One change that the wedding brought that did stay was on the paper’s masthead. From the first edition in 1785 until 1966 The Times’s masthead had borne the royal coat of arms, but this had fallen victim to ‘modernization’ when the paper was redesigned to carry news on the front page. The presence of the royal arms had accentuated the uneven lengths of ‘The’ and ‘Times’ and made the masthead appear off-centre at the top of the page. Stanley Morison had wanted to remove it in 1932 but was dissuaded by the strong opposition of John Walter, scion of the paper’s founder, who still held shares in the company.42 But the eventual exclusion of the device was a doubtful improvement since it made the paper’s masthead excessively austere and bare. Evans had intended to revive the royal arms for the paper’s two hundredth anniversary in 1985 (he had little doubt he would still be in the chair for it) but the huge acclaim from staff and readers to his inclusion of it on the royal wedding edition convinced him that it should stay there forthwith.
In fact, The Times had no more right – and never had – to carry the royal arms than any other newspaper. It did not have the necessary royal warrant, a point the College of Arms had, with ineffectual menaces, periodically brought to the editor’s attention. Although there was some inconsistency over the years, the paper had tended to use the royal arms of the day, but Evans decided to go back to the original coat of arms of King George III. It is this set of arms – complete with the white horse of Hanover in the bottom right quarter – that has graced each edition of the paper since 1981.
With Gray’s Inn Road awash with self-congratulation and the royal couple sailing away on Britannia for their honeymoon, Evans chose his moment to slip out of the country for a three-week holiday. He had scarcely rested since his appointment and most impartial observers could only conclude his opening months had been a success, speckled with moments of triumph. In fact, he too was off to get married.
A fifty-two-year-old father of three, Evans had been divorced from his schoolteacher wife, Enid, after twenty-five years of marriage in 1978 and for the past six years had been seen in the company of his fiancée, the up-and-coming twenty-seven-year-old editor of Tatler, Tina Brown. The couple married on 19 August at the Long Island home of Evans’s friend, the renowned Washington Post editor, Ben Bradlee. Bradlee was Evans’s best man and, with the bride’s parents in Spain, Anthony Holden stepped in to give the bride away. Anna Blundy, daughter of the Sunday Times’s fearless foreign correspondent, David Blundy, was maid of honour. However far from Fleet Street, it was still a journalists’ wedding. Some months later, Evans dropped a memo to Colin Watson, the obituaries editor, telling him to advise his contributors to ‘introduce the subject’s marriage(s) if any, at the appropriate chronological moment. A marriage and the support of a wife is often an important point in a person’s life and we have come to the conclusion that it is wrong merely to tack on a sentence to say that so and so is survived by various people.’43
IV
Mr and Mrs Harold Evans spent part of their honeymoon staying with Henry Kissinger. Evans wanted Kissinger to write a weekly column for The Times and, after consultations with Murdoch, promised a financial inducement the scale of which would have been unprecedented in the paper’s history.44 In the meantime, he had been reading the drafts for the second volume of Kissinger’s memoirs, Years of Upheaval 1973–77, even helping to rewrite certain passages. This was not a role he would have easily taken upon himself with regard to a senior British political figure. In London, Evans was anxious to avoid compromising entanglement between press and politicians, but he enjoyed a more relaxed perspective across the Atlantic and, in later years, he and his wife would happily mix their journalistic careers with the society of, in particular, leading Democrats.
It was a verdict on the past four years rather than a discovery of latent Toryism that had encouraged Evans to vote Conservative in the 1979 general election. Observing him in the morning conferences, Frank Johnson came to the conclusion that Evans, while an enthusiastic campaigner, did not have a considered political position or particular insight into the Westminster village. He had grown up assuming that the welfare state had improved opportunity immeasurably. The arguments propounded by Keith Joseph and the Institute for Economic Affairs, then gripping the radical right of the Conservative Party, had made little impact upon him.
But they had not escaped Frank Johnson, the lone Thatcherite in the editor’s trusted circle (Evans used to tease him in the morning conference by summoning his contribution with the cry, ‘I call upon the Leader of the Opposition’). Evans and Johnson shared a non-middle class background. Johnson was the son of a pastry chef. Working his way up from local reporting to the Sun, he had been a parliamentary sketchwriter for the Daily Telegraph before joining James Goldsmith’s short-lived Now! magazine (fortuitously leaving it for The Times only days before that journal’s demise). While Evans was a proud Durham University graduate, Johnson was an autodidact with strong interests in opera and history who had been cultivated by the Telegraph’s coven of in-house Tory philosophers. ‘I believed Britain was in a life or death struggle,’ he later reflected, ‘and that if Thatcher lost, it was all over for Britain.’ He did not sense that Evans, admiring the achievements of the welfare state and sixties progressivism, shared the same sense of urgency. What was more, Evans had placed the paper’s political direction in the hands of Bernard Donoughue who, fresh from advising James Callaghan, was opposed to the line Johnson wanted The Times to take.45
That line was set almost from the first day of Evans’s editorship by the paper’s analysis of Geoffrey Howe’s 1981 Budget. The headline, ‘Harsh Budget for workers but more for business’, was, according to Paul Johnson in the Spectator, ‘the headline which we all thought was the copyright of the Morning Star and kept in permanent type there’. The subheading, which claimed ‘unexpectedly harsh tax increases’, did not seem to follow the accurate predictions that the paper had been making on this very subject over the previous days. Meanwhile, the assertion that the Budget was pro-business was contradicted in the business news section where both the City and industry were stated as being distinctly cool about the measures. The Times’s handling was, according to Paul Johnson, ‘a disaster’. He also detected hyperbole in the headlines of succeeding days such as ‘Chancellor under savage attack from all quarters’ and a headline on higher education cuts ‘Fears of university system collapsing from loss of income’.46 This was the sensitivity of a Thatcheritie convert, but ‘all quarters’ and ‘collapsing’ left little margin for error.
It was certainly difficult to read the front page without concluding a disaster had befallen the country. Fred Emery’s report made the most of ‘this muddle of severity against consumers with no clear thrust of benefits to business that worries a number of senior Conservatives’.47 By contrast, the summary of the Treasury’s forecasts by the economics editor, David Blake, was in the older, straight-reporting tradition of the principal news page. The leader column was where opinion was supposed to be located. This Evans wrote himself. He rejected both ‘the primitive compass of monetary aggregates’ and ‘crude expansion’. Instead he argued that the country was locked