘I’m a bit – how to say – cheesed off by these complaints.’ Running into Anthony Holden in the office, Long asked him what he thought of the exchange. When the features editor replied that it was ‘in the great tradition of British eccentrics’, Long was uncomprehending, exclaiming, ‘Eccentric? What’s eccentric about it?’[253] He would soon find out. When Murdoch toured the Sunday Times on the Saturday afternoon (supposedly its busiest period), he found its journalists, feet on table, laughing with childlike glee at Long’s cheese pantomime. Evans had knowingly published a correspondence that made the managing director appear ridiculous. What was more, he had allowed Long to demonstrate his obsession with expensive dining at exactly the moment he was also calling for six hundred redundancies, mainly among the clerical staff at Times Newspapers. Long may have hoped that his correspondence would lead Michelin to reconsider the three stars awarded to Le Gavroche. But it was Long who was about to find himself downgraded.

Times Newspapers employed 671 clerical workers (excluding managers and juniors). The combined clerical payroll of its daily and Sunday rivals, the Guardian and the Observer, was 250. It was clear that TNL was grossly overmanned; indeed, it was the principal reason why a company capable of generating nearly £100 million a year in revenue was still so monumentally in the red. Murdoch was blunt with the staff: ‘You will say you have heard of Times crises before. I say to you here that if the crisis facing us today is not resolved within days rather than weeks our newspaper will have to be closed.’[254] Despite intense hostility to this ‘straight forward mugging’ from Barry Fitzpatrick, the father of the Sunday Times clerical chapel, and rumours that those doing management’s bidding by applying for voluntary redundancy would be blacked by their union brothers,[255] negotiations to find the job cuts got underway with the more moderate union officials. It was another torturous exercise and, in the midst of it, Gray’s Inn Road was rocked by a second crisis.

A meeting of the TNL board had been convened on 16 December 1981. In Murdoch’s absence, Long had taken the chair and, with Evans and Frank Giles present, won universal – if qualified – approval to remove The Times and Sunday Times titles trademarks from TNL to News International. The stated reason was that September’s NGA dispute had demonstrated that without this change The Times could not be published if the Sunday Times was liquidated. Transfering the titles to News International would give greater flexibility in future industrial disputes.[256] Consent was agreed subject to ‘a reasonable price’ being paid for them. At a rushed TNL directors meeting held two days before Christmas at the Sun’s headquarters in Bouverie Street (with only Long, John Collier, the company’s secretary Peter Ekberg and Farrar’s lawyer, Geoffrey Richards, present) News International’s offer of £1 million for The Times and £2 million for the Sunday Times was accepted.[257]

The first Evans and Giles heard of the 23 December meeting and its decision to transfer the titles of the papers they edited was on 16 February 1982 when they were sent a copy of the minutes. They were horrified.[258] Why had they not been informed of the meeting? Why was it held at the Sun’s headquarters? The impression was clear: Murdoch’s henchmen had attempted to ‘pull a fast one’. But what was their motive? If TNL was liquidated while still in possession of its principal assets – the titles – it could be bought by another buyer. Evans approached Jim Sherwood of Sea Containers and encouraged him to buy The Times from Murdoch.[259] Murdoch promptly rebuffed Sherwood’s offer when it was sent to him on 9 February. Transferring the titles to News International would, wrote one chapel father (Peter Wilby), allow Murdoch to liquidate TNL and restart the papers at a later date with a more favourable set of union (or nonunion) staffing agreements.[260] This, and the rejection of the Sherwood offer, suggested that if Murdoch did not get the mass redundancy package accepted he really did intend to abolish TNL and relaunch the titles on his own terms, in his own time. It also placed a gun to the head of the unions in the negotiations over cutting six hundred jobs.

Transferring the titles to News International ran counter to Sir Denis Hamilton’s strategy of ring-fencing Times Newspapers in the Articles of Association so that, as he put it, ‘in no way could it be mixed up with the operational or financial side of News International’.[261] But Evans and Giles could no longer appeal to Hamilton who, seeing the way events were moving, had resigned as chairman of the company’s board of directors. The new chairman was none other than Keith Rupert Murdoch. All of a sudden, it seemed Murdoch was doing to Times Newspapers what he had done to the News of the World chairman, Sir William Carr – arriving in the guise of a financial white knight, only to seize the keys to the castle. Yet, was it not inevitable that the person paying the bills also wanted outright control of the company? The only prop keeping TNL on its feet was the money being pumped into it by News International. As Richard Searby, chairman of the parent News Corporation, bluntly put it, ownership of the titles was the security it needed if it was to continue backrolling this liability.[262] The City reacted to the news by wiping £4 million from News International’s stock market value.

There were two problems with this strategy. First, if Murdoch attempted to close TNL and relaunch The Times in a manner that displeased the print unions they could strike at Bouverie Street, bringing down the Sun and the News of the World, the two sure cash cows that contributed most to keeping his media empire afloat. Secondly, the titles transfer appeared to be illegal under point 2 (iii) of the terms set out by John Biffen unless the board of independent directors’ gave their approval, a detail overlooked in the hastily convened and inquorate TNL meeting of 23 December. Biffen had stipulated that a fine or two years imprisonment would apply to Murdoch if he broke the conditions upon which his purchase of TNL had been granted. This included changing the Articles of Association without consent. The Times NUJ chapel pressed for the transferral to be disallowed, threatening if necessary to seek a High Court injunction.[263] Rees-Mogg added his voice to the controversy, writing to Biffen and denouncing the attempted titles shift on the BBC’s The World This Weekend. The independent directors also waded in, Lord Dacre describing it as a ‘gross incivility … the Proprietor met the national directors on January 12 and said nothing about it’ while Lord Greene at least struck a supportive note for the newspaper’s reporting of the fracas by claiming ‘All I know about it is what is in The Times.’[264] Evans had certainly ensured that his paper could not be faulted when it came to washing its owner’s dirty linen on both front and back pages. Even if Murdoch’s exact motives were unclear, the manner in which Long had acted created a suspicion of shadiness. The Shadow Trade Minister, John Smith, complained that Murdoch was attempting ‘a breathtaking subterfuge, which raises very serious questions about his future intentions for both newspapers’.[265] The Conservative former Cabinet minister Geoffrey Rippon asked Mrs Thatcher to consider establishing an enquiry.

Murdoch, Searby and Long had miscalculated. Talks with Department of Trade officials indicated the transfer was probably illegal. Searby got to work on preparing a dignified retreat. The decision to transfer was reversed pending a meeting of the Times board of independent directors who duly made clear their opposition to the plan, killing it there and then.[266] Meanwhile, the deadline for achieving the six hundred redundancies had been reached. But when the requests for voluntary redundancy were counted they numbered scarcely more than one hundred and fifty. Murdoch flew back to London.

For ten hours, the unions and management tried to reach agreement, but the gulf remained too wide. Murdoch announced that 210 clerical workers would be sacked on a last in first out basis if the number of voluntary redundancies did not rise commensurately. The unions replied by issuing a joint statement, making clear they did ‘not accept the mandatory notices’ that were due to be sent out the following morning. The mood at a meeting of NATSOPA clerical workers on 24 February was firmly defiant. In the Spectator, the cartoonist Michael Heath drew an egg timer with the words The Times on it – the sand had almost run out.[267]

At such a moment it would have been helpful if the editor and the proprietor could have managed the pretence of a united front. Evans tried to woo Murdoch by telling him what he wanted to hear but the latter cold-shouldered him.[268] Back on 10 February, the Guardian had reported rumours that Evans’s future had been discussed at a meeting of Times Newspapers’ board of directors. Had this been true (it was not) it would have narrowed the ‘mole’ down to those seated around the boardroom table. Murdoch was quick to deny the story, issuing a statement decrying the ‘malicious, self-serving and wrong’ rumours and praising his editor, whose ‘outstanding qualities and journalistic skills are recognized throughout the world’. Not everyone was convinced. Private Eye, with its vendetta against ‘Dame Harold Evans’ (supposedly confusing him with Dame Edith Evans, first lady of the English stage), played up the stories, as did the new William Hickey columnist in the Daily Express. Evans was not the sort of Fleet Street editor who took a relaxed view about what rival newspapers wrote about him. He believed in the righteous purpose of the fourth estate and was not prepared to tolerate its failings in regard to himself.

Back in September, Evans had taken such exception to a sloppily researched article about his Times editorship in Harpers & Queen entitled ‘O Tempora! O Mores!’ that he forced the magazine’s editor to publish a blow-by-blow rebuttal of points of error. These corrections ranged from ‘Mr Anthony Holden’s mother-in-law is not the Queen’s gynaecologist’ to ‘Mr Holden’s wife does not play the harpsichord’. Readers of the glossy fashion magazine were also to be alerted to the fact that ‘Mr Peter Watson did not go for a trial for Bristol Rovers’ and ‘Mr Brian MacArthur has never written a headline “It’s a beaut”.’[269] Many thought Evans would have been better letting some of this trivia go. But he was even more incandescent when, on 1 March 1982, the BBC’s Panorama alleged – in a feature on the crisis at The Times – that he had moved an illustration of Libyan hit men from an inside page to the front page on Murdoch’s instructions. Evans demanded the BBC issue a statement at the beginning of the following week’s programme conceding the claim was ‘false in detail and inference’.[270] The allegation was indeed untrue, but it had come from someone intent on mischief from inside the newspaper. The BBC ignored Evans’s demand. While this was going on, he was also preparing to go to court against Private Eye after it accused him of being a ‘two-faced hypocrite’ who had tried to do a deal with Rothermere’s Associated Newspapers for Times Newspapers even after he had approved Murdoch on the vetting committee (but before Murdoch offered him the Times editorship). Private Eye had a witness, Hugh Stephenson, and its case would have been strengthened had it known that after Evans had approved Murdoch on the vetting committee, he had written to congratulate Jonathan Aitken on his anti-Murdoch speech in the Commons. Nonetheless, Evans was adamant that he had not assisted Associated, and was determined to get legal redress, dismissing Stephenson as ‘a disappointed potential Editor of The Times’.[271] Richard Ingrams, the Eye’s editor, remained determined to find fault with Evans, subsequently grumbling, ‘the fellow has a nasty habit of suing for libel, an aspect of the great crusader for press freedom not often noted by his admirers’.[272]

During February, the divisions within Gray’s Inn Road ceased being gossip and became hard news. ‘There were two teams producing one newspaper,’ recalled Tim Austin. One team comprised those loyal to the editor. Primarily there were the two men he had brought in to sharpen features and policy, Anthony Holden and Bernard Donoughue. There were also others like Holden’s deputy, Peter Stothard, who had crossed the bridge from the Sunday Times with its illustrious editor. They were in no doubt that, left to his own devices, Evans was a genius who was transforming The Times for the better. They gave him their total loyalty. It was Evans’s great strength that he inspired such emotions in those he appointed and encouraged. It was his weakness that he could not command such loyalty from many of the entrenched Times staff he inherited. Those in the latter camp were a more diffuse entity, brought together only by their belief that the paper was descending into chaos and needed to be rescued by someone who understood its (supposed) core values. Much of what they disliked about Evans’s editorship were actually decisions driven by Murdoch in his desire to cut costs and modernize the paper. But while they could not get rid of the man whose money was keeping them in employment, they could balance what they saw as his less enlightened traits if there was a new editor who combined a will to stand up to him with a sensibility for stabilizing the atmosphere on the paper. Such a man existed in the deputy editor, Charles Douglas-Home. And it was no secret that he was increasingly disaffected with Harold Evans.

Towards the end of February, just as Fred Emery was poised to go on a skiing holiday, he received a telephone call. ‘I’m sorry you’re going away,’ said the caller, by way of introduction. ‘Who’s speaking?’ demanded Emery, momentarily failing to register the mild Australian accent. The proprietor asked if he could pop in to see him before he went skiing, making clear that it was a matter of some urgency. Intrigued, Emery hurried over, wondering what could possibly be so pressing. Murdoch came straight to the point. ‘I’m thinking of changing the editor,’ he said, adding that he now believed Douglas-Home should succeed. He wanted to know what Emery thought. Emery asked what his reasons for the change might be and was told, ‘Harry is all over the place.’ He was particularly concerned about the influence of Bernard Donoughue and the generous terms upon which he had been hired (while maintaining his City interests). Emery admitted that the paper was indeed in chaos. He also supported Douglas-Home’s candidature, while adding that there might be a problem with some of the home news reporters who had never forgiven him for keeping a secret dossier on their private lives. Although disabusing Murdoch on the issue of Evans’s politics (he was not, as the proprietor suspected, endorsing the SDP), Emery had largely confirmed his suspicions. Emery was thanked and told to proceed with his skiing holiday.[273]

There were several theatres of war, but none more important than that over the leader column. Evans recognized that the chief leader writer, Owen Hickey, was an authoritative commentator. On important issues such as the Middle East and Ireland, Hickey shared Evans’s generally pro-Israeli, pro-Ulster Unionist disposition. But Hickey did not contribute much to the leader conferences, preferring to act as if the column was his personal fiefdom where he should be left undisturbed to formulate his own thoughts. Leader writers had long believed themselves to be a higher caste of Times journalist and jealously guarded their right to opine. It was Thomas Barnes (editor, 1817–41), who had introduced the unsigned leader article, prompting William Cobbett to rail against its anonymous pronouncements as if ‘each paragraph appears to be a little sort of order in council; a solemn decision of a species of literary conclave’.[274] Barnes and his team had ‘thundered out’ in the cause of reform, giving the paper its ‘Thunderer’ nickname in the process. But as Evans was aware, the tone had long since become more Delphic. ‘If this was the citadel of The Times,’ he concluded, ‘it was stultified by charm.’ He parodied the style of one of the leader writers, Geoffrey Smith, along the lines of, ‘The crucifixion was not a good thing, but then it was not altogether a bad thing either.’[275]

The reflective and balanced articles were all very well, but Evans wanted to ‘get into the engine-room of government policy, leading as well as reacting’.[276] He looked to Bernard Donoughue, whom he had brought in to formulate the paper’s political strategy, to provide this. Donoughue succeeded in impressing upon the editor the case for using the paper to attack the Government’s economic policies. This raised problems of personality as well as politics. Donoughue and Hickey did not work effectively together.[277] They especially disagreed on Ireland where, despite his Catholicism and his ownership of a farm in the Republic, Hickey remained a conviction Unionist. Nor was Hickey alone in finding Donoughue’s manner that of the bully and there was resentment of him as another Evans import who was indulged by his patron more than the longer serving staff. Certainly he looked ‘like a tough centre forward in professional football’ as Evans put it, gap-toothed and hair sitting ‘tightly on his head in orderly rows of crinkly black like the paper one finds in boxes of chocolates’. But he had every claim to authority as the son of a Northamptonshire car factory worker who had gone down with a First from Oxford and, before his thirties were out, was running the Number Ten Street Policy Unit first for Wilson and later for Callaghan. When Thomson had put Times Newspapers up for sale, Donoughue had been Evans’s lieutenant trying to cobble together the Sunday Times consortium and had briefed MPs to block Biffen’s non-referral of Murdoch’s bid to the Monopolies Commission.

Donoughue was a man of great talents but, unintentionally, he contributed to Evans’s downfall. His role was widely resented by his colleagues who were agreed that he was a disruptive and alien presence at The Times (although they were divided over whether they believed his loyalty was first and foremost to the Labour Party – for whom he was assumed to be informally spying – or to his patron, the editor). Evans was a news-driven editor not a political thinker and consequently felt he needed Donoughue to provide ideological direction. But he was asking for trouble in appointing as his political guru a man who fundamentally opposed the line of the chief leader writer, hated the proprietor, appeared addicted to fuelling conspiracy theories and treated established members of staff with rudeness or suspicion. Rightly or wrongly, most traditional Times journalists took the view that Evans, like a Plantaganet monarch with foreign favourites, relied too heavily on bad counsel. Their desire to be rid of Evans, was, as much, a will to be shot of Donoughue.

When Donoughue arrived, Hickey had already been a leader writer for twenty-six years and the contrast between the two could scarcely have been more marked. Hickey conveyed a shy, donnish and in dress slightly down-at-heel exterior that conflicted with his early days. At Clifton College – the sports-conscious public school to which his Catholic Irish parents had sent him – he had captained both the rugby and cricket teams. During the war he had served with the Third Battalion of the Irish Guards, losing an eye in Normandy. He maintained that he owed his life to his batman who had carried him from the battlefield. After the war he had gone up to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he continued to play cricket and rugby and went down with a First in Greats. In 1949, William Haley had persuaded him to move from the Times Educational Supplement to The Times and he had written the paper’s leaders opposing the 1963 Robbins Report’s call for the rapid expansion of Britain’s universities. He had also drafted much of the 1970 ‘White Swan’ letter against Rees-Mogg’s efforts to broaden The Times’s appeal (which, he believed, meant lowering its standards).[278] But he saved his spiciest writing for the daily round-up he gave each morning to Rees-Mogg on the previous day’s paper, with such acerbic observations as ‘by-line suggests our reporter was at Hammersmith and Covent Garden simultaneously. A reading suggests she was at neither’ and ‘Alan Hamilton has been south of the border long enough not to regard artichokes in cans and sardines as delicacies’.[279] He was, in the verdict of the managing editor, John Grant, ‘the conscience of the paper’. Increasingly it was a troubled conscience.

Evans wanted to run a Times campaign against lead in petrol. Des Wilson, chairman of CLEAR (Campaign for Lead-Free Air), had sent Anthony Holden copies of private correspondence from the Government’s Chief Medical Officer to the Government warning of the health dangers – especially to children – of lead in petrol. To Evans there seemed the possibility of a Government cover-up waiting to be exposed, but the reaction of the paper’s old guard was summed up by the home news editor, Rodney Cowton, who asked with an air of distaste if he was being ordered to run ‘a campaign’ on the subject. The increasingly truculent Charles Douglas-Home phrased it even more dismissively, pondering aloud, ‘What is campaigning journalism?’ To his thinking, the concept was suspect, smacking of personal agendas and sensational (unbalanced) reporting. Temporarily out of the office, Evans wanted Holden to make a big issue out of the story, but Douglas-Home pulled rank and used his authority as deputy editor to shunt the story into the obscurity he believed it deserved.[280] It was a direct challenge to Evans’s authority. The gloves were off.

Evans now had to face a barrage of jabs and cuts from several directions. Some colleagues, who might have helped absorb the blows, were absent. Emery was hurtling down black runs. The other acting editor over the festive period, Brian MacArthur, had impressed Murdoch and been rewarded with the deputy editorship of the Sunday Times. This was The Times’s loss. Nor did Evans enjoy the loyalty of many who remained. Louis Heren all but denounced him on BBC television. Equally unhappy about the situation over which Evans was presiding, John Grant, the managing editor, threatened to resign. This spurred Douglas-Home to call on Murdoch to tell him that, if Grant left, he too would go. The prospect of losing both the deputy editor and the managing editor spurred Murdoch to depose Evans more quickly than he had intended. The fact that Granada television’s What The Papers Say had just awarded him the title of Editor of the Year was a mere inconvenience.

Donoughue had repeatedly challenged Douglas-Home to prove his loyalty to Evans, and the protestations of allegiance were wearing thin.[281] Evans was to paint an unflattering picture of his deputy’s behaviour during this period, implying that he was motivated by a self-serving desire to seize the editorship for himself. On the other hand, Evans’s critics thought that when it came to being self-serving, Evans still had questions to answer about his own role in accepting the editorship from someone he had made such concerted attempts to prevent owning the paper.[282] But Douglas-Home’s motives were less clear-cut than the Evans loyalists assumed. Far from being a sycophant towards the proprietor, he was distinctly wary of him. It was what he regarded as Evans’s weakness in the face of Murdoch’s ill temper that disheartened him.[283] There was more than a whiff of snobbery from some of the staff who lined up behind the Eton and Royal Scots Greys Douglas-Home over the northerner and his posse of meritocratic henchmen but a principal belief was that ‘Charlie’ was the man who would stand up to Murdoch, which ‘Harry’ had supposedly failed to do. It was Evans’s misfortune that Murdoch himself now wanted a dose of Douglas-Home as well.

But did Douglas-Home want to work with Murdoch? Far from pulling out all the stops to supplant Evans, he had entered into negotiations to leave The Times for the Daily Telegraph. Notified of this, Evans had begun to look around for a new deputy and had even approached Colin Welch.[284] Welch, who had resigned as the deputy editor of the Telegraph in 1980, was a noted Tory journalist of the intellectual right. If Evans felt Murdoch’s pressure to adopt a more right-wing tone in the paper, then he could not have appeased the proprietor more than by contemplating a prominent role for Welch. Having told Evans of his decision to resign, Douglas-Home proposed postponing his actual leaving until the immediate crisis was over (financially it also made sense to wait until the new tax year in April). In the meantime, he received information that would make him pause further – for a well-placed source assured him that Evans was losing his grip on the situation and would soon be leaving Gray’s Inn Road himself. The source was Evans’s own secretary, Liz Seeber. Given her job description, Seeber was hardly displaying the customary loyalty to her boss, but she had come to the conclusion Evans was presiding over the paper’s collapse and that the only way of saving it was to help Douglas-Home stay in the game. ‘The atmosphere was so unpleasant, it was a dreadful environment to work in’ was how she defended her actions. ‘You had people like Bernard Donoughue permanently in and out of Harry’s office and you just wanted it to be over; it was no longer running a newspaper, it was Machiavellian goings-on.’[285] Douglas-Home later repaid her efforts by giving a book written by her husband a noticeably glowing review.[286] But even with this flow of information about what Evans was up to, Douglas-Home still wavered. On the anniversary of Evans’s appointment, Murdoch telephoned Marmaduke Hussey to tell him, ‘I’ve ballsed it up. Harry is going so I’m putting in Charlie.’ Hussey later wrote, ‘I knew that already because Charlie had come to see me the night before and was doubtful whether to accept the job. “For heaven’s sake,” I told him. “I’ve spent five years trying to secure you the editorship – if you want out now I’ll never speak to you again.”’[287]

There were certainly some dirty tricks played. Evans loyalists were maintaining that the editor was in a life or death battle to save The Times’s editorial independence from a proprietor bent on imposing his own (increasingly right-wing) views on the paper. This claim was undermined by the leader writer, Geoffrey Smith, who walked into a BBC studio and read out a memo Evans had sent to Murdoch asking for the latter’s view on how the Chancellor’s forthcoming Budget should be presented in the paper. The letter was dynamite but it was between the editor and the proprietor, so why was it being read out for broadcast by a Times leader writer? It was a typed letter and the answer appeared to rest with the holder of the carbon copy. Whether it had touched the intermediary hands of the deputy editor remained a matter for speculation. But one thing was clear: that members of the staff were cheerfully appearing on radio and television alternately to stab or slap the back of their editor was an intolerable situation. For a week, the chaos at The Times dominated the news. Times journalists would gather round the television for the lunchtime news, one half of them cheering Geraldine Norman who would be broadcast condemning Evans, the other half cheering Anthony Holden’s championing of him. Then they would all return to their desks and get on with the job of producing Evans’s newspaper.

Because of their well-placed mole, Evans’s critics had access to more than one incriminating piece of evidence. In a first-year progress report of 21 February, Evans had adopted an excessively ingratiating tone towards Murdoch. ‘Thank you again for the opportunity and the ideas,’ he purred. ‘We are all one hundred per cent behind you in the great battle and I’m glad we’re having it now.’ Evans’s upbeat assessment appeared to offer Murdoch what it could be assumed he wanted. Evans announced that he had approached the right-wing Colin Welch about joining The Times, adding a line that seemed designed to appeal to the Australian’s sociopolitical assumptions, ‘I did talk to Alexander Chancellor but came to the conclusion he represents part of the effete old tired England.’ However, ‘there would be mileage I think in your idea of having some international names (like Dahrendorf, Kissinger, Kristol)’. Regrettably, Evans proceeded to speak ill of past or present colleagues: ‘You’ll perhaps have seen the attack on me in the Spectator for getting rid of “stars” but believe me Hennessy, Berthoud and Berlins they mention were all bone idle. So are many of the others who have gone or are going. It is another part of the old-Times brigade not wanting to work, Louis Heren stirring it up a bit.’[288] The unfortunate tone of this letter tended to support Douglas-Home’s contention that Evans was not always the bulwark for liberty and defender of his staff that his supporters protested him to be.

In fact, if Evans’s tone had been intended to please his proprietor, he was to be sorely disappointed. Two days later, ‘Dear Chairman’ was how he began a huffy note that objected to the ‘cursory comment on the detailed report of our first year which I volunteered to you’. To Murdoch’s criticism that the editorial line had lacked consistency, Evans shot back, ‘You have not, as it happens, made this criticism on several occasions to me but only once (7 January 1982) though I have been made aware of what you have said to other members of the staff when I have not been present.’[289] When it came to the embattled editor, the proprietor’s heart had turned to stone.

Tuesday 9 March marked the first anniversary of Harold Evans’s appointment as editor. It was hardly a soft news day appropriate for distracting him. It was Budget Day and Evans ensured that The Times covered, reported, reproduced and analysed Sir Geoffrey Howe’s measures in an impressive level of detail. ‘The Chancellor of the Exchequer,’ Evans crooned justifiably to Murdoch afterwards, ‘has gone out of his way to say that the Budget coverage of The Times had restored The Times as a newspaper of record for the first time for many years.’[290] Written by Donoughue, the leader took a measured view although the front page headline ‘Howe heartens Tories: a little for everyone’ was certainly more positive than the previous year’s assessment. Rab Butler’s death was also front-page news and together with the obituary was accompanied by an article by his one-time acolyte, Enoch Powell. Powell was as insightful as he was admiring of the man thrice denied the opportunity to become Prime Minister. It ‘was mere chance’, he noted, that Butler’s childhood injuries prevented him from serving in either war, ‘but to some of us it was a chance that seemed to match an aspect of his character. He was not the kind of man for whom any cause – not even his own – was worth fighting to the death, worth risking everything.’[291]

Having only recently returned from his own father’s funeral, Evans was back at Gray’s Inn Road and was just preparing to listen to the Budget speech when he was summoned upstairs to see Murdoch. The proprietor announced he wanted his immediate resignation. He had already asked Douglas-Home to succeed him and Douglas-Home had accepted. According to Evans’s account of the conversation, Murdoch had the grace to look emotional about the situation. Nonetheless he stated his reasons – ‘the place is in chaos’ and Evans had lost the support of senior staff. Evans shot back that it was management’s decisions that had created the chaos and reeled off a list of the senior staff that remained loyal to him. He had no intention of accepting this summary dismissal. Instead he left, refusing to resign, with Murdoch threatening to summon the independent national directors to enforce his departure.[292]

The independent national directors were supposed to ensure that the proprietor did not put inappropriate pressure on his editor. Instead, Murdoch was threatening to use them as an ultimate force to ensure the editor was removed from the building. Evans had taken the drafting of the editorial safeguards extremely seriously. The following morning he went to seek the advice of one of the independent directors, Lord Robens. The two men met in the Reform Club, Evans confiding his predicament to the ageing Labour peer above the din of a vacuum cleaner engaged in a very thorough once over of their meeting place. Robens considered the matter and suggested that, rather than staying on for six more months of this torture, Evans should go away on holiday. According to Evans’s account, Robens advised, ‘Don’t talk to Murdoch. Leave everything to your lawyer. Relax. We’ll stand by you.’[293] The meeting concluded, Evans strode out from the Reform’s confident classicism into St James’s Park, continually circling the gardens like a yacht with a jammed rudder while he tried to decide whether to fight for his job and the paper’s integrity or to go quietly. Eventually he compromised. He would go noisily.

Back at the office, Evans was received by the unwelcoming committee of Murdoch, Searby and Long who pressed him to announce his resignation before the stand-off created yet more appalling publicity for The Times. But believing there were higher issues at stake, making an issue was precisely Evans’s purpose. The television cameras massed outside Gray’s Inn Road and Evans’s home. His admirers and detractors organized further public demonstrations of support and disrespect while those inside the building tried to put together the paper, unsure whether to take their orders from Evans or Douglas-Home.

The headline for 12 March ran ‘Murdoch: “Times is secure”.’ His threat to close down the paper had been lifted by the agreement with the print and clerical unions to cut 430 full-time jobs (rather than the six hundred requested) and cut around four hundred shifts. Taken together with the savings from switching to cold composition, the TNL wages bill would shrink by £8 million. There would now be one thousand fewer jobs at Gray’s Inn Road than had existed when Murdoch had moved in. This was an extraordinary indictment on the previous owner’s inability to overcome union-backed overmanning. At the foot of the news story appeared the unadorned statement: ‘Mr Harold Evans, the Editor of The Times, said he had no comment to make on reports circulating about his future as editor. He was on duty last night as usual.’[294]

In the leader article he wrote, entitled ‘The Deeper Issues’ (some felt this referred to his own predicament), Evans surveyed the panorama of the British disease: the human waste of mass unemployment, the crumbling inner cities, ‘idiot union abuse’, the ‘bored insularity’ of Britain’s approach to its international obligations and the failure of any political party to find answers. There was a scarcely repressed anger from the pen of an editor who had just buried his father – an intelligent and encouraging man for whom the limits of opportunity had confined to a job driving trains. But there were also pointed references to Evans’s own finest hour (the Thalidomide victims) and an attack on ‘the monopoly powers of capital or the trade unions, or too great a concentration of power in any one institution: the national press itself, to be fair, is worryingly over-concentrated’.[295] There was no need to name names.

Saturday’s Times gave an accurate picture of the situation at Gray’s Inn Road – the report was utterly incomprehensible. Murdoch was quoted as stating ‘with the unanimous approval of the independent national directors’ that Evans had been replaced by Douglas-Home. Lord Robens described this statement as ‘a bit mixed up’. Evans was quoted claiming he had not resigned and his staying on was ‘not about money, as alleged. It is and has been an argument about principles.’ Gerald Long claimed that the independence of the editor had never been in dispute. Holden said it was. Douglas-Home said it wasn’t, going on the record to state:

There has been to my knowledge, and I have worked closely with the editor, absolutely no instruction or vestige of an instruction to the editor to publish or not to publish any political article. There has been no undue pressure to influence the editor’s policy or decisions.[296]

Times readers could have been forgiven for believing they were looking not at a news report but at a bleeding gash running down the front page of their paper. During the day, the Journalists of The Times (JOTT) group passed a motion that they released to the press calling for Evans to be replaced by Douglas-Home. They found fault with the ‘gradual erosion of editorial standards’ and Evans’s indecision: ‘The way the paper is laid out and run has changed so frequently that stability has been destroyed.’ Geraldine Norman had been to the fore of getting this motion accepted, much to the disquiet of many of the two hundred subscribing JOTT members whose approval she had not canvassed.[297] A pro-Evans counterpetition was circulated and also attracted support. Nobody wanted another week of this madness.

Meanwhile, Fred Emery had telephoned from the slopes in order to find out what was happening in his absence. Douglas-Home asked him to come back immediately, particularly requesting that he be back in time to edit the Sunday for Monday paper. Emery raced back and found the journalists had become even more polarized during his absence. He also discovered the reason Douglas-Home wanted him back to edit the paper on the Sunday evening. The editor-in-waiting was singing in a choir that evening. In the circumstances, this was a high note of insouciance.

The denouement came the following day, Monday, 15 March, in a series of remarkable twists and turns. Nobody seemed to know whether the editor was staying or going. However, he did periodically emerge to give the impression that he was still in charge. Taking inspiration from a photograph of himself playing tennis, he swung a clenched fist in the air and assured Emery, ‘I play to win!’ Half an hour later, he had tendered his resignation in the curtest possible letter addressed ‘To The Chairman’. It read in its entirety:

Dear Sir,

I hearby tender my resignation as editor of The Times.

Yours faithfully,

H. M. Evans

His colleagues found it easier getting accurate news from the far Pacific than from within the building. All they knew was that Evans had overseen a statement in the early editions of the paper reporting that he had not resigned. They were thus surprised when at 9.40 p.m. he curtly announced to the rolling cameras of News at Ten that he had indeed quit. His decision to give advance warning to ITN in order to maximize the publicity but not his own journalists dampened the send-off he might otherwise have been accorded.[298] Instead, when he was sure the cameras were in position, he walked out of the building, stopping only to shake hands with the uniformed guard at the reception desk (unsurprisingly, there was no sign of his secretary). Stopped by a television reporter as he got into the back seat of a waiting car, he refused to make further comment beyond observing, with a weary expression, that it was a tale longer than the Borgias.[299]