Rees-Mogg took the view on his successor’s downfall that an editor could fall out with his proprietor or several of his senior staff but not with both at the same time.214 In the eyes of the old guard, Evans had two principal problems. First, he frequently changed his mind. This had all been part of the creative process when he had edited a Sunday paper, since he had a week to finalize his position, but it made life on a daily basis extremely difficult. The second irritation was that he surrounded himself with his own people who were not, in heart and temperament, ‘Times Men’. For this reason, Donoughue and Holden were disliked in a reaction that overlooked their considerable talents. In the closing months of the drama, Holden would periodically arrive at his office to find childish sentiments scrawled on his door. Invariably they were of an unwelcoming nature.215 Indeed, the pro-Evans petition circulated in the dying moments of his tenure demonstrated perfectly the essential rift between The Times old guard and Evans’s flying circus of new recruits. Six of the thirteen senior staff members signed the pro-Evans petition (the other seven were either absent or pointedly refused to endorse him). But of Evans’s six senior supporters, five had been recruited by him from outside the paper in the course of the past year. Only one of the seven who did not sign had worked for The Times for less than twelve years.216 Good Times, Bad Times concentrated on Murdoch as the assassin. But at the moment of impact there were plenty of other bullets flying from a plethora of vantage points.
Tony Norbury, able to speak from the vantage point of over forty years experience on the production side of the paper, believed that although Evans’s demise was inevitable and perhaps necessary, he was nonetheless ‘the Editor who saved The Times’.217 In the space of a year, he had brought about great changes and many of them were for the better. The layout was much improved. Circulation was up by 19,000 on the comparable period in 1980. The paper was revitalized. It was no longer in retreat. Probably his greatest legacy was those journalists he brought in who stayed with the paper in the years ahead, among whom Peter Stothard, Frank Johnson, Miles Kington and the medical correspondent, Dr Thomas Stuttaford, were to loom large. Indeed, it would be quite wrong to assume that the old guard were necessarily right in opposing Evans’s innovations. Their victory over him in March 1982 was personal and vindictive. It was also temporary. Much of what he attempted to teach the paper about ‘vertical journalism’ would, in time and in a less frenetic environment, eventually be accepted and adopted.
It was Evans’s other concept, the ‘editing theory of maximum irritation’, that did for him. As one of the senior financial journalists snootily put it, ‘What is this silly little man doing running around trying to tell us how to do our jobs?’218 Evans’s mistake was to make too many radical changes too quickly and in a manner that left old Times journalists feeling excluded. His attempts to make the paper more like its more popular Sunday neighbour were especially disliked. A critic at the Spectator found fault that ‘instead of spending the morning in Sir William [Rees-Mogg’s] musty but absorbing library we should be outside “in the field” with Mr Evans getting down to what a French investigative reporter once termed “the nitty grotty”. It’s all lead poisoning from petrol fumes nowadays, and why not? Only that several other papers tell us about that sort of thing all the time.’219 While the Sunday Times was a ‘journalists paper with a high-risk dynamic’ to break news, The Times ‘must get its facts and opinions right’ and its editor ‘must possess great steadiness and consistency … He must be patient and move slowly.’220 Or, as Philip Howard put it, ‘The Sunday Times and The Times are joined by a bridge about ten yards long and somewhere along that bridge Harry fell off.’221
One of the few journalists brought in by Evans who did not support him in his time of trial was Frank Johnson. ‘I cannot think of a better thing I did in 1981 than ask you to join The Times,’ Evans wrote to congratulate him when he was named Columnist of the Year at the British Press Awards.222 But Johnson, who had always admired the old Times, was relieved when Douglas-Home took over. With Murdoch’s threat to close the paper lifted and Evans, Holden and Donoughue seeking alternative employment, the atmosphere at Gray’s Inn Road improved remarkably swiftly. Douglas-Home, the editor most of the senior staff had wanted in the first place (and but for Murdoch would probably have got), was at last in the chair. But what buried the internecine bickering most decisively was a major incident in – of all unlikely places – the South Atlantic. As Britain’s armed forces sailed towards the Falkland Islands and an uncertain fate, office politics suddenly looked self-indulgent and thoughts switched back to the job everyone was paid to do – report the news.223
The Falklands War; the Lebanon;
Shoring up NATO; Backing Maggie
I
The journalists of the Buenos Aires Siete Dias had a commendable knowledge not only of their government’s intentions but also of how The Times of London liked to lay out its front page. Forty-eight hours before the invasion began Siete Dias’s readers were presented with an imaginary front page of that morning’s edition of The Times. It was good enough to pass off as the real thing. The masthead and typeface were accurate. Even the headline ‘Argentinian Navy invades the Falkland Islands’ was grouped across the two columns’ width of the lead report rather than stretched across the whole front page. That was a particularly observant touch. The accompanying photograph of advancing Argentine troops was also in exactly the place the page designers of Gray’s Inn Road would have put it – top centre right with a single-column news story hemming it back from the paper’s edge. Someone, at least, had done his homework.
The real Times of London for that day had an almost identical front-page layout. The only visual difference was that the lead headline announced ‘Compromise by Labour on abolition of Lords’ – which could have been confidently stated at almost any time in the twenty years either side of 31 March 1982. But the perceptive reader would have noticed something more portentous in the adjacent single column headlined ‘British sub on the move’. The story, ‘By Our Foreign Staff’, claimed that the nuclear-powered hunter-killer submarine, HMS Superb ‘was believed to be on its way’ to the Falkland Islands although the Royal Navy ‘refused to confirm or deny these reports’. This was odd. The Times was not in the habit of knowing, let alone announcing, the sudden change of course of a British nuclear submarine. In fact, the story had been planted. It was intended to warn the government in Buenos Aires that their invasion intentions had been discovered. But it was too late. The Argentinian troops had already boarded the vessels. The aircraft carrier Veinticinco de Mayo had put out to sea.
In the aftermath of a war that caused the deaths of 255 Britons and 746 Argentinians, questions were asked about why London failed to perceive the threat to the Falkland Islands until it was too late. The press had not seen it coming. But they could hardly be blamed when Britain’s intelligence community had also failed to pick up on the warning signs. In retrospect, the Government’s dual policy of dashing Argentina’s hopes of a diplomatic solution while announcing a virtual abandonment of the islands’ defence appeared like folly on a grand scale.
Despite talk of there being oil, there had long been little enthusiasm in the Foreign Office for holding onto the barren and remote British dependency, eight thousand miles away and important primarily for the disruption it caused