The hearing was brief, almost anti-climactic. Popplewell – shocked by Aitken’s behaviour, if not (he said in his memoirs) surprised – took the rest of the day off at Lord’s cricket ground, discussing the case with the former prime minister John Major. Peter Preston and I emerged blinking into a wall of flashbulbs to pronounce on the verdict. Barely two years earlier I would have been on the other side of the cameras, notebook in hand. I had unwittingly, and to some extent unwillingly, become a public figure.
The emotions were feverish on all sides. There was, for us, relief, exhaustion, exhilaration: for Aitken, hollow emptiness and remorse. He knew he now faced the wreck of a marriage and career as well as jail for perjury and probable bankruptcy,8 with costs nudging £2 million.
Win, lose or draw, there was nothing remotely enjoyable about fighting libel actions. Ben Bradlee, editor of the Washington Post at the time of Watergate, said he would rather be publicly whipped than lose one. He added, of one battle fought on behalf of two reporters, that if he’d known in advance what would be involved: ‘I would have told them both to go piss up a rope.’ He wouldn’t, of course.
We drew some criticism for reporting Aitken’s perjury to the Attorney General, though the judge would almost certainly have been bound to do so himself. For us, it was a matter of principle that libel shouldn’t be seen as some sort of high-stakes gamble. I didn’t rejoice at Aitken’s subsequent downfall, but the defence of a free press did require the law to defend the truth and punish lies. I was unable to shrug the past two years of slog and anxiety off and behave as if it had all been a game.
Aitken subsequently served six months of an 18-month prison sentence, and was released in January 2000. The following year another prominent Conservative politician, (Lord) Jeffrey Archer, was jailed for four years for an even more egregious act of perjury in successfully suing the Daily Star in 1987.
The two cases signalled that libel cases had extremely serious consequences. Together, they were the high-water mark of defamation. The number of high-profile contested cases fell off over the next decade and – after some brilliant lobbying by human rights groups and lawyers – the law was eventually reformed.
*
Aitken found God, or God found him. His book, Pride and Perjury, is the story of a religious journey as well as a public downfall. In 2005 he was invited to talk at the Hay Festival, a jamboree of books and ideas in a little town on the Welsh borders, then sponsored by the Guardian. By mischievous design or accident he had been booked to stay in the same bed and breakfast as me, and we found ourselves sharing a polite cup of tea in the garden of our slightly discombobulated hosts. All bitterness and passion had, on both sides, melted away. I had great respect for the way he rebuilt his life with considerable humility and integrity. He remained very active in the cause of prison reform. When I eventually stepped down as editor in 2015 he came to the farewell party.
5
Shedding power
The legal entanglements sometimes felt like a full-time job on their own, on top of editing. Trying to engineer a digital future for the Guardian felt like a third job. There were somehow always more urgent issues – including printing; international circulation; and the Guardian’s sister Sunday paper, the Observer, which continued to drain away cash at an alarming rate.
The Observer had the most wonderful, romantic history – a paper of principle, humanity and cultural distinction. But, commercially, the paper was struggling to an extent that would exhaust vast amounts of editorial, management and commercial time for the best part of the next decade. The paper had had two editors between 1948 and 1993. Within five years of buying the Sunday title, we were on our fourth.
We struggled to bring the two titles together under one roof and with a broadly common culture. The paper was proudly independent – perhaps even defined by a wish to be seen as quite distinct from the Guardian. That was understandable, but the economics of purchasing the paper had been predicated on a large degree of co-operation, if not integration. Without some degree of collaboration it was difficult to see how the Scott Trust coffers – intended to be just about sufficient as rainy day money for the Guardian – weren’t going to be siphoned away by the newly acquired sister paper.
If it was this difficult to integrate even two newspapers, how much more difficult would it be to graft on an entirely different medium?
By March 1996 ideas we’d hatched in the summer of 1995 were already out of date. That was a harbinger of the future. No plans in the new world lasted very long.
It was now apparent that we couldn’t get away with publishing selective parts of the Guardian online. Other newspapers had shot that fox by pushing out everything. We were learning about the connectedness of the web – and the IT team tentatively suggested that we might use some ‘offsite links’ to other versions of the same story to save ourselves the need to write our own version of everything. This later became the mantra of the City University of New York (CUNY) digital guru Jeff Jarvis – ‘Do what you do best, and link to the rest.’1
We began to grapple with numerous basic questions about the new waters into which we were gingerly dipping our toes.
Important question: should we charge?
The Times and the Telegraph were both free online. A March 1996 memo from Bill Thompson, a developer who had joined the Guardian from Pipex, ruled it out:
I do not believe the UK internet community would pay to read an online edition of a UK newspaper. They may pay to look at an archive, but I would not support any attempt to make the Guardian a subscription service online . . . It would take us down a dangerous path.
In fact, I believe that the real value from an online edition will come from the increased contact it brings with our readers: online newspapers can track their readership in a way that print products never can, and the online reader can be a valuable commodity in their own right, even if they pay nothing for the privilege.
Thompson was prescient about how the overall digital economy would work – at least for players with infinitely larger scale and vastly more sophisticated technology.
What time of day should we publish?
The electronic Telegraph was published at 8 a.m. each day – mainly because of its print production methods. The Times, more automated, was available as soon as the presses started rolling. The Guardian started making some copy available from first edition through to the early hours. It would, we were advised, be fraught with difficulties to publish stories at the same time they were ready for the press.
Why were we doing it anyway?
Thompson saw the dangers of cannibalisation; that readers would stop buying the paper if they could read it for free online. It could be seen as a form of marketing. His memo seemed ambivalent as to whether we should venture into this new world at all:
The Guardian excels in presenting information in an attractive easy to use and easy to navigate form. It is called a ‘broadsheet newspaper’. If we try to put the newspaper on-line (as the Times has done) then we will just end up using a new medium to do badly what an old medium does well. The key question is whether to make the Guardian a website, with all that entails in terms of production, links, structure, navigational aids etc. In summer 1995 we decided that we would not do this.
But was that still right a year later? By now we had the innovation team – PDU – still in the basement of one building in Farringdon Road, and another team in a Victorian loft building across the way in Ray Street. We were, at the margins, beginning to pick up some interesting fringe figures who knew something about computers, if not journalism. But none of this was yet pulling together