Indeed, the trickle of departures among the editorial staff was turning into a torrent. First out of the door was Hugh Brogan, the respected Washington correspondent, who resigned shortly after Evans’s arrival in protest at what he anticipated would be Murdoch’s certain destruction of the paper’s integrity. But Evans soon found himself at loggerheads with the paper’s New York correspondent, Michael Leapman, as well. Exasperated by the frequency with which Brian Horton, the foreign editor and French restaurant lover, spiked his copy, Leapman assumed the worst and accused Evans of political censorship.127 One of Horton’s techniques was to unsettle Leapman by sending him dismissive comments about the quality of his grammar. Not that Horton knew better. He covertly obtained the judgments from the literary editor, Philip Howard, who innocently thought Horton was seeking advice on grammatical matters as a form of self-improvement. 128 Leapman, meanwhile, continued to express dissatisfaction and when Evans demanded an assurance of a ‘reasonable’ attitude from him he resigned,129 preferring to become ‘William Hickey’ in the Express instead.
As Evans’s closest colleague, Anthony Holden, the features editor, became the lieutenant most closely associated with the drive to introduce new blood – by which was also meant the determination to sack old favourites. Marcel Berlins took voluntary redundancy.130 With this, The Times lost a distinguished and authoritative commentator on legal affairs. The leader writer, Roger Berthoud, also packed up and left. Another to seek redundancy was the paper’s Whitehall correspondent, Peter Hennessy. This was a grievous blow for Hennessy was, as Patrick Marnham has pointed out, the first journalist to persuade senior civil servants to talk regularly about what was really going on in the corridors of Government.131 Evans was sorry to see him go but was unable to dissuade him from doing so.132 In the course of Evans’s opening year as editor, more than fifty members of the editorial staff left with redundancy payouts.
Too much was happening all at once. Familiar faces were leaving, less familiar ones arriving. The paper was riddled with mistakes due to the delays caused by switching to cold composition, a change that was not even improving the print quality of the paper. This was not the best moment to reorder the contents, but the editor did so all the same, deciding that, instead of constantly having to shift around the various news, sport and law sections of the paper in order to keep the centre of the paper fixed, the centre pages should float instead. At one stage he even considered the sacrilege of moving leaders and letters to pages two and three. Even without going that far, floating the paper’s philosophical core a few pages either way succeeded only in giving the impression that editorial policy was adrift. Readers were not impressed. Nor were the leader writers, increasingly airing their doubts about the editor’s variable decisiveness. Owen Hickey, the chief leader writer, tackled Evans directly, assuring him that readers did not want to turn to the centre of their paper and find obituaries on the left and badminton on the right.133
The Times was not used to being in a state of perpetual revolution. But this was now the inevitable tension in a paper stretched on the live wire between the two electricity pylons of Rupert Murdoch and Harold Evans. Recognizing his desire to be closely involved, the backbench would try and track Evans down when news broke during the course of the night. Calls would be made across London to establish his whereabouts. Eventually, he would be discovered subbing a sports report elsewhere in the building. The problem was that, called away from his handiwork, he would then forget to return to it, leaving the subeditors unable to ascertain which bits had been sent. They were left with no option but to unpick his work and start again from scratch. No matter how helpful – how the master of the paper – Evans thought he was being, subs did not always welcome his attempts to steer every boat in the paper’s flotilla from early morning to late at night. The Times had long published the Oxford and Cambridge exam results, but the editor decided to extend the service to all the universities. Compiling these graduation lists involved an enormous amount of extra work done after the London edition had been put to bed. On one occasion, around midnight, Tim Austin was working on them when Evans arrived back from a dinner in his black tie. Seeing it was Durham, his alma mater, Evans volunteered to do the subbing himself. Unfortunately, he got the style wrong and the whole section had to be redone. ‘He just did not know when to stop,’ concluded Austin; ‘he was not the best at delegating.’134
The editor’s insistence on making his mark in almost every possible part of the paper might have been a tolerable if irritating eccentricity had it only affected his relations with colleagues. The problem was that his interventions were wrecking the paper’s deadlines. The Times was becoming increasingly unobtainable in Scotland because the train at King’s Cross would not wait while Evans held up production in order to make some needless alteration. This was a question of priorities and the editor appeared to have lost sight of the commercial imperatives at work. The leader writers would deliver their copy on time only for Evans to announce that he would run them through his own typewriter. Aware that another deadline was being missed, Fred Emery would race over to the editor’s office to find its occupant kneeling on the floor with a pair of scissors in his hands. He would be cutting up the original copy and trying to insert some extra lines of his own on scraps of paper with glue. Emery did not even believe the editor’s additions improved the sense of the original. ‘Rhythms and disciplines are crucial to a daily newspaper’s morale and professionalism,’ Emery believed. When they were destroyed, ‘things fall apart’.135
There was a journalistic maxim that ‘you can edit with a typewriter or a calculator, but not both’.136 This was exactly the problem at The Times in the dying days of 1981. The editor led with the typewriter while his managing director and the proprietor attempted to rule with the calculator. Famous names were departing and, as so often with voluntary redundancy, it was those most marketable to an alternative employer who were going while those who feared leaving the life raft clung on. Yet, Evans persisted in hiring new journalists, often at higher salaries than those they replaced. Each appointment became a battleground, particularly since, in the short term, even the redundancy programme was adding to the paper’s costs. One of many disputes concerned finding a replacement for Michael Leapman. Murdoch maintained that The Times could not afford its own correspondent in New York in addition to its office in Washington DC. Instead it should seek a saving by using News Group’s New York bureau instead. Ignoring both this opinion – which he felt was an attempt to see copy in The Times written by employees answerable to Murdoch rather than to himself – and that of Brian Horton, Evans sent out Peter Watson, formally of the Diary column.137 Evans simply did not see how he could satisfy the proprietor’s instruction to improve the paper without being left alone to hire whoever he felt could best achieve it.
At the heart of the matter was Evans’s complaint that he was not given a clear budget allocation. A memo from Gerry Long demanding that all company executives seek written authorization for ‘any proposed action’ was understandably resented.138 Evans insisted that this was no way to run a newspaper. ‘I am a little shaken,’ he told Murdoch with restrained anger. ‘I do find it difficult to accept the principle of day-to-day approval for detailed items. I can’t honestly edit the paper properly without having discretion … It makes life difficult and erodes authority if I am not to be the sole channel for your instructions.’139 It was demeaning for the editor of The Times to have to scurry up and down stairs to the proprietor or managing director every time he wanted to spend money. In May 1981,