The History of the Times: The Murdoch Years. Graham Stewart

the directors first voting on it. There was an embarrassing delay at the start of the meeting while this was done although it was not entirely to the directors’ credit that they appeared to know little about one of Fleet Street’s most successful editors and longest serving figures.⁸ It had been under Pickering’s editorship that the Daily Express had achieved its highest ever circulation. Suitably acquainted with his qualifications, the directors hastily assented to Pickering joining them and proceeded on to the main business – the appointment of the new editor. Under the articles of association, the proprietor had the power of putting forward his preference for editor. The directors had the right of veto but not necessarily the option of discussing who they actually wanted. Had they the right of proposition, the editorship would most likely have gone to Charles Douglas-Home. But it was Harold Evans’s name that Murdoch put before them.

      Not everyone shared his enthusiasm. Marmaduke Hussey, the executive vice-chairman of TNL who had overseen the failed shutdown strategy with the unions in 1979–80, had already assured Murdoch that the intention to make Evans editor of The Times and to move his old deputy, Frank Giles, into his vacated chair at the Sunday Times was ‘the quickest way to wreck two marvellous newspapers I can think of!’. To no avail, Hussey pleaded with him to make Douglas-Home the new editor.⁹ Having brought Evans to the Sunday Times in the first place and watched over him as group editor-in-chief and TNL chairman, Denis Hamilton was, in principle, well placed to offer his assessment. And it was not entirely favourable. Certainly, Evans had his flashes of inspiration, even genius, but he was temperamental and liable to change his mind. In the course of producing a once weekly product this could be managed, but in editing a daily it could be disastrous. Yet, at the meeting of national directors, Hamilton chose to pull his punches and the opposition to Evans’s appointment was instead led by the forthright historian Lord Dacre, who articulated his objections with a pointed vehemence that bordered upon the abusive. But Dacre’s blackball was not enough and following his departure to deliver a lecture at Oxford, Murdoch’s insistence that The Times needed the best and Evans was the best convinced the rest of the board.¹⁰ So it was that Harold Evans became only the eleventh man to edit The Times since Thomas Barnes established the modern concept of the office in 1816, the year after Waterloo.

      Evans’s appointment caused a buzz throughout Fleet Street. Those with a liking for archaic usage may still have referred to the paper as ‘The Thunderer’ but as a noun, not a verb. If anything, critics, particularly those who did not read it, thought of it as The (behind the) Times. Murdoch hoped that the new editor would instil some of the Sunday paper’s drive and contemporary feel into the all too respectable daily.

      Those happy with the paper as it was greeted this prospect with disquiet. Louis Heren was of the view that ‘we were not a daily version of the Sunday Times’. But he conceded that the niche was a small one, being ‘boxed in by the Guardian on our left and the Daily Telegraph on our right’ while ‘the FT stood between us and all that lovely advertising in the City of London’.¹¹ The fact that the paper’s readers were sufficiently loyal to return to it after it had been off the streets for almost a year was not, in itself, proof that all was well. In retrospect, Hugh Stephenson took the view that the 1979–80 shutdown ‘served to make people realize that the things they really missed about The Times were its quirky features – letters, law reports, obits, crossword. They didn’t miss its news, which wasn’t particularly good. In most respects the Daily Telegraph, the Guardian and the Financial Times were better newspapers.’¹² This was an assessment broadly shared by the new editor.¹³ In 1981, The Times was normally four pages longer than the Guardian and four pages shorter than the Telegraph. But the gap was wider in the statistics that mattered. In daily sales, the Guardian had overtaken The Times in 1974. Almost since the day of its launch in 1855, the Telegraph had given The Times a pasting. When Evans took over, The Times averaged 282,000 daily sales to the Telegraph’s 1.4 million.

      Now the drive was on at least to catch up with the Guardian again. There would be no repeat of the famous 1957 advertising campaign – ‘Top People Take The Times’ a preposterously exclusive slogan for a campaign supposedly intended to widen circulation. Murdoch believed The Times could aim for a half-million readership. Under Hamilton and Evans the Sunday Times, with its book serializations and glossy colour magazine, had promoted the new elite of the photogenic. It was as glamorous and of the moment as The Times was monochrome and old-fashioned. Evans’s Sunday Times promoted celebrities and ‘big names’ while the Times old guard were still lamenting the loss of the anonymous non-de-plume ‘By Our Special Correspondent’. Sunday Times reporters having occasion to cross the Gray’s Inn Road connecting bridge that took them into The Times claimed to feel they were crossing into East Berlin.

      The Times old guard – those horrified by the connotations of the word ‘promotion’ and ill at ease with the world of the colour supplement – hated the prospect of their paper being turned into a daily Sunday Times or a mark two Telegraph. They and their spiritual forebears had blocked a 1958 report by the accountants Coopers with its outlandish idea about putting news on the front page (as the Guardian had done since 1952), their objections only finally overcome in 1966. Nor did they see what was wrong with a relatively low circulation so long as it was sufficiently upmarket to cover its costs through advertising (as the FT did). There was certainly no obvious link between a broadsheet’s influence and its sales figures: by the late 1930s, the Telegraph had opened up a half-million lead on The Times, but it was Geoffrey Dawson who was the politically influential editor, not the Telegraph’s Arthur Watson.

      Those apprehensive about the forthcoming Evans – Murdoch strategy of going for growth could also point to precedent. Fortified by Thomson’s cash injection, Rees-Mogg’s editorship had started with radical attempts to modernize the paper by introducing a separate business news section, a roving ‘News Team’ acting like a rapid reaction force under Michael Cudlipp’s direction, bigger headlines and shorter sentences. Circulation had improved dramatically from 280,000 in 1966 to 430,000 in 1969. Meeting in the White Swan pub, twenty-nine members of staff, including the young Charles Douglas-Home and Brian MacArthur, had signed a declaration condemning what they believed was the accompanying cheapening of the paper’s authority. But the most telling argument was that the paper was still not making a profit – the boosted revenue from sales being outstripped by the cost of the expansion programme necessary to sustain it. So the expansion policy was abandoned; circulation slipped back towards 300,000 and, by the mid-seventies the paper even – fleetingly – returned a profit.

      Now the introduction of a Sunday Times man at the helm suggested The Times would retrace its steps and repeat the failed 1967–9 growth strategy, but Harold Evans saw his task as editor in less primarily commercial terms. ‘At the Sunday Times before Hamilton and Thomson,’ he later recalled, ‘it was a sackable offence to provoke a solicitor’s letter,’ but after he became editor ‘we were in the Law Courts so many times I felt they owed me an honorary wig.’ Evans maintained that this became necessary ‘because real reporting ran into extensions of corporate and executive power that had gone undetected, hence unchallenged, and the courts, uninhibited by a Bill of Rights, had given property rights priority over personal rights.’¹⁴ This had not been how The Times had generally seen its role during the same period. Indeed, when in 1969 the paper caught out Metropolitan policemen in a bribery sting some old Times hands were deeply uneasy about their paper going in for the sort of exposé that subverted the good name of the forces of law and order. Others agreed. Three days after the story broke, the paper reported on its front page a meeting of Edward Heath’s Shadow Cabinet in which ‘it was considered deeply disturbing that to trial by television …