The Falklands War; the Lebanon;
Shoring up NATO; Backing Maggie
The journalists of the Buenos Aires Siete Dias had a commendable knowledge not only of their government’s intentions but also of how The Times of London liked to lay out its front page. Forty-eight hours before the invasion began Siete Dias’s readers were presented with an imaginary front page of that morning’s edition of The Times. It was good enough to pass off as the real thing. The masthead and typeface were accurate. Even the headline ‘Argentinian Navy invades the Falkland Islands’ was grouped across the two columns’ width of the lead report rather than stretched across the whole front page. That was a particularly observant touch. The accompanying photograph of advancing Argentine troops was also in exactly the place the page designers of Gray’s Inn Road would have put it – top centre right with a single-column news story hemming it back from the paper’s edge. Someone, at least, had done his homework.
The real Times of London for that day had an almost identical front-page layout. The only visual difference was that the lead headline announced ‘Compromise by Labour on abolition of Lords’ – which could have been confidently stated at almost any time in the twenty years either side of 31 March 1982. But the perceptive reader would have noticed something more portentous in the adjacent single column headlined ‘British sub on the move’. The story, ‘By Our Foreign Staff’, claimed that the nuclear-powered hunter-killer submarine, HMS Superb ‘was believed to be on its way’ to the Falkland Islands although the Royal Navy ‘refused to confirm or deny these reports’. This was odd. The Times was not in the habit of knowing, let alone announcing, the sudden change of course of a British nuclear submarine. In fact, the story had been planted. It was intended to warn the government in Buenos Aires that their invasion intentions had been discovered. But it was too late. The Argentinian troops had already boarded the vessels. The aircraft carrier Veinticinco de Mayo had put out to sea.
In the aftermath of a war that caused the deaths of 255 Britons and 746 Argentinians, questions were asked about why London failed to perceive the threat to the Falkland Islands until it was too late. The press had not seen it coming. But they could hardly be blamed when Britain’s intelligence community had also failed to pick up on the warning signs. In retrospect, the Government’s dual policy of dashing Argentina’s hopes of a diplomatic solution while announcing a virtual abandonment of the islands’ defence appeared like folly on a grand scale.
Despite talk of there being oil, there had long been little enthusiasm in the Foreign Office for holding onto the barren and remote British dependency, eight thousand miles away and important primarily for the disruption it caused Britain’s relations with Argentina, a bulwark against South American Communism where much British capital was invested. The general impression was given that if Buenos Aires wanted the islands that much, they could have them. But the will of the 1800 islanders, stubborn and staunchly loyal subjects of Her Majesty, complicated the matter. In November 1980, Nicholas Ridley, a Foreign Office minister, thought he had the answer when he suggested transferring the islands’ sovereignty formally to Argentina while leasing back tenure in the short term so that the existing islanders would not be handed over to an alien power effectively overnight. This idea had been broadly supported in a third leader in The Times, written by Peter Strafford, albeit on the condition the Falkland islanders agreed to it.1 They lost no time in making clear they did not. Their opposition emboldened Margaret Thatcher and the House of Commons, sceptical of the ‘Munich tendency’ within the Foreign Office, to dismiss the proposal out of hand.
Argentina was a right-wing military dictatorship. During the 1970s ‘dirty war’, its ruling junta had murdered thousands of its citizens. If the British Government was determined to close the diplomatic door over the islands’ sovereignty to such a regime it might have been advisable to send clear messages about London’s determination to guard the Falklands militarily. Yet, this is not what happened. The public spending cuts of Margaret Thatcher’s first term did not bypass the armed forces. In 1981, John Nott, the Defence Secretary, proposed stringent economies. Guided by Henry Stanhope, the defence correspondent, The Times had argued that if there had to be cuts it would be better for the greater blow to fall upon the British Army of the Rhine rather than the Royal Navy since the BAOR’s proportionate contribution to the NATO alliance was not as significant as the maritime commitment. Yet, when Nott’s spending review was published in June, he proposed closing the Chatham dockyards and cutting the number of surface ships. One of those vessels was HMS Endurance, which was to be withdrawn from its lonely patrol of the South Atlantic.
Although it was understandably not described as such, the Endurance was Britain’s spy ship in the area – as the Argentinians had long assumed. But for those who did not look beyond its exterior, it appeared too lightly defended to put up much resistance to an Argentine assault. Consequently, scrapping the ship appeared to make sense in every respect other than the psychological signal it transmitted to Buenos Aires. It was a fatal economy. Britain appeared to be dropping its guard over the Falkland Islands. The junta saw its chance. Only a small but prophetic letter, from Lord Shackleton, Peter Scott, Vivian Fuchs and five other members of the Royal Geographical Society, printed in The Times on 4 February 1982, pointed out the strategic short-sightedness of withdrawing the only white ensign in the South Atlantic and Antarctic seas.2 The paper did not pick up on the point.
To be fair, there were remarkably few early warning signs. General Leopoldo Galtieri’s inaugural speech as Argentina’s President in December 1981 contained no reference to reclaiming ‘Las Malvinas’. The first indication Times readers received that all was not well came on 5 March 1982 when Peter Strafford reported that Buenos Aires was stepping up the pressure over the islands. Strafford speculated that with the Falklands defended by a Royal Marines platoon and local volunteers – a total of less than one hundred men – an invasion was possible ‘as a last resort’. But it seemed far more likely that Buenos Aires would apply pressure through the United Nations or by threatening to sever the only regular air service out of the islands which was operated by the Argentine Air Force.
It was not until 23 March that The Times again focused its attention firmly on developments when it reported the Foreign Office’s confirmation that an illegal detachment of about fifty Argentinians claiming to have a contract to dismantle the whaling station at Leith on South Georgia, a British dependency eight hundred miles south-east of the Falklands, had hoisted their national flag. The Foreign Office was quoted as reacting ‘sceptically to the suggestion that the landing on South Georgia last week was instigated by the Argentine Government’.3
Whitehall could not be expected to dispatch the Fleet every time a trespasser waved his national flag on some far-off British territory. In the same month in which the ‘scrap metal merchants’ were posing for photographs on the spectacularly inhospitable and all but uninhabited South Georgia, Thomas Enders, the US Assistant Secretary of State for Latin America, had visited President Galtieri and passed on to the British Foreign Office Minister Richard Luce the impression that there was no cause for concern. Nonetheless, Margaret Thatcher asked for contingency plans to be drawn up and for a reassessment of the Joint Intelligence Committee’s existing report on the invasion threat to the Falklands. It was too late. On the evening of 31 March, John Nott passed to the Prime Minister the appalling news: an intelligence report that an Argentine armada was at sea and heading straight for the Falklands. Their estimated date of arrival was 2 April.4
The Times had already reported, on the front page for Monday 29 March, ‘five Argentine vessels were last night reported to be in the area of South Georgia’. The second leading article that day, ‘Gunboat or Burglar Alarm?’, warned that the Falklands were probably the real target. It attempted to marry the diplomatic tone taken when the leader column had last addressed the subject in November 1980 that the islanders’ future ‘can only be on the basis of an arrangement with their South American neighbours’ with a belated note of half-warning, ‘Britain should help them get the best arrangement possible, and to do that should be prepared to put a military price on any Argentine smash-and-grab raid’.5 Tuesday’s front page reported that ‘two other Argentine naval vessels were said to have left port’ but that London was still making no official comment. The following day came the leaked report that a nuclear submarine was on its way to the Falklands. On Thursday 1 April, the paper conveyed accurately the atmosphere in the Gray’s Inn Road newsroom with a headline that ought to have become famous in its field: ‘Impenetrable silence on Falklands crisis’.
Apart from some ‘library pictures’ of the Falkland Islands’ capital, Port Stanley, and rusting hulks in South Georgia’s Grytviken harbour, it was not possible to accompany the unfolding saga with ‘live’ pictures. There was no press cameraman on the islands. However, the Sunday Times had dispatched Simon Winchester to follow up on the South Georgia ‘scrap metal merchants’. Winchester was in Port Stanley when the Argentine forces landed. On 2 April, The Times was able to use his copy, announcing that the invasion was expected any moment and citing the state of emergency alert broadcast to the islanders by their Governor, Rex Hunt. It made for dramatic reading. Ironically, while a paper like The Times, famed for its correspondents in far flung places had not got round to getting a reporter in situ, the Sun – not celebrated for its foreign desk or international postings – did have a man there. Its reporter, David Graves, had set off for South Georgia on his own whim. He too was in Stanley when the shooting started.6 Unfortunately, neither journalist would be filing from there for much longer. Both Winchester and Graves had to move to the Argentine mainland. There, Winchester, together with Ian Mather and Tony Prime of the Observer were arrested on spying charges. Over the next few weeks, the British media was put in the impossible position of trying to report what was happening on a group of islands where they had no reporters.
If the Government had dithered before the invasion, it was resolute – or at any rate its Prime Minister was – in its response. A Task Force would be dispatched to take the islands back if no diplomatic solution had been reached in the time it would take the Royal Navy to reach the Falklands. All the newspapers recognized the necessity of getting their journalists on board the ships, but the Royal Navy was hostile to carrying any superfluous personnel on board – least of all prying journalists. It took considerable pressure from Downing Street to get the Navy to accept the necessity of any press presence.7 After much bullying, it was agreed that the newspaper journalists would be corralled upon the aircraft carrier HMS Invincible, travelling with the first batch of the Task Force. There would be only five places available.
It was left to John Le Page, director of the Newspaper Publishers’ Association, to decide which newspapers would make the cut. He opted for the method of Mrs Le Page drawing the winning titles out of a hat. This pot-luck approach produced random results, not least of which was that the Daily Telegraph would be the only representative of the ‘quality press’. Neither The Times, nor the Guardian, nor the country’s major tabloid, the Sun, was selected. This was no way to report a war. Outrage followed with Douglas-Home and his rival disappointed editors demanding representation. Bernard Ingham, the Prime Minister’s press secretary, only managed to cool the heat emanating from his telephone receiver by insisting the three papers were included after all.8
The Times only heard that a place had been secured for its nominated reporter, John Witherow, at 10.15 p.m on Sunday 4 April. He had to race to catch the train to Portsmouth – for Invincible was scheduled to set sail at midnight. Almost the only instructions Witherow received from Gray’s Inn Road was to pack a dark suit. There was, after all, the possibility he might be asked to dine with the officers in the wardroom. He at least came better prepared for the rigours of a South Atlantic winter than the Sun’s representative who arrived at Portsmouth docks on a motorbike wearing a pair of shorts.9
Robert Fisk was The Times’s star war reporter, but he was in the Middle East. And as it transpired, he would soon have an invasion on his doorstep to cover. John Witherow was a thirty-year-old reporter on the home news desk, who had come to the paper from Reuters as recently as 1980. The son of a South African businessman, he had been brought to England as a child and sent to Bedford School. Before reading history at York University, he had done two years voluntary service in Namibia where he taught and helped establish a library for the inhabitants and was befriended by Bishop Colin Winter, an outspoken critic of Apartheid. He was hardly the obvious choice but, although there was no certainty that the Task Force would see action, his status as a young and unmarried reporter who was not committed anywhere else at that moment weighed in favour of his being sent on an assignment that could take weeks or months – or even take his life.
Only representatives of the British media were allowed to accompany the Task Force, Margaret Thatcher taking the view ‘we certainly didn’t want any foreigners reporting what we were doing down there!’.10 Witherow and his fellow journalists were soon to discover the limitations imposed upon them, their dispatches monitored by MoD minders and by Royal Naval press officers. The minders occasionally prevented details in dispatches leaving the ship only for the same disclosures to be released by the MoD in London. There was to be considerable friction over this and other scores. When either bureaucratic or technical difficulties prevented Witherow getting his dispatches out, the burden of war reporting fell on Henry Stanhope in London. For his information, Stanhope was reliant upon MoD briefings. But in the first weeks of the Task Force’s long journey, the focus was on how diplomacy might yet avert shots being fired in anger. Julian Haviland, the political editor, reported the mood in Westminster as did Christopher Thomas from Buenos Aires. Nicholas Ashford filed from Washington and from New York Zoriana Pysariwsky followed developments at the UN.
With the hawkish Charles Douglas-Home in charge, there was never any doubt what line the paper would take. The seizure of the islands was, the leading article declared as soon as the invasion was confirmed, ‘as perfect an example of unprovoked aggression and military expansion as the world has had to witness since the end of Adolf Hitler’. Russia would back Argentina and nothing but words could be expected from the UN. If need be, it would be necessary to meet force with force.11 On Monday 4 April – the day the Task Force left Portsmouth harbour – there was only one leading article, stretching down the page and occupying sixty-eight column inches and more than five and a half feet. It was written by the editor. ‘When British territory is invaded, it is not just an invasion of our land, but of our whole spirit. We are all Falklanders now’ the paper thundered. The Argentine junta had eliminated its opponents – ‘the disappeared ones’ as they were euphemistically known. ‘The disappearance of individuals is the Junta’s recognized method of dealing with opposition. We are now faced with a situation where it intends to make a whole island people – the Falklanders – disappear.’ This could not be tolerated. The words of John Donne were intoned. And it was time for the Defence Secretary, John Nott, and the Foreign Secretary, Lord Carrington, to consider their positions.12
During the weekend, Margaret Thatcher and her deputy, Willie Whitelaw, had tried to shore up Carrington’s resolve to stay. But, as Thatcher put it in her memoirs, ‘Having seen Monday’s press, in particular the Times leader, he decided that he must go.’13 Nott, however, was persuaded to hang on. For Douglas-Home, the most important task was to bolster the Prime Minister’s reserve not to back down. On 2 April, the Foreign Office had presented her with a litany of diplomatic pitfalls if she proceeded with her intention to send, and if necessary, use, the Task Force just as the MoD had listed the military impediments. Her decision to disregard such advice filled many in Whitehall with alarm. It was essential to restrict the strategic decisions to an inner core. An inner ‘War Cabinet’ was formed to meet once (sometimes twice) a day to conduct operations. On it sat Mrs Thatcher, her deputy Whitelaw, Nott, Carrington’s successor at the Foreign Office, Francis Pym and Cecil Parkinson (who, although only Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, could be expected to back his leader’s resolve if the Foreign Office tested it).
In New York, Britain’s UN Ambassador, Sir Anthony Parsons, had achieved a notable triumph in securing Resolution 502, which demanded an Argentine withdrawal from the islands. The Security Council presidency was in the hands of Zaire and Spain and Panama sympathized with Argentina. Russia, which could have vetoed the resolution outright, had no reason to back a NATO country and was heavily dependent on Argentine grain. Parsons’s skill (and a telephone lecture from Mrs Thatcher to King Hussein of Jordan) ensured most of the opposition was neutered into abstention. Only Panama voted against Britain. Yet, while the United States had voted favourably, its true position was equivocal. It could not rebuff its most senior NATO ally, but it did not want to undermine the anti-Communist regime in Buenos Aires. The 1947 Rio Treaty allowed for any American country to assist any other that was attacked from outside the American continent. Washington believed this was a shield against Soviet interference. A British strike could fatally crack the edifice. Indeed, the night the Argentinians had invaded, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Walter Stoessel and Thomas Enders (respectively US Ambassador to the UN; Deputy-Secretary of State; Assistant Secretary of State for Latin America) were among a group of senior US officials who had dined at the Argentine Embassy. Kirkpatrick, in particular, was no friend of Britain. On 13 April she went so far as to suggest ‘If the Argentines own the islands, then moving troops into them is not armed aggression.’14 Could Britain proceed without US endorsement? The lesson of Suez was not encouraging.
The dispatch of the US Secretary of State, Alexander Haig, as a peace broker between Buenos Aires and London bought Washington time to avoid taking sides. President Mitterrand proved a staunch supporter of Britain’s claim to take back islands recognized by international law as her own, but not all the European partners were so steadfast. When the EEC embargo on Argentine imports came up for its monthly renewal in mid-May, Italy and Ireland opted out of it. The closer the Task Force got to fighting the more jumpy became the Germans. Beyond the EEC, Britain’s greatest allies proved to be Pinochet’s Chile, Australia and New Zealand. Auckland’s Prime Minister, Robert Muldoon, wrote a personal article in The Times making clear ‘New Zealand will back Britain all the way’.15 He offered one of his country’s frigates to take the place of a Royal Naval vessel called up for South Atlantic operations.
To Conservatives of Douglas-Home’s cobalt hue, reclaiming the Falklands had implications beyond assuring the self-determination of its islanders. It was also about marking an end to the years of continuous national retreat since Suez. It was about proving that Britain was still great and was not, as Margaret Thatcher put it in reply to Foreign Office defeatists, a country ready to accept ‘that a common or garden dictator should rule over the Queen’s subjects and prevail by fraud and violence’.16 That Tories saw an opportunity to commence a national revival of self-confidence troubled the left and many liberals. They had no love for a right-wing military junta in Buenos Aires but they worried a triumphant feat of British arms would restore militaristic (right-wing, class-ridden) attitudes. It was little wonder they turned to the UN in the hope of a compromise that would fudge such absolutes as ‘ownership’ and ‘nationalism’. Indeed, Britain at large appeared to be apprehensive. During April and early May, opinion polls suggested there was support for sending the Task Force but considerable doubt about whether reclaiming the islands was worth spilling British blood.17
Despite his own stalwart position, Douglas-Home was careful to ensure the widest possible spectrum of views should be aired in the paper. Never shy to criticize, Fred Emery told him ‘your leaders have been a sight too romantic, losing sight of the practicalities’.18 David Watts was in the camp that argued that the islanders had precious little future without Argentine collaboration and that the utility of 1800 Falkland Islanders to the national interest was less than the financial portfolios of the 17,000 British citizens living in Argentina. A full-page pro-Argentine advert was published.19 The historian and anti-nuclear campaigner E. P. Thompson was given much of the Op-Ed page to explain ‘why neither side is worth backing’. He concluded that Mrs Thatcher’s ‘administration has lost a by-election in Glasgow and it needs to sink the Argentine navy in revenge’.20 The letters page started to fill. Many disliked Douglas-Home’s editorial line. The former Labour Paymaster-General, Lord (George) Wigg got personal:
I have no confidence in improvised military adventures in pursuit of undefined objectives, and my doubts are further emphasized by the attitude of The Times which, during my lifetime, has been wrong on every major issue, and I have little doubt that the time will come when your current follies will be added to the long list of failures to serve your country with wisdom in her hour of need.21
Sackloads of letters abhorred the idea of a resolution through violence in the South Atlantic. The playwright William Douglas-Home (the editor’s uncle) was among those wondering if a referendum could be held to ask the islanders whether they wanted to be evacuated and, if so, to where, ‘otherwise a situation might arise in which the Union Jack flew again on Government House with hardly anybody alive to recognize it’. Four to five hundred letters were arriving at Gray’s Inn Road every day. Leon Pilpel, the letters page editor, considered that in the past thirty years only two other issues had generated comparable levels of correspondence – the 1956 Suez crisis and the paper’s resumption in 1979 after its eleven-month shutdown. In the first three weeks of the crisis the number of letters received suggested that a little over half disagreed with the paper’s editorial line and favoured a negotiated settlement rather than using the Task Force. But there were also sackloads of letters from America supporting the Prime Minister’s resolve.22 It was hard to gauge to what extent this reflected most Times readers’ views. Doubtless an anti-war editorial policy would have stimulated a greater torrent of pro-war letters.
Among broadsheets, The Times and the Daily Telegraph stood alone in unambiguously supporting the Task Force’s objectives. Not even all the ‘Murdoch Press’ (as the left now chose to call it) supported the war. The Sunday Times’s editor, Frank Giles, believed ‘The Times’s leaders brayed and neighed like an old war horse’.23 By contrast, the Sunday Times warned its readers that any attempt to retake the islands by force would be ‘a short cut to bloody disaster’. Impressed by no force other than that of the market, the Financial Times opposed sending the Task Force. Britain, it maintained, should not seek to retain control of an ‘anachronism’. Instead it should propose turning the islands over to a UN Trusteeship.24 The Guardian became the main protest sheet against liberating the islands. The paper’s star columnist, Peter Jenkins, perfectly encapsulating the Guardian mindset by warning, ‘We should have no wish to become the Israelis of Western Europe’. The strident tone adopted by the Sun – derided for turning from ‘bingo to jingo’ – particularly confirmed bien pensant opinion against liberating the Falklands. Accusations of fifth columnists in the fourth estate raised temperatures further. The Guardian’s editor, Peter Preston, denounced the Sun as ‘sad and despicable’ for questioning the patriotism of the Daily Mirror and the BBC’s Peter Snow.25 There would be worse to come.
The New Statesman, edited by Bruce Page, a noted investigative journalist who had worked with Harold Evans at the Sunday Times, baited The Times for its ‘We Are All Falklanders Now’ editorial. ‘It is not easy to believe,’ the New Statesman pronounced, ‘that even a government as stupid and amateurish as Mrs Thatcher’s can actually be sending some of the Navy’s costliest and most elaborate warships to take part in a game of blind-man’s bluff at the other end of the world.’ The weekly house magazine of the left exploded in a torrent of loathing, which, surprisingly, was directed not against the side led by a right-wing military junta but against ‘the thing we still have to call our government – the United Kingdom state … so long as it has its dominion over us it will betray us – and makes us pay the price of betrayal in our own best blood’. For its 30 April edition, the New Statesman splashed across its cover the most demonic looking photograph of Mrs Thatcher it could tamper with, above the bold capital letter indictment ‘THE WARMONGER’.26
The peace lobby tried to talk up every diplomatic initiative to avoid the coming confrontation. In contrast, Buenos Aires’s offers were met with the Sun’s famous headline suggestion to ‘Stick it up your junta!’27 Al Haig’s shuttle diplomacy stumbled on. But as far as Margaret Thatcher and the editorial policy of The Times was concerned, it was hard to see what offer would be acceptable that fell short of handing the islands back to their British owner. Not everyone in the War Cabinet saw the matter in such absolutes. The new Foreign Secretary, Francis Pym, supported a compromise he negotiated with Haig in Washington. The Task Force would turn back and the Argentine occupation would end. In its place a ‘Special Interim Authority’ would be established in Stanley that would include representatives of the Argentine government and a mysterious as yet unknown entity described as the ‘local Argentine population’. There would be no explicit commitment to self-determination. Mrs Thatcher stated in her memoirs that she believed the deal would have allowed Buenos Aires ‘to swamp the existing population with Argentinians’ and that, had it been approved, she would have resigned.28 But, rather than be seen to be negative, it was decided to wait and see what the junta made of the scheme. On 29 April, they rejected it. The following day, the United States at last came out formally in support of Britain. By then, South Georgia was back in British hands. With Witherow and the other reporters hundreds of miles away on the Invincible, there were no journalists with the landing force and the only photograph The Times could run with was an old panorama of a peaceful looking Grytviken harbour.
As the prospect of a major confrontation became inevitable, so Douglas-Home spent long periods on the telephone with intelligence officers and assorted defence experts. As Liz Seeber, his secretary, put it, ‘He did seem to be remarkably well informed on some things’.29 D-notices, a system established in 1912, set out the guidelines for the British news media’s reporting of national security matters. Whitehall had only just reviewed and extended them two days before the Argentines had invaded. Concerned that Julian Haviland’s article citing ‘informed sources’ that there was already an advance party on the Falklands breached D-notice 6 on ‘British Security and Intelligence Services’, Douglas-Home discreetly edited the piece before allowing it onto the front page for 27 April. This was an example of self-censorship, without the Secretary of the D-notice committee even being contacted on the subject.30
The censors reviewing John Witherow’s dispatches from HMS Invincible forbade any mention of the Task Force’s strengths, destinations, of the capability of the onboard armoury or even the weather. In London, the Vulcan bombing raid on Stanley’s airfield was portrayed as a success (despite Argentine film footage that showed the airstrip was still useable). Witherow spoke to one of the personnel in the flight control room who told him the raid had been a disastrous flop. Witherow filed his copy to this effect, only to have the censor change it to read that the mission had been a success. This, however, was an extreme and rare example. Generally, as at Gray’s Inn Road, self-censorship helped ensure that little of substance was actually excised from Witherow’s copy.31 Yet, this did not make relations on board Invincible easy. Unlike the Army, which had learned through long (and occasionally bitter) experience as a consequence of the Troubles in Ulster, the Navy was not used to dealing with the press at such close quarters. There was also the question over whether naval procedures applied to the journalists on board. It did not go down well that during the first ‘Action Stations’ Witherow went onto the bridge of Invincible protesting that ‘as he represented The Times, he could go where he liked’.32 As the Task Force steamed closer to the Total Exclusion Zone around the Falklands, relations between the press corps and their MoD ‘minder’ broke down completely. Recognizing the problem, the Invincible’s captain, Jeremy Black, did his best to help and assigned his secretary, Richard Aylard (later the Prince of Wales’s private secretary), to smooth things over with the journalists. Nonetheless, Witherow’s copy was vetted four times before it reached Gray’s Inn Road. Once the MoD press officer, Aylard and Black had vetted it on the Invincible, it was transmitted to Admiral Sir John Fieldhouse’s Command HQ at Northwood, Middlesex, where the MoD censors vetted it again. Despite Captain Black’s request that, after they had cleared it, Northwood should release the journalists’ dispatches at the same time as its own statements, this frequently did not happen.33
Transmitting copy from ship to shore was a major problem. Understandably, the journalists’ dispatches were the lowest priority of all the information punched out by the Invincible’s messenger centre. It took half an hour for the operator to transfer a journalist’s dispatch onto tape. Further delays took place trying to transmit it by satellite and the copy frequently got lost in the process, requiring it to be sent again. The whole process frequently took two to three hours – just to send one dispatch. And there were five Fleet Street journalists, all sending in their handiwork. It was hardly surprising that Black objected to 30 per cent of his outgoing traffic being taken up by press copy when he had far more important operational detail to convey. At one stage, there was a backlog of one thousand signals waiting to be cleared. Eventually Black demanded that press copy could only be transmitted at night, when there was usually less operational messaging needing to be sent. This ensured that copy was appearing in The Times around two days after it was written. A seven-hundred-word limit was also imposed.34
It had been decided that dispatches would be ‘pooled’ so that all the news media would have access to them. In any case, it proved almost impossible for any of the Fleet Street editors to make contact with their journalists on board ship. Witherow managed to get a brief call through to Fred Emery on 18 May, but this was a rare exception.35 ‘Those of us without experience of war would have done better,’ Witherow later reflected, ‘if we’d had the office saying “give us 2000 words on how the Harrier pilots spend their time” – we didn’t know what they wanted and were just firing into a void all the time.’ By the time newspapers were flown on board ship for the journalists to analyse, they were two to three weeks out of date. Witherow concluded that the failure to provide the embedded reporters with better communication channels ended up harming the Task Force’s own publicity: ‘if they had allowed it, they would have got much better and less spasmodic, coverage’.36
Witherow did not find the crew to be particularly pugnacious. ‘They knew the ships were hopelessly defended,’ he recalled; ‘this became apparent when I saw them strapping machine guns to the railings of Invincible to shoot down low flying planes.’37 On 1 May, the Fleet came under air attack. In London, the War Cabinet was concerned about the strike range of the carrier Veinticinco de Mayo and the cruiser General Belgrano. Although the latter was an aged survivor of Pearl Harbor, it was fitted with anti-ship Exocet missiles and was escorted by two destroyers. The Task Force’s commander, Admiral Woodward, feared the carrier and the cruiser were attempting a pincer movement against his ships. On Sunday 2 May the War Cabinet gave to the submarine HMS Conqueror the order to torpedo the Belgrano. Three hundred and twenty-one members of its crew went down with her.
The Belgrano’s sinking was to be the most controversial action of the conflict. But, at first, it was very difficult to establish much information about it. Such was the paucity of information from the MoD, it did not make the newspapers until Tuesday 4 May editions. Even then, The Times had to rely on its US correspondent, Nicholas Ashford, for the news that ‘authoritative sources in Washington’ had confirmed the cruiser had sunk and that as many as seven hundred of its crew might have drowned. Filing from Buenos Aires, Christopher Thomas backed up Washington’s claims. All the MoD in London could offer was that they were ‘not in a position to confirm or deny Argentine reports’. Witherow, however, did manage to get a dispatch out that concentrated on the Navy’s ‘compassion’ in sparing the Belgrano’s escort ships and in searching for survivors. The best the picture desk could procure was a tiny image with the caption ‘The General Belgrano in a photograph taken 40 years ago’.38 A further sixteen days would pass before the dramatic photograph of the ship – listing heavily and surrounded by life rafts – would make it into the paper, halfway down page six.
News that the Belgrano had been hit had prompted the infamous ‘Gotcha!’ headline in the Sun. The NUJ had called an eleven day strike and the paper was being brought out by only a handful of editorial staff on whom the excitement and stress were clearly beginning to have a deleterious effect. The paper’s combative editor Kelvin MacKenzie pulled the crude headline after the first edition once news of serious loss of life began to permeate the Bouverie Street newsroom, but by the time ‘Gotcha!’ had been replaced by the more contrite (though less factually accurate) headline ‘Did 1200 Argies drown?’ the damage had been done.39 Reacting to the anti-war stance of its rival, the Daily Mirror, the Sun’s reporting of the conflict was not only stridently patriotic but also frequently couched in language that suggested the war was some sort of game show. In particular, the ‘Gotcha!’ front page brought the Sun considerable opprobrium, but The Times, while opting for the lower-case headline ‘Cruiser torpedoed by Royal Navy sinks’, was equally certain of the need to send her to the bottom of the ocean. Those who pointed out the ship had been torpedoed outside the Total Exclusion Zone were slapped down, the leader column declaiming, ‘it is fanciful to imagine that any Argentine warship can put to sea – let alone sail some three hundred miles eastward towards the Falkland Islands – without having hostile intentions towards the British task force’.40
The press and political recriminations over the Belgrano had only just begun when the news broke that HMS Sheffield had been hit – the first British warship to be lost in battle since the Second World War. Witherow’s dispatch from Invincible led the coverage, describing how the Sheffield ‘was completely blotted out by the smoke which formed a solid column from the sea to the clouds’. The sea was ‘full of warships all manoeuvring at top speed’ with the Invincible’s personnel spreadeagled on a floor that ‘shook with vibrations’ as the carrier dodged the incoming assaults.41 The war situation was now totally transformed. ‘The cocktails on the quarterdeck in the tropics seem another existence,’ Witherow stated two days later. The quarterdeck ‘is now swept by sleet and spray and piled high with cushions from the officers’ wardroom, ready for ditching overboard to reduce risk of fire’.42
‘In military terms, the Falklands war is turning into a worse fiasco than Suez,’ announced Peter Kellner, the New Statesman’s political editor, adding that The Times ‘in superficially more measured tones’ was as guilty as the rest of ‘the jingo press’ in getting Britain’s servicemen into this mess.43 As news of the Sheffield’s casualties slowly emerged, there was a palpable ‘told you so’ from those who thought going to war ridiculous. The Times published a letter from the acclaimed professor of politics Bernard Crick lambasting ‘the narrowly legal doctrine of sovereignty’ that had produced the ‘atavistic routes of patriotic death when our last shreds of power lie in our reputation for diplomatic and political skill’. Instead of making war, Britain should work ‘in consort’ with the EEC and its friends to put ‘pressure on the USA to control its other allies’.44
Conspiracy theorists soon suggested that the Belgrano had been sunk in order to derail a peace plan being proposed by Peru. Thatcher later stated that she knew nothing of the Peruvian proposals (which envisaged handing the islands over to a four-power administration) when the order to sink the cruiser was given and, in any case, Buenos Aires proceeded to reject the proposals. The Times did not think much of the Peruvian plan, sniffing that it promised to turn the Falklands into ‘some latter-day post war Berlin’.45 But the Belgrano’s sinking created an international outcry. President Reagan begged Mrs Thatcher to hold off further action. The Irish Defence Minister declared Britain ‘the aggressor’. The Austrian Chancellor opined that he could not support Britain’s colonial claims over the islands. At home and abroad, Thatcher’s critics demanded she return to the United Nations for a diplomatic solution. But with the South Atlantic winter setting in, and Galtieri scouring the world’s arms market for more Exocet missiles, prevarication was not what the Task Force wanted.46 The Times was deeply sceptical of further diplomatic overtures. Nonetheless Pym got to work with Perez de Cuellar, the UN Secretary-General, on a plan to place the islands under the interim (though some concluded indefinite) jurisdiction of the United Nations. Nigel Lawson later wrote that he thought the plan would have commanded a Cabinet majority.47 Instead, on 19 May, the Argentine junta rejected the proposals. Pym wanted to try again, but his colleagues overruled him. On 21 May, British troops went ashore at San Carlos Bay. The liberation had begun.
The following morning The Times led with ‘Troops gain Falklands bridgehead’ above a photograph of three Royal Marine Commandos running the Union Jack up a flagpole. The image had not quite the vivid urgency of the US Marines planting Old Glory at Iwo Jima, but, compared to the paper’s front-page treatment of the campaign until that moment, it was positively dramatic. The day before the landing, Sir Frank Cooper, the permanent under-secretary at the MoD, had deliberately misinformed a press briefing that British strategy would take the form of a series of smash and grab raids at various locations around the islands rather than a single D-Day-style landing.48 All the papers, including The Times, advised their readers accordingly. Thus, news that there was a major invasion thrust in San Carlos Bay came as a complete surprise. The intention behind Cooper’s misleading briefing was to throw the Argentinians off the scent. Amphibious landings were precarious at the best of times and if the defending force had guessed the location, the outcome could have been in the balance. Instead, it would take time for the Argentinians to work out that what was going on in San Carlos Bay was something more than one of the smash and grab raids authoritatively traced throughout the British media to a ‘senior Whitehall source’.
Although the landing went unopposed, talk of success was premature. The RAF’s failure to gain commanding air superiority and the bravery of the Argentine pilots made it far from certain that the campaign would succeed. The Times reported an MoD briefing that five – unnamed – warships had been hit together with the Argentine claim that they had sunk a Type 42 destroyer and a Type 22 frigate. Such sketchy detail caused considerable anxiety to all those with loved ones in the Task Force and appeared to be another instance of the press having to deal with a MoD that was self-defeating in its dilatory release of vital information. But on this occasion, it ensured a better initial headline: Fleet Street led with the good news that British troops were ashore, rather than the battering the naval armada was receiving. Only later did it emerge that HMS Ardent and, subsequently, HMS Antelope, had been lost.
Frustrated in his bid to land with the troops, Witherow had got himself transferred to what less intrepid reporters might consider a precarious posting – on board an ammunition ship moored in the ‘bomb alley’ of San Carlos Water. In view of the highly inflammable cargo, he was cheerily assured that if the ship was hit, he wouldn’t need a lifejacket but a parachute. ‘The bombs came within fifty metres. We were feeling a bit nervous,’ he recollected; ‘whenever the planes came in, everybody let loose, bullets, guns, missiles.’ It was a perfect spot to observe the Argentine air force’s finest hour. Night-time offered little relief. Fears that Argentine divers might lay mines necessitated the dropping of depth charges: ‘You would be lying in your bunk at 4 a.m. right next to the waterline,’ Witherow recalled, ‘when suddenly BOOM!’49
With the bridgehead on East Falkland secured and the British troops beginning to move inland, Witherow became increasingly frustrated. Having journeyed down with the Navy, he had not had an opportunity to make the now imperative links with the Army that those journalists who had travelled later with the troop ship Canberra had established. Most prominent in this group was Max Hastings of the London Evening Standard. With Hastings and the Army were Michael Nicholson of ITN and the BBC’s Brian Hanrahan who were able to file voice reports (pictures would have to wait) from the beachhead. Eventually, Witherow and the other four journalists on the ammunition ship were helicoptered onto East Falkland. But within hours, they were told they were too inadequately clothed to proceed with the troops and were going to be sent back to the ship. Deciding anything was better than skulking on a floating powder keg, they attempted to hide behind some bales of wool. They were discovered and escorted from the island. Next they were put on board HMS Sir Geraint, a logistical support vessel that promptly sailed back out to sea. For several days Witherow and his companions wondered why their ship appeared to be taking a peculiar course, circling round the aircraft carriers. Eventually they realized the Sir Geraint was trying to draw an Exocet missile attack upon itself so as to save the carriers. Having placed the press corps on, respectively, an ammunition ship and a decoy for air assault, it was clear what the Royal Navy thought of their travelling journalists. The land campaign had been going for two weeks before Witherow was next permitted to step ashore with 5 Brigade.
By then the most famous land battle of the war, Goose Green, had been won. Without air support and with little in the way of artillery, 2 Para had attacked and overcome an entrenched enemy nearly three times their size, taken 1400 prisoners and freed 114 islanders shut up in a guarded community hall. It was an impressive feat and earned a posthumous Victoria Cross for Colonel ‘H’ Jones, the commanding officer who fell with seventeen of his men. But not everyone had played his or her part. With a level of ineptitude far surpassing their usual reticence, the MoD in London had announced the capture of Goose Green eighteen hours before it happened. The BBC’s World Service reported the news that the attack was about to take place. In the meantime, the Argentine troops rearranged their defences to guard against an assault from exactly the direction 2 Para were approaching – supposedly in secrecy.50 This scandalous lapse was primarily the MoD’s fault, but it generated further animosity between the troops and the reporters. In Gray’s Inn Road, the fall of Goose Green was not the main story. Instead, Fred Emery decided to lead with the Pope’s arrival in Britain because the first steps of a pontiff on British soil were of greater historical significance.51
The British Army’s objective was now to yomp across East Falkland, eject the Argentines from the defensive positions in the hills to the west and south of Stanley and liberate the capital. Having finally got himself accredited to 5 Brigade, Witherow proceeded to spend some days with the Gurkhas before attaching himself to the Welsh Guards, a regiment he rightly assumed would be in the thick of any fighting. Despite the cold weather, he spent most nights huddled up in barns or sheds or, occasionally, trying to sleep outdoors. The only way he could now get copy to London was to write it down, persuade a helicopter pilot to carry it on his next trip back to HMS Fearless (where all journalists’ copy was being directed) and then have the ship transmit it to the MoD censors in Northwood from where it would, it was hoped, be passed, unedited, onto Gray’s Inn Road. This chain of action only worked if the pilot remembered to pass the copy to someone who knew what to do with it next. Frequently, the copy got mislaid, put aside or discarded at some point along this convoluted process. One of the reports that got lost in transit was a graphic eyewitness account of the horror on board the stricken landing ships Sir Tristram and Sir Galahad from Mick Seamark of the Daily Star. Some felt its loss was convenient.52
Witherow was at Bluff Cove when the disaster struck. His dispatch – which did get through – conveyed the essentials that between five hundred and six hundred men from the Royal Marines and the Welsh Guards had been on the ships, awaiting disembarkation when the air attack came. One survivor was quoted as stating, ‘People were screaming, trapped in their rooms. People were in agony. There was mangled wreckage in the corridor.’53 The attack had come on Tuesday 8 June yet such was the MoD’s reticence in releasing details that the death toll had still not been confirmed when The Times went to press for its Saturday 12 June edition – four days after the ships had been hit. Henry Stanhope was left to report the rumours of forty-six deaths and 130 wounded but that ‘the Ministry’s refusal to give casualty figures has also prompted wide speculation in Washington where some sources say British casualties in the Tuesday raids are estimated at 300 dead and a large number wounded’.54 The actual figure was fifty-one fatalities and forty-six injuries.
The MoD’s failure to respond quickly with accurate information was not a cause of media incompetence, as was widely assumed at the time, but of military cunning. The Argentinians believed they had inflicted nine hundred casualties and checked the British advance. Determined to foster this misimpression in their opponents’ minds, the MoD deliberately briefed the press that losses had indeed been very heavy and the assault on Stanley might have to be postponed. Henry Stanhope dutifully reported this misinformation.55 The true death toll was withheld until the assault on Stanley had commenced on time and at full strength.56 As Admiral Sir Terence Lewin later put it, ‘The Bluff Cove incident, when we deliberately concealed the casualty figures, was an example of using the press, the media, to further our military operations.’57
Witherow moved up with the Welsh Guards as they advanced for the final push. Passing gingerly through a minefield he observed the battle of Mount Tumbledown from ‘quite a way back’. Comprehensively defeated in the hills around the capital, the Argentine garrison was now preparing to surrender. Reaching the outskirts of Stanley, Witherow noted that the road ahead appeared to be open. He decided to advance on the city, hoping to be the first journalist – indeed the first person with the Task Force – into the islands’ capital. Gallingly, he discovered the omnipresent Max Hastings of the Evening Standard had beaten him to it. By the time Witherow’s report made it into The Times it was as the follow-up to Hastings’s celebrated dispatch describing the moment he liberated the Upland Goose Hotel. Taking advantage of the order to 2 Para to halt just outside the city while negotiations were entered into, Hastings had seen his chance and – exchanging his Army-issue camouflaged jacket for an anorak – wandered into the city. Finding an Argentine colonel on the steps of the administration block, Hastings recorded, ‘I introduced myself to him quite untruthfully as the correspondent of The Times newspaper, the only British newspaper that it seemed possible he would have heard of.’58
Having innocently printed the MoD’s misinformation about delays to the final assault, The Times was as taken by surprise by the speed of the Argentine surrender as were MPs who had gathered in the Commons chamber expecting a ministerial progress report only to discover that the Argentines were ‘reported to be flying white flags over Port Stanley’. In the preceding hours, the MoD had insisted upon a news blackout from the South Atlantic so that no reporter could get the news of the ceasefire out before the Prime Minister had announced it to Parliament. The Times could feel a sense of vindication for the strong editorial line it had taken from the first, the leader column starting, ‘In war, only what is simple can succeed’ because ‘it was clear that it was the sheer simplicity of Britain’s immediate response to the original invasion which has sustained the operation over all these weeks and made such an historic victory possible.’59 Having initially supported the 1956 Suez fiasco, The Times had not always made the right call in such matters. Douglas-Home had risked the paper’s reputation in taking an unambiguous stance right from the beginning. Notwithstanding the loss of life, it was natural that there was a sense of relief at Gray’s Inn Road that the gamble had succeeded in its objective.
In The Winter War, the book he co-wrote with Patrick Bishop of the Observer, Witherow pointed out that the Falklands campaign was a nineteenth-century affair in the respect that it was about territory rather than ideology. Moreover, apart from the missiles, ‘the basic tools for fighting were artillery, mortars, machine guns and bayonets’, weapons that ‘would have been familiar to any veteran of World War II’.60 It thus proved to be markedly different from the British military operations of the following twenty years in which air power and technology would predetermine the outcome on the ground and Britain would be but a junior partner in an American-led coalition. Witherow maintained that Britain’s campaign was never a preordained walkover against a bunch of useless conscripts. Argentine equipment had been generally as good as that possessed by the British. Indeed, with supplies being flown into Stanley airport right up to the eve of the surrender (so much for Britain’s claim to have disabled the runway) the Argentine troops in the area were better fed and supplied than the British. What was more, they had had plenty of time to prepare defences and ‘initially out-numbered their attackers by three to one, a direct inversion of the odds that conventional military wisdom dictates. They had nothing like the logistical problems that beset their attackers.’61 There had been moments of luck – in particular the failure of so many Argentine missiles to detonate after hitting their target – but it was undeniably a great feat of British arms. Some began to hope that it presaged an end to the long years of managing decline that had inhabited the Whitehall psyche since Suez.
The Franks Report cleared the Thatcher Government of negligence in failing to foresee the invasion but found fault with Whitehall’s capacity for ‘crisis management’. The extent to which the Government and the MoD in particular had manipulated the news coverage of the campaign rumbled on elsewhere. The Commons Defence select committee provided newspaper editors, Douglas-Home among them, with the opportunity to draw attention to the many deficiencies that MoD restrictions and poor communication links had produced. Many journalists were outraged that senior Whitehall figures like Sir Frank Cooper had consciously misled them into writing that there would be no single D-Day-style landing only hours before such an undertaking got underway. This kind of deceit undermined trust in Government information. Doubtless Sir Frank calculated that the exact veracity of a particular briefing was less important than the survival of several hundred soldiers who would be sent to their deaths if the Argentines were ready to meet the landing party. If this was the calculation then only a public servant with a peculiar set of priorities would have done otherwise. But it was a stunt that could not be repeated too often. If journalists began to disbelieve everything Government officials told them, the whole point of briefings would break down. Operational reasons were also used to justify the slow release of information. The MoD’s decision to announce that ships had been hit without naming which and the late release of casualty figures from the Bluff Cove disaster caused distress to anxious relatives and angered all those who believed news involved immediacy of information. Where the balance resided between Whitehall’s obligation to provide a free society with truthful information and its duty not to needlessly endanger servicemen’s lives could not be easily resolved.
In the twenty years following the Falklands’ campaign, the number of commercial satellites proliferated, permitting war correspondents to communicate swiftly and directly to their offices and readers or viewers. Those reporting from the South Atlantic in 1982 did not enjoy such liberty. They had no alternative but to entrust their copy to the British military who alone had the capability to transmit it back to London and, in the first instance, to the MoD censors. If the armed forces did not like the look of the copy they were under no obligation even to send the dispatch. Whitehall had been able to prevent any foreign press from covering the operation by the simple device of refusing them a berth on any of the ships travelling with the Task Force. But subsequent wars were not fought over inaccessible islands close to the Antarctic. And since they involved joint operations with allies, what reporters with one country’s troops could transmit became the effective property of all.
Indeed, the Falklands War would be the last major conflict in which newspaper reports were more immediate than television pictures. The experience of the BBC and ITV crews on the aircraft carrier Hermes was even more frustrating than that of the Fleet Street journalists on Invincible. Because the British military transmitters were at the edge of their South Atlantic coverage, satellite transmission rendered pictures of too poor a quality to show. Using commercial satellites ran supposed security risks if Argentina managed to dial in to them and gain potentially useful information. Instead, all film footage had to be flown from the Falklands to Ascension Island before it could be broadcast. This created monumental delays. The first television pictures of the landings at San Carlos were shown on British television two and a half weeks after the event. Some of the footage took twenty-three days to reach transmission. This was three days longer than it took Times readers to find out the fate of the Charge of the Light Brigade in 1854.62
The quality of The Times’s reporting of the Crimean War had been one of the most illustrious episodes in the paper’s history. But besides seeing its editorial line vindicated, The Times’s coverage of the Falklands’ crisis was competent rather than remarkable. It did not, of course, want to compete with the attention-grabbing antics of the tabloids. Nonetheless, its news presentation lacked sharpness. Perhaps it was at its most deficient in its layout. Sometimes the picture selection beggared belief. The front-page headline for 3 June, ‘Argentina lost 250 men at Goose Green’, was accompanied by a photograph entitled ‘Languid lesson: Students basking in Regent’s Park, London yesterday’. The photograph that should have been used – of dejected Argentine soldiers being marched out of Goose Green into captivity – appeared on page three where there was no directly related article. Put simply, Douglas-Home had none of the visual awareness of his ousted predecessor. The magic touch of Harold Evans and his design team was noticeably lacking.
Max Hastings of the Evening Standard had proved to be the most successful reporter of the conflict, a reality that created enmity from some of the other reporters who felt he had been given preferential treatment on account of his being au fait with Army ways. Journalists’ squabbling over who got the best coverage appeared petty to soldiers and sailors whose every thought and action had been directed towards a team effort and a common purpose. Three of the journalists, including the representative from the Guardian, so hated the experience of covering the war that they quit and had to be brought home before the campaign was over. Witherow had stuck it out. Right at the very last moment, he was almost rewarded with the scoop he had been so long seeking. Having surrendered to General Moore, General Menendez, the Argentine commander-in-chief, was being held in a cabin on HMS Fearless. With Patrick Bishop, Witherow managed to sneak into the cabin and began interviewing the defeated general. Unfortunately, the inquisition had not advanced far when a naval officer walked in, discovered what was afoot and bundled the two reporters out.63
The strident jingoism of the Sun and the less patriotic ‘even-handedness’ of the BBC generated the two shouting matches within the media. The Times gave little space to the first issue but it refused to join what it termed the ‘shrill chorus of complaint’ heard from the Sun and right-wing Tories who perceived the BBC’s attempts to present both sides of the argument as tantamount to treason. The MoD’s inability to speed the supply of copy from the South Atlantic inevitably ensured news services turned to other sources – including Argentine ones – to find out what was going on. What else could they do but cite ‘Argentine claims’ against ‘British claims’? However, the Panorama presenter Robert Kee had taken the unusual step of writing a letter to The Times criticizing the one-sided anti-war tone of one of the offending reports on his own programme.64 This ensured the end of Kee’s Panorama career but it was noticeable that The Times did not share the Sun’s view that there were ‘traitors in our midst’, especially in the Corporation.
The boost in national newspaper circulation during the conflict was scarcely perceptible. By the end of hostilities, the increase was below 1 per cent. This tended to support the analysts’ claim that the tabloid market had long been at saturation point. But if people were not buying more newspapers, it did not mean they were not above switching titles. Looked at over a slightly broader period, comparing the same March to September period of the previous year, The Times circulation had risen 13,000 to 303,300. This compared to a 66,000 fall in the Telegraph to 1,313,000 while the war-sceptic Guardian had risen by over 8 per cent (33,500) to 421,700, increasing the margin of its lead over The Times.65 In sales figures, it was the Guardian that, ironically, had the best war.
The stalwart position adopted by the new editor came as no surprise to those who knew him. Among those who did not, there was an easy temptation to portray Charlie Douglas-Home as a placeman of the Establishment. He had gone to Eton and Sandhurst but not to university. His middle name was Cospatrick. His uncle, Sir Alec, had succeeded Harold Macmillan as Prime Minister and his defeat in the subsequent 1964 general election was widely interpreted as victory for British meritocracy. His mother moved in Court circles. His cousin, Lady Diana Spencer, was still in the first year of her marriage to Prince Charles. As the Princess of Wales she carried the hopes not only of a dynasty but also of much of the nation. Even without this connection, Douglas-Home had been a close friend of the Prince of Wales since the 1970s, the two men having been brought together by Laurens van der Post.
Charlie Douglas-Home certainly had the self-confident attributes of one used to privileged surroundings and high-achieving company. In particular, he had a quick and natural wit that put those he met at their ease. But his background also contained its fair share of family problems, dysfunctional relationships and alcoholism. His brother, Robin, was an accomplished pianist (he was regularly engaged entertaining the members of the Clermont Club in Berkeley Square) and a great lover of beautiful women. Married in 1960 to Sandra Paul, the model and future wife of the Tory leader Michael Howard, he subsequently had affairs with Jackie Kennedy, Princess Margaretha of Sweden and, ultimately, Princess Margaret. After he lost the affections of the Queen’s sister to Peter Sellers, he committed suicide in 1968, aged thirty-six. Following the funeral, Charlie came across a manuscript for a novel that was thinly disguised as an account of his brother’s affair with Princess Margaret. He lit a fire and placed it on it.
Three novels (and a biography of Frank Sinatra) by Robin Douglas-Home had already been published in his brief lifetime. One, entitled Hot for Certainties, ruthlessly parodied his parents although he was saved from parental wrath primarily because each recognized the cruel portrait of their spouse but not of themselves. Both Robin and Charlie had developed a love for playing the piano from their mother, a concert pianist and close friend of Ruth, Lady Fermoy, the Queen’s lady-in-waiting. Margaret Douglas-Home was also a fantasist whose tall stories gave Charlie an early training in the journalist’s requirement not to take statements at face value but rather to interview many people and ask searching questions in order to get a true picture. At Ludgrove, his prep school, he had been one of only two boys considered to have intellectual potential. The other was the boy he befriended and sat next to, the future left-wing writer Paul Foot (despite their subsequent political differences, they remained on good terms). At Eton, where he was a scholar, Douglas-Home’s favourite subject had been history and he had been accepted to go up to Oxford. His college, Christ Church, got as far as putting his name on his door, but he never arrived – at the last minute he discovered that his mother had squandered the money that would have sustained him there.
Instead, he took a commission in the Royal Scots Greys and went out to Kenya as the ADC to the Governor, Sir Evelyn Baring. This proved an important early grounding in political decision taking and the tasks of government. He later wrote Baring’s biography which he subtitled The Last Proconsul. When he returned to Britain, Douglas-Home determined upon becoming a journalist. He began as a crime reporter at the Scottish Daily Express. It was a rough but useful training in reporting from the sharp end, with the young recruit catapulted not only into the seamy side of low life in the Gorbals but also into the hard-drinking culture prevalent in the Glasgow offices of Beaverbrook’s paper. His great break came first in moving down to London in 1961 as the Express’s defence correspondent and then in covering the same portfolio at The Times four years later.
By then he had shown himself to be not only fearless in the ganglands of Glasgow but also in pursuit of the country fox. Hunting was a passion he pursued with a physical recklessness that appeared to know few bounds. He parted from his horse regularly, although never for long. His friend since school days, Edward Cazalet, noted that he used to regard it as ‘a military exercise on a grand scale: the terrain, the plan, the tactics were invariably analysed to the full. I know of no-one who got more thrill from riding flat out over fences despite the falls he took.’ More traditional members of the hunting fraternity were less impressed. They admonished Douglas-Home for wearing his father’s pink hunting coat and black cap, which they believed he was not entitled to wear. Never one to put great store by appearance, he merely dyed the coat blue and sewed on his own regimental buttons. The effect was not entirely harmonious. Unfortunately, a senior officer in the regiment witnessed him in this costume and reported him to the colonel, writing along the lines of, ‘Whenever in this dreadful coat a button happened by chance to coincide with a button hole, I saw, to my horror, the Regimental Crest.’ Douglas-Home was ordered to remove the offending item. He refused. The matter went higher. Still he refused. Finally, a general was brought in to settle matters. At this point Douglas-Home won the argument by observing that if the regimental crest was deemed worthy to grace beer mugs and place mats, it was surely not out of place amid the risks and dangers of the hunting field.66
His chosen profession also involved him in dangers potentially greater than the ever-looming prospect of a hunting accident. In 1968, when he was The Times’s defence correspondent, he was arrested by Soviet forces after he discovered 25,000 troops waiting, concealed, along the Czechoslovak border. His report broke in The Times on 27 July. Just over three weeks later the tanks he had stumbled upon rolled in to crush the Prague Spring. The experience made a great impression upon him and deepened his intense hostility towards the Communist expropriation of half of Europe. He was also conscious that for many in Britain and the West, the desire to live in peaceful co-existence had deadened their condemnation of left-wing totalitarianism. His wife had been staying in a hotel in Folkestone when the news broke that Soviet forces had arrested her husband. She was promptly asked to leave the hotel. Its manager did not want the custom of the wife of a man who had been arrested.67
The treatment of dissidents in Eastern Europe was an issue that deeply concerned both the editor and his wife. Douglas-Home had met and married Jessica Gwynne, an artist poised to embark upon her career as a theatrical set and costume designer, in 1966. Both subsequently became friends of Roger Scruton, the Tory philosopher who edited the Salisbury Review. Scruton was in touch with many of Eastern Europe’s leading underground samizdat thinkers. He was also involved with the Jan Hus Foundation, a support group that had been founded with money from Times readers who had been shocked following the paper’s reporting of the arrest in Prague of Anthony Kenny, the Master of Balliol, while discussing Aristotle in a dissident’s flat. When Douglas-Home became editor of The Times, Scruton encouraged him to publish an anonymous article by the Czech dissident Petr Pithart, who later became the Prime Minister of the Czech and Slovak Federation. Accompanied by Scruton, Jessica Douglas-Home made the first of her many trips behind the Iron Curtain in October 1983 to meet with and assist dissidents. Dodging the secret police became part of her routine. Meanwhile, every Tuesday The Times published brief biographies of political prisoners from around the world in a series called ‘Prisoners of Conscience’, written by Caroline Moorehead.
Another writer who shared the Douglas-Homes’ loathing for Communism was Bernard Levin. In October 1982, he returned to The Times to write his ‘The Way We Live Now’ column. After a gap of eighteen months, his first article commenced with the words ‘And another thing …’68 Levin, a scourge of authority in almost any guise – from the North Thames Gas Board upwards – never shirked from what he saw as his duty to denounce the totalitarian mindset. The son of a Ukrainian Jewish mother and (an absentee) Lithuanian Jewish father, Levin had shaken off the left-wing views of his youth at the LSE and his early days as the That Was The Week That Was resident controversialist but not the argumentativeness or iconoclasm. While he continued to despise many aspects of the traditional British Establishment, in particular almost all the judiciary and most of the politicians, he was unsparing in his criticism of Soviet repression in Eastern Europe. There was no shortage of material for his scorn.
Throughout 1981, Dessa Trevisan in Warsaw and Michael Binyon, the Times correspondent in Moscow, had been filing alarming reports about the deteriorating situation in Poland. The economy was in desperate shape and the Solidarity Movement, the Eastern Bloc’s first free trade union, was openly challenging the authority of the Communist Party. Moscow had been issuing the Warsaw government with ominous requests to put its house in order and crack down on ‘anti-Soviet activities’.69 There were fears of a repeat of the Prague Spring of 1968 with Soviet tanks this time invading Poland to restore Communist unity. On 13 December 1981, Poland’s leader, General Jaruzelski, took the hint and imposed martial law.
For The Times, as with all news services, the problem was how to get reports out from a country that had imposed a news blackout. With the Polish borders sealed and all telephone and telex links shut down, it was extremely difficult to get any accurate news out of the country. Peter Hopkirk pieced together some details from ‘western diplomatic sources’ and a variety of eyewitness reports from businessmen leaving the country as the crackdown commenced. There were troops and armoured vehicles on the city streets but reports varied as to the extent of the strike action in the mines and factories. Roger Boyes, the Times correspondent in Warsaw, managed to get out a daily diary of the first four days of martial law and this appeared in the paper on 17 December. Solidarity’s leaders had been arrested and Lech Walesa was being held in isolation in a government villa outside Warsaw. ‘Chopin martial music and the general [Jaruzelski] on the screen and radio all day,’ Boyes noted. Announcers were wearing military uniform. Troops had occupied the Gdansk shipyards and surrounded the Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, some of whose staff were led away. ‘Troops are to be seen everywhere with fixed bayonets.’70
Prior to the imposition of martial law, The Times had taken the view that between offering fresh financial aid ‘tied to IMF-type conditions’ and witnessing the economic collapse of Poland, the first was preferable. Unlike the second option, it was more likely to detach the country from the Soviet Union. Jaruzelski’s actions in December 1981 killed off any hopes in Gray’s Inn Road of sending in the investment analysts.71 Harold Evans (still editor at that time) wrote to Rupert Murdoch, ‘You ought to know that The Times leader on the West’s reaction to Poland last week described the attitude of Lord Carrington as “flacid and feeble” (among other things) and he has let it be known that he is extremely annoyed.’72
Following street scuffles and clashes with the police, 205 arrests were made in Gdansk over the weekend of 30–31 January 1982. More violent demonstrations led to 1372 arrests on 3–4 May and the reimposition of evening curfews in Warsaw for young people. With a Polish Pope in Rome who had become a rallying point against oppression, the Church in Poland was caught in a difficult position – a spiritual power trying to negotiate with a temporal one. As Roger Boyes suggested, ‘the perpetual paradox of Church strategy is that the closer it moves to talking to the government, the further it moves from the main body of Catholic believers’.73 In November, the release of Lech Walesa after 336 days in custody raised hopes that the end of martial law in Poland might be in sight. But still the West held back in refusing aid.
The Polish situation sharpened the debate over whether the West should invest in the Communist east (a debate held in parallel to that over economic sanctions against South Africa). The cause célèbre was the construction of the Siberian gas pipeline. British jobs were involved in it. France and Germany wanted it to help with supplying their own energy needs. There were fears that a decision to cease cooperation would provoke Moscow into pressuring Poland to default on her massive debts to British and European banks. During 1982, however, President Reagan, having banned American companies from equipping the gas pipeline, sought to apply US law retrospectively against European companies involved in its construction. Considering the United States was continuing to sell Midwest grain cheaply to the Soviet Union, there was a measure of inconsistency in the President’s position. The Times, already irritated by Washington’s initial irresolution on the Falklands’ crisis, was deeply unimpressed, lambasting an idea that ‘set a precedent that could undermine the basis of international business trust’.74 Reagan backed down and the ban was lifted on 21 August 1983, exactly one month after the end of martial law in Poland. In July, Douglas-Home, accompanied by Murdoch, was granted a twenty-minute audience with President Reagan in the White House.
Michael Binyon had been The Times’s man in Moscow. Urbane, with the manner of the British diplomats with whom he spent so much of his time, the Cambridge-educated Binyon had arrived in the Soviet capital with his wife and three-year-old child in 1978. Extraordinarily, the paper had had no Moscow correspondent since 1972, a consequence of Soviet obstruction and a serious handicap to the paper’s pretensions as a world paper of record. Yet, as Binyon discovered, ‘the Russians had a great respect for The Times. They thought it was the official voice of Britain in the same way that Pravda is for the Soviet Union. They took it very seriously.’75
There was virtually no night life in Moscow, only endless ambassadorial receptions. Binyon had the distinction of being touched out of a photograph published in Izvestia at a reception for Michael Foot. He was more readily recognized for his work at the British Press Awards in 1981, when he picked up the David Holden prize. According to the judges, his reporting from the Soviet Union had been ‘one of the joys of the year. He combines hard reporting, descriptive writing and highly significant detail.’ Such observation filled his subsequent book, Life in Russia. But in mid-1982 he was moved on to become the paper’s Bonn correspondent. His replacement in Moscow was Richard Owen. Owen was thirty-four and had been at The Times for only two years, having previously gained a Ph.D. from the LSE and worked for the BBC. He spoke Russian, German, French and some Polish. He was still settling in Moscow when the Tass news agency confirmed Brezhnev’s death after eighteen years at the superpower’s helm. ‘When the end came, and it had been coming for a long time,’ reported Owen ‘the Soviet leadership seemed temporarily paralysed.’ The previous day The Times had led with the headline ‘Rumours of top leader’s death sweep Moscow’, based on Owen’s observations that ‘television schedules were changed without explanation and television news readers appeared dressed in black’. With the official confirmation, The Times went through its usual motions: page six cleared for a full-page obituary – ‘President Brezhnev: consolidator of Soviet power’ – while on the following page Owen assessed the runners and riders. ‘One of the main weaknesses of the Soviet system,’ he stressed, ‘is that it makes no provision for political succession.’ Konstantin Chernenko was the favourite followed by Yuri Andropov, while, of the less likely contenders, ‘Michael Sergeyevich Gorbachov is perhaps the most interesting Politburo member in the long term … He is confident, quiet, efficient, and biding his time.’76
In the event, Andropov pipped Chernenko, The Times trying to find the crumb of comfort that, having been head of the KGB for fifteen years, he would at least know what was going on in the country.77 Fifteen months later, Owen was again prophesying a successor when Andropov died in February 1984 (he had not been seen in public since the previous August). The obituary had no option but to focus on his professional CV since – despite being at the forefront of Soviet politics for so many years – details such as whether he had a wife remained unknown (he did, but she made her first public appearance in the wake of his funeral). This time it was the seventy-two-year-old Chernenko who succeeded.
The West’s tense relations with the teetering old men of the Kremlin formed the backdrop to the most important non-party political movement of the early 1980s, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. In Britain, the particular rallying call was the arrival of ninety-six US cruise missiles at the Greenham Common air base in Cambridgeshire. A hard core of women ‘peace protestors’ had been camping out at the air base for fifteen months when, on 12 December 1982, they were joined by a mass demonstration of thirty thousand women who linked hands and circled the perimeter wire of the base. With flowers and poems being inserted in the wire, the tone of the protest harked back to the ‘make love not war’ hippy movement of the late 1960s, although the women-only nature of the demonstration reduced, to some extent, the opportunities for hedonism available. There were sixty arrests. A CND demonstration outside Parliament led to 141 arrests. Douglas-Home was not much impressed, but the huge scale of national unease over the deployment of US nuclear weapons could not be so easily dismissed as an offshoot of a particular strain of feminism. Uncertainty about the power struggle in Moscow and dislike for the gun-totting tough talk of the ex-Hollywood cowboy (as his detractors so frequently described him) Ronald Reagan produced a broad coalition which feared that the sober reality of MAD (mutually assured destruction) would prove insufficient deterrence against either side attempting a first strike. With Monsignor Bruce Kent as its general secretary, CND drew particular support from many Church groups and individuals. When The Church and the Bomb, a report by the Church of England’s working party, argued that the retention of Britain’s nuclear deterrent was immoral, the editor’s brand of muscular Christianity rose to the fore: ‘The immorality of possessing nuclear weapons with the improbable intention of using them is only a small fraction of the immorality of actually using them. Set that against the certain rather than probable moral benefits of sustained peace in Europe, and the working party’s case falls down.’78
The 1982 Labour Party conference voted for the third year in succession in favour of Britain’s unilateral nuclear disarmament. The motion, put forward by the SOGAT ’82 print union, gained the necessary two-thirds majority to ensure it was binding on party policy (it had, in any case, the support of the party leader). It called for ‘developing with the trade union movement a detailed programme for the conversion of the relevant parts of the arms industry to the manufacture of socially-useful products so that no compulsory redundancy should arise from this policy.’ Truly, the party was committed to turning swords into ploughshares. Few on the editorial floor at Gray’s Inn Road doubted the ability of SOGAT to master the art of turning sophisticated technology into labour-intensive machinery.
Like Rupert Murdoch, Harold Evans had been broadly sympathetic towards Israel, putting on record his doubts about some of his leader writers’ wish to endorse a Palestinian state at a time when the PLO was not prepared to acknowledge the state of Israel. He had been up against the pro-Palestinian view of, in particular, Edward Mortimer, a leader writer and foreign specialist at The Times since 1973. An Old Etonian, Balliol man and fellow of All Souls, Mortimer’s history of Islam, Faith and Power, was published in 1982. Rather pointedly, he stuck up a pro-Palestinian poster in his office.79 He would later become chief speech writer to the Secretary-General of the UN, Kofi Annan. In June 1982, The Times affirmed its commitment to an independent Palestinian state: ‘Lebanon for the Lebanese, must be the slogan; Israel for the Israelis; and a Palestine of some sort, west of Jordan, for the Palestinians.’80
In June 1981, Israeli jets struck the Osirak nuclear plant near Baghdad. The Israeli Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, justified it as a pre-emptive strike at a project that was covertly developing Iraq’s attempts to gain nuclear weapons, and he had no doubt that such a capability would be used to annihilate Israel. The Israeli attack raised several issues, not all of them subject to definitive answers. Was Iraq really developing such a capability and, if so, would she use it against Israel? Did such a possibility justify a pre-emptive attack of this kind? There was also the diplomatic angle, given the outrage felt by Arab countries and the French government. France had built the reactor and French personnel (one of whom was killed in the attack) were helping to operate it. The Times took the view that the Iraqis probably were acquiring weapons-grade enriched uranium but that the Israeli action would only drive Saddam Hussein into the arms of Syria. The action ‘may cause rejoicing in Israel in the short term, but it has not guaranteed Israeli security in the longer term’ concluded the leader column.81 The unpalatable central issue – whether it was in anyone’s interest for Saddam Hussein to acquire nuclear weapons – was sidestepped.
Robert Fisk was the paper’s Middle Eastern correspondent. Having completed a Ph.D. at Trinity College Dublin on Irish neutrality during the Second World War, he had joined The Times in 1971 in his mid-twenties, reporting on the Troubles in Northern Ireland and winning Granada TV’s What The Papers Say award for Reporter of the Year in 1975. It was while in Ireland that he uncovered a succession of British Army cover-ups, further cementing his dislike of what he saw as the repressive tendencies of authority and officialdom. ‘I learned that authority lies, governments lie, ministries of defence lie,’ he said of his time in Ulster, adding that his response was to ‘keep challenging, to reject and refuse what you’re handed’.82 The police took him in for questioning following their discovery that he had been receiving classified documents from a rogue Army press officer who was later convicted for manslaughter. His subsequent switch away from reporting on Ireland was wrongly attributed to this incident. In fact, he merely wanted a change of scene. But Gray’s Inn Road was no place for a man of Fisk’s peripatetic courage. He had an ally in Douglas-Home, at that time home news editor, who, despite his own regard for the British Army, always encouraged Fisk to investigate further. In 1976 he was dispatched to the Middle East, finding plenty of trouble to write about in the Lebanon and Iran before covering the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan where he gained considerable access to the Soviet forces. At the IPC awards he had won International Reporter of the Year for two years running in 1980 and 1981. Frequently shot at, ‘you reach a point’ he laconically observed, ‘when one shell looks very much like another’.83
Fisk had arrived in the Lebanon just as the Syrians were invading the country. The Lebanon had collapsed into anarchy and the Syrian occupation had the backing of the Arab League and East Beirut’s Christian population. It was not long before Damascus’s intervention became, in turn, deeply resented and the Christians began to look for a new saviour – Israel. Syria, meanwhile, decided to crush ruthlessly its own fanatical Muslims. In February 1982 there was an insurrection by Sunni fundamentalists in the Syrian city of Hama. With the Syrian government warning foreign journalists they risked being shot by their forces if they tried to travel there, it was impossible to gauge exactly the extent of the uprising and the undoubted ferocity with which it was being suppressed. Fisk, however, decided to get a closer look and took a detour from the road to Damascus. As he approached, he could see the smoke from the ruins of Hama’s old city rising but roadblocks prevented him from getting any closer – as they had prevented any other journalist from enquiry. Fisk, however, had a stroke of luck when two displaced Syrian soldiers approached his car and asked if they could hitch a lift with him back to their units. This was his opportunity. With shells whizzing overhead, Fisk’s car sped across the battlefront, making it to the Syrians’ lines from where Soviet-made T62 tanks were firing across the Orontes river. A mosque was being shelled to pieces; a giant eighteenth-century wooden waterwheel was on fire, water cascading from its shattered structure; huge mortar cannons rocked back and forth, pounding the ancient walled city to obliteration. Bullets pinged and whirled back from the insurgents. The siege, Fisk learned, had been going on for sixteen days. There had been ferocious fighting in the cellars and passageways underneath the city as well as within it at street level. Syrian troops had even been blown up by a new and shocking phenomenon – women suicide bombers who embraced them clutching uncorked grenades. Some troops had defected to the insurgent Muslim Brotherhood.84
At Gray’s Inn Road there was considerable concern for Fisk’s safety, not least when he telegrammed, ‘My decision is to stick it out.’85 The Syrian government was keen to silence him and complained to the British Ambassador in Damascus that Fisk was filing false reports from Hama and other places ‘which he had not visited’.86 Syrian radio denounced him as a liar. The Times, however, stood by its reporter’s claim to have been the only journalist to have witnessed the scenes of carnage. The following year he returned to Hama to find out what had happened in the aftermath. To his amazement the old city had simply disappeared. Where ancient walls and crowded streets had once stood, now there was only a giant car park. The death toll remained unknown but was estimated at around ten thousand. The Baathist regime had successfully destroyed its militant Islamic opposition. 87 The Times was no advocate of instability for its own sake in the area. It believed the Syrian President, Hafez al-Assad, was ‘a man of straightforward dealing and statesmanlike behaviour’ and warned Israel not to take advantage of Syria’s internal problems by invading southern Lebanon.88
Instead, with the world’s attention on the Falklands War, Israel attacked southern Lebanon following the shooting on 3 June 1982 of the Israeli Ambassador to Britain outside the Dorchester Hotel in London. Israel claimed that since the ceasefire agreed with the PLO in July 1981 she had been subjected to more than 150 terrorist attacks. The Times disputed the legitimacy of this casus belli, questioning not only the statistics but also pointing out that none of the attacks during this period had come from the northern front.89 The implosion of Lebanon, once a land of democracy and prosperity, was, of course, a long affair. Civil war in 1975 was followed by occupation by Syria. Hating their Palestinian and Syrian guests, many Lebanese Christians regarded the Israeli invaders as liberators. But in Gray’s Inn Road, sympathy with Begin’s Israel was wearing thin. Peace with Egypt in 1978 and massive military and financial aid from the United States, far from giving Israel the sense of security necessary for it to make concessions to the dispossessed Palestinians, appeared to have encouraged aggression: the attack on Iraq’s nuclear plant in June 1981, the bombing of Beirut the following month and the annexation of Golan in December. In leading articles written by the paper’s Middle East expert, Edward Mortimer, both the invasion of the Lebanon and the equivocal attitude to it from Washington were condemned.90
The Israeli offensive into the Lebanon temporarily displaced the Falklands’ conflict on the front page. Christopher Walker was able to file censored reports on the Israeli advance including a gripping account of the storming of Beaufort castle, the twelfth-century crusader fortress that had been the PLO’s main forward position in southern Lebanon for over a decade. Robert Fisk filed daily from Beirut, chronicling the air assault on the city. Transmitting his reports was an arduous business. At five o’ clock each morning he would travel south to observe the Israeli advance, often with reporters from the Associated Press bureau, coming under ferocious air attack, before returning to Beirut to file his report from a telex machine in time for it to make the copy deadline at Gray’s Inn Road. The situation deteriorated as Beirut became surrounded. The electricity supply was curtailed and food and petrol were not allowed into the city. Fisk kept his generator running by bribing an Israeli tank crew to supply him with fuel at extortionate rates. Filing to London could take hours because, whenever the generator cut out, the telex went down too. At eight o’clock in the evening, the task would be completed and Fisk, exhausted, had anxious moments waiting for Gray’s Inn Road to confirm it had indeed received all of his copy. Periodically, a message would be returned thanking him for his report and apologizing for the fact the unions had called another strike and so it would not be appearing after all. When they were printed, his reports were graphic, gripping and made no attempt to be impartial. ‘To say that Israel’s war against the Palestinians is turning into a dangerous and brutal conflict,’ he wrote, ‘would be to understate the political realities of its military adventure into Lebanon’91
By 14 June, Israeli tanks had linked up with the Christian Phalange in East Beirut. The Palestinians were hemmed in and surrounded. Yet Fisk, still in the city, predicted disaster for the invader: ‘a war which was initially supposed to take their troops only 25 miles north of their own border’ now appeared poised to degenerate into costly street fighting, ‘terrorizing the entire civilian population of West Beirut and killing hundreds of people. Is it a war that will ultimately be worth winning?’92 From the greater comfort of Gray’s Inn Road, Edward Mortimer agreed, adding that ‘the inability of the wealthy and supposedly powerful rulers of the Gulf to save Lebanon and the Palestinians from being destroyed with weapons supplied by the United States will add fuel to the brushfire of Islamic revolution blowing in from Iran’.93
The disaster came in September. A disengagement force led by US Marines had overseen the evacuation of the PLO guerrillas from West Beirut, a notable triumph for Israel. But it was no harbinger of peace. Scarcely had the US Marines left than chaos returned. On 14 September, Bashir Gemayel, Lebanon’s Christian President-elect, was killed in a terrorist bomb blast on a Beirut Phalangist Party office. Two hours later, Israeli troops moved into West Beirut. The next day they surrounded the Sabra and Chatila camps which were teeming with Palestinian refugees. As early as the 18 September edition of The Times, Leslie Plommer was able to report from Beirut that Phalangists had entered the camps, started fires and removed individuals while Israeli troops looked on. Two days later, Fisk filed a report that painted an altogether more serious picture. His dispatch dominated the front page. The shooting, he wrote, had lasted fourteen hours. He estimated the deaths at around a thousand (the actual figure is still disputed, though thought to be between 600 and 1400). Fisk had gained entry to the Chatila camp shortly after the last Phalangists had left: ‘in some cases, the blood was still wet on the ground … Down every alley way, there were corpses – women, young men, babies and grandparents – lying together in lazy and terrible profusion where they had been knifed or machine gunned to death,’ he wrote. The smell of death was everywhere. Having feasted on the dead, flies moved pitilessly to the living. Fisk had to keep his mouth covered to stop them swarming into it. ‘What we found inside the camp … did not quite beggar description although it would be easier to re-tell in a work of fiction or in the cold prose of a medical report.’ It was certainly graphic, men shot at point-blank range, one castrated. ‘The women,’ Fisk continued:
were middle-aged and their corpses lay draped over a pile of rubble. One lay on her back, her dress torn open and the head of a little girl emerging from behind her. The girl had short, dark curly hair and her eyes were staring at us and there was a frown on her face. She was dead.
Another child lay on the roadway like a discarded flower, her white dress stained with mud and dust. She could have been no more than three years old. The back of her head had been blown away by a bullet fired into her brain. One of the women also held a tiny baby to her body. The bullet that had passed through her breast had killed the baby too.
Further gruesome descriptions followed, the dispatch ending with Fisk moving on from the camp and finding himself with Israeli troops under fire from a ruined building. Taking cover beside a reticent army major, he tried to solicit information on what had happened at Chatila: ‘Then his young radio operator, who had been lying behind us in the mud, crawled up next to me. He was a young man. He pointed to his chest. “We Israelis don’t do that sort of thing,” he said. “It was the Christians”.’94
Subsequently Journalist of the Year again, Fisk’s dispatch from Chatila became famous with the closing statement adopted as its title. It was reproduced in The Faber Book of Reportage, an international anthology edited by John Carey in 1987, one of only four historic examples of Times journalism to be included.* Fisk also secured an interview with Major Saad Haddad who denied his Israeli-sponsored private army had participated with the Phalangist militia in the massacre. The tone of Fisk’s interview was decidedly sceptical. The Times leader column was quick to point the finger at Israel’s shared culpability: ‘Even if they did not actively will the massacre, they are guilty of knowingly creating the conditions in which it was likely to happen.’95 The following February, the paper devoted extensive coverage, led by Christopher Walker in Jerusalem, to the findings of the Kahan Commission, the Israeli judicial enquiry, into the tragedy. It was highly critical of the Begin administration’s general disregard and in particular found fault with Ariel Sharon, the Defence Minister and architect of the Lebanon invasion, who had permitted the Phalangists to enter the camp despite the obvious likelihood that they would slaughter its inhabitants.
The instant response of The Times to the massacre was to argue that, since neither Syrian nor Israeli forces had brought the stability necessary for a civilian government to succeed in the Lebanon, a multinational UNsanctioned force should be sent. The Times wanted full British participation, something Mrs Thatcher was keen to avoid.96 Reagan, however, responded immediately, ordering eight hundred US Marines back into West Beirut. France and Italy followed as, reluctantly, did Britain. They marched into a trap. On 23 October 1983, two Shia Muslim suicide bombers killed 242 US Marines and 58 French troops stationed in Beirut. In one day, more servicemen had been killed than Britain lost throughout the Falklands War the previous year. In December, French and US jets retaliated, hitting Syrian positions. It was all in vain. In the new year the Lebanese government fell, having lost control of West Beirut. In March, the multinational force packed its bags and left. The Israelis were drawing and redrawing their defence line closer and closer to their own border. The Lebanon was being left to the militias, the Syrians and the undertakers.
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.97 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’.98 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.99
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’.100 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”.’101 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.102
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.103 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’.104
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’.105 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.106
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’.107 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?’108
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’.109
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’110 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.
The recession was reflected in the fortunes of the business pages of The Times. Confronted with the necessity of finding economies, the axe fell on The Times business news. Anthony Hilton was appointed City editor but the once large supporting staff was decimated. The journalistic range contracted accordingly. Even great culls present opportunities for those who remained and this was the attitude of the new financial editor, Graham Searjeant, who came over from the Sunday Times in 1983. Douglas-Home greeted him with words of advice that could have served well many a new boy: ‘Never attempt to be definitive, because you will have to write again tomorrow.’111 Searjeant proved to be one of the most accomplished business commentators of the next two decades, contributing not only in the business pages but also, anonymously, as a leader writer. For the paper as a whole, though, the comprehensive filleting of The Times business news – the section the old Thomson ownership had once imagined would rival the FT in its coverage – represented a major contraction. It left the FT with an almost unassailable advantage in this vital sector of the market for the next decade.
It was thus surprising that The Times was endorsing the Thatcherite vision of the enterprise economy while simultaneously cutting back on its own business coverage. The transformation to Thatcherite cheerleader was not swift or unquestioning, however. The bulk of the Government’s privatization campaign to roll back the frontiers of the nationalized economy lay ahead in a second term of office. The first attempt, in 1982, left The Times noticeably underwhelmed. The privatization of a majority stake in ‘Britoil’, as the British National Oil Corporation was renamed, was, as its author Nigel Lawson put it, ‘the largest privatization the world had ever known’.112 But with Labour immediately pledging to renationalize the oil assets at the sale price, investors were cautious. This, together with a flotation in November 1982 that badly coincided with gloomy predictions about future oil prices, ensured it was embarrassingly undersubscribed. Neither Adrian Hamilton in the business news section nor The Times leader writers were surprised, concluding that ‘a decent interval before the next major sale would be judicious’.113 What was more, the paper still had to be convinced that ‘selling assets at a discount’ and ‘transferring ownership from twenty million taxpayers to a few hundred thousand shareholders, simply to raise a relatively small amount of money’ made sense.114 This was one tune that time and experience would later change.
Whatever the battles over the opinion pieces in the paper, there was still enough of the journal of record spirit within The Times to ensure straight, unbiased reporting on the news pages. The political editor was Julian Haviland, whom Harold Evans had appointed after he had spent more than twenty years at ITN. Haviland was reinforced by Tony Bevins, the chief political correspondent, and a team of four journalists working from the House of Commons to report British political news. In any case, despite the claims that it was now a bastion of right-wing prejudices, it was hard to discern too much enthusiasm for the Conservative Party even on the comment pages of The Times as the 1983 general election approached. ‘Only the conquest of inflation and of the Falklands were measureable successes,’ the leader column conceded, ‘with the rest having to be taken on trust from a not very eloquent band of ministers.’115 But the Labour Party manifesto, immortalized by Gerald Kaufman as ‘the longest suicide note in history’, put beyond the slightest doubt which party the paper would endorse. Labour’s manifesto called not only for the scrapping of Trident, unilateral nuclear disarmament and withdrawal from the EEC, but for the reimposition of exchange controls and the threat to the major clearing banks that if they refused to ‘cooperate with us fully … we shall stand ready to take one or more of them into public ownership’. Nationalization would be extended over electronics and pharmaceutical companies, on all tenanted land and on any private property ‘held empty without justification’. Private schools would lose charitable status and were to be ‘integrated’ into the local authority sector ‘where necessary’.116 There was scarcely a word in the entire manifesto with which The Times columnists and leader writers did not take issue. Claiming to feel sympathy for his predicament, Bernard Levin described Michael Foot as ‘lurching between disaster and calamity with all the skill and aplomb of a one-legged tightrope-walker’. He was, Levin maintained, a man ‘unable to make his own Shadow Cabinet appointments or indeed to blow his nose in public without his trousers falling down’.117
The paper was also critical of the Liberal-SDP Alliance’s offering which was ‘a worthy compilation of much that has been tried, half-tried or at least seriously considered over the last political generation’.118 Editorially, the switch from Harold Evans to Douglas-Home probably made little difference to the paper’s hostility to Michael Foot’s Labour Party, but it ensured a less charitable attitude towards the centre-left alternative. Despite this, subsequent estimates suggested that a third of Times readers voted for the Alliance. With the exception of the Guardian (41 per cent), this was the highest proportion for any national newspaper’s readership.119
Due to the 1978–9 shutdown, the 1983 general election was the first that The Times had covered since 1974. There was a last minute danger that it would miss out again when Fleet Street was hit by a fresh wave of strikes. A nine-week dispute with its print workers ensured the Financial Times missed the general election. Two hundred thousand copies of the Observer’s final edition before election day were lost when the NGA decided to punish the newspaper’s editor, Donald Trelford, for not allowing the NGA space in his paper to attack a Conservative Party advertisement. Since the Observer supported Labour, it was hard to see what the NGA’s action was intended to achieve. The following night, the NGA members took exception to the main leader in the Daily Express and refused to print it. Early editions of the paper appeared with a blank space where the offending leader should have appeared. In these circumstances, The Times could consider itself lucky to escape the unions’ ad hoc attempt at press censorship.
Nor, happily, did the paper have to contend with any political direction from the proprietor’s office. Although Murdoch was in London on polling day, he had not felt the need to be in the country during the election campaign. He did not interfere with The Times’s stance (not that he would have felt the need to) and the same was true at the less resolute Sunday Times whose editor, Frank Giles, later made clear that ‘at no period had Murdoch raised with me the question of our political line. Nor had [Sir Edward] Pickering.’120
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.’121 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.122
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?’123 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.124 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’.125 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.’126 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.127 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 …
* Fisk thus joined the illustrious Times company of William Howard Russell’s report of the Battle of Balaclava and Charge of the Light Brigade, November 1854; Nandor Ebor’s dispatch on Garibaldi’s liberation of Palermo, June 1860; and James (Jan) Morris on the conquest of Mount Everest, June 1953.