The History of the Times: The Murdoch Years

At the end of March, 364 economists sent a letter to The Times denouncing monetarism. The signatories included seventy-six present or past professors and five former chief economic advisers to the Government. It was the idea of two Cambridge professors, Frank Hahn and Robert Nield, and academics at thirty-six universities appended their names. Although it became famous as the ‘Letter to The Times’, the newspaper almost squandered it. David Blake wrote up the story, but its front-page position was anything but prominent and much of it was continued fifteen pages on in the business news section. By the time it attracted a leader article, the following day, it had been downgraded by the altogether more dramatic story of the assassination attempt on President Reagan.

But the letter was important, not only as a counterblast of the learned and eminent against the Government’s economic policy but also as a measure of the culture clash between those now in power and the academic community whose stipends were about to be cut. The letter did give grounds for ambiguity. It claimed there was ‘no basis in economic theory or supporting evidence for the Government’s belief that by deflating demand they will bring inflation permanently under control’ or, as a consequence, bring about an economic recovery. In ignoring the alternatives to monetarism, ‘Present polices will deepen the depression’.[155 - The Times, 30 March 1981.]

When the leading article ‘An Avalanche of Economists’ appeared, it was somewhat more circumspect. It avoided explicitly endorsing the round-robin letter but made clear The Times believed the Treasury’s fixation with Sterling M3 concentrated minds upon too narrow a measure of the money supply. Rather, there was now a need for controlled reflation rather than further deflation.[156 - The Times, leading article, ‘An Avalanche of Economists’, 31 March 1981.] The monetarist response appeared in the business pages in an article by Patrick Minford, Professor of Economics at Liverpool University. His article so pleased the Prime Minister that she wrote to congratulate him.[157 - Thatcher, The Downing Street Years, p. 138.] Suspecting the 364s’ ‘apparently political ends’, Minford claimed they were more Keynesian than Keynes: Keynes had supported reflation in 1932 when there was sub-zero inflation and less than 1 per cent money supply growth. He had thus advocated price stability. But the public sector borrowing requirement for 1980–81 was an inflationary 4 per cent. Consequently, reducing the PSBR would create the structure for the sort of price stability Keynes had in mind. Recent history suggested incomes policies were not an effective alternative. What was more, Minford even maintained ‘there is no evidence that those with sound long-term prospects are going to the wall’ since ‘the stock market is now increasing the capitalization of even the hardest hit sectors’.[158 - Patrick Minford, The Times, 7 April 1981.] Nigel Lawson later wrote of the 364 economists, ‘Their timing was exquisite. The economy embarked on a prolonged phase of vigorous growth almost from the moment the letter was published’.[159 - Nigel Lawson, The View from No. 11, 1992, p. 98.] This may have surprised the still swelling ranks of the unemployed, but it was true, nonetheless. The standard measure of national output, gross domestic product (GDP), reached its bottom in the first quarter of 1981, at the very moment when the massed ranks of academia staked their reputations to the statement ‘present policies will deepen the depression’.

The end of fixed exchange rates in 1972 had freed governments from the necessity of manipulating their balance of payments to stay in check in order to uphold the exchange rate parity. This liberty permitted running up a persistent budget deficit as a means to stimulate demand and fund the welfare benefits of those for whom there remained no demand. But easing discipline in this way quickly drove western governments onto a road to ruin and by the late seventies Whitehall was desperately trying to rein back the PSBR’s share of GDP. The squeeze applied by the Thatcher Government’s high interest rate policy also had the effect of pushing up the exchange rate because high rates of interest made it attractive for ‘forex’ traders to buy sterling. At a time when North Sea oil revenues were already giving the pound the credentials of a petrocurrency, the resulting high exchange rate made exports yet more uncompetitive. During 1981, The Times became increasingly hostile to the notion that the Government, obsessed by its monetary targets, should have no view on what the appropriate exchange rate should be. In July, a leader column, ‘The Price of Floating’, attacked the whole post-1972 free-for-all. Railing against ‘the ideology of do-nothing monetarism’ with its exclusive focus on combating inflation, the editorial maintained that since ‘it is doubtful if a sensible exchange rate policy can be maintained unilaterally’ it was necessary to restore international cooperation.[160 - ‘The Price of Floating’, leading article, The Times, 8 July 1981.]

Supporting calls for new world central banking institutions to curb the supposed excesses of the foreign exchange markets, Evans wrote a leading article claiming, ‘our fortunes and our prospects have been devastated’ by ‘the experiment with floating rates and the stupendous growth of international mobile funds’. There was ‘a currency casino’ in operation when ‘on the world market the average trading volume in currency is now some 70,000 million dollars a day, a volume by which the global trade in goods, services and investment is insignificant’. The leader article mentioned Enoch Powell and Samuel Brittan among the false prophets who had preached floating as a means of ridding the country of its balance of payments problems. In fact, Peter Jay had penned an influential four column Times leader article in September 1976 advocating monetarism and a ‘cleanly’ floating currency only days before he had drafted the speech his father-in-law, James Callaghan, delivered to the Labour Party conference denouncing reflationary politics – a turning point in the country’s affairs. But in July 1981, The Times renounced its own former position with the excuse that ‘the beginning of wisdom is the admission of error’ (unfortunately the ‘i’ was missing from the word ‘is’ when the sentence was printed).[161 - ‘The Ottawa Opportunity’, leading article, The Times, 17 July 1981; see Grigg, The Thomson Years, p. 390; Edmund Dell, The Chancellors, p. 427.]

Margaret Thatcher had told the 198 °Conservative Party conference, ‘You turn if you want; the lady’s not for turning.’ With Evans at the steering wheel, The Times now made clear it was performing a very public U-turn. It marked the 1981 party conference debate on economic policy with a damning analysis of monetarism by James Tobin, the Yale professor who had the previous day been named as the winner of the 1981 Nobel Prize for Economics.[162 - James Tobin, The Times, 14 October 1981.]

‘Three million unemployed and still more to come’ was the front-page headline for Melvyn Westlake’s report that one in eight of the workforce was without a job and that the figure – which excluded a third of a million more on special employment and training schemes – was likely to keep rising at least until 1983. This proved an optimistic forecast. The accompanying leader column concluded that with output below its 1974 level and the national fabric fragmenting:

It is devastatingly clear that Britain needs massive investment, private and public, to restore its competitive strength … The Europeans are valiantly trying to create a pool of lower interest rates to protect their nascent recovery from another surge of American interest rates … we need not be flotsam on the high seas.[163 - ‘Britain’s Economic Legacy’, leading article, The Times, 27 January 1982.]

The paper’s position had suffered from the conundrum that if it thought the exchange rate was so overvalued, why was it wanting to see it locked in at such a rate? But a relatively trouble-free realignment of the major currencies within the European Monetary System encouraged the leader column to adopt the line that it was ‘a good time for Britain to join’.[164 - ‘The Flexible Side of EMS’, leading article, The Times, 6 October 1981.] This allowed the paper to preach currency stability and commitment to the ‘European Vision’ that Rees-Mogg’s paper had encouraged. But it was premature for it to declare, ‘the excuse that the pound is now a petrocurrency is not valid’.[165 - ‘Wanted: European Vision’, leading article, The Times, 2 December 1981.] On currency stability, as on ‘European Vision’, The Times would find consistency as difficult to sustain as did the Treasury.

Indeed, it was across the English Channel that the paper needed to look if it wanted to see alternatives to monetarism in practice rather than theory. A golden opportunity was provided by the victory of François Mitterrand over Válery Giscard d’Estaing. Sixteen years had separated Mitterrand from his first challenge (to de Gaulle in 1965) and his taking possession of the Elysée Palace. More importantly, as Charles Hargrove reported from Paris, it was a ‘turning point’ in French politics. It was the first presidential victory for the left in the twenty-three year life of the Fifth Republic. Indeed, it was the first time the left had been in complete power since Léon Blum’s ill-fated Popular Front in 1936. With the news of Mitterrand’s triumph, Ian Murray reported that French customs officers were given urgent instructions to stop attempts to export money from the country: ‘The officers have been told to watch particularly for large cars not registered in frontier areas.’[166 - Charles Hargrove and Ian Murray, The Times, 11 March 1981.]

While the Conservatives had abandoned exchange controls shortly after coming to power in Britain, Mitterrand tightened the French State’s preventative powers to see capital exported beyond its border. A real socialist experiment was underway. Editorially, The Times was caught between fearing the possibility that a far left resurgence in the coming National Assemby elections could lead to a left – Communist coalition and the satisfaction of seeing the fall of Giscard d’Estaing and ‘his scandalous relations’ with the Central African Empire’s Emperor Bokassa.[167 - ‘The Choice for France’, leading article, The Times, 12 May 1981.] Writing in his column, Ronald Butt suggested Mitterrand’s election might ‘bring greater flexibility and a greater significance to the European voice’ and ‘establish for the first time that the European Community is not simply a vehicle for the centre-right’ as it had been under its Christian Democrat domination (for even Germany’s SPD Chancellor Schmidt ‘makes the kind of leader many a British Tory would be glad to own’). The consequence could be a softening in the anti-EEC attitude of Britain’s Labour Party.[168 - Ronald Butt, The Times, 14 May 1981.]

The British summer of 1981 was one of disorder. From a news reporting perspective, the most graphic examples came on the streets of Ulster and the deprived inner cities of England.

The hunger strikes among Irish Republican prisoners housed in the ‘H-Blocks’ of the Maze prison near Belfast had started in October 1980 with demands to wear their own clothes, to have the restrictions on their movement within the prison lifted and to be exempted from doing any work. The Government made a concession, permitting ‘civilian style’ (but not personal) clothing, but was wary of going further for fear that it was all part of an orchestrated IRA campaign to give their terrorists effective run of the prison and to see them accorded ‘political prisoner’ status. Indeed, a May 1980 report by the European Commission on Human Rights had rejected the bulk of the prisoners’ complaints. A letter was smuggled out from an inmate of Wormwood Scrubs to The Times endorsing the view that Irish terrorists enjoyed a far laxer regime than British individuals convicted of more minor misdemeanours on the mainland.[169 - Letter to the editor, The Times, 30 May 1981.] The hunger strike had been called off in December 1980 when one of the participants lost consciousness. This was followed by a mass ‘dirty protest’ in which cells were deliberately fouled.

In March the dirty protests ended and the hunger strikes recommenced. By the time the campaign ended, seven months later, ten Republican prisoners had starved themselves to death. But it was the first prisoner to die who captured the public imagination and caused the most serious political upset. Bobby Sands was a twenty-seven-year-old Republican who had served five of his fourteen-year sentence for being caught with a gun in a car. His decision to stand for Parliament, in absentia, on an anti-H-Block ticket in the Fermanagh and South Tyrone by-election was given a boost when the Nationalist SDLP opted to stand aside, giving him a direct run against his Unionist opponent. The consequence of uniting the Nationalist and Republican vote was to hand Sands victory by a margin of 1446 votes.

Filing his Times report, Christopher Thomas suggested the result had ‘dealt a severe blow to the stronghold of moderate Roman Catholic opinion, the Social Democratic and Labour Party, from which it may never fully recover. Recriminations over the party’s failure to contest the seat are biting deep.’[170 - Christopher Thomas, The Times, 11 April 1981.]The Times’s leader was in no mood to indulge dangerous games. ‘The House of Commons should move at once, that is before the Easter recess, to unseat him,’ it announced, continuing, ‘that would be an entirely proper thing to do since he is precluded from attending the House for the duration of this parliament.’ The clear extent of polarization precluded pushing ahead with early ‘attempts to introduce provincial institutions acceptable to the leaders of both communities’. Instead, the Government was faced with no option but to concentrate on ‘normalizing’ the ‘administration of the province within the United Kingdom’.[171 - Leading article, The Times, 11 April 1981.]

In May, Sands died. The immediate response was an orgy of rioting in Belfast and protests beyond. But the main legacy was a propaganda coup for Irish Republicanism, attracting the world’s media and drumming up financial support from United States citizens. The Times did not form up behind the long procession of mourners that followed Sands’s IRA-decorated coffin. ‘By refusing to submit to Mr Sands’s blackmail, the British government bears no responsibility whatever for his death,’ the leader column stated. ‘He was not in prison for his beliefs, but for proved serious criminal offences. He was not being oppressed or ill-treated. Indeed the opposite was true. The prison rules applying to Northern Ireland allow for a more comfortable existence than do most English prisons.’ It ended, ‘There is only one killer of Bobby Sands and this is Sands himself.’[172 - Ibid., 5 May 1981.] He did not get an obituary.

The paper’s position continued to be stalwartly supportive of the Thatcher Government’s inflexible approach, maintaining, ‘It has chosen the right ground to stand on – denial of separate political status in name and substance.’ As for the ‘murderous’ IRA leadership, ‘Hope is their oxygen. It must be denied them.’[173 - ‘If Ireland Is To Be United’, leading article, The Times, 2 July 1981.] Mrs Thatcher would later refer to the need to cut off the IRA’s ‘oxygen of publicity’. But far from gulping for air, the Republican movement appeared wholly revived. Indeed, the upsurge of tension in Ulster ensured that The Times had to send its first itinerant news team there for many years, with Tim Jones and John Witherow joining the permanent reporter, Christopher Thomas. ‘Amid mixed scenes of jubilation and despair,’ Thomas reported from Enniskillen the victory of the IRA supporting candidate who retained – with an increased majority – the Fermanagh seat on Sands’s death. The leader column condemned a situation in which ‘the Irish Government and the Roman Catholic Hierarchy of Ireland so conspicuously qualify their condemnation of this extension of terrorist violence by piling the blame on British ministers for allowing it to continue’. In doing so, the hunger strikers were gaining the virtual ‘status of martyrdom’.[174 - ‘Fermanagh Does It Again’, leading article, The Times, 22 August 1981.]

The IRA ensured that the hunger strike ended in October with a bang. They detonated a nail-bomb on a coach in Chelsea Barracks carrying Irish Guards. The following month the Unionist MP for Belfast South was shot dead while he was holding a surgery for his constituents. An Anglo-Irish summit brassed up the existing ministerial and official collaborations under a new name, ‘The Inter-Governmental Council’, but by the following spring, when the proposals of the Northern Ireland Secretary, Jim Prior, for ‘rolling devolution’ of responsibilities held by Whitehall back to Ulster were ready to get underway, they faced opposition from the SDLP and from across the border from the Taoiseach, Charlie Haughey. Sinn Fein made gains in the elections to the Northern Ireland Assembly in October 1982 and the SDLP members refused to take their seats, effectively torpedoing the project. Once again, the Province’s future appeared to be wedged in an impasse. It would take time, and a more emollient attitude in Dublin with the election of Dr Garret Fitzgerald, before the next initiative could be sprung upon the Province.

During 1981, political unrest in Ulster was matched by social disorder in Britain’s inner cities. In April, petrol bombs were thrown for the first time on the streets of the mainland. The Brixton riots injured 279 policemen and forty-five members of the public. Twenty-eight buildings were set on fire while surrounding shops were systematically looted. News of scuffles in Brixton came late and received minor billing in the following day’s paper under the brief headline, ‘Police hurt in scuffles with blacks’. But after a weekend of serious rioting and looting, the events dominated Monday 13 April’s paper, forcing Michael Leapman’s report from Cape Canaveral on the launch of the space shuttle Columbia to take second place on the front page. Inside the edition, Martin Huckerby, who had been jostled by the mob, provided a graphic eyewitness report of the chaos in Brixton:

The only sign of authority was an abandoned fire engine astride the junction, its windows smashed and its wrecked equipment strewn across the road … Red hot debris dripped from a series of burning buildings along both sides of the road. Amid the roaring of the flames and crashing of collapsing buildings there were screams and shouts. Despite the furnace of heat, figures could be seen running through the smoke, hurling missiles at unseen police.[175 - Martin Huckerby, The Times, 13 April 1981.]

Elsewhere on the page the various angles were covered: an interview with a white woman who said she had come to fear the brooding violence of her largely black neighbourhood and ‘a young, sharply dressed Guyanan black’ who approved ‘ “of what’s happened. It’s the only way people can put across their case”.’ The police’s view was also represented and there was an article on Lambeth Council’s attempts to grapple with housing allocation between its white and black areas. The leading article backed the establishment of a broad ranging enquiry – which the Home Secretary, Willie Whitelaw, announced that day would be conducted by Lord Scarman. On 15 April, Op-Ed featured a gripping article by the Indian journalist Sasthi Brata detailing how, blindfolded and threatened, he was taken by a black gang in Brixton to see their amateur bomb-making cottage industry while one of his captors told him: ‘“There’s going to be a lot more, a big lot more, just tell ’em that. We ain’t kidding. We goin’ burn ’em down, everythin’ everywhere.”’[176 - The Times, 13 April 1981; Sasthi Brata, The Times, 15 April 1981.]

Naturally, the immediate aftermath of the riots in Brixton (and those that followed in Southall and the Toxteth area of Liverpool) were dominated by the apportioning of blame. Political activism was pitched against insensitive policing, moral degeneracy against a trinity of overt racism, poor housing and unemployment. The affected areas combined high numbers of immigrants with a level of social deprivation that was all too obvious to see. But to what extent was the Thatcher Government to blame? That The Times stated nothing justified the rioters’ behaviour was to be expected but it went further, conceding that the wider social issues were relevant and that the Scarman Inquiry should have the widest remit to consider them. As for the Government, the leader article chose to pick on its inability to articulate and demonstrate a belief that its policies had a positive social dimension worthy of the same priority as the fight against inflation.[177 - Leading articles, The Times, 14 April, 7 July and 13 July 1981.]

But there was also the question of racism. In a leader entitled ‘The Soiled Coin’, The Times believed racist sentiments ‘will not be resisted by preaching integration. This is a fallacy of the sixties. It is unrealizable, it is questionable if it is desirable, and it raises more fear and animosity than it dissipates with its overtones of inter-racial sex, marriage and a coffee-coloured Britain.’ Social pluralism, it argued, was obtainable without tolerance requiring ‘that every Englishman should have a black man for his neighbour or that every Asian should forget his cultural identity’. Rather, while ‘the Government cannot be expected to resolve such a complex and volatile problem overnight’ it could at least follow the American lead in encouraging the rapid promotion of ‘qualified coloureds to positions of obvious authority – in the army, the police and above all the public service – so that the coloured community can identify with those who take decisions as well as those at the receiving end’.[178 - ‘The Soiled Coin’, leading article, The Times, 10 July 1981.]

When it was published in November, the 150 page Scarman Report denied the existence of ‘institutional racism’ in Britain. Militant activists also disliked the report’s support for the police who ‘stood between our society and a total collapse of law and order on the streets’. But most sides of the community supported the principal recommendations: racist behaviour by police officers to be a sackable offence, better training, greater independent monitoring of the police complaints procedure, new statutory consultative committees with community liaison but no change to the Riot Act. Whitelaw moved immediately to endorse the principles of the report. Much of this was supported by The Times, although not Scarman’s enthusiasm for ‘taking the investigation as well as the adjudication of complaints out of the hands of the police’ which was ‘a minefield of good intentions’. Instead, ombudsmen and better lay scrutiny of the results of investigation would be preferable. The paper also lamented the failure to reform the Riot Act, taking the view that ‘if a riot is in progress the offence is, or ought to be, being in on it. No one should be able to feel that he can join in with impunity provided no further offence can be proved against him.’[179 - ‘The Scarman Report’, leading article, The Times, 26 November 1981.]

But The Times also gave space on the Op-Ed page to Darcus Howe, editor of Race Today, billing him as ‘a militant voice of black dissent’. According to Howe, the fault lay primarily with the way in which the police exercised their powers against the West Indian community. The trigger for the riots, Operation Swamp, had been regarded as a form of licensed harassment by Brixton’s youth. Instead, Howe argued for the ‘immediate abolition of all powers of stop and search’.[180 - Darcus Howe, The Times, 26 November 1981.]

The police countered that without ‘stop and search’ powers they had little chance of containing the violence and drug-related disorder that was prevalent in the inner cities and the areas dominated by blacks in particular. Yet, over the following fifteen years, the issue of racism slowly receded from the forefront of public debate until reignited towards the end of the century by the influx of asylum seekers and by the police’s inadequate handling of the racist murder of a black teenager, Stephen Lawrence. With the resulting Lawrence Inquiry, specific sore points like ‘stop and search’ not only became live issues again, but Scarman’s rejection of ‘institutional racism’ within the police force would be publicly revoked.

The critical tone adopted towards the Thatcher Government’s fixation with setting targets for narrowly defined money supply growth may have given the impression that under Evans The Times believed the State was a font of civic largesse. Certainly, the paper took the view that the Government needed to invest more in capital expenditure, citing the view of one with such impeccable monetarist credentials as Milton Friedman that there was no necessary relation between monetary growth and the size of the public sector borrowing requirement. But the paper took a more parsimonious view with regard to current expenditure. The Treasury’s demand of a 4 per cent public sector pay increase (at a time when inflation was running in double-digit per cent) was welcomed as an essential contribution to combating inflation. Indeed, the leader column argued that public sector workers had no right to expect the same pay parity with those in ‘the risk-taking’ private sector. What was more, those working in the nationalized industries should also see their wage increases pruned, ‘and that includes the wages of the miners and water workers as well as civil servants. If it means a hard winter, so be it.’[181 - ‘Moonshine and Money’ and ‘A Hard Winter’, leading articles, The Times, 17 September and 20 October 1981.] In this respect, The Times seemed ready to take on the miners before Mrs Thatcher, with memories of their defeat of Edward Heath, was prepared to do.

Not many miners read The Times. But on the issue of cuts in higher education, the newspaper was trespassing on the personal finances of a core area of its readership. In March 1980 the Government had announced three-year spending cuts in higher education. By May the following year, it was clear the University Grants Committee had failed to mitigate the full effects and universities braced themselves for falling matriculation rolls and the possibility of whole departments being axed as a consequence of an 8.5 per cent cut being enforced. Their woes were compounded by a fall in the income from foreign students, following the Government’s announcement that it would stop subsidizing fees for foreign students who would, in future, be charged the full cost of their course. Diana Geddes, the education correspondent, analysed the ‘grim future’ facing Britain’s universities. As a consequence of the 1963 Robbins Report, the proportion of eighteen-year-olds in higher education had risen from 3 per cent in the early 1950s to 14 per cent by the 1970s. The Government was now putting this process into reverse, having, as Geddes put it, ‘abandoned once and for all the Robbins principle that all those suitably qualified by ability and attainment should have the right to higher education’.

The universities were now paying the price for becoming the dependent wards of the State: over 90 per cent of their income came from public funds. But even ‘an overdue pruning of dead wood’ would be expensive. Redundancy bills alone could reach £200 million. This would wipe out most of the savings from reducing student numbers. Geddes’s article suggested that the Government might be better achieving its cuts by instead reducing its contribution to local authority-administered colleges and polytechnics – these ‘less respected institutions in the public sector’ – many of whose staff did not enjoy the same academic tenure and who would thus be much cheaper to sack.[182 - Diana Geddes, The Times, 30 March 1981.] In its leader column, the paper was prepared to accept the wrath of its readership in academia by stating that the cuts were necessary in the economic climate in which the country found itself.[183 - ‘Universities Under the Knife’ and ‘The Cost of University Cuts’, leading articles, The Times, 3 July and 10 October 1981.]

The plights of publicly funded professionals certainly provided a fitting moment for the Social Democratic Party (SDP) to launch itself. Departing the editor’s chair in carefree demob spirit, Rees-Mogg had penned one of his last leader articles by endorsing Shirley Williams as the best future hope for 10 Downing Street. The Labour Party’s lurch to the left under James Callaghan’s successor, Michael Foot, had been demonstrated in January 1981 when a special conference held at Wembley voted to elect future leaders through an electoral college made up principally of trade union block votes and of party activists. The Parliamentary Labour Party would be reduced to the status of minority shareholders. The immediate consequence of this was the breakaway of the moderate ‘Gang of Four’ (Shirley Williams, David Owen, Roy Jenkins and Bill Rodgers) to form the Council for Social Democracy. In March, the first twelve Labour MPs resigned the whip and the SDP was born.

The ‘Gang of Four’ were Murdoch’s first guests to lunch at Gray’s Inn Road. The main boardroom’s table was rather long, ensuring a disconcerting distance between each of the quiet revolutionaries. Fearing they might be given short shrift from the proprietor, Evans came away relieved that Murdoch had asked ‘polite, probing questions on policy’.[184 - Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, pp. 218–19.] Indeed, the SDP’s Communications Committee harboured hopes, believing Murdoch was ‘usually open to persuasion, if not to be converted, at least to give us a fair crack’.[185 - Ivor Crewe and Anthony King, SDP: The Birth, Life and Death of the Social Democratic Party, p. 261.] With no established national organization and without the funding of the trade unions or big business, the party’s success was dependent upon achieving maximum publicity in order to attract a mass membership quickly. The party’s birth was the main front page story in every national daily apart from the Sun. The Times reported the party’s opening press conference under the informative if underwhelming headline ‘SDP pleased by initial recruitment response’. Fred Emery and Ian Bradley reported from ‘a crowded news conference in London, staged brilliantly for television, and with a claque of applauding supporters’.

The SDP was launched with twelve policy tasks. Several were phrased in the inclusive language common to the public aspirations of all mainstream politicians. But a few distinctive polices stood out. The party differed from Thatcherism through its belief in a long-term incomes policy and a mixed economy in which ‘public and private firms should flourish side by side without frequent frontier changes’. In other words, it rejected monetarism as the principal means of curbing inflation and it would not role back the frontiers of the State. It was at odds with the Labour left by wanting to stay within the EEC and NATO and in resisting unilateral nuclear disarmament. It upheld traditional Liberal Party interests in constitutional reform, particularly of the House of Lords and the introduction of proportional representation. Yet overall, its bias was summed up from the first by Bill Rodgers who told the assembled press that the SDP was ‘not a new centre party, we are very plainly a left-of-centre party’.[186 - The Times, 27 March 1981.] As The Times put it in its leader, ‘with the exception of proportional representation there is no major policy being propounded by the Social Democrats now which was not at least attempted by the Callaghan Government’.[187 - ‘The Gang Becomes a Party’, leading article, The Times, 27 March 1981.]

It was natural that there should be curiosity and, indeed, excitement at the launch of a major new force in British politics. The SDP’s difficulty was in sustaining it in the months ahead, denied, as it was, the ability of the Government or the official Opposition to set the agenda in Parliament. It needed constant media interest. In this respect, The Times was less helpful than might have been expected. Unless there was a by-election campaign underway, the SDP rarely got more than two front-page mentions a week.[188 - Crewe and King, SDP, p. 257.] This was surprising, given the extent to which the SDP gained the reputation of being the journalists’ party with high-profile supporters like the Guardian’s Polly Toynbee, Anthony Sampson of the Observer and even the Daily Mirror’s agony aunt, Marjorie Proops. Tony Benn was convinced the BBC was an ‘agency of the SDP’.[189 - Ibid., p. 254.] The chronicler of the Guardian would even conclude that the ‘chief reason’ for the paper’s ‘success in the early 1980s was that the Social Democratic Party was founded in its pages and the battle for the soul of the Labour party fought out there’.[190 - Geoffrey Taylor, Changing Faces: History of The Guardian, 1956–1988, p. 213.] No such claim could be entertained by The Times. But the paper’s editorial line might have tilted more obviously towards the SDP if Rees-Mogg had continued as editor. He had made clear his belief that Shirley Williams was a figure around which a new national consensus could be constructed. Back in 1972, when the Labour Party appeared close to self-destruction over the Heath Government’s EEC entry terms, the Rees-Mogg Times had looked favourably on the possible creation of a government of the centre (that is to say, pro-EEC) under the leadership of Roy Jenkins. In the three general elections during which Rees-Mogg was editor (the paper was off the streets in 1979) The Times had expressed the hope of seeing an increase in the Liberal Party’s seats so that they might prove a moderating force on the two principal parties.

But if The Times under Harry Evans did not rush to pledge itself to the SDP’s red, white and blue colours, the atmosphere in Gray’s Inn Road was nonetheless respectful towards the new party. Its initial by-election performance suggested it was being taken seriously by an electorate fearful of Labour’s leftwards lurch and repulsed by the economic and social cost of Thatcher’s medicine. At a by-election in Warrington in July, Roy Jenkins achieved a 23 per cent swing to the SDP, almost unseating Labour in its heartland. The Conservative candidate lost his deposit. In October, following the creation of the ‘Alliance’ with the Liberal Party, a Liberal activist, Bill Pitt, became the first Lib-SDP Alliance candidate to win a seat, taking Croydon North-West from the Conservatives on a 24 per cent swing. Then, in November, Shirley Williams took Crosby from the Conservatives, recording the biggest turnover of votes in any parliamentary by-election. Repeated at a general election on a nationwide scale, it would give the Alliance 533 MPs, Labour 78 and the Conservatives four. The SDP really looked as if it might succeed in its great project, to break the mould of British politics.

By-elections are problematic for newspapers since the lateness of the declaration plays havoc with newspaper production. Nonetheless, Brian MacArthur and his team managed to beat the competition with the speed in which The Times led with Bill Pitt’s capture of Croydon. Unfortunately, the front page went to press with a pre-arranged victory article, ‘Our Credibility Barrier is Broken’ by Shirley Williams, to accompany it. By placing a partisan opinion piece by Williams on the front page, the paper appeared to be not only confusing news with comment but almost endorsing her party. This was a genuine slip. Nonetheless, Evans had to field a call the next day from an irate Gerald Long, the uncompromising new managing director of Times Newspapers, demanding an explanation.[191 - The Times, 23 October 1981; Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, p. 289.]

Whatever the placement on the front page, nobody could be in any doubt what the back page of The Times made of the SDP’s progress. That was where Frank Johnson’s daily parliamentary sketch appeared. To Johnson the ‘Gang of Four’ provided a rich quarry for satire. Roy Jenkins was ‘a Fabergé of an egghead … shining, exquisitely crafted, full of delights, a much loved gracious figure who is to the liberal classes what the Queen Mother is to the rest of us’. The SDP, he would later note in 1986, was ‘a happy party, fit for all factions’, there being:

the Owenites; the Jenkinsites; the Elizabeth Davidites; those who want a successor to Polaris; those who want a successor to their Volvo; militant Saabs; supporters of Tuscany for August as opposed to the Dordogne; members of those car pools by which middle class families share the burden of driving their children to the local prep school; owners of exercise machines; people who have already gone over to compact discs … readers of Guardian leaders; and (a much larger group) writers of Guardian leaders.[192 - Frank Johnson, ‘A Happy Party, Fit for all Factions’, The Times, 16 September 1986.]

But besides the affectionate whimsy, Frank Johnson was also a perceptive judge. He foresaw the strategic weakness in the SDP’s condition. As he noted in September 1982, in lacking ‘the irrational emotions, the cranky zeal, that drives on the rank and file of the other parties’ the SDP’s supporters would eventually become demoralized by any faltering in momentum. And that faltering would come. Johnson had been introduced to Maurice Cowling and the school of Tory historians at Cambridge’s oldest college, Peterhouse, who rejected Whig and Marxist interpretations of historical progress and inevitability in favour of a ‘high politics’ view of men and events. Johnson applied this approach in his own analysis. Try as the SDP might to take a rational or scientific approach, he reminded them ‘politics is not a “subject” or an academic discipline. It is simply the random play of chance on a few ambitious politicians. No one, no matter how great an authority on “politics”, predicted the Falklands war.’[193 - Frank Johnson, The Times, 15 September 1982.]

This was not an approach shared by the theorists of the left, where historical inevitability remained the vogue – especially if it could be given a push with the sort of underhand tactics still employed in the Eastern Bloc or Britain’s student unions. Twenty-four hours after Labour had won control of the Greater London Council (GLC) on 7 May 1981, its group leader, the moderate Andrew McIntosh, was ousted in an internal coup by the left wing Ken Livingstone. The radical left now had the opportunity to show what they could do with – or to – Britain’s capital city. As ‘Red Ken’ put it to Nicholas Wapshott who interviewed him for The Times shortly after the successful putsch, ‘if the left GLC fails, it will be a sad day for the left everywhere’. Wapshott did not paint a favourable background for his subject, stating that, ‘as the housing chief of Camden, Livingstone’s performance was generally considered abysmal’ and ended with Livingstone enthusing about his pet salamanders: ‘I feed them on slugs and woodlice. They just live under a stone, come out at night and are highly poisonous. People say I identify with my pets.’[194 - Nicholas Wapshott’s interview with Ken Livingstone, The Times, 14 May 1981.]

The Times was not impartial in its commentary on the left’s progress within the Labour Movement. The paper thought it iniquitous and was not slow to say so. When the former Labour Cabinet minister Lord George Brown asked if he could pen articles for the paper, Evans replied affirmatively, suggesting ‘we are particularly interested in the Communists making inroads into the Labour Party’.[195 - Evans to Lord George Brown, 2 July 1981, Evans Day File.] During September, the paper ran extracts from a forthcoming book by David and Maurice Kogan on the activities of left-wing activists in Tony Benn’s campaign team, the ‘Campaign for Labour Party Democracy’ and the ‘Rank and File Mobilizing Committee’ who were trying to make the party leadership answerable to the activists rather than the Members of Parliament.[196 - The Times, 23 and 23 September 1981.] Labour was now led by the left wing, nuclear unilateralist, Michael Foot. But in September the battle commenced for the Deputy Leadership. Although this was not a position that involved the wielding of great power itself, the belief that Foot, aged sixty-eight, was a caretaker leader turned it into the struggle for the future of the party, one that was made critical by the possibility of it being won by Tony Benn.

Outside the ranks of his supporters, Tony Benn was perhaps the most feared figure in British politics. For those on the right, it would be more accurate to describe him as a hate figure. He certainly frightened The Times. Having seen Benn at close quarters during his period working with Callaghan, none was keener to save the Labour Party from him than Bernard Donoughue. With the Deputy Leadership election pending, Donoughue suggested the moment had come for a hatchet job on Benn in the form of an investigation into his considerable financial interests.[197 - Bernard Donoughue, 10 September 1981, Evans Day File 1/17.] This would show the great tribune of wealth redistribution to be a multimillionaire who had craftily ring-fenced his own money. The piece appeared on 25 September in a profile of the contenders which described Benn as ‘a wealthy aristocrat who waged a remarkable campaign to shed his peerage and upbringing’. The profile stated that his ‘main assets’ were:

shares in Benn Bros, publishers; large house in Holland Park and farm in Essex; most of the Benn family wealth comes from legacies and trusts connected with his American-born wife, Caroline. The estimated total is several million dollars: city sources confirm the existence of a Stansgate trust in the tax haven of the Bank of Bermuda. No details of amounts or beneficiaries have ever been disclosed.[198 - The Times, 25 September 1981.]

The following day The Times found itself in the embarrassing position of printing an apology attached to Benn’s letter of complaint. Evans also wrote a personal letter to him. Benn’s letter stated, ‘Neither I nor my family have ever owned a farm nor had any assets in any trust in Bermuda or any tax haven in the world … I might add that your account of my wife’s assets is grossly exaggerated.’[199 - Tony Benn, letter to the editor, The Times, 26 September 1981.] So much for ‘city sources’ – the information had been supplied by two outside informants. The editor dictated a memo to Anthony Holden, Fred Emery and Adrian Hamilton, the business editor, concluding that the lesson to be learned was ‘that incidental attacks on someone like this are not worth making. It is only worth attacking or exposing someone, in any event, when we have very high certainty of our evidence.’[200 - Evans to features, home and business editors, 29 October 1981, Evans Day File 1/17.]

The Deputy Leadership result was to be announced at the Labour Party Conference in Brighton. The declaration was expected in the evening so two different leader articles had been pre-prepared depending on the result. The leader assuming a Benn victory concluded that Michael Foot should ‘resign immediately’. ‘Both from personal self-respect,’ it elaborated, ‘and for the good of the Labour Party he should resign instead of providing a fig leaf of shabby respectability for the extremists who have now taken over the Labour Party.’[201 - Evans Day File, A327/3626.]

In the event, The Times was not able to run that night with either leading article: a strike by the NGA print union prevented the paper from coming out. Thus was missed the chance to report on an evening of great drama. John Silkin had been eliminated in the first ballot. Benn’s rival, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, Denis Healey, appeared to have victory in the bag when the Silkin-supporting TGWU announced that it would use its 1.25 million block votes in the electoral college to abstain in the second round. Healey duly arrived in triumph at the conference hall only to discover that the TGWU had decided at the last moment to vote for Benn instead. This suddenly made the result a cliffhanger. When the declaration was made, Benn secured 49.574 per cent of the vote. Healey had squeezed home by a hair’s breadth.

Unrepentant in defeat, Benn claimed the ‘incoming tide’ was with him despite the fact that, ‘The privately-owned Press without exception have done all they possibly could to discredit the Labour party, its electoral mechanism, Socialism and the arguments we were putting forward in the campaign. To have got Fleet Street down to fifty-point-something in the Labour party is quite an achievement.’[202 - Tony Benn, quoted in the Daily Telegraph, 28 September 1981.] At least The Times and the rest of the ‘privately-owned Press’ knew what to expect if ever the great champion of State control ever did surf in on the ‘incoming tide’.

Healey’s victory prevented a potentially fatal defection of Labour MPs and supporters to the SDP. By a fraction of 1 per cent he probably saved his party. In doing so, he dished the SDP. When The Times returned after the strike, its sigh of relief was all but audible. For the contest to be ‘a turning point’ the moderates within the Labour Party would have to regain their lost ground.[203 - ‘Unfinished Business’, leading article, The Times, 1 October 1981.] Over 80 per cent of party activists in the constituencies had voted for Benn in the Deputy Leadership ballot, but his colleagues in the Parliamentary Labour Party held him in less regard and when Foot made clear he wanted rid of his turbulent priest, Benn failed to be elected by the MPs into the Shadow Cabinet. But he had not finished in his assault on the media. In March 1982, Benn chose a conference of Pan-Hellenic socialists in Athens to announce that British democracy was threatened by its military (in its pursuit of the arms race) and by its media. Britain, he said, did not have a free press because he could not point to a single newspaper that reflected his views. Catching the eye of The Times reporter, Mario Modiano, Benn added:

And The Times, dare I say to you, is really disreputable. It does not print truthfully and faithfully what happens and it pretends, because it is printed in small print that it is above argument. But it is a political propaganda instrument like the Sun, but it is printed in rather better print and rather shrewder language.[204 - Tony Benn, quoted in The Times, 13 March 1982.]

Benn had a particular reason for lumping the Sun and The Times together. In January 1982, the Sun had printed allegations of widespread drunkenness, absenteeism, rota tampering and moonlighting by train drivers. In retaliation, the drivers’ ASLEF union called on its members to ‘black’ not only the Sun but – on the grounds it had the same owner – The Times as well. Without access to the trains, the paper could not be distributed. The ‘blacking’ continued even after a promise to revoke it in the High Court had been secured. Ultimately, the dispute kept The Times off the streets for five days. Benn told an NUJ branch meeting that unions were right to black newspapers that printed ‘lies’ about them in a struggle in which ‘day after day Fleet Street conducts its campaign against working people’. He accused journalists who did the bidding of their editors and owners instead of reporting facts accurately as being like ‘Jews in Dachau who herded other Jews into the gas chambers’.[205 - Ibid., 27 January 1982.] But if Benn had come to the conclusion that new laws were needed to – as he phrased it – ensure wider press diversity, News International drew different lessons from the dispute with ASLEF: the sooner the strike-prone British Rail distribution system could be replaced with a non-unionized road freight service, the better.

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