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

The Times reported the election result below the headline (which it would have been safe to have prepared in advance) ‘Mrs Thatcher back with a landslide’. Julian Haviland’s reporting was updated as results came in, though, by 2 a.m., the picture was pretty clear. Tony Benn was ousted in Bristol East, the paper quietly whooping that ‘the man who seemed certain to challenge for the Labour Party leadership next autumn has lost his principal power base, a seat in Parliament’. No less significant was the defeat of two of the Gang of Four – Shirley Williams and Bill Rodgers. It was a frustrating night for the Alliance. It received almost as many votes as Labour but the vagaries of the electoral system ensured it made little headway with a quarter of the vote translating into one twenty-eighth of the seats. All but five of the former Labour MPs who had defected to the SDP were defeated. The results were received from Press Association wires and rekeyed. The Times managed to publish around 450 results by the time the last election-night edition rolled off the press, which was more than any of its rivals. The Saturday paper was accompanied by a twelve-page supplement produced by Alan Wood, who was covering his seventh general election. It provided short biographies of all 650 MPs, an unprecedented feat. The final tally was Conservatives 397 seats, Labour 209, Alliance 23 (and Others 21). Margaret Thatcher was the first twentieth-century Conservative Prime Minister to win two successive working majorities. It was the worst result for Labour since 1935. Pat Healy, the only Times employee standing, found the soil of North Bedfordshire unfertile for Labour.

Michael Foot was the first post-election casualty of his party’s disastrous showing at the polls. His oratorical style had amused Frank Johnson who drew attention to the Labour leader’s ‘peroration trouble’ – the habit of inserting an extra subclause into the ending of a speech that forced him to digress, take the tempo down, rewind and recapitulate like the conclusion of a Beethoven symphony. Foot’s successor, Neil Kinnock, also proved a gift for Johnson, who played on his supposed ‘windbag’ tendencies. Editorially, The Times was not confident about the new leader, fearing he was still far too left wing. The day after Kinnock won the party leadership, a four-sequence photo shot was spooled across the front page showing him on Brighton beach stumbling into the advancing sea and having to be hauled to safety by his wife Glenys. The caption read: ‘Early lesson for new leader: time and tide wait for no man.’ [450] The Times , 3 October 1983. Douglas-Home wanted Foot, liberated from the cares of leadership, to write regular book reviews for The Times , but, citing various commitments, he politely declined. [451] Michael Foot to Douglas-Home, 15 September 1983, Douglas-Home Papers.

Cecil Parkinson had masterminded the Conservatives’ 1983 election campaign and was talked of as Thatcher’s eventual successor. The Times reacted to the revelation that Sarah Keays, Parkinson’s former secretary, was expecting his child with a stalwart defence: ‘whatever society’s aspirations to the contrary, life in this land is full of split homes, illegitimacy, and one-parent families. Why then does the public expect its leaders to preserve the outward forms of a morality which it no longer practises, if it ever did?’ [452] Leading article, The Times , 7 October 1983. But when Parkinson responded to questioning on the matter during the course of an interview on Panorama , Sarah Keays decided to offer her side of the story exclusively to The Times . Douglas-Home was at Blackpool for the Conservative Party conference, but as soon as the offer was put to him he dispatched a reporting team to visit her in Bath. In the small hours of 14 October, the Daily Telegraph journalist Graham Paterson was awoken in his Blackpool hotel room by an irate editorial office in Fleet Street desperate to find out what was going on and furious at having been scooped by its rival. [453] Graham Paterson to the author, interview, 18 September 2002. The headline said it all. ‘Sarah Keays talks to The Times of “loving relationship”’ appeared across the top of the paper that morning, overshadowing the enthusiastic reception Parkinson had received at the Conservative Party conference the previous day. Within hours, Parkinson had resigned. The one hundredth anniversary Conservative Party conference had turned from celebration to deep gloom, with many outraged that The Times had sunk to the depths of printing what they took to be the fury of a woman scorned. The familiar cry went up that the ‘paper wasn’t what it used to be’ and ‘what is The Times coming to?’. The use of a picture of two of Parkinson’s daughters looking distressed outside the family home came in for particular attack. The editor was deluged with letters of complaint, one reader who had been subscribing to the paper for sixty years assuring him, ‘the tone of The Times is beginning to resemble that of the so-called gutter press … you have become VULGAR’. [454] Enid M. Macbeth to the Douglas-Home, 15 October 1983, ref. 3627/2/12. Mrs Macbeth was, however, won over by Douglas-Home’s reply and wrote to tell him she would be continuing with the newspaper-reading habit of her lifetime after all (letter, 25 October 1983). Yet Sarah Keays was not paid for her story and, as Douglas-Home told Alastair Hetherington, ‘what ground have I got for not publishing it? Answer: only those of protecting the Minister, and that’s not my job.’ [455] Douglas-Home to Alastair Hetherington, undated, Douglas-Home Papers. Further offence was caused when the paper quoted Miss Keays’s claim that the Daily Telegraph had recommended aborting the child. In fact, the Telegraph had stated that such an option ‘hardly seems a moral advance’ and prominent space had to be hurriedly found for the Telegraph ’s editor, Bill Deedes, to point this out. [456] The Times , letters to the editor, 15 October 1983; W. F. Deedes, Dear Bill , p. 283. For its part, The Times continued to be sympathetic to Parkinson’s predicament. Jock Bruce-Gardyne wrote an Op-Ed appreciation of the fallen minister, ‘hounded out by hypocrisy’. Bernard Levin also raised his eyebrows at the moral panic, finding his usual seam of satire in the lofty pronouncements of the Daily Mirror , the Daily Telegraph and the Bishop of Bath and Wells.

Despite her reputation for supporting ‘Victorian values’, the Prime Minister was not noted for taking the moral high ground with those she liked and, in time, Parkinson was allowed back into the Cabinet where he proceeded to set in motion the process that would lead to ‘Big Bang’ – deregulating financial services and opening up the City more widely to global competition. But the ‘love child’ revelations had ruined his chances of succeeding Margaret Thatcher in Downing Street. The episode’s coverage was said – by those with little knowledge of the paper’s history – to be symbolic of the way The Times under Rupert Murdoch’s ownership had departed from its values. It had given supposedly excessive space to a minor scandal, sensationalizing the accusations of a wronged woman. It had also failed to chastise sufficiently the lax moral standards expected of a man in public office who, for some, had committed the additional sin of being a brazen Thatcherite. As the paper approached its bicentenary, questions over its news presentation, priorities and Thatcherite bias threatened to undermine its continuing claim to being a unique national treasure of objectivity and truth. Matters were not helped when the paper announced it had access to the diaries of Adolf Hitler …