Although the union activists in the paper’s NUJ chapel remained sceptical or hostile, opinion was sharply divided and immediately after Murdoch had made his address to them, one hundred journalists on the paper quickly signed a statement supporting his purchase. On the same day, Jake Ecclestone passed on the view of the NUJ meeting to John Biffen, the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, demanding a referral to the Monopolies Commission.69
Looked at at face value, the case for referring the Murdoch bid to the Monopolies Commission was overwhelming. In 1966 Harold Wilson’s Government had referred Roy Thomson’s purchase of The Times even although it would give him control of a mere 6.5 per cent of the national and provincial dailies’ circulation. In 1981, The Times had only 1.9 per cent of the market share in national daily newspapers but the Sun enjoyed a 25.3 per cent share. Together this meant that News International’s papers would account for 27.2 per cent. Concentration was yet higher in the Sundays market where the 7.7 per cent share of the Sunday Times, when added to that of the News of the World, gave News International a 31 per cent share.70
On the other hand, such was the relative smallness of their sale, the addition of the Times titles made only marginal difference to News International’s total market share, especially in the dailies market. In any case, adding the Sun’s circulation to The Times produced a figure of limited practical meaning since the proportion of readers who regularly bought both a daily tabloid and a broadsheet was tiny. But even if the sales were all added together and treated as one, the company would still not be the market leader. Adding the sales of The Times gave News International 4,120,493 daily sales. The Mirror Group had 4,380,000 sales a day. London would still have less of a monopoly newspaper structure than existed in New York, Paris, Bonn or Frankfurt.71
Whatever the spin put on the statistics, the 1973 Fair Trade Act stipulated that all major newspaper takeovers should be referred to the Monopolies Commission. But the Secretary of State could overrule this stipulation if the paper concerned was unprofitable and in danger of closing down without a quick transferral of ownership. This section, 58(3) of the Act, was the Thomson-Murdoch ‘get out of jail’ card and one they were determined to play.
Thomson’s submission to the Secretary of State, John Biffen, left little room for ambiguity. On no account would the seller extend the deadline in order to facilitate the Monopolies Commission to undertake its report (which was expected to take a minimum of eight weeks to compile). The proposed agreement with Murdoch rested on consent from the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) being granted by 12 February otherwise the deal was off. A new potential proprietor would then have to be approached in the time remaining. This would not be easy since ‘there is little likelihood that a suitable alternative buyer for TNL as a whole will be identified. There are no signs that any other potential buyer for TNL as a whole has as strong a commitment as NIL [News International Limited] to preserving The Times on a long-term basis.’ Indeed, if a new serious bidder came forward he would probably be another owner of a media empire, necessitating a fresh Monopolies Commission report to be put in motion and causing yet further delay. The process could last for months with each serious bidder eventually being ruled out in turn until someone sufficiently minor could be found to take on the paper’s elephantine problems. Rather than continue losing money while this merry-go-round proceeded at its own leisurely pace, Thomson were not prepared to relent on their decision to close down The Times and its sisters, with or without a sale, by 15 March.72 In other words, the Government could agree to the sale and secure the papers future, or it could demand a referral and risk their destruction.
On 26 January, John Biffen was deluged with visitors. Having only just returned from a trip to India, he was heavily dependent upon the briefing provided by his departmental officials who had spent the last few days working on the legal technicalities of whether the TNL sale necessitated a referral. Sally Oppenheim, his junior minister at the DTI, came over to discuss the matter. Their first visitor was Sir Gordon Brunton. Biffen and Oppenheim insisted that he postpone the sale deadline so that the Monopolies Commission could intervene. Brunton refused point-blank.73 The next visitor was Rupert Murdoch. He made clear that he would pull out of the deal if it was referred to the Commission. If some thought this a bluff, they were wrong. Murdoch would have pulled out if the deal had been referred.74 Then came Jake Eccelestone (with Eric Jacobs, his Sunday Times counterpart) to put the NUJ case for referral. Finally, Sir Denis Hamilton called, assuring Biffen that Murdoch was the papers’ only hope and that he had made guarantees on editorial freedom that no other Fleet Street proprietor had been prepared to make.
This was not the only influence brought to bear. In 1981, Margaret Thatcher and Rupert Murdoch scarcely knew one another and had no communication whatsoever during the period in which The Times bid and referral was up for discussion.75 But, in Woodrow Wyatt, Murdoch and the Prime Minister had a mutual friend. This clearly being the moment to make the most of such a contact, Murdoch got Wyatt to plead his case directly with her.76 Subsequently, Murdoch assumed that Biffen was ‘probably told what to do by Margaret.’77 In fact the part played by Margaret Thatcher in the decision not to refer the bid was at best a subtle one. Critics of Thatcher and Murdoch have long maintained that there must have been some – even if tacit – understanding in which she used her weight to ensure that he could bypass the Monopolies Commission and buy The Times and in return he ensured his newspapers henceforth banged the Thatcherite drum. There is a problem with this theory. Although John Biffen assumed the Prime Minister wanted the bid to go through, he could recall no occasion when she pressed him on the matter. What was more, when ‘E’ Committee – the Cabinet committee delegated with the task of determining whether to make the referral – convened on 26 January the most outspoken voice in favour of permitting Murdoch’s purchase was the decidedly un-Thatcherite Jim Prior. Prior, who was Employment Secretary, wanted the deal to go ahead not least because the unions wanted Murdoch.78
Whether adding 1.9 per cent to News International’s market share of daily sales constituted a threat to the free working of a competitive market was no longer the issue bothering ‘E’ Committee. But there certainly remained a presentational problem if the bid was not referred. Lawyers spent the evening working out how the safeguards Murdoch had made to the TNL vetting committee could be legally incorporated into the conditions giving consent for the transfer of ownership to go ahead. The somewhat arbitrary commitment to editorial quality could not be phrased into a legal obligation, but in other respects the guarantees would be made legally binding. Although a fine was more likely, Murdoch would risk a spell in jail if he flouted them.79
Biffen was due to give his statement to the Commons on 27 January. By then ninety-two MPs had signed the Early Day Motion demanding a referral to the Monopolies Commission and the Speaker of the House of Commons permitted the Opposition a three-hour emergency debate on the matter.
As Shadow Secretary of State, Labour’s John Smith opened the case for referring the sale of what he called ‘The Times, perhaps our most prestigious newspaper’. It was, he believed, ‘one of the largest and perhaps the most significant mergers in the history of journalism in the United Kingdom’. He questioned the Sunday Times’s supposed unprofitability and cast doubts on the ability of national directors – of whom ‘there was a faint air of the Athenaeum’ – to keep Murdoch true to his promises. Biffen then made his statement. He conceded the law stipulated that any transferral of a national newspaper must be subject