Saturday’s Times gave an accurate picture of the situation at Gray’s Inn Road – the report was utterly incomprehensible. Murdoch was quoted as stating ‘with the unanimous approval of the independent national directors’ that Evans had been replaced by Douglas-Home. Lord Robens described this statement as ‘a bit mixed up’. Evans was quoted claiming he had not resigned and his staying on was ‘not about money, as alleged. It is and has been an argument about principles.’ Gerald Long claimed that the independence of the editor had never been in dispute. Holden said it was. Douglas-Home said it wasn’t, going on the record to state:
There has been to my knowledge, and I have worked closely with the editor, absolutely no instruction or vestige of an instruction to the editor to publish or not to publish any political article. There has been no undue pressure to influence the editor’s policy or decisions.191
Times readers could have been forgiven for believing they were looking not at a news report but at a bleeding gash running down the front page of their paper. During the day, the Journalists of The Times (JOTT) group passed a motion that they released to the press calling for Evans to be replaced by Douglas-Home. They found fault with the ‘gradual erosion of editorial standards’ and Evans’s indecision: ‘The way the paper is laid out and run has changed so frequently that stability has been destroyed.’ Geraldine Norman had been to the fore of getting this motion accepted, much to the disquiet of many of the two hundred subscribing JOTT members whose approval she had not canvassed.192 A pro-Evans counterpetition was circulated and also attracted support. Nobody wanted another week of this madness.
Meanwhile, Fred Emery had telephoned from the slopes in order to find out what was happening in his absence. Douglas-Home asked him to come back immediately, particularly requesting that he be back in time to edit the Sunday for Monday paper. Emery raced back and found the journalists had become even more polarized during his absence. He also discovered the reason Douglas-Home wanted him back to edit the paper on the Sunday evening. The editor-in-waiting was singing in a choir that evening. In the circumstances, this was a high note of insouciance.
The denouement came the following day, Monday, 15 March, in a series of remarkable twists and turns. Nobody seemed to know whether the editor was staying or going. However, he did periodically emerge to give the impression that he was still in charge. Taking inspiration from a photograph of himself playing tennis, he swung a clenched fist in the air and assured Emery, ‘I play to win!’ Half an hour later, he had tendered his resignation in the curtest possible letter addressed ‘To The Chairman’. It read in its entirety:
Dear Sir,
I hearby tender my resignation as editor of The Times.
Yours faithfully,
H. M. Evans
His colleagues found it easier getting accurate news from the far Pacific than from within the building. All they knew was that Evans had overseen a statement in the early editions of the paper reporting that he had not resigned. They were thus surprised when at 9.40 p.m. he curtly announced to the rolling cameras of News at Ten that he had indeed quit. His decision to give advance warning to ITN in order to maximize the publicity but not his own journalists dampened the send-off he might otherwise have been accorded.193 Instead, when he was sure the cameras were in position, he walked out of the building, stopping only to shake hands with the uniformed guard at the reception desk (unsurprisingly, there was no sign of his secretary). Stopped by a television reporter as he got into the back seat of a waiting car, he refused to make further comment beyond observing, with a weary expression, that it was a tale longer than the Borgias.194
VII
Harold Evans came home to a party organized by Tina Brown, his wife. His stalwart supporters came to rally round. Anthony Holden had already created a stir that evening at a function for authors of the year (of which he was one). Seeing Murdoch in the corner of the room he stormed over, almost elbowing the Queen to the ground in the process, and proceeded to harangue the newspaper proprietor. The exchange ended with Murdoch assuring him he would never work on any of his papers again and Holden telling him where he could stick them. Such was the excited gravitation towards this verbal brawl that the Queen found herself momentarily deserted and ignored by the room’s inhabitants.195 Holden resigned from The Times with immediate effect without taking a penny of compensation. This was a principled stand that impressed Murdoch. Evans, meanwhile, negotiated a pay-off in excess of £250,000. After only one year’s employment, this sum was at the time considered so large that it almost (but not quite) dented Private Eye’s preening glee at his departure in its 26 March edition, unpleasantly entitled and illustrated ‘Dame Harold Evans, Memorial Issue. A Nation Mourns’.196
The generous severance terms did not stop Evans writing Good Times, Bad Times, an account of his struggles at Gray’s Inn Road which was published in 1983. Inevitably, not everyone liked and some did not recognize the picture he painted. His successor as editor, Douglas-Home, refused to read it. He did, however, see enough of the extracts in the press to pronounce, ‘that it presented a quite insurmountable question of inaccuracy’.197 The most damaging charges Evans brought both in his book and in subsequent allegations concerned his relations with the proprietor, especially in matters of editorial independence. Evans believed he had incurred Margaret Thatcher’s displeasure and that, in sacking him, Murdoch was enacting a tacit understanding with the Prime Minister as a result of her pressure to ensure his bid for Times Newspapers was not referred to the Monopolies Commission. Perhaps, as Sir John Junor had prophesied to Tina Brown, Murdoch had always intended to sack Evans after a year as soon as he had been the fall guy for unpopular changes Murdoch wanted forced upon the paper.198 Such was the regard Evans was held in at the Sunday Times, Murdoch would have had difficulty removing him from that editorship, but switching him next door suited his purposes perfectly.199 Many of the changes Evans effected were those Murdoch had himself wanted to see brought about: redundancies, the paper redesigned with new layout, sharper reporting, more sport and less donnish prevarication as a cover for laziness. On this interpretation of events, Murdoch had used Evans and then flung him overboard.
In Good Times, Bad Times, Evans stated that early in 1982 Murdoch had visited Mrs Thatcher suggesting that she find for Evans a public post so that he could be levered out of the editorship. According to Evans’s account, the Prime Minister had asked Cecil Parkinson, the Conservative Party chairman, to cast around for a job for him and Parkinson had come up with the post of chairman of the Sports Council. Mrs Thatcher, it seemed, was keen to assist Murdoch in finding an easy way to be rid of his turbulent editor.200 Evans had caused annoyance by running on his front page a story concerning a letter from Denis Thatcher to the Welsh Secretary written on Downing Street paper (though since this was where he lived, it was not clear what other address he could have given) concerning the slow pace of resolving a planning application made by a subsidiary of a company to which he was a consultant. Most commentators considered undue prominence had been given to a rather minor indiscretion (Mr Thatcher had made clear ‘obviously nothing can be done to advance the hearing’) and even the Times leader on the subject placed it third, where it belonged, below Liberal Party defence policy and political developments in Chad.201 There was also