CHAPTER 20

Fleet Street RIP

When the Great Fire of London ravaged Fleet Street in 1666, printers and publishers had already worked there for more than 150 years. In 1976, when I left for New York, it was still the palpitating heart of the newspaper industry; a village locked inside a great metropolis, with its own distinct culture, rhythms, and familiar faces. Each morning, lorries jammed the warren of alleys to deliver huge rolls of the paper that is the raw material of Fleet Street’s daily alchemy; arriving blank and lifeless, and leaving at night reincarnated by the drama and trivia, brilliance and dross, outrage and entertainment of the British national press.

Twenty years later, when I returned to London, Fleet Street had become an archaeological site, a newspaper ghost town even as it bustled with new purpose.

Old newspaper temples today are protected, like the pyramids. Their facades are frozen in time, almost, but not entirely, stripped of their original identities. The Daily Telegraph building, grey stone and mighty pillars, stands in all its glorious art deco ostentation. Its gilded two-faced timepiece hangs above the street, the clock tower of a lost village. The building’s identity, once displayed across its front in glorious Gothic, is gone. The only clues are in the sculpted facade: the two winged messengers above the main entrance fly away with the news, and two sculpted faces represent Past and Future. ‘Past’ is grim and beaten, ‘Future’ open and hopeful.

The Telegraph’s shining neighbour is Fleet Street’s slinky lady-in-black, the glass and chrome-trimmed Express building. Inside, still intact, is the manically lavish lobby, a glittering folly of gold and silver, its gigantic tableaus of Empire an everlasting testament to Beaverbrook’s idea of patriotism, and possibly his state of mind as well. This lobby must embarrass the new tenants, Goldman Sachs; heavy grey curtains hide it from the street.

Between these two giants sits the proud, but respectfully small, bay facade of Mersey House, once the London home of the Liverpool Echo, the newspaper that announced my birth.

Engraved plaques in the pavement commemorate dead pioneers, and newspapers that are lost, or shadows of their former greatness: The Daily Courant, the Standard, the Express, the type designer William Caslon, and Charles Dickens, who wrote as ‘Boz’ in Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese pub. One plaque depicts Space Invaders, an early kill-or-be-killed computer game in which waves of jagged-edged aliens attack the player. It was put in place to commemorate the arrival of the computer technology that ended the era of linotype machines and hot metal. Now, it is an unintentional metaphor for the digital destroyers that would descend on the industry that built Fleet Street.

Life is no less febrile, and lights still burn into the night, but the new citizens of Fleet Street talk obscurely of ‘discounted cash flow’, of ‘accretion and dilution analyses’, and ‘affirmative covenants’. The talk of ‘upside collars’ and ‘downside collars’ has nothing to do with fashion, and ‘goodwill’ does not mean precisely that. This is now the world of big money, of mergers and acquisitions, and the language coming from these buildings will never again touch the masses. Bankers and lawyers are the citizens of Fleet Street now; it was once a world of words, but now money does the talking.

For me, a visit to Fleet Street is like wandering through a mirage; it’s not what it seems and never will be again. Physically, much of it is intact. I pass many of the same buildings walking east from the Strand, past the ornamental spires and arches of the Royal Courts of Justice. The surviving pubs and wine bars are as inviting as ever, but the drinkers inside are strangers.

A fierce dragon in the middle of the street, flying high on a plinth, still guards the City of London border, but nearby, the Wig & Pen Club, once a haunt of lawyers and journalists, is a Thai restaurant. El Vino, the ancient wine bar, thrives, but I hardly went there; it was the officers’ mess of Fleet Street, and down-table youngsters were not welcome.

As the road bends near Bouverie Street, you get the same unaltering glimpse of St Paul’s Cathedral. On the right is the narrow, red-painted facade of The Tipperary pub. It was the local for The Sun and the News of the World, but their nearby offices are now the headquarters of Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, a multinational law firm, and the conversation in the ‘Tipp’ is more sedate.

Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese still draws crowds. A public house has stood on the same site since the 1500s, and the Cheese itself was built soon after the Great Fire. Its ceilings are blackened by pipe and cigarette smoke, and its sloping timber floor makes guests unsteady even before their first drop. Journalists drinking in the Cheese once jostled for room with Ben Jonson, Dickens, Conan Doyle, and P. G. Wodehouse. Now its unruly farewell parties are for bankers and lawyers off to globalising jobs in Tokyo, Hong Kong, and New York.

In 1976, no journalist worked more than 50 yards from a pub. From seven o’clock in the evening, it was a safe bet who would be in each of them. Each newspaper had its favourite bar and its share of notorious drinkers. Journalism was a thirstier trade back then. Drink and dissolution felt like a prerequisite, and I arrived in 1965 at the age of 21 as a happy apprentice. The old hands were role models and even their bad habits were desirable. Pubs were study halls where veterans conducted barstool seminars, spinning yarns of great scoops and dangerous travels. The tuition fee was a round of drinks.

These days, now and then, in places like the Cheese and El Vino, white-haired groups can be seen among the brisk new habitués. If they look out of place, it is because they are. They will be the frail old nostalgics of Fleet Street on a pilgrimage of remembrance. They approach the bar more slowly and less often. Sometimes they sit in silence, with recollecting smiles.

Often, they will have taken an ambling walk from St Bride’s Church, where the father of Fleet Street, Wynkyn de Worde, set up his print shop in the churchyard more than 500 years ago, before St Bride’s was destroyed in the Great Fire and rebuilt by Wren. Fleet Street may have been a godless world, but journalists will always crowd pews beneath the wedding-cake spire of St Bride’s for funerals and memorials. Today, outside St Bride’s, a crude notice of red letters announces: ‘The world-famous Journalists’ Church’. It has become a tourist trap.

In their day, heavy drinkers were the heroes of Fleet Street. The lost productivity that resulted was seen by companies as an unavoidable cost of business, and an occupational hazard for the journalist. A man too drunk after lunch would be sent home to sleep it off. He might — or might not — be given a mild chiding next day. When The Sun’s news editor Ken Donlan found a reporter snoozing at his desk, he attempted a reprimand. ‘Drunk again, Mike?’ he asked.

‘Are you, Ken?’ came the reply. ‘I’ve had a few myself.’

Heavy drinkers who could still do the job would carry on for years until their health failed. Many of my peers died in their fifties and sixties. Others would crash and burn quickly. These were serious casualties, who would sneak out for a morning Bloody Mary or two, or return at closing time for the overnight shift with a hidden bottle of Scotch. I went on a royal tour with the Queen and Prince Philip, and no one was sober after a six-hour flight from Vancouver to the Bahamas, but one reporter was so incapable his rivals filed his copy to London. Fleet Street had its own support system for its alcoholics.

In the 1960s, I worked with a brilliant but deeply troubled and alcoholic reporter whose perfect copy the sub-editors rarely altered. A decade later, a shuffling old-looking man stopped me on Fleet Street. I recognised him at once, but his raincoat was torn and tied by thin rope, his long hair and beard unwashed, and sticky tape held together his wire-rimmed glasses. He was looking for money and I gave him some, but Barrie didn’t know who I was. He could not yet have reached his fortieth birthday.

Heavy drinking was a habit that came from the top. Ruth Dudley Edwards writes about this in Newspapermen, her dual biography of Hugh Cudlipp and Cecil King, the odd couple who made the Mirror newspapers great. The papers, she says, were ‘produced on an ocean of alcohol … Visit Cudlipp before 11am and you would be offered a beer (unless it was a day of celebration, when there would be a champagne conference at 10.30).’ After 11, Cudlipp would open a bottle of white wine; lunch was ‘aperitif, wine, brandy’.

The Mirror was not alone. Rupert would fume when he surprised imbibing executives sitting together in the office of Larry Lamb, The Sun’s editor. Lamb had learned his trade and drinking habits at Cudlipp’s Mirror. For years, Rupert railed against ‘those bloody Fleet Street lunches’, and once the company was safely removed to Wapping, he put in place a strict prohibition. This ban never worked as well as he thought; executives kept secret stores in their offices, which I pretended not to notice.

This prohibition was at odds with the rest of London. The growing New York tradition of dry lunches had yet to leap the Atlantic. I was still Rupert’s strict enforcer when John Major, the prime minister, came to Wapping for lunch in February 1996. The night before, the Provisional IRA had blown up a double-decker bus in the West End. The device had gone off too soon, killing the bomber and injuring eight. We were sure Major would be too busy at Number 10 to come to Wapping, but he did. Walking into our dining room, his first words were, ‘I am in serious need of a large gin and tonic.’

It was no time to recite company rules. ‘I can imagine you are. Right away,’ I replied.

The problem was there was no known gin bottle within 500 yards, although, in reality, there were probably a secret dozen. While I kept the prime minister entertained with sparkling water — ‘Have I caused a problem asking for gin?’ — Marianne Krafinski, my assistant, hurried to the local Morrisons supermarket to return breathless with a bottle of Beefeater. From then on, we had plenty of alcohol for visiting VIPs.

Newspaper people today certainly drink less. They may use less evident intoxicants, but it is not so easy to tell. When The Sun’s editor David Yelland dreamt up a tabloid gimmick involving the purchase of a drug-sniffing dog, there was anxiety among some staff when it visited the editorial floor.

Despite all the mourning for the lost spirit and community of old Fleet Street, it was a sick place by the time I left for America. Newspapers had stayed there too long, trapped by greed, mismanagement, and torpor. Fleet Street would have become the industry’s tomb, had it not escaped.

Fleet Street was not just a thoroughfare, but also a neighbourhood. Every newspaper, in the local labyrinth of backstreets and beyond, belonged to Fleet Street. In the 1970s, it was being eaten away by the mad avarice of over-powerful unions. For years, feeble newspaper managers had enabled these unions by yielding to ever more ruinous demands.

The unions rejected every effort to introduce new technology, reduce manning, and increase profits — in some cases, simply to allow newspapers to become profitable. While these methods were being adopted around the world, unions were binding UK newspapers to production practices that were a century old. Reporters sat at ancient typewriters when desktop computers could save time and expense, bypassing clunky mechanical practices. Printing plants were trapped inside an ancient, congested city when new technology could transmit pages to distant press sites.

It was a natural reflex for unions to protect jobs, but they didn’t only resist new technology. The unions practised extortion against pliable management. Many printers didn’t even work the days they were paid; workmates would sign them in while they stayed home or worked shifts at other newspapers. The power to hire rested entirely with union leaders, and jobs were passed from father to son. Salaries were huge; the men who cleaned the reporters’ room at The Sun earned more than reporters.

The unions exploited bitter competition among newspapers, picking them off one at a time. If a strike closed one paper, others increased their print runs to steal readers, forcing the newspaper under attack to surrender to the latest demands. This fatal cycle went on for years.

There were dubious sidelines. For years, I did my Christmas shopping in newspaper production areas, which would be turned into bargain basements selling everything from clothes and cosmetics to electric kettles. I never asked about the provenance of these goods.

By the time I went to New York, a turning point was approaching in the history of Fleet Street, and its fate would be rewritten by an epic confrontation. In 1981, exhausted by shakedowns, the Canadian Thomson Corporation, owner of The Times and The Sunday Times, decided to quit Fleet Street. After fighting union rapacity for years, Thomson had staged its last stand in 1979, suspending publication for almost a year rather than surrendering to union pressure. When the strike ended in another union victory, non-striking journalists, who had been paid throughout the dispute, staged their own walkout demanding higher salaries. This was when Thomson left town, and Rupert bought their struggling titles to become Britain’s biggest newspaper publisher.

The same intractable union demands confronted Rupert, but he had a plan. In January 1986, when more than 5000 production workers walked out in yet another dispute, he moved his entire newspaper production to a fortified new plant in Wapping, in the East End of London.

For months, the plant had secretly been made ready with the modern technology unions had scorned for years. The 5000 he left behind in Fleet Street were suddenly jobless and furious. They and their supporters lay siege on Wapping. There were many nights of violence and hundreds of injuries before the unions agreed a settlement and the pickets went away. The siege of Wapping lasted for 12 months.

Other newspaper groups watched this drama from a safe distance, but when Rupert prevailed they followed in his footsteps. One by one, they threw off their shackles, joined the late twentieth century, and left behind the neighbourhood and traditions of Fleet Street.

Wapping was a great drama of Margaret Thatcher’s struggle against trade unions. She had changed the law to diminish their powers, and protected Wapping with a strong police presence that ensured the plant remained in operation.

But the dispute left a bitter taste, and the left’s loathing of Rupert and News International had abated only slightly eight years later when Rupert introduced me to Wapping in May 1995.

—

We drove around the turrets and battlements of the Tower of London, turned left onto The Highway, and headed into Wapping. Long ago, this was a rowdy seafaring village, the haunt of sailors, fishermen, footpads, and smugglers. Royal Navy press gangs prowled the pubs, kidnapping drunks to fight for king and country. Local entertainment was provided beside the Thames at Execution Dock where crowds gathered for the hanging of mutineers and pirates.

But the excitement had drained out of Wapping long ago. The thriving docklands economy had perished after the Second World War, and its great riverside warehouses had been transformed into flats and offices. The Wapping siege had been the most dramatic event since the London Blitz.

This was my first glimpse of the place the entire country knew as ‘Fortress Wapping’. Until now it had been the flickering backdrop on American television news, the scene of surging crowds and charging police horses.

It was not a sight to lift the heart. The building was massive, with a cold and Soviet blandness, and was encircled by tall fences topped with barbed wire. It looked like a penitentiary. Speed bumps slowed the approach of our green Daimler and guards lifted the barrier quickly when they recognised Rupert. Other vehicles were searched at random.

The building had been designed as a factory to print newspapers, and architects had failed in their attempts to give it the appearance of a successful company’s headquarters. The most recent effort when I arrived was an unfinished £2 million entrance lobby designed to impress the parade of cabinet ministers and other important visitors. It was attached to the original factory, with floors of chocolate-coloured marble, and enclosed by walls of glass. When finished, escalators swept guests between tall palms and indoor fountains pungent with chlorine. It felt like checking into a Midwest Marriott hotel. Rupert didn’t like it either. Within a few months, he also appeared to have forgotten who had built it, and accused me of squandering £2 million. When I told him he was pointing the finger at the wrong person, he grunted: ‘Bloody waste of money.’

The offices of The Times titles challenged every standard of decent working conditions. Journalists were housed in a narrow listed building next to the factory. Napoleonic prisoners-of-war had built it as a warehouse for barrels of rum shipped to London. It was fitting in a way. The Times, established in 1785, was about 20 years older than the building, but this cannot have given much comfort to the twenty-first century trustees of a historic newspaper. There were few windows, and rain bouncing off the modern corrugated roof drowned normal conversation.

The executive suite I inherited was so lavish I felt I needed an appointment to be there. I spent several years in it, but when the managing director left and wasn’t replaced, I moved next door to his more modest space and turned my old suite into meeting rooms.

My introduction to Wapping was fleeting. Rupert wanted to show me the scene of one of the triumphs of his career. It was Saturday, and whenever he was in London on a weekend, his favourite pre-dinner ritual was to visit his Sunday editors. These visits were unannounced, but never unexpected; when Rupert was in town, his arrival at your door was never a surprise.

We paid a hasty visit to the News of the World, thriving in 1995. Its editor was Piers Morgan, then aged 30. Piers wouldn’t be in the job for long, but none of us knew that. He ran through his big stories for the next day’s paper and Rupert nodded non-committally. Piers had become editor a year before, and already showed a talent for notoriety. The British Press Complaints Commission had admonished him for publishing a photograph of Princess Diana’s sister-in-law at a rehab clinic. She was the wife of Diana’s younger brother — Charles, Earl Spencer — and the photograph was a clear invasion of her privacy. Rupert had taken the unusual step of publicly rebuking Piers, declaring, ‘the young man went over the top’. In private he admonished editors all the time, but I don’t remember another occasion when Rupert did it in public.

‘He’s a very bright man,’ said Rupert as we left. ‘But he can be a bit reckless. Keep an eye on him.’

Rupert would later express his view more colourfully: ‘The trouble with Piers is that his balls are bigger than his brains.’

In the old rum warehouse, we visited John Witherow in his brick-walled office at The Sunday Times. Witherow was as taciturn and considered as Morgan was chatty and impulsive. He belonged to the school of editors who stayed in the office and produced the paper, avoiding the tempting glitz of the television sofa and the overseas seminar. In this, Witherow and Paul Dacre of the Daily Mail were brothers; both shackled themselves to their desks for many successful years. These were the editors my mentor and guide at News International, Sir Edward Pickering, loved. He was still working in his eighties, and had taught a young Rupert Murdoch subbing skills on the Daily Express. ‘Pick’ scorned editors too frequently absent from their posts,. ‘An editor’s job is to stay in the attic and edit,’ he would say.

Having presented me with this vast enterprise, Rupert took me off to dinner. And for two hours I listened. We sat among white-clothed tables in the empty silence of a hotel restaurant near his St James’s flat. It was the kind of place where the old head waiter wore a stiff collar and tails. I suspected the menu hadn’t changed since Dickens was alive. This is why it was empty, and why Rupert chose it for our chat.

He laid out the problems at Wapping and was as frank as ever in his criticism of people and their mistakes. The place was stagnating, the workers were unhappy, and a deep antipathy had developed towards the bosses. Above all, the staff in the production departments — the historic source of most woes — were beginning to agitate. The Labour Party, after years in the wilderness, had been resuscitated by Tony Blair and already looked set to win the next general election. We were certain, should they win power, they would loosen the controls Thatcher had imposed on the unions.

The unions were back at the gates, literally, but this time they were wielding recruitment pamphlets instead of rocks. Wapping was the print unions’ crucible, where Rupert had crushed and humiliated them. Their defeat had released a gush of profit now being used for expansion in the United States, and the unions’ return to News International would be a catastrophe for the company, and, as the new boss, a disaster for me.

These circumstances helped Mary and me focus on family matters. The job of running News International was notoriously tricky and the mortality rate of bosses was high. I was to become the fourth chief executive in five years, and I was taking the job at what seemed to be the most dangerous moment since the siege.

When one predecessor, Bruce Matthews, died, an obituary said: ‘The court of Rupert Murdoch is much like the court of Henry VIII. Men and women are promoted to positions of great power only to be felled on the royal whim, either because they cease to be useful or because they threaten to gain more fame than the monarch himself. Bruce Matthews was Murdoch’s Thomas Cromwell.’

That might have been a harsh judgement of Rupert, but I had to be realistic. Based on history, my chances of long-term survival were about equal to that of a subaltern in a First World War trench. When the Hollywood executive Peter Chernin had been promoted at Fox, he sat down his children and told them that one day their dad would be fired, but there would be no disgrace in it. In fact, Chernin spent many years as Rupert’s deputy before deciding it was time to go.

We prepared for a short stay. We placed our two youngest children, James and Jane, into London’s private American School in St John’s Wood. After moving them from city to city — and now to a strange country — at least we could keep them in the same education system.

Rupert can be casual about turning the lives of people upside down. He did it to me a few times, but the move to London was completely unexpected. We were happy to be out of Los Angeles and looking forward to New York. We had lived in the United States for almost 20 years, and three of our five children had been born there; the two eldest moved with us to New York aged just 18 months and 5. We had become US citizens a decade earlier. We were an American family.

Mary took the news of London imperturbably. She had become accustomed to a life of perpetual motion. Will, our third, was 16 and at high school in Los Angeles. We worried he wouldn’t want to move to a country where he had never lived. He chose to stay behind at boarding school, and leaving him was hard on Mary and me. His two older brothers, Martin and Thomas, had jobs in New York.

When we moved to London in August 1995, the family saw it as a short-term foreign posting. I was still in the job 12 years later.

That night at dinner, Rupert warned me what to expect. I would be in charge of a company responsible for one-third of the country’s national newspaper sales. He said I should prepare for an onslaught of flattery from politicians, Royal Family acolytes, company bosses, and every civic leader with a cause to promote. As well as flattery, complaints would pour my way from important people annoyed at the way they had been treated in our pages.

‘Don’t get too close to these people,’ he said. ‘In a few years, they’ll probably offer you a knighthood. Be careful about accepting it.’

He talked about something else that night that I believe is a key to him. He talked about how often he had been underestimated. As a young man, he said, others dismissed him because of his age and inexperience. It had been the same whenever he arrived somewhere new.

Rupert didn’t reveal to me — then, or ever — any complicated secrets to his success. He repeated what he often said. He was willing simply to work harder than anyone else. But that night, alone in our restaurant, I saw him wistful. He had long ago lost the underdog’s ability to surprise and subvert. Never again could he be the little guy with not much to lose and so much to gain — the upstart with impossible ideas and boundless self-conviction.

In 1969, when he was seeking to buy The Sun, he arrived in the lobby of the Daily Mirror headquarters in Holborn Circus on his way to see Hugh Cudlipp. He walked up to a wall graphic showing the International Publishing Corporation’s newspaper circulations. The Mirror, Britain’s biggest seller at more than 5 million, towered above the limping Sun. Rupert unpinned the two ribbons tracking the newspapers and reversed them, putting The Sun at the top of the scale.

‘That’s what is going to happen’, he told Stephen Catto — the hereditary peer, Lord Catto — the banker who helped Rupert make his foothold in Britain.

‘I didn’t know where to look,’ Catto told me years later.

Later that year, Hugh Cudlipp, the IPC chairman, turned the pages of the first edition of the new tabloid version of The Sun, raised a glass of champagne, and told his team it had nothing to fear. Cudlipp soon knew he had made the mistake of his life.

This story repeated itself often, and each time Rupert became the big guy — in Sydney, in London, in New York, and in Los Angeles — he went looking for the next unconquered world, searching for a new place to be underestimated.

Rupert had been his own kind of revolutionary and overthrown giants on three continents to become the biggest giant of all, an authentic colossus. But I think he missed the life of a long shot, and that all his success had drowned a little of the original man.