The paper’s position had suffered from the conundrum that if it thought the exchange rate was so overvalued, why was it wanting to see it locked in at such a rate? But a relatively trouble-free realignment of the major currencies within the European Monetary System encouraged the leader column to adopt the line that it was ‘a good time for Britain to join’.60 This allowed the paper to preach currency stability and commitment to the ‘European Vision’ that Rees-Mogg’s paper had encouraged. But it was premature for it to declare, ‘the excuse that the pound is now a petrocurrency is not valid’.61 On currency stability, as on ‘European Vision’, The Times would find consistency as difficult to sustain as did the Treasury.
Indeed, it was across the English Channel that the paper needed to look if it wanted to see alternatives to monetarism in practice rather than theory. A golden opportunity was provided by the victory of François Mitterrand over Válery Giscard d’Estaing. Sixteen years had separated Mitterrand from his first challenge (to de Gaulle in 1965) and his taking possession of the Elysée Palace. More importantly, as Charles Hargrove reported from Paris, it was a ‘turning point’ in French politics. It was the first presidential victory for the left in the twenty-three year life of the Fifth Republic. Indeed, it was the first time the left had been in complete power since Léon Blum’s ill-fated Popular Front in 1936. With the news of Mitterrand’s triumph, Ian Murray reported that French customs officers were given urgent instructions to stop attempts to export money from the country: ‘The officers have been told to watch particularly for large cars not registered in frontier areas.’62
While the Conservatives had abandoned exchange controls shortly after coming to power in Britain, Mitterrand tightened the French State’s preventative powers to see capital exported beyond its border. A real socialist experiment was underway. Editorially, The Times was caught between fearing the possibility that a far left resurgence in the coming National Assemby elections could lead to a left – Communist coalition and the satisfaction of seeing the fall of Giscard d’Estaing and ‘his scandalous relations’ with the Central African Empire’s Emperor Bokassa.63 Writing in his column, Ronald Butt suggested Mitterrand’s election might ‘bring greater flexibility and a greater significance to the European voice’ and ‘establish for the first time that the European Community is not simply a vehicle for the centre-right’ as it had been under its Christian Democrat domination (for even Germany’s SPD Chancellor Schmidt ‘makes the kind of leader many a British Tory would be glad to own’). The consequence could be a softening in the anti-EEC attitude of Britain’s Labour Party.64
The British summer of 1981 was one of disorder. From a news reporting perspective, the most graphic examples came on the streets of Ulster and the deprived inner cities of England.
The hunger strikes among Irish Republican prisoners housed in the ‘H-Blocks’ of the Maze prison near Belfast had started in October 1980 with demands to wear their own clothes, to have the restrictions on their movement within the prison lifted and to be exempted from doing any work. The Government made a concession, permitting ‘civilian style’ (but not personal) clothing, but was wary of going further for fear that it was all part of an orchestrated IRA campaign to give their terrorists effective run of the prison and to see them accorded ‘political prisoner’ status. Indeed, a May 1980 report by the European Commission on Human Rights had rejected the bulk of the prisoners’ complaints. A letter was smuggled out from an inmate of Wormwood Scrubs to The Times endorsing the view that Irish terrorists enjoyed a far laxer regime than British individuals convicted of more minor misdemeanours on the mainland.65 The hunger strike had been called off in December 1980 when one of the participants lost consciousness. This was followed by a mass ‘dirty protest’ in which cells were deliberately fouled.
In March the dirty protests ended and the hunger strikes recommenced. By the time the campaign ended, seven months later, ten Republican prisoners had starved themselves to death. But it was the first prisoner to die who captured the public imagination and caused the most serious political upset. Bobby Sands was a twenty-seven-year-old Republican who had served five of his fourteen-year sentence for being caught with a gun in a car. His decision to stand for Parliament, in absentia, on an anti-H-Block ticket in the Fermanagh and South Tyrone by-election was given a boost when the Nationalist SDLP opted to stand aside, giving him a direct run against his Unionist opponent. The consequence of uniting the Nationalist and Republican vote was to hand Sands victory by a margin of 1446 votes.
Filing his Times report, Christopher Thomas suggested the result had ‘dealt a severe blow to the stronghold of moderate Roman Catholic opinion, the Social Democratic and Labour Party, from which it may never fully recover. Recriminations over the party’s failure to contest the seat are biting deep.’66 The Times’s leader was in no mood to indulge dangerous games. ‘The House of Commons should move at once, that is before the Easter recess, to unseat him,’ it announced, continuing, ‘that would be an entirely proper thing to do since he is precluded from attending the House for the duration of this parliament.’ The clear extent of polarization precluded pushing ahead with early ‘attempts to introduce provincial institutions acceptable to the leaders of both communities’. Instead, the Government was faced with no option but to concentrate on ‘normalizing’ the ‘administration of the province within the United Kingdom’.67
In May, Sands died. The immediate response was an orgy of rioting in Belfast and protests beyond. But the main legacy was a propaganda coup for Irish Republicanism, attracting the world’s media and drumming up financial support from United States citizens. The Times did not form up behind the long procession of mourners that followed Sands’s IRA-decorated coffin. ‘By refusing to submit to Mr Sands’s blackmail, the British government bears no responsibility whatever for his death,’ the leader column stated. ‘He was not in prison for his beliefs, but for proved serious criminal offences. He was not being oppressed or ill-treated. Indeed the opposite was true. The prison rules applying to Northern Ireland allow for a more comfortable existence than do most English prisons.’ It ended, ‘There is only one killer of Bobby Sands and this is Sands himself.’68 He did not get an obituary.
The paper’s position continued to be stalwartly supportive of the Thatcher Government’s inflexible approach, maintaining, ‘It has chosen the right ground to stand on – denial of separate political status in name and substance.’ As for the ‘murderous’ IRA leadership, ‘Hope is their oxygen. It must be denied them.’69 Mrs Thatcher would later refer to the need to cut off the IRA’s ‘oxygen of publicity’. But far from gulping for air, the Republican movement appeared wholly revived. Indeed, the upsurge of tension in Ulster ensured that The Times had to send its first itinerant news team there for many years, with Tim Jones and John Witherow joining the permanent reporter, Christopher Thomas. ‘Amid mixed scenes of jubilation and despair,’ Thomas reported from Enniskillen the victory of the IRA supporting candidate who retained – with an increased majority – the Fermanagh seat on Sands’s death. The leader column condemned a situation in which ‘the Irish Government and the Roman Catholic Hierarchy of Ireland so conspicuously qualify their condemnation of this extension of terrorist violence by piling the blame on British ministers for allowing it to continue’. In doing so, the hunger strikers were gaining the virtual ‘status of martyrdom’.70
The IRA ensured that the hunger strike ended in October with a bang. They detonated a nail-bomb on a coach in Chelsea Barracks carrying Irish Guards. The following month the Unionist MP for Belfast South was shot dead while he was holding a surgery for his constituents. An Anglo-Irish