With Evans’s arrival, it seemed The Times would become a disruptive influence again. The new editor proposed what he called ‘vertical journalism’ as opposed to the ‘horizontal school of journalism’ with which the paper had become too comfy, whereby ‘speeches, reports and ceremonials occur and they are rendered into words in print along a straight assemblyline. Scandal and injustice go unremarked unless someone else discovers them.’ Evans believed he was the true inheritor of an older Times tradition, ‘The Thunderer’ of Thomas Barnes, in which ‘the effort to get to the bottom of things, which is the aspiration of the vertical school of journalism, cannot be indiscriminate. Judgments have to be made about what is important; they are moral judgments. The vertical school is active. It sets its own agenda; it is not afraid of the word “campaign”.’16
Evans’s style of leadership was markedly different from that of Rees-Mogg. The outgoing editor had always given the impression that it was the paper’s commentary on events that was his prime interest. The leader articles written, he was quite content to leave the office shortly after 7 p.m. in order to spend the evening with his family or at official functions and dinners, confident that the team on the ‘backbench’ could be entrusted with presenting the breaking news stories. Evans could not have been more different. On his first day as editor, he told his staff that he would be on the backbench every night. ‘It is called,’ he said proudly, ‘the editing theory of maximum irritation.’17 And he was not wrong. As if to make his point, he took off his jacket – a sight unseen during Rees-Mogg’s fourteen years in the chair (unfortunately Evans’s unattended jacket was promptly stolen).18
One who lamented the passing of the baton from Rees-Mogg to Evans was Auberon Waugh. He foresaw what might be in store:
If, in the months that follow, footling diagrams or ‘graphics’ begin to appear illustrating how the hostages walked off their aeroplane into a reception centre; profiles of leading hairdressers suddenly break on page 12; inquiries into the safety of some patent medicine replace Philip Howard’s ruminations on the English language; if a cheap, flip radicalism replaces Mr Rees-Mogg’s carefully argued honourable conservatism and nasty, gritty English creeps into the leader columns where once his sonorous phrases basked and played in the sun; if it begins to seem that one more beleaguered outpost has fallen to the barbarians, we should reflect that there never really was an England which spoke in this language of good nature, of friendliness, of fair dealing, of balance. It was all a product of Mr Rees-Mogg’s beautiful mind.19
II
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.20 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’.21
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.22 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.23 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.’24