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

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.