Murdoch interviewed the three ‘internal’ candidates on 16 February although, since he already had a preferred candidate in mind, he was essentially going through the motions. The man he wanted was not an old hand of The Times. Having made such a success steering the Sun, Larry Lamb anticipated the call up and was deeply hurt when it did not come. ‘I would never have dreamt of it,’ Murdoch later made clear, ‘he would have been a disaster.’5 Yet Murdoch’s critics, incredulous that he meant what he said about guaranteeing editorial independence, were still waiting to see which other stooge he would appoint. In an article entitled ‘Into the arms of Count Dracula’, the editor of the New Statesman, Bruce Page, informed his readers, ‘it is believed in the highest reaches of Times Newspapers that the candidate which [sic] he has in mind is Mr Bruce Rothwell. Rothwell can reasonably be described as a trusted Murdoch aide …’6 But, whatever was now the practice at the New Statesman, The Times was not ready to be run by a man named Bruce. Murdoch had fixed upon someone very different – a hero in liberal media circles.
Even before the deal to buy Times Newspapers was done, Murdoch had invited Harold Evans round to his flat in Eaton Place and asked him whether he would like to edit The Times. It was a probing, perhaps mischievous, question since Evans was at the time still trying to prevent the Murdoch bid for TNL so that his own Sunday Times consortium could succeed. But Murdoch could have been forgiven for regarding the avoidance of saying ‘no’ as a conditional ‘yes’.
Harold Evans was the most celebrated editor in Fleet Street. At a time when standards were said to be falling all over the ‘Street of Shame’, Evans appeared to exemplify all that was best about the public utility of journalism. By 1981, he had been editor of the Sunday Times for fourteen years – thereby shadowing exactly the service record of his opposite number, Rees-Mogg, in the adjoining building at Gray’s Inn Road. The two editors were the same age but their backgrounds could not have been more different. Two years older than Murdoch, Harold Evans was born in 1928, the son of an engine driver. His grandfather was illiterate. Leaving the local school in Manchester at the age of sixteen, he had got his first job towards the end of the Second World War as a £1-a-week reporter on a newspaper in Ashton-under-Lyme. The interruption of national service with the RAF in 1946 led to opportunity: the chance to study at Durham University (where he met his Liverpudlian first wife, Enid) and later Commonwealth Fund Journalism fellowships at the universities of Chicago and Stanford. By 1961 he had become editor of the Northern Echo. Driven by its new editor, the Echo started to take its investigative journalism beyond its Darlington readership. Its campaign to prove the innocence of a Londoner wrongly convicted of murder gained it national prominence. One of those who took notice was the editor of the Sunday Times, Sir Denis Hamilton, who brought Evans down to London to work alongside him. The following year, 1967, he succeeded Hamilton as editor of the paper. It was a meteoric rise from provincial semi-obscurity. Evans immediately proved himself at Gray’s Inn Road. In his new role as editor-in-chief, Sir Denis’s patronage and guidance were useful and some of the paper’s success was the consequence of his own formula: the paper’s colour magazine (a honey pot for advertising) and major book serializations. But Evans built on these strong foundations and, assisted by Bruce Page, Don Berry and others, he entrenched the position of the Sunday Times as Britain’s principal campaigning and investigative newspaper.
In 1972, Evans drove the campaign with which his name, and that of the Sunday Times, will always be associated: the battle to force Distillers Ltd to compensate adequately the victims of its drug, Thalidomide. The immediate reaction – as he well anticipated – was Distillers’ withdrawal of £600,000 worth of advertising in the paper. The other equally swift response was an injunction silencing the Sunday Times’s attempts to reveal the history of the drug’s development and marketing. With great tenacity (and an understanding proprietor in Roy Thomson), Evans continued the fight through the courts and to Strasbourg. Distillers was eventually forced into a £27 million payout to its product’s victims. And at last, in 1977, the Sunday Times got to print the details of its story (although the print unions decided to call a stoppage that day, ensuring few got to read about it).
Under Evans, the Sunday Times was a paper with a liberal conscience. The paper appeared at ease with the more permissive and meritocratic legacy of the 1960s. The cynic within Murdoch may well have thought that he could silence the howls of protest about his being allowed to buy The Times by putting such a respected, independent and liberal-minded editor in charge of it. Indeed, to appoint the man who had spent the previous months trying to wreck the News International bid with his own consortium (and who had privately applauded Aitken’s attack on it in the Commons) appeared to show a spirit of open-minded forgiveness that few had previously associated with Murdoch’s public conduct. Surely the new owner could not be all that right wing or controlling if he put in charge a man who had wanted the Sunday Times to be part owned by that tribune of democratic socialism, the Guardian? This would certainly be a calming message to convey.
But there was genuine admiration as well. Back in 1972, Murdoch had played his part in the Thalidomide controversy. He had been behind the anonymous posters that suddenly appeared across the country ridiculing Distillers, hoping (unsuccessfuly) that by this means his papers could discuss the company’s role at a time when its legal proceedings made doing so contempt of court. Unusually for Fleet Street proprietors, Murdoch understood every aspect of the newspaper business – not just the accounts. Thanks to the efforts of his father and Edward Pickering at the Express, Murdoch could sub articles with effortless aplomb. In this respect, he had something in common with Evans – comprehensive mastery of the journalistic craft. For Evans was the author of such tomes as The Active Newsroom and Editing and Design (in five volumes) which covered almost every aspect of putting together the written (and pictorial) page. The two men also appeared to have a common outlook. They admired American spirit and drive (both later became American citizens) and neither wished to be considered for membership of the traditional British Establishment. Despite his migration to London, Evans still wanted to be considered something of an outsider and this attracted Murdoch. The American academic Martin Wiener had just written his influential book, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit 1850–1980. Its message appealed to Murdoch who told a luncheon at the Savoy: ‘It is the very simple fact that politicians, bureaucrats, the gentlemanly professionals at the top of the civil service, churchmen, professional men, publicists, Oxbridge and the whole establishment just don’t like commerce.’ Apart from the reference to ‘publicists’, he had basically reeled off a list of the core Times readership. But he was not finished with his castigation: ‘They have produced a defensive and conservative outlook in business which has coalesced with a defensive and conservative trades union structure imposing on Britain a check in industrial growth, a pattern of industrial behaviour suspicious of change – energetic only in keeping things as they are.’7
With this attitude, it is easy to see why Murdoch hoped for great things from a restless and meritocratic figure like Harold Evans. That he could be given a pulpit in the housemagazine of the Establishment while being sufficiently intelligent to prevent accusations of being a downmarket influence made him, in Murdoch’s view, the ideal candidate.
It was up to the independent national directors, sitting on the holdings board of Times Newspapers, to make the final decision. The board consisted of four peers of the realm, Lords Roll, Dacre, Greene and Robens who, before ennoblement, had been Eric Roll, civil servant and banker; Hugh Trevor-Roper, historian; Sid Greene of the National Union of Railwaymen; and Alf Robens of the National Coal Board. Two new directors nominated by Murdoch now joined them: Sir Denis Hamilton and Sir Edward