The History of the Times: The Murdoch Years

His chosen profession also involved him in dangers potentially greater than the ever-looming prospect of a hunting accident. In 1968, when he was The Times’s defence correspondent, he was arrested by Soviet forces after he discovered 25,000 troops waiting, concealed, along the Czechoslovak border. His report broke in The Times on 27 July. Just over three weeks later the tanks he had stumbled upon rolled in to crush the Prague Spring. The experience made a great impression upon him and deepened his intense hostility towards the Communist expropriation of half of Europe. He was also conscious that for many in Britain and the West, the desire to live in peaceful co-existence had deadened their condemnation of left-wing totalitarianism. His wife had been staying in a hotel in Folkestone when the news broke that Soviet forces had arrested her husband. She was promptly asked to leave the hotel. Its manager did not want the custom of the wife of a man who had been arrested.[395 - Jessica Douglas-Home, Once Upon Another Time, p. 11.]

The treatment of dissidents in Eastern Europe was an issue that deeply concerned both the editor and his wife. Douglas-Home had met and married Jessica Gwynne, an artist poised to embark upon her career as a theatrical set and costume designer, in 1966. Both subsequently became friends of Roger Scruton, the Tory philosopher who edited the Salisbury Review. Scruton was in touch with many of Eastern Europe’s leading underground samizdat thinkers. He was also involved with the Jan Hus Foundation, a support group that had been founded with money from Times readers who had been shocked following the paper’s reporting of the arrest in Prague of Anthony Kenny, the Master of Balliol, while discussing Aristotle in a dissident’s flat. When Douglas-Home became editor of The Times, Scruton encouraged him to publish an anonymous article by the Czech dissident Petr Pithart, who later became the Prime Minister of the Czech and Slovak Federation. Accompanied by Scruton, Jessica Douglas-Home made the first of her many trips behind the Iron Curtain in October 1983 to meet with and assist dissidents. Dodging the secret police became part of her routine. Meanwhile, every Tuesday The Times published brief biographies of political prisoners from around the world in a series called ‘Prisoners of Conscience’, written by Caroline Moorehead.

Another writer who shared the Douglas-Homes’ loathing for Communism was Bernard Levin. In October 1982, he returned to The Times to write his ‘The Way We Live Now’ column. After a gap of eighteen months, his first article commenced with the words ‘And another thing …’[396 - The Times, 22 October 1982.] Levin, a scourge of authority in almost any guise – from the North Thames Gas Board upwards – never shirked from what he saw as his duty to denounce the totalitarian mindset. The son of a Ukrainian Jewish mother and (an absentee) Lithuanian Jewish father, Levin had shaken off the left-wing views of his youth at the LSE and his early days as the That Was The Week That Was resident controversialist but not the argumentativeness or iconoclasm. While he continued to despise many aspects of the traditional British Establishment, in particular almost all the judiciary and most of the politicians, he was unsparing in his criticism of Soviet repression in Eastern Europe. There was no shortage of material for his scorn.

Throughout 1981, Dessa Trevisan in Warsaw and Michael Binyon, the Times correspondent in Moscow, had been filing alarming reports about the deteriorating situation in Poland. The economy was in desperate shape and the Solidarity Movement, the Eastern Bloc’s first free trade union, was openly challenging the authority of the Communist Party. Moscow had been issuing the Warsaw government with ominous requests to put its house in order and crack down on ‘anti-Soviet activities’.[397 - Ibid., 19 September 1981.] There were fears of a repeat of the Prague Spring of 1968 with Soviet tanks this time invading Poland to restore Communist unity. On 13 December 1981, Poland’s leader, General Jaruzelski, took the hint and imposed martial law.

For The Times, as with all news services, the problem was how to get reports out from a country that had imposed a news blackout. With the Polish borders sealed and all telephone and telex links shut down, it was extremely difficult to get any accurate news out of the country. Peter Hopkirk pieced together some details from ‘western diplomatic sources’ and a variety of eyewitness reports from businessmen leaving the country as the crackdown commenced. There were troops and armoured vehicles on the city streets but reports varied as to the extent of the strike action in the mines and factories. Roger Boyes, the Times correspondent in Warsaw, managed to get out a daily diary of the first four days of martial law and this appeared in the paper on 17 December. Solidarity’s leaders had been arrested and Lech Walesa was being held in isolation in a government villa outside Warsaw. ‘Chopin martial music and the general [Jaruzelski] on the screen and radio all day,’ Boyes noted. Announcers were wearing military uniform. Troops had occupied the Gdansk shipyards and surrounded the Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, some of whose staff were led away. ‘Troops are to be seen everywhere with fixed bayonets.’[398 - Ibid., 17 December 1981.]

Prior to the imposition of martial law, The Times had taken the view that between offering fresh financial aid ‘tied to IMF-type conditions’ and witnessing the economic collapse of Poland, the first was preferable. Unlike the second option, it was more likely to detach the country from the Soviet Union. Jaruzelski’s actions in December 1981 killed off any hopes in Gray’s Inn Road of sending in the investment analysts.[399 - ‘Can We Help Poland?’, leading article, The Times, 23 September 1981; ‘What the West Should Do’, leading article, The Times, 17 December 1981.] Harold Evans (still editor at that time) wrote to Rupert Murdoch, ‘You ought to know that The Times leader on the West’s reaction to Poland last week described the attitude of Lord Carrington as “flacid and feeble” (among other things) and he has let it be known that he is extremely annoyed.’[400 - Harold Evans to Rupert Murdoch, 17 January 1982, Evans Day File A759/ 9329.]

Following street scuffles and clashes with the police, 205 arrests were made in Gdansk over the weekend of 30–31 January 1982. More violent demonstrations led to 1372 arrests on 3–4 May and the reimposition of evening curfews in Warsaw for young people. With a Polish Pope in Rome who had become a rallying point against oppression, the Church in Poland was caught in a difficult position – a spiritual power trying to negotiate with a temporal one. As Roger Boyes suggested, ‘the perpetual paradox of Church strategy is that the closer it moves to talking to the government, the further it moves from the main body of Catholic believers’.[401 - The Times, 13 August 1982.] In November, the release of Lech Walesa after 336 days in custody raised hopes that the end of martial law in Poland might be in sight. But still the West held back in refusing aid.

The Polish situation sharpened the debate over whether the West should invest in the Communist east (a debate held in parallel to that over economic sanctions against South Africa). The cause célèbre was the construction of the Siberian gas pipeline. British jobs were involved in it. France and Germany wanted it to help with supplying their own energy needs. There were fears that a decision to cease cooperation would provoke Moscow into pressuring Poland to default on her massive debts to British and European banks. During 1982, however, President Reagan, having banned American companies from equipping the gas pipeline, sought to apply US law retrospectively against European companies involved in its construction. Considering the United States was continuing to sell Midwest grain cheaply to the Soviet Union, there was a measure of inconsistency in the President’s position. The Times, already irritated by Washington’s initial irresolution on the Falklands’ crisis, was deeply unimpressed, lambasting an idea that ‘set a precedent that could undermine the basis of international business trust’.[402 - ‘Trade Across the Curtain’, leading article, The Times, 16 November 1982.] Reagan backed down and the ban was lifted on 21 August 1983, exactly one month after the end of martial law in Poland. In July, Douglas-Home, accompanied by Murdoch, was granted a twenty-minute audience with President Reagan in the White House.

Michael Binyon had been The Times’s man in Moscow. Urbane, with the manner of the British diplomats with whom he spent so much of his time, the Cambridge-educated Binyon had arrived in the Soviet capital with his wife and three-year-old child in 1978. Extraordinarily, the paper had had no Moscow correspondent since 1972, a consequence of Soviet obstruction and a serious handicap to the paper’s pretensions as a world paper of record. Yet, as Binyon discovered, ‘the Russians had a great respect for The Times. They thought it was the official voice of Britain in the same way that Pravda is for the Soviet Union. They took it very seriously.’[403 - Michael Binyon, quoted in TNL News, September 1982.]

There was virtually no night life in Moscow, only endless ambassadorial receptions. Binyon had the distinction of being touched out of a photograph published in Izvestia at a reception for Michael Foot. He was more readily recognized for his work at the British Press Awards in 1981, when he picked up the David Holden prize. According to the judges, his reporting from the Soviet Union had been ‘one of the joys of the year. He combines hard reporting, descriptive writing and highly significant detail.’ Such observation filled his subsequent book, Life in Russia. But in mid-1982 he was moved on to become the paper’s Bonn correspondent. His replacement in Moscow was Richard Owen. Owen was thirty-four and had been at The Times for only two years, having previously gained a Ph.D. from the LSE and worked for the BBC. He spoke Russian, German, French and some Polish. He was still settling in Moscow when the Tass news agency confirmed Brezhnev’s death after eighteen years at the superpower’s helm. ‘When the end came, and it had been coming for a long time,’ reported Owen ‘the Soviet leadership seemed temporarily paralysed.’ The previous day The Times had led with the headline ‘Rumours of top leader’s death sweep Moscow’, based on Owen’s observations that ‘television schedules were changed without explanation and television news readers appeared dressed in black’. With the official confirmation, The Times went through its usual motions: page six cleared for a full-page obituary – ‘President Brezhnev: consolidator of Soviet power’ – while on the following page Owen assessed the runners and riders. ‘One of the main weaknesses of the Soviet system,’ he stressed, ‘is that it makes no provision for political succession.’ Konstantin Chernenko was the favourite followed by Yuri Andropov, while, of the less likely contenders, ‘Michael Sergeyevich Gorbachov is perhaps the most interesting Politburo member in the long term … He is confident, quiet, efficient, and biding his time.’[404 - The Times, 12 November 1982.]

In the event, Andropov pipped Chernenko, The Times trying to find the crumb of comfort that, having been head of the KGB for fifteen years, he would at least know what was going on in the country.[405 - ‘Enter Mr Andropov’, leading article, The Times, 13 November 1982.] Fifteen months later, Owen was again prophesying a successor when Andropov died in February 1984 (he had not been seen in public since the previous August). The obituary had no option but to focus on his professional CV since – despite being at the forefront of Soviet politics for so many years – details such as whether he had a wife remained unknown (he did, but she made her first public appearance in the wake of his funeral). This time it was the seventy-two-year-old Chernenko who succeeded.

The West’s tense relations with the teetering old men of the Kremlin formed the backdrop to the most important non-party political movement of the early 1980s, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. In Britain, the particular rallying call was the arrival of ninety-six US cruise missiles at the Greenham Common air base in Cambridgeshire. A hard core of women ‘peace protestors’ had been camping out at the air base for fifteen months when, on 12 December 1982, they were joined by a mass demonstration of thirty thousand women who linked hands and circled the perimeter wire of the base. With flowers and poems being inserted in the wire, the tone of the protest harked back to the ‘make love not war’ hippy movement of the late 1960s, although the women-only nature of the demonstration reduced, to some extent, the opportunities for hedonism available. There were sixty arrests. A CND demonstration outside Parliament led to 141 arrests. Douglas-Home was not much impressed, but the huge scale of national unease over the deployment of US nuclear weapons could not be so easily dismissed as an offshoot of a particular strain of feminism. Uncertainty about the power struggle in Moscow and dislike for the gun-totting tough talk of the ex-Hollywood cowboy (as his detractors so frequently described him) Ronald Reagan produced a broad coalition which feared that the sober reality of MAD (mutually assured destruction) would prove insufficient deterrence against either side attempting a first strike. With Monsignor Bruce Kent as its general secretary, CND drew particular support from many Church groups and individuals. When The Church and the Bomb, a report by the Church of England’s working party, argued that the retention of Britain’s nuclear deterrent was immoral, the editor’s brand of muscular Christianity rose to the fore: ‘The immorality of possessing nuclear weapons with the improbable intention of using them is only a small fraction of the immorality of actually using them. Set that against the certain rather than probable moral benefits of sustained peace in Europe, and the working party’s case falls down.’[406 - ‘The Morality of Deterrence’, leading article, The Times, 19 October 1982.]

The 1982 Labour Party conference voted for the third year in succession in favour of Britain’s unilateral nuclear disarmament. The motion, put forward by the SOGAT ’82 print union, gained the necessary two-thirds majority to ensure it was binding on party policy (it had, in any case, the support of the party leader). It called for ‘developing with the trade union movement a detailed programme for the conversion of the relevant parts of the arms industry to the manufacture of socially-useful products so that no compulsory redundancy should arise from this policy.’ Truly, the party was committed to turning swords into ploughshares. Few on the editorial floor at Gray’s Inn Road doubted the ability of SOGAT to master the art of turning sophisticated technology into labour-intensive machinery.

III

Like Rupert Murdoch, Harold Evans had been broadly sympathetic towards Israel, putting on record his doubts about some of his leader writers’ wish to endorse a Palestinian state at a time when the PLO was not prepared to acknowledge the state of Israel. He had been up against the pro-Palestinian view of, in particular, Edward Mortimer, a leader writer and foreign specialist at The Times since 1973. An Old Etonian, Balliol man and fellow of All Souls, Mortimer’s history of Islam, Faith and Power, was published in 1982. Rather pointedly, he stuck up a pro-Palestinian poster in his office.[407 - Harold Evans to Owen Hickey, Richard Owen, Brian Horton, 5 November 1981, Evans Day File; Harold Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, p. 237.] He would later become chief speech writer to the Secretary-General of the UN, Kofi Annan. In June 1982, The Times affirmed its commitment to an independent Palestinian state: ‘Lebanon for the Lebanese, must be the slogan; Israel for the Israelis; and a Palestine of some sort, west of Jordan, for the Palestinians.’[408 - ‘Lebanon for the Lebanese’, leading article, The Times, 14 June 1982.]

In June 1981, Israeli jets struck the Osirak nuclear plant near Baghdad. The Israeli Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, justified it as a pre-emptive strike at a project that was covertly developing Iraq’s attempts to gain nuclear weapons, and he had no doubt that such a capability would be used to annihilate Israel. The Israeli attack raised several issues, not all of them subject to definitive answers. Was Iraq really developing such a capability and, if so, would she use it against Israel? Did such a possibility justify a pre-emptive attack of this kind? There was also the diplomatic angle, given the outrage felt by Arab countries and the French government. France had built the reactor and French personnel (one of whom was killed in the attack) were helping to operate it. The Times took the view that the Iraqis probably were acquiring weapons-grade enriched uranium but that the Israeli action would only drive Saddam Hussein into the arms of Syria. The action ‘may cause rejoicing in Israel in the short term, but it has not guaranteed Israeli security in the longer term’ concluded the leader column.[409 - ‘Israel’s Pre-Emptive Strike’, leading article, The Times, 9 June 1981.] The unpalatable central issue – whether it was in anyone’s interest for Saddam Hussein to acquire nuclear weapons – was sidestepped.

Robert Fisk was the paper’s Middle Eastern correspondent. Having completed a Ph.D. at Trinity College Dublin on Irish neutrality during the Second World War, he had joined The Times in 1971 in his mid-twenties, reporting on the Troubles in Northern Ireland and winning Granada TV’s What The Papers Say award for Reporter of the Year in 1975. It was while in Ireland that he uncovered a succession of British Army cover-ups, further cementing his dislike of what he saw as the repressive tendencies of authority and officialdom. ‘I learned that authority lies, governments lie, ministries of defence lie,’ he said of his time in Ulster, adding that his response was to ‘keep challenging, to reject and refuse what you’re handed’.[410 - Robert Fisk to the author, interview, 21 September 2004.] The police took him in for questioning following their discovery that he had been receiving classified documents from a rogue Army press officer who was later convicted for manslaughter. His subsequent switch away from reporting on Ireland was wrongly attributed to this incident. In fact, he merely wanted a change of scene. But Gray’s Inn Road was no place for a man of Fisk’s peripatetic courage. He had an ally in Douglas-Home, at that time home news editor, who, despite his own regard for the British Army, always encouraged Fisk to investigate further. In 1976 he was dispatched to the Middle East, finding plenty of trouble to write about in the Lebanon and Iran before covering the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan where he gained considerable access to the Soviet forces. At the IPC awards he had won International Reporter of the Year for two years running in 1980 and 1981. Frequently shot at, ‘you reach a point’ he laconically observed, ‘when one shell looks very much like another’.[411 - TNL News, March 1983.]

Fisk had arrived in the Lebanon just as the Syrians were invading the country. The Lebanon had collapsed into anarchy and the Syrian occupation had the backing of the Arab League and East Beirut’s Christian population. It was not long before Damascus’s intervention became, in turn, deeply resented and the Christians began to look for a new saviour – Israel. Syria, meanwhile, decided to crush ruthlessly its own fanatical Muslims. In February 1982 there was an insurrection by Sunni fundamentalists in the Syrian city of Hama. With the Syrian government warning foreign journalists they risked being shot by their forces if they tried to travel there, it was impossible to gauge exactly the extent of the uprising and the undoubted ferocity with which it was being suppressed. Fisk, however, decided to get a closer look and took a detour from the road to Damascus. As he approached, he could see the smoke from the ruins of Hama’s old city rising but roadblocks prevented him from getting any closer – as they had prevented any other journalist from enquiry. Fisk, however, had a stroke of luck when two displaced Syrian soldiers approached his car and asked if they could hitch a lift with him back to their units. This was his opportunity. With shells whizzing overhead, Fisk’s car sped across the battlefront, making it to the Syrians’ lines from where Soviet-made T62 tanks were firing across the Orontes river. A mosque was being shelled to pieces; a giant eighteenth-century wooden waterwheel was on fire, water cascading from its shattered structure; huge mortar cannons rocked back and forth, pounding the ancient walled city to obliteration. Bullets pinged and whirled back from the insurgents. The siege, Fisk learned, had been going on for sixteen days. There had been ferocious fighting in the cellars and passageways underneath the city as well as within it at street level. Syrian troops had even been blown up by a new and shocking phenomenon – women suicide bombers who embraced them clutching uncorked grenades. Some troops had defected to the insurgent Muslim Brotherhood.[412 - Robert Fisk to the author, interview, 21 September 2004; Robert Fisk, Pity the Nation, pp. 183–7.]

At Gray’s Inn Road there was considerable concern for Fisk’s safety, not least when he telegrammed, ‘My decision is to stick it out.’[413 - Telegram from Robert Fisk, 25 February 1982, HME 1/19.] The Syrian government was keen to silence him and complained to the British Ambassador in Damascus that Fisk was filing false reports from Hama and other places ‘which he had not visited’.[414 - Brian Horton to Harold Evans, 5 March 1982, HME 1/19.] Syrian radio denounced him as a liar. The Times, however, stood by its reporter’s claim to have been the only journalist to have witnessed the scenes of carnage. The following year he returned to Hama to find out what had happened in the aftermath. To his amazement the old city had simply disappeared. Where ancient walls and crowded streets had once stood, now there was only a giant car park. The death toll remained unknown but was estimated at around ten thousand. The Baathist regime had successfully destroyed its militant Islamic opposition. [415 - Fisk, Pity the Nation, pp. 183–7.]The Times was no advocate of instability for its own sake in the area. It believed the Syrian President, Hafez al-Assad, was ‘a man of straightforward dealing and statesmanlike behaviour’ and warned Israel not to take advantage of Syria’s internal problems by invading southern Lebanon.[416 - ‘The Best Assad We Have’, leading article, The Times, 15 February 1982.]

Instead, with the world’s attention on the Falklands War, Israel attacked southern Lebanon following the shooting on 3 June 1982 of the Israeli Ambassador to Britain outside the Dorchester Hotel in London. Israel claimed that since the ceasefire agreed with the PLO in July 1981 she had been subjected to more than 150 terrorist attacks. The Times disputed the legitimacy of this casus belli, questioning not only the statistics but also pointing out that none of the attacks during this period had come from the northern front.[417 - ‘Israel Erupts’, leading article, The Times, 8 June 1982; ‘An Unbalanced Policy’, leading article, The Times, 10 June 1982.] The implosion of Lebanon, once a land of democracy and prosperity, was, of course, a long affair. Civil war in 1975 was followed by occupation by Syria. Hating their Palestinian and Syrian guests, many Lebanese Christians regarded the Israeli invaders as liberators. But in Gray’s Inn Road, sympathy with Begin’s Israel was wearing thin. Peace with Egypt in 1978 and massive military and financial aid from the United States, far from giving Israel the sense of security necessary for it to make concessions to the dispossessed Palestinians, appeared to have encouraged aggression: the attack on Iraq’s nuclear plant in June 1981, the bombing of Beirut the following month and the annexation of Golan in December. In leading articles written by the paper’s Middle East expert, Edward Mortimer, both the invasion of the Lebanon and the equivocal attitude to it from Washington were condemned.[418 - ‘An Unbalanced Policy’, leading article, The Times, 10 June 1982.]

The Israeli offensive into the Lebanon temporarily displaced the Falklands’ conflict on the front page. Christopher Walker was able to file censored reports on the Israeli advance including a gripping account of the storming of Beaufort castle, the twelfth-century crusader fortress that had been the PLO’s main forward position in southern Lebanon for over a decade. Robert Fisk filed daily from Beirut, chronicling the air assault on the city. Transmitting his reports was an arduous business. At five o’ clock each morning he would travel south to observe the Israeli advance, often with reporters from the Associated Press bureau, coming under ferocious air attack, before returning to Beirut to file his report from a telex machine in time for it to make the copy deadline at Gray’s Inn Road. The situation deteriorated as Beirut became surrounded. The electricity supply was curtailed and food and petrol were not allowed into the city. Fisk kept his generator running by bribing an Israeli tank crew to supply him with fuel at extortionate rates. Filing to London could take hours because, whenever the generator cut out, the telex went down too. At eight o’clock in the evening, the task would be completed and Fisk, exhausted, had anxious moments waiting for Gray’s Inn Road to confirm it had indeed received all of his copy. Periodically, a message would be returned thanking him for his report and apologizing for the fact the unions had called another strike and so it would not be appearing after all. When they were printed, his reports were graphic, gripping and made no attempt to be impartial. ‘To say that Israel’s war against the Palestinians is turning into a dangerous and brutal conflict,’ he wrote, ‘would be to understate the political realities of its military adventure into Lebanon’[419 - The Times, 8 June 1982.]

By 14 June, Israeli tanks had linked up with the Christian Phalange in East Beirut. The Palestinians were hemmed in and surrounded. Yet Fisk, still in the city, predicted disaster for the invader: ‘a war which was initially supposed to take their troops only 25 miles north of their own border’ now appeared poised to degenerate into costly street fighting, ‘terrorizing the entire civilian population of West Beirut and killing hundreds of people. Is it a war that will ultimately be worth winning?’[420 - Ibid., 15 June 1982.] From the greater comfort of Gray’s Inn Road, Edward Mortimer agreed, adding that ‘the inability of the wealthy and supposedly powerful rulers of the Gulf to save Lebanon and the Palestinians from being destroyed with weapons supplied by the United States will add fuel to the brushfire of Islamic revolution blowing in from Iran’.[421 - Edward Mortimer, ‘Why the West should fear the shame of the Arabs’, The Times, 8 June 1982.]

The disaster came in September. A disengagement force led by US Marines had overseen the evacuation of the PLO guerrillas from West Beirut, a notable triumph for Israel. But it was no harbinger of peace. Scarcely had the US Marines left than chaos returned. On 14 September, Bashir Gemayel, Lebanon’s Christian President-elect, was killed in a terrorist bomb blast on a Beirut Phalangist Party office. Two hours later, Israeli troops moved into West Beirut. The next day they surrounded the Sabra and Chatila camps which were teeming with Palestinian refugees. As early as the 18 September edition of The Times, Leslie Plommer was able to report from Beirut that Phalangists had entered the camps, started fires and removed individuals while Israeli troops looked on. Two days later, Fisk filed a report that painted an altogether more serious picture. His dispatch dominated the front page. The shooting, he wrote, had lasted fourteen hours. He estimated the deaths at around a thousand (the actual figure is still disputed, though thought to be between 600 and 1400). Fisk had gained entry to the Chatila camp shortly after the last Phalangists had left: ‘in some cases, the blood was still wet on the ground … Down every alley way, there were corpses – women, young men, babies and grandparents – lying together in lazy and terrible profusion where they had been knifed or machine gunned to death,’ he wrote. The smell of death was everywhere. Having feasted on the dead, flies moved pitilessly to the living. Fisk had to keep his mouth covered to stop them swarming into it. ‘What we found inside the camp … did not quite beggar description although it would be easier to re-tell in a work of fiction or in the cold prose of a medical report.’ It was certainly graphic, men shot at point-blank range, one castrated. ‘The women,’ Fisk continued:

were middle-aged and their corpses lay draped over a pile of rubble. One lay on her back, her dress torn open and the head of a little girl emerging from behind her. The girl had short, dark curly hair and her eyes were staring at us and there was a frown on her face. She was dead.

Another child lay on the roadway like a discarded flower, her white dress stained with mud and dust. She could have been no more than three years old. The back of her head had been blown away by a bullet fired into her brain. One of the women also held a tiny baby to her body. The bullet that had passed through her breast had killed the baby too.

Further gruesome descriptions followed, the dispatch ending with Fisk moving on from the camp and finding himself with Israeli troops under fire from a ruined building. Taking cover beside a reticent army major, he tried to solicit information on what had happened at Chatila: ‘Then his young radio operator, who had been lying behind us in the mud, crawled up next to me. He was a young man. He pointed to his chest. “We Israelis don’t do that sort of thing,” he said. “It was the Christians”.’[422 - The Times, 20 September 1982.]

Subsequently Journalist of the Year again, Fisk’s dispatch from Chatila became famous with the closing statement adopted as its title. It was reproduced in The Faber Book of Reportage, an international anthology edited by John Carey in 1987, one of only four historic examples of Times journalism to be included.[423 - Fisk thus joined the illustrious Times company of William Howard Russell’s report of the Battle of Balaclava and Charge of the Light Brigade, November 1854; Nandor Ebor’s dispatch on Garibaldi’s liberation of Palermo, June 1860; and James (Jan) Morris on the conquest of Mount Everest, June 1953.] Fisk also secured an interview with Major Saad Haddad who denied his Israeli-sponsored private army had participated with the Phalangist militia in the massacre. The tone of Fisk’s interview was decidedly sceptical. The Times leader column was quick to point the finger at Israel’s shared culpability: ‘Even if they did not actively will the massacre, they are guilty of knowingly creating the conditions in which it was likely to happen.’[424 - ‘After the Massacre’, leading article, The Times, 20 September 1982.] The following February, the paper devoted extensive coverage, led by Christopher Walker in Jerusalem, to the findings of the Kahan Commission, the Israeli judicial enquiry, into the tragedy. It was highly critical of the Begin administration’s general disregard and in particular found fault with Ariel Sharon, the Defence Minister and architect of the Lebanon invasion, who had permitted the Phalangists to enter the camp despite the obvious likelihood that they would slaughter its inhabitants.

The instant response of The Times to the massacre was to argue that, since neither Syrian nor Israeli forces had brought the stability necessary for a civilian government to succeed in the Lebanon, a multinational UNsanctioned force should be sent. The Times wanted full British participation, something Mrs Thatcher was keen to avoid.[425 - Ibid.] Reagan, however, responded immediately, ordering eight hundred US Marines back into West Beirut. France and Italy followed as, reluctantly, did Britain. They marched into a trap. On 23 October 1983, two Shia Muslim suicide bombers killed 242 US Marines and 58 French troops stationed in Beirut. In one day, more servicemen had been killed than Britain lost throughout the Falklands War the previous year. In December, French and US jets retaliated, hitting Syrian positions. It was all in vain. In the new year the Lebanese government fell, having lost control of West Beirut. In March, the multinational force packed its bags and left. The Israelis were drawing and redrawing their defence line closer and closer to their own border. The Lebanon was being left to the militias, the Syrians and the undertakers.

IV

While Robert Fisk and other courageous reporters around the world dodged shot and shell to file their copy for The Times, the paper continued to be under an industrial life sentence itself. At the NUJ’s annual conference at Coventry in March 1982, the union’s president, Harry Conroy, warned that the freedom of the press was being undermined by the Thatcher Government, the proprietors and ‘the misuse of new technology’. The Times had sent its Midlands correspondent, Arthur Osman, to cover the speech but he was barred from entering the conference on the grounds that the NUJ did not allow non-NUJ journalists to cover its affairs. Mr Osman’s crime was to be a member of the Institute of Journalists union. First up to condemn The Times for having the temerity to employ a member of a different trade union was Jake Ecclestone, long-term scourge of Times Newspapers’ management, who had finally left The Times’s employment the previous year and taken up the position of deputy general secretary of the NUJ. Those who spoke most volubly about safeguarding the freedom of the press were, it seemed, less keen on the freedom of association.

The Fleet Street paradox was that, although the various print unions hated one another and the various journalist unions hated one another, they remained great believers in trade union solidarity across unrelated industrial sectors. British Rail still had the contract to deliver The Times. In June 1982 a rail strike paralysed distribution of the paper. Yet rather than assist the companies that employed their members, the SOGAT print union refused to distribute any newspapers that were switched to road distribution, thereby closing off the only means of circumventing the National Union of Railwaymen’s ability to shutdown the press.[426 - Brenda Dean to all Fathers of chapel working under NPA Agreement, 25 June 1982, 6985/21.] This was far from being an isolated incident. In August, Fleet Street was silenced by a sympathy strike by the London press branch of the EETPU (electricians’ union) in support of a 12 per cent pay claim by NHS nurses. Fleet Street’s proprietors, working though the Newspaper Publishers Association, could not see what the going rate for hospital nurses had to do with those employed to produce newspapers and secured a High Court injunction against what was classed as ‘secondary action’. Frank Chapple, the EETPU’s moderate general secretary, also appealed to his members not to pull the plug on the press. Undaunted, Sean Geraghty, the branch secretary, led his 1300 members out. No national newspaper managed to publish. Geraghty had excluded only the Communist Morning Star from the EETPU strike. Despite this thoughtful dispensation, it too failed to appear when SOGAT members halted its production.

Having lost a day’s production due to Geraghty’s action, Fleet Street braced itself for a longer shutdown when the NGA print union threatened to go on strike if Geraghty went to prison for contempt of court. As the law stood there was no debate about the matter. James Prior’s 1980 Employment Act had made secondary action illegal. Geraghty had ignored a High Court injunction to this effect. Yet, the belief by trade unionists that the matter could nonetheless be determined by the effect of industrial action rather than the writ of a court of law was instructive. The Times suspected that the NGA’s motivation was to test the secondary action legislation by creating a martyr ‘like the commotion that attended the jailing of five London dockers who defied the Industrial Relations Court in 1973 and hastened its demise’.[427 - ‘An Unlawful Interruption’, leading article, The Times, 12 August 1982.] In the event, a showdown was avoided. Geraghty was fined £350 and legal costs of £7000.

Yet, this would not prove to be the end of secondary or ‘sympathy’ action. On 22 September, The Times, together with all the other national newspapers, did not appear when the print unions downed tools and joined the TUC’s ‘Day of Action’ in support of health service workers. Douglas-Home was perturbed by the handful of the paper’s journalists who joined the boycott work campaign. He was particularly uneasy with the decision of Pat Healy, the social services correspondent, to be adopted as the Labour candidate for Bedford at the next general election, believing that readers would question the impartiality of her reporting. There was, it has to be said, no shortage of precedent for the conscientious journalist becoming a politician and the matter, perhaps wisely, was allowed to rest.

Industrial action silenced The Times again between 20 December 1982 and 3 January 1983. The dispute was caused by nine EETPU members who refused to operate new equipment until management renegotiated their terms and cost Times Newspapers more than £2 million. They won the support of their fellow electricians. Murdoch again threatened to close down the paper. Being off the streets was not the best omen for the paper’s new year. In the end, management had to abandon its plan to implement a wage freeze on all staff for 1983. Any hope of The Times scraping out of the red was lost. When, on 3 January, the paper returned to the streets, a leader article written by Douglas-Home, entitled ‘All Our Tomorrows’, laid bare the feeling in Gray’s Inn Road. It started on a positive, almost lyrical note:

For many people, life without a newspaper would be like music without time – a blur of inchoate sounds, an endless and incomprehensible cacophony. It is newspapers which puncture the march of time, syncopating their narrative of events with commentary, analysis and entertainment. Newspapers comprehend the sound of history in the making, and give it meaning.

But it questioned how long a newspaper could expect to keep its readers’ loyalty if it could not keep its side of the bargain:

The British press is only too ready fearlessly to expose bad management, bad unions, and bad industrial relations wherever they occur, except in its own backyard. The subterfuge and cynicism which poison industrial relations in Fleet Street remain a close secret. That is a strange kind of conspiracy of silence to maintain when the newspaper houses themselves find any other kind of cooperation almost impossible to achieve.[428 - ‘All Our Tomorrows’, leading article, The Times, 3 January 1983.]

The response of the unions was to go back on strike and The Times was not published between 27 January and 3 February when SOGAT struck. As part of a pooling of Times and Sunday Times library resources, management had appointed a member from SOGAT’s supervisory branch, but SOGAT insisted that management could only employ someone to a library position from the union’s clerical branch. Amazingly, this was the demarcation issue upon which SOGAT shut down the paper. Twenty-six days after this dispute was settled, The Times was again shut down when members of the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers (AUEW) walked out as part of another TUC-endorsed ‘Day of Action’ – this time in protest at the Government’s efforts to ban union membership among national security and intelligence civil servants at GCHQ in Cheltenham.

V

Those who were preoccupied by Douglas-Home’s aristocratic credentials or the fact that his uncle had been a ‘wet’ Tory Prime Minister, did not, at first, realize that he was of a determinedly Thatcherite frame of mind. No one should have been surprised that he took an uncompromising line on the Falklands’ crisis, the first issue to dominate the news after he assumed the chair. Defence was his special subject and he was an ex-soldier and military historian. But some were surprised when he continued to take a bullish view of Mrs Thatcher’s domestic agenda as well. There were complaints that his leaders were too often uncritical in their support of the Government. The veteran liberal sage Hugo Young believed that, under Douglas-Home, The Times developed ‘the most right-wing world view in the serious press’ in Britain. Young told Douglas-Home that the paper had even come to outdo the Daily Telegraph in this respect, ‘mainly by virtue of so rarely finding President Reagan to the left of you’.[429 - Hugo Young to Douglas-Home, 16 February 1985, Douglas-Home Papers.] When Douglas-Home asked the Labour MP Clare Short why she had stopped reading The Times she told him it had ‘deteriorated into a crudely biased, right-wing paper. Someone else used the phrase “up-market Sun”.’[430 - Douglas-Home/Clare Short correspondence, 26 March and 2 April 1985, Douglas-Home Papers.] A consequence of this belief was that it was sometimes difficult to coax senior Labour MPs to write for the Op-Ed page, although in Peter Stothard’s experience of trying to commission articles from them this was also partly attributable to their disappointment at being offered the going rate of only £150 per article.[431 - Peter Stothard to Douglas-Home, 13 April 1983, Douglas-Home Papers.]

The left’s dissatisfaction with what they saw as an increasingly partisan and hostile paper was balanced by those on the right who had found the bien pensant pieties of the middle ground stale and unchallenging. In an article ‘Welcome Back Thunderer’ for the Wall Street Journal, Seth Lipsky commended the paper’s new sense of purpose, supporting the US intervention in Grenada, agreeing that the USSR was ‘an evil empire indeed’ and condemning the hypocrisy of those who wanted to place sanctions on South Africa.[432 - Seth Lipsky, ‘Welcome Back Thunderer’, Wall Street Journal, 14 November 1985.] Others agreed that it was time ‘The Thunderer’ got some fire back in its belly after a long period in which, according to the leader page of the Spectator, it had ‘tended to support a government only when it was taking an easy way out’.[433 - Leading article, Spectator, 2 November 1985.]

The appointment of Roger Scruton as a regular columnist in 1983 began a four-year run in which the Tory philosopher and enthusiastic foxhunter succeeded in running to ground his quarry – from trendy dons and churchmen to CND campaigners and modern architects. Scruton was a friend of Charles and Jessica Douglas-Home but it was Peter Stothard, with whom responsibility for columnists fell, who took the brunt of the backlash from the soi-disant ‘great and the good’ at their most outraged. Reflecting on the matter a decade later, Stothard concluded that ‘no decision brought me more trouble’ than Scruton’s weekly philippics since ‘barely would a piece have appeared in print before my in-tray was filled with “dump the mad doctor” from all sides of polite society and the political left’.[434 - The Times, 4 March 1993.] An admirer of Edmund Burke, Scruton was an articulate, intelligent and authentic critic of modernity’s failings, which, in the eyes of progressives bent on cultural conformity to their own nostrums, made him something equivalent to a dangerous revolutionary.

Yet, it was with Douglas-Home’s leader writing policy that dissent within the ranks of the paper’s ‘college of cardinals’ was most strongly expressed. None were closet fellow travellers: they were as opposed to the Kremlin’s world view as was the editor. Nonetheless, two leader writers in particular who specialized in foreign policy, Richard Davy and Edward Mortimer, were increasingly unhappy with Douglas-Home’s tendency to see the editorial column as a fire and brimstone preacher’s pulpit rather than the open house for mid-term discussion and the expression of honest doubt. ‘Until Charlie took over,’ Davy lamented, ‘the best Times leaders started from an independent position and argued their way to a conclusion giving due weight to other views … He seemed to want leaders to do no more than fulminate about the Soviet threat whereas I wanted to discuss the political and diplomatic problems of dealing with it.’ Davy believed that the tired, old men who ran the Kremlin could not last forever and it was necessary to reinvigorate the 1970s spirit of détente. He was horrified when Douglas-Home looked at him blankly and replied, ‘What is there to talk about?’ To the editor, détente was indistinguishable from appeasement while to his chief foreign leader writer it was a form of diplomacy that ‘merely required periodic adjustment to new circumstances and regular checks to keep it in line with military security’. Where necessary, this meant not only attempting to encourage the trapped peoples of Eastern Europe but also to find means of ‘improving relations with their ghastly governments at the same time’. There was, of course, no meeting of minds with Douglas-Home on this point and when in 1984 Davy realized that he was no longer going to be given the space to present his more nuanced argument he resigned. Edward Mortimer left shortly thereafter, also disillusioned. With their departures, Mary Dejevsky started writing leaders. She was much closer to the editor’s perception of Cold War realities. With hindsight and the opening of previously closed archives, Davy concluded that Douglas-Home was more hawkish than Ronald Reagan – the latter had, after all, established private channels to Moscow even when his public pronouncements remained at their most defiant.[435 - Richard Davy to the author, 2 January 2005.]

On most political matters, Douglas-Home and Rupert Murdoch were of like mind. Unquestionably, this made the proprietor more benevolent towards his editor than he had been towards Harold Evans. Consequently, the self-confident Douglas-Home felt able to take the sorts of liberties with his boss that it would not have been sensible for Evans to have risked. Douglas-Home was not averse to putting the phone down on Murdoch – particularly if there was an audience to appreciate such lèse-majesté. The belief that their editor had the social confidence not to be intimidated by the proprietor certainly enhanced his popularity among the staff. Many, however, were uneasy about the political repositioning of the paper. Hugh Stephenson, the former editor of The Times business section who had gone on to edit the New Statesman, felt the political move defied commercial sense, doubting ‘whether there is room for two Daily Telegraphs’.[436 - ‘Not the Age of The Times’, New Statesman, 11 January 1985.] But Murdoch was an admirer of the Telegraph’s sense of mission and identity and believed The Times should be equally purposeful. At one stage, Douglas-Home got so tired of hearing Murdoch sing the Telegraph’s praises that he shouted back, ‘then why didn’t you buy the bloody Telegraph?’[437 - Rupert Murdoch to the author, interview, August 2003. Other accounts render the expletive variously.]

An unshakeable belief in defence and NATO was at the core of Douglas-Home’s views. At a time when Labour was committed to unilateral nuclear disarmament and the Cold War was going though a tense phase, it was natural that he should back the Conservatives. But under his editorship The Times became much more sympathetic to monetarist policies at home. The dislike of monetarism red in tooth and claw evident in the leader columns of Harold Evans was cast aside. ‘British economic policy should be guided by two rules: the first is that the Government should have a balanced budget and the second is that the growth of the money supply should be roughly similar to that of underlying production capacity’ the column now announced. ‘Only if the Government adheres to them consistently will it achieve price stability and, in the long run, price stability is the only macro-economic objective which it can deliver.’ Yet there were complications associated with pursuing purity in a world of sin. Britain’s problem was the same as that experienced by Switzerland in 1978: trying to achieve balanced budgets and price stability when other countries remained profligate turned the currency into such a safe haven for international investors that the exchange rate rose to levels that made manufactured exports prohibitively expensive. Although The Times continued to advocate a way round this problem by re-establishing fixed exchange rates it conceded, somewhat lamely, that in the meantime Britain could do little more than ‘set an example of good monetary management and encourage other industrial countries to behave the same way’.[438 - ‘The International Framework’, leading article, The Times, 11 February 1983.]

Certainly, if everything else depended upon bringing down the cost of money, there was finally some cause for hope. By November 1982, the inflation rate had fallen to 6.3 per cent, the lowest for a decade, but there was still no sign of this having a positive impact upon the unemployment rate. The Times leader column could draw comfort from the reality that ‘few people would have believed in 1979 that an unemployment total of three million would be accompanied by so little social discontent’[439 - ‘Beyond the Budget’, leading article, The Times, 8 February 1983.] but many felt complacent observations of this kind failed to grasp the extent of social disarray. It was not until September 1983 that there was the first recorded fall in unemployment since 1977, the true extent of joblessness masked by a proliferation of training schemes of varying degrees of usefulness.

The recession was reflected in the fortunes of the business pages of The Times. Confronted with the necessity of finding economies, the axe fell on The Times business news. Anthony Hilton was appointed City editor but the once large supporting staff was decimated. The journalistic range contracted accordingly. Even great culls present opportunities for those who remained and this was the attitude of the new financial editor, Graham Searjeant, who came over from the Sunday Times in 1983. Douglas-Home greeted him with words of advice that could have served well many a new boy: ‘Never attempt to be definitive, because you will have to write again tomorrow.’[440 - Graham Searjeant to the author, interview, 11 January 2005.] Searjeant proved to be one of the most accomplished business commentators of the next two decades, contributing not only in the business pages but also, anonymously, as a leader writer. For the paper as a whole, though, the comprehensive filleting of The Times business news – the section the old Thomson ownership had once imagined would rival the FT in its coverage – represented a major contraction. It left the FT with an almost unassailable advantage in this vital sector of the market for the next decade.

It was thus surprising that The Times was endorsing the Thatcherite vision of the enterprise economy while simultaneously cutting back on its own business coverage. The transformation to Thatcherite cheerleader was not swift or unquestioning, however. The bulk of the Government’s privatization campaign to roll back the frontiers of the nationalized economy lay ahead in a second term of office. The first attempt, in 1982, left The Times noticeably underwhelmed. The privatization of a majority stake in ‘Britoil’, as the British National Oil Corporation was renamed, was, as its author Nigel Lawson put it, ‘the largest privatization the world had ever known’.[441 - Lawson, The View From No. 11, p. 208.] But with Labour immediately pledging to renationalize the oil assets at the sale price, investors were cautious. This, together with a flotation in November 1982 that badly coincided with gloomy predictions about future oil prices, ensured it was embarrassingly undersubscribed. Neither Adrian Hamilton in the business news section nor The Times leader writers were surprised, concluding that ‘a decent interval before the next major sale would be judicious’.[442 - ‘The Pains of Privatisation’, leading article, The Times, 22 November 1982.] What was more, the paper still had to be convinced that ‘selling assets at a discount’ and ‘transferring ownership from twenty million taxpayers to a few hundred thousand shareholders, simply to raise a relatively small amount of money’ made sense.[443 - ‘Selling at a Discount’, leading article, The Times, 28 October 1982.] This was one tune that time and experience would later change.

Whatever the battles over the opinion pieces in the paper, there was still enough of the journal of record spirit within The Times to ensure straight, unbiased reporting on the news pages. The political editor was Julian Haviland, whom Harold Evans had appointed after he had spent more than twenty years at ITN. Haviland was reinforced by Tony Bevins, the chief political correspondent, and a team of four journalists working from the House of Commons to report British political news. In any case, despite the claims that it was now a bastion of right-wing prejudices, it was hard to discern too much enthusiasm for the Conservative Party even on the comment pages of The Times as the 1983 general election approached. ‘Only the conquest of inflation and of the Falklands were measureable successes,’ the leader column conceded, ‘with the rest having to be taken on trust from a not very eloquent band of ministers.’[444 - ‘The Love that Labour Lost’, leading article, The Times, 6 June 1983.] But the Labour Party manifesto, immortalized by Gerald Kaufman as ‘the longest suicide note in history’, put beyond the slightest doubt which party the paper would endorse. Labour’s manifesto called not only for the scrapping of Trident, unilateral nuclear disarmament and withdrawal from the EEC, but for the reimposition of exchange controls and the threat to the major clearing banks that if they refused to ‘cooperate with us fully … we shall stand ready to take one or more of them into public ownership’. Nationalization would be extended over electronics and pharmaceutical companies, on all tenanted land and on any private property ‘held empty without justification’. Private schools would lose charitable status and were to be ‘integrated’ into the local authority sector ‘where necessary’.[445 - The New Hope for Britain, Labour Party 1983 general election manifesto.] There was scarcely a word in the entire manifesto with which The Times columnists and leader writers did not take issue. Claiming to feel sympathy for his predicament, Bernard Levin described Michael Foot as ‘lurching between disaster and calamity with all the skill and aplomb of a one-legged tightrope-walker’. He was, Levin maintained, a man ‘unable to make his own Shadow Cabinet appointments or indeed to blow his nose in public without his trousers falling down’.[446 - The Times, 1 December 1982.]

The paper was also critical of the Liberal-SDP Alliance’s offering which was ‘a worthy compilation of much that has been tried, half-tried or at least seriously considered over the last political generation’.[447 - ‘All Their Tomorrows’, leading article, The Times, 8 June 1983.] Editorially, the switch from Harold Evans to Douglas-Home probably made little difference to the paper’s hostility to Michael Foot’s Labour Party, but it ensured a less charitable attitude towards the centre-left alternative. Despite this, subsequent estimates suggested that a third of Times readers voted for the Alliance. With the exception of the Guardian (41 per cent), this was the highest proportion for any national newspaper’s readership.[448 - Ivor Crewe and Anthony King, SDP: The Birth, Life and Death of the Social Democratic Party, p. 498.]