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

This was very much to the point, for the Thomson board had been meeting to debate that very question. Although it was denied at the time, it was the NUJ strike that tipped the balance in convincing Thomson executives to dispose of The Times and, with it, the other TNL titles. [41] Sir Gordon Brunton to the author, interview, 8 April 2003. Sir Gordon Brunton had called senior colleagues to his beautiful country house near Godalming, Surrey, and it was there that the decision was taken. This was then ratified by the Thomson British Holdings board and, over the telephone, confirmed with Lord Thomson of Fleet. Preferring to live most of his time in Canada, Ken Thomson had taken over the family empire on the death of Roy, his father, in 1976. He felt little of his Anglophile father’s obvious pride in owning The Times . In the end, the ultimate proprietor did not take much persuading although, naturally, in the press release he stated, ‘it grieves me greatly’. [42] Lord Thomson of Fleet, press release, 22 October 1980. File 9335. It was Harold Evans, editor of the Sunday Times , who put it succinctly: ‘One can’t blame Lord Thomson … the poor sucker has been pouring millions into the company and has been signing agreements which have been torn up in his face.’ [43] Harold Evans at a luncheon talk to Morgan Grampian journalists, quoted in UK Press Gazette , 27 October 1980. Roy Thomson’s dream of securing The Times ’s future forever had ended after only fourteen years and at a cost of £70 million. The Spectator ’s media pundit, the historian Paul Johnson, summed up the situation:

The Times … is a femme fatale : it sent Northcliffe off his rocker, proved too expensive even for the Astors and wrecked Thomson’s reputation for business acumen. It could well drag down Murdoch and his entire empire, financially much less solid than Thomson’s, if he is fool enough to saddle himself with it. [44] Paul Johnson, Spectator , 31 January 1981.

And yet, on New Year’s Eve, the last day in which bids for the paper would be accepted, Times Newspapers received an offer from Rupert Murdoch. It was for a mere £1 million, but it was a declaration of intent.

In all, there were around fifty bids, although given the criteria Sir Gordon Brunton and Sir Denis Hamilton had drawn up, less than a handful were seriously considered. The Aga Khan and a plethora of Middle Eastern bidders were ruled out by the decision to ensure that a potential owner had to be either British or from the Commonwealth. At a stretch this would be widened to include suitable (North) Americans. Rejected on personal grounds were Robert Maxwell, Sir James Goldsmith and Tiny Rowland. [45] Grigg, The Thomson Years , pp. 554, 556; Sir Gordon Brunton to the author, interview, 8 April 2003; Denis Hamilton, Editor-in-Chief , p. 179; Evans, Good Times, Bad Times , p. 125.

In so far as any one man could determine who would buy The Times , that man was Sir Gordon Brunton. Lord Thomson fully trusted his chief executive with the task of disposing of his most famous possession. Born in the East End and influenced as a student by Harold Laski, his tutor at the LSE, as well as by his experiences of wartime command in the Royal Artillery and Indian Army in Assam and Burma, Brunton combined formidable business acumen, left-leaning political inclinations and a committed interest in the Turf. He had joined the Thomson Organisation in 1961 and within seven years had risen to become its managing director and chief executive. Given that TNL had ultimately proved to be the one major failing company in Thomson’s British operations, it would have been understandable if Brunton had regarded its disposal as a matter of getting the best price in the fastest time with the minimum of fuss. But this was not at all how he saw his task. Rather, he threw his full weight behind finding a buyer who would ensure the survival of the famous newspaper, even if this meant declining a higher but separate bid for the Sunday Times on its own. By the 31 December deadline, Rees-Mogg’s consortium had proffered a token £1 for The Times . Believing that the paper’s viability was tied to staying within the TNL family, Brunton was fundamentally at odds with the Times consortium’s assumption that the daily could have an independent future. Consequently, he was equally dismissive of the attempts of Harold Evans to form a separate consortium to buy the Sunday Times . Like Rees-Mogg with The Times , Evans had been trying to encourage a range of investors to take a share in the future ownership of the paper he edited. At one stage he had been hopeful that the Guardian would be the paper’s saviour, although the Guardian ’s board soon balked at the cost. But even if Evans had succeeded in attracting sufficient support, Brunton was having none of it, making his position clear in a telephone conversation in which Evans recalled the chief executive saying, ‘Consortia cannot deal with unions. And I am not selling single titles. I will not see The Times shut down.’ [46] Evans, Good Times, Bad Times , pp. 89–91, 111, 125.

In the 1960s, The Times ’s then owners, the Astor family, concerned by the paper’s inability to make a profit, had also concluded that it could not stand on its own. They sought out the possibility of it merging with the Guardian . The Guardian enjoyed a higher circulation, but there were serious questions over whether the differences in political outlook (and the readership thereby attracted) could be harmonized successfully into one merged paper. When in 1966 the scheme fell through, The Times considered merging with the Financial Times . This would have created a newspaper of perhaps unsurpassable international authority with a readership profile tailored to suit a quality – and thus very lucrative – advertising market. The Times would have formed the main paper with the distinctive pink-papered FT inserted inside as its business section. Owned by Pearson, the FT was profitable and had established itself as the principal daily record of business and finance. But despite his protestations that owning The Times was about preserving the national interest rather than making a profit, Gavin Astor had considered Pearson’s price for buying The Times inadequate to the point of insulting. Meanwhile, Roy Thomson, owner of the Sunday Times , offered over £3 million for The Times . Considering the Astor family had bought it for £1.5 million in 1922, this gave some indication of how poor an investment it had proved. But the Thomson bid was far better than that from the Financial Times . [47] Iverach McDonald, The History of The Times , vol. V: Struggles in War and Peace 1939–1966 , pp. 409–28; Jenkins, Market for Glory , p. 53. Thus was given up one of the great opportunities to ensure The Times ’s market sector pre-eminence so that it could successfully fund its own expansion. Instead, its future would depend upon subsidy from the wealth of its group owner.

In becoming the one hundred and eighty-third newspaper in the Thomson Organisation, The Times found itself in the same group as the Sunday Times . Despite the coincidence of the same word in the title, there was no shared ancestry between the two papers – both had always had different owners. Roy Thomson had bought the Sunday Times from its then owner, Lord Kemsley, in 1959. Only when Thomson purchased The Times in 1966 did the two papers find themselves, while still editorially independent from one another, sharing a common proprietor. Although his own experience was in guiding the Sunday Times to its extraordinary commercial success, Sir Denis Hamilton prided himself on his role in supporting Brunton’s fusion of these two very different newspapers into one company, Times Newspapers Limited. In fact, it was always cohabitation rather than a marriage and the decision to live together at Gray’s Inn Road, while not obviously affecting The Times ’s editorial morality, was widely viewed as corrupting it in other respects. Courteous and highminded, this was not how Sir Denis saw it and he desperately wanted to avoid seeing what he regarded as one of his life’s achievements end in an acrimonious break-up. Thus he shared Sir Gordon Brunton’s view that whoever bought the potentially profitable Sunday Times would have to be equally committed to shoring up the losses of The Times . On no account should their creation, TNL, be broken up. This dovetailed perfectly with Murdoch’s plans since he did not think he could buy either paper separately. In the case of the Sunday Times , he thought the Monopolies Commission would block his purchase. In view of the daunting scale of its losses, he recalled, ‘I would not have had the guts to buy The Times on its own.’ [48] Rupert Murdoch to the author, interview, 4 August 2003. But if both were sold to him as a joint package, so these barriers were removed: the daily paper’s losses could be cancelled out by the Sunday’s revenue potential while the Government might permit him to own the Sunday paper if it meant that in doing so he could save the existence of the daily.