There was little by way of Christmas cheer. Evans injured himself putting up decorations and took time off to recover. With Charles Douglas-Home away on sabbatical, the paper was edited by Brian MacArthur and Fred Emery. It was at this moment that Evans committed an act that infuriated Murdoch. The proprietor knew that Evans had taken time off to recover from his spell of concussion but, long after he assumed that the editor was back at his desk, he was aghast to discover that he was, in fact, mysteriously in the United States. Evans had intended to keep his transatlantic mission secret but his secretary had forgotten to tell either MacArthur or Emery that this was the case. Hours before Murdoch was due to fly over to London from New York, he telephoned The Times expecting to speak to Evans, only to discover he was unaccountably in America. The proprietor was furious and perhaps not a little suspicious. When Evans hurried back to the office (having been tracked down by MacArthur and warned to return to London immediately), it was to find a bitter letter from Murdoch waiting for him, berating him for the time he had taken to convalesce. Given how manically hard Evans had worked since his appointment, this was unfair, although, in the circumstances in which the paper found itself, the furtive trip to America certainly looked peculiar. Indeed, the letter read more as if the proprietor was issuing a written warning, putting on record that he was distancing himself from his chosen editor. This was ominous. Evans fired back a six-point rebuttal of Murdoch’s charges, reasserting his acceptance of the necessity for hard work and pleading, ‘I love The Times. We have until now, I thought, had an extremely close liaison.’142
From this moment on, suspicion governed Evans’s attitude to Murdoch. He began to suspect Murdoch was complaining about him behind his back and that one of those listening was Paul Johnson, whose media column in the Spectator was giving Evans critical reviews. Unless he was there in the room to monitor possible interference, Evans was nervous about Murdoch sounding forth on politics to Times journalists. On his return from his Christmastide absence, Evans discovered that Murdoch had expressed a preference for economic sanctions against the USSR while chatting to Owen Hickey. Hickey, who was not likely to compromise his intellectual self-certainty to anyone, did not feel Murdoch was leaning on him. But Evans went out of his way to write a leader condemning the policy as a ‘romantic notion’ and, worse, an ‘apocalyptic strategy’.143 Whether this could be considered an overreaction depended upon how narrowly the proprietor’s guarantee not to direct editorial policy could be reasonably defined. To assume he had to take a Trappist vow whenever a conversation touched upon the modern world was clearly ridiculous. The problem was, did all journalists have the strength to put from their mind Murdoch’s stated opinions when they filed copy he might read and note?
Evans’s predicament was that tensions were now running high not only with Murdoch but with Gerry Long as well. Scarcely anyone had missed The Times’s decision to cancel its detailed coverage of the European Parliament but Long also wanted to cut costs by scrapping the paper’s Westminster gallery staff and rely on PA reports instead.144 This would certainly undermine the paper’s claims to be offering something more than its competitors and Evans would have none of it. It was not just Evans who had difficulty relating to Long. Frank Giles, the Sunday Times editor, also felt ‘to describe his nature as complex is about as observant as pointing out that Schubert’s Eighth Symphony is unfinished’.145 Shortly before he assumed the editorship, Evans had a foretaste of Long’s eccentricity when he went to the latter’s house for dinner. When the discussion turned to how The Times’s reputation should be restored, Long became animated, telling Evans, ‘The man you need for authority is Penning-Rowsell of the Financial Times’ and reached from his bookshelves the proof – a copy of Penning-Rowsell’s The Wines of Bordeaux.146 This proved to be a portent of his priorities. Although Long proceeded to demonstrate his readiness to sacrifice good journalists in pursuit of cutting costs, he was never prepared to compromise gastronomic standards at The Times. On one occasion when Sir Geoffrey Howe, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, came to lunch at Gray’s Inn Road, roast lamb was on the menu. When Howe asked for mint sauce, the waitress pulled rank, grandly announcing, ‘Mr Long does not allow mint sauce on the fifth floor.’147
Evans could not unseat Murdoch, but he could try and undermine Long. The easiest way of doing this was to provide Long with a public platform for self-immolation. Long had suggested the financially imprudent idea of importing a French and a German food critic to eat their way round Britain’s most famous restaurants as part of a forthcoming Times series of articles on expensive foods.148 Discovering that the managing director had been in acrimonious correspondence with the leading restaurateur Albert Roux, Evans persuaded Long that publishing the exchange would be a wonderful opening salvo to start the series. Long had dined at Roux’s celebrated Le Gavroche restaurant and had asked for the ‘farmhouse cheeseboard’. But, horror of horrors, he suspected that one of the cheeses, a St Paulin, was industrially produced, a fact confirmed upon consulting his trusty Androuet Guide du Fromage. ‘This met at first with an indignant response from your waiter,’ Long informed Roux. Perhaps unwisely, the waiter retaliated with the flip put-down, ‘if Monsieur knows cheese better than I do, then of course Monsieur is right’. This remark appeared to have straightened the bristles on Long’s Lord Kitchener-style moustache. Roux wrote to assure him that the offending cheese was a product ‘made by craftsmen on the scale of a cottage industry’ thereby generating a fresh debate on Long’s second major hobby – semantics. Long replied at great length, also finding fault with the turbot and making clear he was sending the correspondence to Michelin who had recently given Le Gavroche the only three star rating in England. Despite the provocations, Roux attempted to bring the argument to a close, somewhat incredibly assuring Long, ‘the fact that you have taken so much trouble to write about food leaves me with endless pleasure’, and inviting him and his wife to dine with him. Boorishly, Long declined the offer.
The unintentionally hilarious correspondence appeared in the paper on Saturday 6 February, suitably illustrated with a Calman cartoon of a French waiter intoning, ‘I’m a bit – how to say – cheesed off by these complaints.’ Running into Anthony Holden in the office, Long asked him what he thought of the exchange. When the features editor replied that it was ‘in the great tradition of British eccentrics’, Long was uncomprehending, exclaiming, ‘Eccentric? What’s eccentric about it?’149 He would soon find out. When Murdoch toured the Sunday Times on the Saturday afternoon (supposedly its busiest period), he found its journalists, feet on table, laughing with childlike glee at Long’s cheese pantomime. Evans had knowingly published a correspondence that made the managing director appear ridiculous. What was more, he had allowed Long to demonstrate his obsession with expensive dining at exactly the moment he was also calling for six hundred redundancies, mainly among the clerical staff at Times Newspapers. Long may have hoped that his correspondence would lead Michelin to reconsider the three stars awarded to Le Gavroche. But it was Long who was about to find himself downgraded.
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