Graham Stewart - The History of the Times - The Murdoch Years

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.

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.