HarperCollins £30 pp727
Why would anyone want to read 700-plus pages about a tiny loss-making subsidiary of a giant multinational company? The answer is because that subsidiary is a newspaper. Newspapers are different. For more than a century rich people have lost money publishing them in return for some intangible glory and personal satisfaction. They are the thinking man’s horseflesh and showgirls.
No paper comes more expensive than The Times, tribal noticeboard of the British Establishment. Nobody has spent more money publishing it than a supposedly anti-Establishment Australian called Rupert Murdoch (also publisher of The Sunday Times). His predecessor, the Canadian Lord Thomson, acquired it from the once-American Astors, remarking that losing money on The Times was the “greatest privilege of my life”. These men were not so much businessmen as retro-imperialists.
Murdoch bought the paper in 1981 in a calculated gesture of bravado and mischief. Owning The Sun and News of the World had brought him profit but much woe. Buying The Times, then in desperate straits, would infuriate his enemies, raise his world profile and dilute his image as a vulgarian.Given the dire state of the newspaper industry, it could not conceivably make money. Fifty offers were received by Thomson but none was related to the paper’s (negative) value. An anti- Establishment owner would have bought The Times to get The Sunday Times, and closed it. Murdoch did not.
There are already six official volumes of the history of The Times since its foundation in 1785, written as a house journal to Britain’s ruling class. The seventh covers just 21 years of Murdoch’s ownership down to 2002 and is too long. Nor does the chopping back and forth between the internal life of the paper and a compendious political and social history of Britain quite work. The Times’s role as a journal of record has long been ceded to the press collectively. The whereabouts of a Times reporter or the tilt of a Times editorial are of little moment.
As a result the public events of the period — the Falklands, Thatcherism, the Iraq War, Tony Blair — appear in Stewart’s pages as a background chorus to his forte, the human drama of an always turbulent newspaper. Stewart tells this story with the verve of a soap opera. He relates the chaotic rise and fall of Harry Evans, the painful interregnum of Charles Douglas-Home, Charlie Wilson’s brave and raucous move to Wapping, my own two and half years fighting the Independent while Murdoch fought bankruptcy and, finally, Peter Stothard’s successful 10-year circulation war.
Stewart is unsparing in his judgment on individuals. Some might quibble at a reliance on interviews with journalists as an unchecked source. (I never “went wobbly” on the Gulf war, just on the efficacy and ethics of bombing civilians.) But the book is not intended as a eulogy. Indeed it is one of the best evocations I have read of the pandemonium of a newspaper office when internal personalities and external events meet in tempestuous conflict.
No pandemonium equalled that of Murdoch’s 1986 move to Wapping to outflank the print unions. Here Stewart is definitive. It was the most dramatic event in the Times’s history, and a turning point for the whole newspaper industry. The measure of “the Wapping revolution” was the vicious antipathy to it of virtually all of political and intellectual Britain. The Observer sacked sub-editors who also worked for The Times. Labour banned Times reporters from its events. The BBC was still boycotting the paper five years later.
Wapping would have happened under no other ownership. Unwilling to confront their production costs, other cities in Europe and America slid towards high-cost monopoly. London has as many titles today as it did 50 years ago. That is Murdoch’s doing. It was inevitable that Murdoch should tower over the Times’s story as did no previous proprietor. He respected the integrity of the editorial content, at least after Evans’s departure.
When I supported John Major as Tory leader he barely knew who he was. But his concern with strategy and market position was unceasing. Stewart rightly portrays him as an easier man to like than to work for. He was fidgety, unsupportive and sometimes unfair. But I have no doubt that he saved The Times, and is still doing so.
The first consequence of Wapping was to enable Fleet Street to invest heavily in expansion. The second was a circulation war, preventing any hope that The Times might become profitable. In the early 1990s Murdoch was close to bankruptcy. He imposed a 10% cut in staff costs, a 50% price rise and a ban on promotion. It was probably the only time since the war that the paper traded at a marginal surplus. By the middle of the decade, with the advertising recession over and Murdoch safe, he indulged himself in a savage battle for a higher sale, notably with Conrad Black’s Telegraph.
Lord Thomson had done likewise in the mid-1960s, selling the paper at a quarter of its production cost. The same thing happened now as then. Sales soared and losses were astronomical. The price war cost £45m in a year. But Murdoch kept his nerve, or at least kept the Sunday Times’s cross-subsidy flowing. The paper broke through the half-million circulation barrier and went up to 700,000.
The question Stewart boldly asks is did Murdoch and Stothard “dumb down” The Times in order to retain these costly sales? It is only at this point that he slips into apologia mode. The paper’s presentation and some of its content were patently popularised, and later “tabloidised”. But this broadening of the paper’s appeal was a reasonable strategy. Murdoch could have followed the Financial Times into an up-market niche and lost far less money doing so. Having fought off The Independent, The Times now risked falling between the mighty stools of the Telegraph and The Guardian. By going down-market towards the Daily Mail, Murdoch avoided this trap.
But going down-market did not mean deserting up-market. As Stewart shows, the paper’s home and foreign news grew steadily over the 1990s. So did the range and quality of its serious writing and coverage of social, business and cultural affairs. The Times was never a bad paper. The cost of keeping it going was, and still is, exorbitant. But the readers are clearly not complaining. Quality newspaper circulation in Britain is as high as ever. Long may rich men take enough pride in such things to pay for them.
Simon Jenkins was editor of The Times, 1990-92. The History of The Times is available at the Sunday Times Books First price of £27 on 0870 165 8585
