Poor Morale; Robert Fisk Departs; New Faces;
Thatcher on the Ropes; the Collapse of Communism;
Something for the weekend; Sent to Siberia
There was something distinctly odd about the old rum warehouse in which The Times’s journalists daily got down to work. Producing a journal that purported to illuminate the ways of the world from a building that had almost no windows was a metaphor worthy of Kafka. After January 1987, the baying hordes outside, shouting abuse and hurling iron railings, had packed off and gone. But the sense of being under siege was not lifted with their departure.
Wapping was home to at least three editors whose reputations for brilliance and brusqueness extended far beyond their offices. In the floors above the giant printing hall, Kelvin MacKenzie appeared to be a law unto himself at the Sun, the most iconic, trailblazing and incorrigible of any British newspaper in the 1980s. Strong-willed and abrasive Scotsmen ruled the roost at either end of the long rum warehouse. At its west end was the office of the Sunday Times’s editor, Andrew Neil. A cordon sanitaire of boilers, pipes and humming power generators separated his domain from that of his compatriot, Charles Wilson, at the east end where The Times was based. Life in these quarters was difficult. Times journalists felt as if they were toiling on board an unusually elongated hunter-killer submarine patrolled by a gifted but periodically tyrannical captain. At the far end – where the design team, features, sport and business writers were located – there was at least some legroom. However, the closer operations got to Wilson’s command post, the more claustrophobic it became. Journalists sat alongside the foreign desk monitoring incoming wire reports and information traffic. A galley of subs separated them from the keyboard-pounding reporters on the home news desk. The advantage of this cheek-by-jowl existence was that there was nowhere to hide – the crew members were always visible and usually within hollering or shoulder-tapping distance. This benefited subs wanting to check changes to stories with their authors. For a hands-on commander like Wilson, it was particularly useful. A mezzanine level had been slotted within the rafters. This doubled as the captain’s bridge. From it, Wilson could stand and harangue the ratings stretched out below as far as the eye could see. Those who clambered up to his berth soon discovered that he too was a stranger to comfort. Such was the makeshift nature that the staff lavatories had been erected adjacent to Wilson’s wardroom. Potential eavesdroppers were deterred by his periodic habit of giving an almighty kick to the Gents’ door as he passed. Those who did squeeze into his personal cabin discovered just how cramped were the conditions from which he charted the paper’s course. Its low ceiling was liable to spring a leak whenever there was a heavy downpour. Those most committed to the submarine analogy found this particularly unsettling.
It was not an environment conducive to high morale. Wilson was under tremendous pressure and was well aware that his most able staff members were subject to relentless targeting by the Independent to jump ship. Some of the most prized names succumbed. Never had the competition been so intense. What especially alarmed Wilson was when a journalist who was no stranger to hardship and did not even have to work from Wapping decided that he too had had enough. Robert Fisk was The Times’s most famous serving reporter. The editor treated his decision to quit as a shattering blow.
Wilson liked Fisk because he admired his courage and professionalism. Politically, the two men had little in common. Fisk had made his reputation at The Times during the 1970s when he had been a thorn in the side of the British Army in Ulster. When he shifted his reporting to the Middle East in 1976, the Israeli forces and government came to loathe him no less. To many of Israel’s sympathizers in Britain he was a hated figure and accusations of anti-Semitism (which he furiously rejected) were frequently levelled at him and The Times for indulging his passions. Yet, he had not regarded Murdoch’s purchase of the paper with quite the same foreboding as had some left-leaning journalists. Frequently, he had risked his life to bring out stories from the world’s most dangerous region only to discover that the unions had called a strike and the paper had not come out. Four years into News International’s ownership, Fisk was still happy to state that Murdoch could have cloven hoofs for all he cared – at least he brought out the newspaper.1 It was easy to understand why he was sanguine. With Douglas-Home in the editor’s chair, he knew he had a protector who would defend his right to report events in the Middle East as he saw them. ‘While Douglas-Home was there, there was no problem, you could write what you liked about the Israelis,’ Fisk recalled.2 He began, however, to sense that Douglas-Home’s successor was uneasy about some of the stories he wished to pursue. Wilson looked to balance Fisk’s dispatches with columnists who were sympathetic to Israel’s case. This should not have been a problem. Fisk, however, took particular exception to what he saw as a personal slur when a columnist was allowed to state that journalists working from West Beirut could not report fairly because they were too scared or embedded with the Muslim militias. A collision course had been set.
The divergence between what The Times was saying on its leader page and what its Middle East correspondent was reporting on its front page became increasingly apparent. In April 1986, US warplanes flying from British bases attempted to assassinate Colonel Gaddafi in Tripoli. Instead, they killed around a hundred others including the Libyan leader’s adopted daughter. Fisk was there to record the scene of devastation. The leading article, however, defended the raid. Such was the extent of complaints from readers at this line of argument that the paper was forced to write another leader that conceded ‘a newspaper which finds itself in marked disagreement with the opinions of its readers must seriously address their concerns if it is to have any hope of influencing them’.3 Having originally believed that the paper’s editorial line was no business of his so long as he was left to report events as he saw fit, Fisk increasingly felt annoyed and perhaps even snubbed by the tone taken on surrounding pages.4
Like Douglas-Home before him, Wilson recognized Fisk as a courageous man, prepared to risk his life daily for his profession. Wilson admired toughness. In 1984 he had even gone out to visit him in Beirut. There, he was introduced to Fisk’s close friend Terry Anderson, the bureau chief of the Associated Press news agency. Keen to talk to Israeli troops in order to get their point of view, Wilson travelled with Fisk to southern Lebanon. It proved a mistake. One Israeli lieutenant left Wilson in no doubt about his views when he promptly had him arrested. Giving the command ‘get these bastards out of here’, the officer had the two distinguished Times journalists put under armed guard and sent back to Beirut. When they reached the capital it was to discover there had been another suicide bomb attack on the (new) American Embassy.
Filing copy from the Lebanon to London was a particularly frustrating part of Fisk’s job. The era of the mobile phone had not arrived and getting through on a landline was a process that could take many hours if achieved at all. Instead, late afternoons and early evenings were spent up in the AP bureau, huddled over a stuttering telex machine whose staccato click-click-clicking replicated the outbursts of rapid machine-gun fire in the streets outside. The AP wire was an old machine using Second World War technology that worked with codes punched out on tape. Whenever the electricity cut out before the complete coding had gone through to London, the whole process would have to be repeated, the tape stuck back together and pushed through the machine with a new code added while Fisk prayed for the requisite twenty minutes of uninterrupted electricity supply. Such orisons were frequently offered up in vain and filing reports that ran to several pages could take hours. There would then be the anxious wait before a telex would come back stating all the pages had been received and understood.
Yet, getting through to London was far from the greatest of Fisk’s problems. Various militant factions, most notably the pro-Iranian Islamic Jihad, began kidnapping Westerners. In March 1984, Jeremy Levin, bureau chief of CNN, was kidnapped. Five months later Jonathan Wright, a Reuters correspondent, also fell victim. Both men eventually managed to escape but the seizures continued. In March 1985, Islamic Jihad took Terry Anderson hostage. Others followed, including Terry Waite, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s representative, who had tried to negotiate their release. By the spring of the following year, forty-seven foreigners had been abducted over the previous twenty-seven months. Of this number, twenty-six had been subsequently released and five were definitely dead. The fate of the others was in doubt. Faced with this level of danger, all but the most hard-boiled reporters packed up and left. The number of Western journalists based in Beirut fell from more than seventy in 1984 to seventeen in 1986. By then, there was not a single American reporter still around. ‘Lebanese and Palestinian gunmen have now almost achieved what the Israelis could never have hoped for,’ reported Fisk; ‘much of the war in southern Lebanon is now reported only from Jerusalem, where correspondents are in no danger of being kidnapped.’5 Fisk had no intention of relying on the Israeli government for his information. He saw it as his calling to be a witness on the front line.
Fisk’s obstinacy (some mistook it for a death wish) riled those for whom he was also a liability. The Times came under pressure from the Foreign Office to have him withdrawn from Beirut and relocated to a place of greater safety. Wilson, however, had a right winger’s natural disdain for the Foreign Office. He demurred and made it clear to Fisk that he trusted his judgment and would stand by whatever he decided to do. From a personal perspective, this was a courageous position to adopt since the editor was likely to face far less criticism for forcing his correspondent to leave than if he allowed him to be captured and killed. When Fisk replied that he was willing to go back and continue reporting, Wilson’s reply was characteristic, ‘Ok matey. Good luck.’6
Back in Beirut, Fisk’s life was a misery. Shells continued to rain down on the city, frequently exploding close to him. Long hours were spent in the comfortless refuge of a windowless corridor. The prospect of being kidnapped was as much a probability as a possibility. If the Archbishop of Canterbury’s envoy was not sacred, it could be presumed that the life of a Times journalist was cheap. To avoid capture, he had to constantly alter his movements, give false names and even make false arrangements. He avoided meeting Western diplomats since this opened him up to allegations of being in cahoots with Western spies. A car circling his building was an extremely worrying occurrence. The prospect of betrayal appeared at every corner. One Lebanese employee at a press bureau asked casually which flight he was catching. Fisk told him. The man disappeared into what had been Terry Anderson’s office. Fisk loitered long enough to overhear him whispering down a telephone in Arabic. He was passing on the flight times and movements. Fisk opted not to go to the airport. What was particularly distressing was that his betrayer was the same employee who in 1978 had saved his life.7
This was not the environment in which a roaming reporter could operate effectively. Nor was it conducive to embarking upon a relationship either, despite Fisk’s hopes of settling down to married life with the Financial Times journalist Lara Marlowe. Eventually, Wilson arranged for him to take up a new role as a Paris based features writer for The Times. Fisk accepted and enjoyed his new post, but privately he was in a quandary over whether to stay with the paper. He now considered its editorial stance so irksome that he found himself hesitant to mention who his employer was when the subject came up in conversation. The Times, he felt, had changed a lot from the liberal-minded journal he had joined in 1971. He disliked its coverage of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, being particularly upset that it had not probed more deeply into security service operations there as he had once done. He was horrified that the paper had urged the BBC and ITV to supply the RUC with film of the brutal murder of two British soldiers in Belfast. This Fisk regarded as a betrayal of journalistic integrity. He was equally opposed to its increasingly hard-line attitude towards the Middle East. He had been appalled by a leading article, ‘Death of a Terrorist’, that all but supported the Israeli assassination of Abu Jihad. Fisk had long questioned The Times’s promiscuous use of the word ‘terrorist’ when referring to Arab groups but not to Israeli or Lebanese Christian troops in the area.
There was also the question of the proprietor, whose toughness Fisk had previously applauded. ‘I do not for a moment think that Mr Murdoch dictates our leaders or our op-ed pages,’ he assured Wilson, ‘but the organization is so powerful – and has shown itself so ruthless – that many on our editorial staff simply have no inclination to challenge what they think is the received opinion.’ The deciding moment came when the USS Vincennes, an American warship in the Gulf which mistakenly thought it was under attack, shot down an Iranian passenger jet, killing 290 civilians. The Times quickly postulated on why the Iranian airbus was so far off course and even pondered whether a suicide pilot was flying it. Fisk filed a report making use of air-traffic recordings he had heard. This did not tie in with the line the leading article had peddled and Fisk’s copy was edited accordingly. Four months later, Fisk resigned. ‘It is impossible for a reporter to risk his life under fire for a newspaper in which he no longer believes,’ he later explained. The Independent, he had came to the conclusion, was more like The Times he had happily joined in 1971. It was to the Independent he would now go.8
Wilson was both horrified and hurt at the prospect of his most famous reporter’s departure. At a personal level they had always had mutual regard and – with the exception of the Vincennes incident – Fisk could certainly not claim that the paper had treated him, or his copy, without due respect. Wilson, however, was not prepared to let him leave without first putting up the sort of fight that between less strong-minded individuals would have been grounds for a terminated friendship. When a personal appeal failed, he threatened Fisk with breach of contract, claiming he would refuse to release him to the Independent. In fact, thanks to the Lebanese postal service which had become as dislocated as everything else in that country, the contract had never been received or signed but the editor was not prepared to let this detail stand in the way. Clearly the matter had to be settled and on 18 November 1988 Fisk came to see Wilson at his office. The meeting began in sorrow and ended in anger. According to Fisk’s account, Wilson pleaded, ‘You have to do your duty to The Times’, to which the reply came, ‘I cannot do duty to a paper which I no longer respect.’ Wilson snapped back, ‘I’m not asking you to respect it, I’m asking you to work for it.’ Fisk refused, saying simply, ‘The Times lacks honour.’ At this, Wilson, agitated and wounded in equal measure, rose to his feet. ‘That is personally insulting,’ he growled. Fisk explained that, as far as he was concerned, ‘some of its leaders are morally bad’. He particularly objected to the excoriating tone of a leading article entitled ‘His Infamous Career’, written to mark the death of Sean MacBride, the international human rights campaigner who had been the IRA’s chief of staff. Whatever the contradictory actions of MacBride’s life and work, there was clearly no prospect of a ceasefire in the editor’s office at Wapping. Finally, after further traded accusations, the meeting broke up. ‘See you soon,’ Wilson said. ‘No,’ replied Fisk, making for the door (which had been locked) and the end of almost eighteen years at the paper. ‘It’s goodbye, Charles, and good luck.’9
The disapproving chorus from those who believed The Times ‘was no longer the paper it used to be’ (an ad hoc community that appears to have existed since issue two on 2 January 1785) sometimes focused on superficial changes. They grumbled at the increasing size of headlines, the overuse of diagrams and the assumption that popular entertainers are household names even at exclusive addresses. Yet many, especially those who praised the Independent for supposedly turning the clock back, felt that Charles Wilson had detached The Times from the liberal-Tory moorings to which it had been chained during Rees-Mogg’s fourteen years in the chair. For them, Fisk’s departure was evidence that the paper no longer tolerated alternative voices. In fact, Wilson was anxious to please. Indeed, he not only wanted to provide a wider forum for middle-of-the-road opinions but also sought to attract back some of the centre-left voices that had stopped writing for the paper at the time of the Labour Party’s boycott of the Wapping titles. With the lifting of the edict, attempts were made to reestablish links. During 1987 and 1988 Ben Pimlott wrote regularly for the paper while Jack Straw returned to write the fortnightly column from which he had withdrawn in January 1986. Whether employing Robert Kilroy-Silk as a weekly columnist aided or retarded the process of reaching out to those to the left of centre was perhaps more debatable. Militant activists had ousted him from his Liverpool constituency and The Times serialized Hard Labour, the account of his travails. His subsequent career as a daytime television host and increasingly populist maverick of the right clouded the image he had first brought to The Times in 1987 as a promising and charismatic, if somewhat polemical, voice.
Where the claim that the paper had shifted politically to the right did have most substance was in the opinions emanating from the leader conferences (although the editorial line was not markedly more hawkish than in the days when it had been penned by Douglas-Home). John O’Sullivan – who wrote the Conservatives’ 1987 election manifesto – and Frank Johnson – who wrote the 1987 election day leading article commending a Tory vote – were among the leader writers moving the paper to the right at a moment when Max Hastings was attempting to redirect the Daily Telegraph away from this ground. In 1987, The Times gained a refugee from Hastings’s low tolerance for those who preached ‘the doctrines of Victorian Conservatism’.10 This was T. E. Utley. Universally known except in print as ‘Peter’, Utley had been blind since the age of nine and overcame the inability to read or type to become one of the great comment journalists of the previous twenty years. Dictating trenchantly argued copy to his secretaries, he had advocated Thatcherism back when Margaret Thatcher was a Heath supporter, personally encouraged a younger generation of Tory-minded journalists, and done as much as any man to invigorate the Telegraph’s intellectual traditions. His treatment by that paper’s new guard certainly demonstrated that there was little romance or gratitude to be dispensed or expected in the modern newspaper world. Wilson, however, welcomed him to Wapping and to the paper for which he had first worked at the outset of his career during the Second World War. The Times gained a new advocate for the Ulster Unionist cause on the Op-Ed page to replace Owen Hickey whose leader writing days Wilson had finally drawn to a close. Besides his closely argued essays on the Op-Ed page, Utley also became obituaries editor in succession to John Grigg. Utley appeared set to enjoy a lengthy Indian summer at The Times. Sadly, it was not to be; he died the following year, at the age of sixty-seven.
Wilson’s switch of Grigg from the obits department to become a columnist was one of the signs that he was aware of the need to reclaim prominent liberal voices for the paper. Grigg was exactly the sort of Times man that it was popularly assumed had defected to the Independent. He was sympathetic towards the SDP and was, in several admirable respects, the embodiment of a generation described in his friend Noel Annan’s book, Our Age. His father, Sir Edward Grigg, had been ‘Imperial Editor’ of The Times before the First World War and, after the conflict, had successively advised Lloyd George, become an anti-appeasement Conservative MP and ended up as Lord Altrincham. John Grigg processed through Eton and Oxford (where he won the Gladstone Memorial Prize) and, during the Second World War, the Grenadier Guards. He had unsuccessfully attempted to become a Tory MP in the 1950s and in 1963 renounced the peerage he had inherited from his father in order to pursue his political ambition. It was to remain unfulfilled – possibly because constituency associations were unhappy with an infamous article he had written in 1957 criticizing the Court’s stultifying atmosphere. He had dared to describe the Queen’s public appearances as those of a ‘priggish schoolgirl’. At the time a passer-by in the street punched him in the face. Rudeness, though, was very far from being his stock in trade. A cultivated and engaging man, Grigg brought to The Times the historian’s erudition to the analysis of political events, focusing particularly on lessons from the period of Lloyd George and the Liberal collapse (perhaps Grigg’s greatest achievement was his multi-volume biography of the Liberal war leader who knew his father). The fortunes of the House of Windsor also provided plenty of scope for his historical insight. His column continued until 1995, after which he specialized in reviewing books for the paper. Sir Edward Pickering commissioned him to write volume six of the official History of The Times covering the years of Rees-Mogg’s editorship, 1966–81, which he completed in 1993. It was widely regarded as the most definitive of the series.
Grigg embodied the understated but authoritative approach of an older generation. Attracting the freshness and vigour of younger voices was no less important. In 1965, the management of all national newspapers had succumbed to an NUJ edict banning the recruitment of any reporter direct from university. Instead, they would first have to work three years on provincial newspapers. This restrictive practice crumbled with the union that had promoted it. Under Peter Stothard’s direction, The Times was the first national newspaper to establish a trainee journalist scheme for graduates. Thus the paper became the first port of call for ambitious aspiring hacks who wanted to skip the supposed grind of the regional press. Traditionalists demurred at the consequences of this form of gentrification, believing that a stint on a local newspaper provided a far broader education in the basic journalistic skills than could be offered by a swift transition from student digs in Clifton or Cowley to a by-line on a national paper. The Times’s scheme however – which included a short spell with a provincial placement – proved a great success in luring intelligent and articulate graduates into journalism who, faced with the alternative of reporting on leaks from the parish pump, might have otherwise been tempted away by the increasingly lucrative alternatives of law, accountancy and the City. ‘We were the way in’ as Stothard put it.11 In consequence, he became the minder to a whole new Fleet Street kindergarten of talent.
One who arrived in the guise of a trainee was Toby Young, a precociously witty, socially outgoing and, to all intents and purposes, untameable youth. Another was his Oxford contemporary Boris Johnson who had been President of the Union and a Classics Scholar at Balliol. Both proceeded to make their mark in the paper and, in doing so, encouraged a mailbag from those who felt misrepresented in the articles they penned. Whatever the doubts about the accuracy of their reporting, Young and Johnson could have gone on to become rich adornments of The Times. Unfortunately, they fell victim to a reluctance to take the risks involved. Young was sacked for writing freelance articles in the Mail on Sunday’s You magazine although not before he had hacked into Wilson’s confidential files on the database by making the inspired guess that the access codeword would be ‘Top Man’. Purporting to be the editor, he proceeded to send vernacularly phrased instructions to various colleagues and departmental heads. Next, he hacked into the database that listed everyone’s salary, which he mass copied to every computer screen in the building. In the circumstances, his dismissal was perhaps understandable. Boris Johnson’s career at The Times was even briefer. He was sacked for making up a quote in an article. He went on to become a star columnist at the Daily Telegraph, editor of the Spectator, enter Parliament and become the closest thing the fourth estate had to a genuine celebrity.
The Times was better able to hold onto another high-profile journalist, Barbara Amiel. She had been a journalistic sensation in Canada where she had edited the Toronto Sun having gone to the country in her adolescence (she had been born in London to a Jewish lawyer and colonel who later committed suicide), fallen out with her family and graduated from Toronto University. By 1980, at the age of thirty-nine, she had already published her autobiography, Confessions. Returning to the land of her birth, by the time she arrived at Wapping in 1986 she was on her third marriage and had switched from Marxism to neoconservatism with all the zeal of the convert. Peregrine Worsthorne had turned her down for a job at the Sunday Telegraph in part because he mistook her fragrant and carefully coiffured appearance for a lack of seriousness. The Times thought otherwise. ‘She looks like Gina Lollobrigida and writes like Bernard Levin – and do get it the right way round,’ said a friend.12 Times readers of long standing might have thought this was slightly overegging it, at least in regard to the venerable Levin. She certainly had his spark and gifts for invective although could not reasonably be expected (who could?) to match the extraordinary breadth of his cultural range. Others believed her presence tilted the paper’s political scales too far to the right.
Of all the appointments Wilson made, none was more surprising or inspired than when, in the autumn of 1988, he hit upon the idea of employing Matthew Parris in succession to Craig Brown as The Times’s parliamentary sketchwriter. The appointment was a risk. Aged thirty-nine, Parris had spent seven years on the Conservative backbenches before resigning his seat in favour of a television career which soon came to an abrupt halt when LWT axed Weekend World, the Sunday political programme he had presented – it was widely accepted – less adeptly than his predecessor, Brian Walden. Parris’s print journalism was limited to three one-off articles for The Times over the past six years and a few Sunday Times book reviews. There was no doubt that he had the requisite intellect. From a childhood spent partly in Rhodesia, he had gone up to Cambridge, won a fellowship to Yale, been a trainee diplomat at the Foreign Office and worked for Mrs Thatcher at the Conservative Research Department before becoming a Tory MP in 1979 at the age of thirty. After such early precocity, the resignation of his seat and the failure of Weekend World suggested talent unfulfilled. When Wilson telephoned him with the offer of The Times parliamentary sketch, Parris was even in two minds about accepting. ‘I was nearly forty,’ he recalled, ‘and I had never met with conspicuous success in any job I’d done.’ What was more, having been an MP, ‘this trudging back, a mere reporter, into a place I had quit as a Member with head held high to be a television star, was a kind of defeat. How could I return except with my tail between my legs? The job seemed a come-down.’13
It was, as he later came to accept, his making. Yet so unsure was he initially that he suggested doing it for only twelve months (it ended up being thirteen years). He also agreed to do a weekly Op-Ed column on Mondays. His sketch writing got off to a shaky start. Dispatched to the Liberal Democrats’ conference in Blackpool, he filed for the first day. It had to compete with the rather more interesting news of Ben Johnson’s drugs shame. The following day Parris did not bother filing at all – unaware that Wapping was expecting daily copy, regardless of whether there was anything worth reporting or not.14 Within weeks, he had established himself as a crucial feature of the paper. Many of his greatest fans appeared to be his targets for ridicule. Indeed, it was generally his impression that, regardless of their politics, most MPs were so desperate to be noticed and to feel they were important, that they enjoyed a mention in a Parris sketch, almost regardless of how much fun was being had at their expense. In this respect, they were different from peers of the realm. Parris’s occasional sketches from House of Lords’ debates sometimes provoked personal notes from the close friends of peers (never from the peer personally) writing to let him know how much hurt his jests had caused their target. Working peers toiled long and hard for little public acknowledgement and no proper salary. They did not see why their devotion to public service should be a matter for satire.15 Disliking causing unnecessary offence, it was little wonder that Parris preferred to look down from the gallery upon the self-promoting politicians of the lower chamber. He was the first columnist to have his handiwork reprinted in the New Oxford Book of English Prose.
There were other arrivals. In 1989 a cost-cutting plan that, in everything but the comment section, merged the Daily and Sunday Telegraph into a seven-day paper caused chaos and resentment within the ranks of Conrad Black’s empire. The Times benefited from refugees from this miscalculation that included Martin Ivens and Graham Paterson. Wilson might have been presiding over a newspaper that was losing some of its most famous journalists, but he was also responsible for ensuring that it gained new ones who would add lustre to it in the years ahead.
Thatcherism’s domestic agenda was blown off course by three ill winds: the poll tax, the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s faltering grip on the economy and Britain’s relations with Europe. The last two became interconnected. After pushing through the legislation to create a single European market, the Prime Minister became much more uneasy about the European Community. She became personally antagonistic towards Jacques Delors, the French socialist who was the European Commission’s president. Where Thatcher envisaged the single market as an end in itself, Delors saw it as the prerequisite for an extension of Brussels’ competences in other areas, including social legislation. He dared to suggest that, in the future, 80 per cent of legislation would emanate from Brussels. Thatcher had fooled herself into believing the expressions of support for European economic and European monetary union (EMU) that accompanied the Single Act were windy rhetoric. On this she was soon disabused. Europe’s idealists were more practical than she realized. The Delors Report set June 1989 as the date for agreement on commencing the process towards EMU. Forewarned that the Prime Minister was about to make her opposition explicit, The Times ran for cover, its leading article warning her against making a speech that would give the impression to the country’s partners that Britain wanted to be a disruptive player, a notion that would deny ‘Mrs Thatcher an unusual opportunity to take a leading role in Europe as it approaches its single market in 1992’.16 The Prime Minister, however, was not in the mood for such equivocation. Later that day she addressed the College of Europe in Bruges and delivered a speech that would become one of the most important of her career. In it she reaffirmed her belief in nation states and warned that at a time when central control was being seen to fail in Eastern Europe the future lay not with Delors’s socialist utopia: ‘We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain only to see them reimposed at a European level.’ She wanted the completion of the single market in 1992 to ensure deregulation not centralization and monetary union. These Euro-sceptical shots across the bow were widely resented. Reporting from Bruges, Nicholas Wood quoted a senior European official as calling her remarks ‘outrageous and unrelentingly negative’.17 The Times was left to sigh ineffectually, ‘she is honest where our partners are idealistic. Their point is that there is a place for ideals.’18
The Times was not yet a Euro-sceptic paper although it failed to have the strength of conviction to make clear exactly what sort of a European Community it did envisage. The prospect of creating a single European currency, however, meant that the period for prevarication had passed. The precursor to signing up for the new currency was to stabilize sterling’s exchange rate with those of her partners in the Exchange Rate Mechanism. The Prime Minister’s problems were compounded not only by Cabinet colleagues who favoured joining the ERM because they wanted to sign up to the single currency but by those – including the Chancellor of the Exchequer – who thought the ERM’s anti-inflationary disciplines were the overheating British economy’s only hope of salvation. During May 1989, interest rates were pushed up to 14 per cent. The following month inflation hit 8.3 per cent, the highest for seven years. In August, the trade deficit substantially worsened. Despite knowing Nigel Lawson’s intentions, Sir Alan Walters, the Prime Minister’s personal adviser, described the ERM as ‘half-baked’ in an article for the American Economist. There was an outcry and Mrs Thatcher faced calls to dismiss her adviser. Instead she stuck by him. She lost her Chancellor instead.
Nigel Lawson’s resignation was the greatest blow to Mrs Thatcher’s Government since Michael Heseltine’s dramatic walkout three years earlier.
Given Lawson’s position, it was altogether more serious and the issue was of rather greater magnitude than who owned Westland helicopters. The following morning the news was splashed across the front page with a large Richard Willson cartoon of Sir Alan Walters falling out of Lawson’s collapsing Budget briefcase. Thatcher’s decision to stick by Walters had not even saved his skin. His continuation as her adviser would have made life for Lawson’s successor all but untenable and he too opted to resign on what Philip Webster and Richard Ford’s report described as ‘a night of sensation’. ‘At 7.45 p.m. in one of the most astonishing scenes enacted in the Commons, Sir Geoffrey Howe, Deputy Prime Minister, told MPs of Lawson’s resignation,’ the report continued. John Major was promoted to fill Lawson’s shoes, despite the fact that he had only been made Foreign Secretary the previous month. Webster described Major as ‘one of the most respected Chief Secretaries in recent years’.19
Analysing the Lawson resignation, Robin Oakley wrote that although the immediate issue had concerned the differences between Howe and Lawson who supported ERM membership and Thatcher and Walters who did not, it had its roots in
Mrs Thatcher’s way of doing things. It is not a case of two people who had stuck together for the sake of the party finally being unable to bear the strain. Lawson was one of the group of four musketeers who used to work with Mrs Thatcher back in opposition days, feeding her the ammunition with which to make an impact at Prime Minister’s Question Time. Like Norman Tebbit, another of the four, he was a Thatcherite by conviction, a genuine soul mate.
They had come to find that ‘when things go wrong, they feel, she detaches herself from her ministers and talks about them as if they work for somebody else’. Now she had been forced to make Douglas Hurd Foreign Secretary. Given that he did not share her growing hostility to the European project, she would either have to concede political ground to him or retreat further ‘into the bunker with that small team of advisers’.20
In its leading column, The Times put loyalty to the Prime Minister before sensible analysis of what had happened. Minimizing the scale of the crisis, it suggested that Lawson’s departure solved the divisive cohabitation on economic policy. Praise for Lawson’s achievements was muted: ‘His strength of mind was admired, but he has yet to be forgiven for relaxing the fiscal reins last year and allowing the economy to overheat. To that extent his departure will actually strengthen the Government’s position.’21 Three days later, the leading column, entitled ‘Panic Over’, went so far as to assure Tory backbenchers that ‘the drama is over’.22
With a challenge to her leadership on the horizon from the backbench ‘stalking horse’, Sir Anthony Meyer, Mrs Thatcher was interviewed by Robin Oakley and Nicholas Wood in The Times in November 1989. She implied she would fight not only the 1992 election as leader but also the 1997 contest ‘by popular acclaim’, as she put it (although she would be seventy-two by then). Her eventual successor, she hinted, would probably come from a younger generation (which, if she stayed on beyond 1997, could hardly be doubted). It was, as Oakley and Wood pointed out, ‘an astonishing move which can be expected to goad her opponents within the Conservative Party’.23 In the short term, however, it did not fail. On 5 December, she saw off the ‘stalking horse’ without having to break into more than a canter. It would take someone altogether more substantial than Sir Anthony Meyer to see her off.
In December 1988, The Times asked its foreign correspondents to speculate on what 1989 held in store. Roger Boyes came closest: ‘Romania and East Germany will have leadership crises this year. East Germany is particularly sensitive since there is real pressure for change from below on Herr Erich Honecker, age 75.’ As for Romania’s even more dictatorial ruler, Nicolae Ceausescu:
This may be the year of transition as the limits of his power are becoming evident and he has destroyed the machinery of succession …The real risk takers are Poland and Hungary, which are trying to run faster and faster to keep up with the rising expectations of their people … Hungary is galloping into the new world, with talk of a multi-party system and much else … the political implosion of neutral Yugoslavia will become a political factor in the rest of the Balkans; and debt-servicing will be a problem everywhere.24
Boyes was certainly well placed to observe a transforming moment in world history. It was Mikhail Gorbachev’s attempts to liberalize the Soviet Union that gave the peoples of Eastern Europe hope. Amazingly, The Times had been without a correspondent in Moscow for almost a year due to foot-dragging over giving a visa to Mary Dejevsky, who was Wilson’s choice to succeed Christopher Walker. Dejevsky’s record of writing critically about the Soviet regime told against her. Yet, if the Soviet authorities believed their stalling tactics in issuing a visa would encourage The Times to offer up a more amenable journalist instead, they were much mistaken. Wilson refused to play games, insisting that the choice of correspondent would not be a matter for the Soviet government. Undaunted, he even began planning during the summer of 1988 to send a team of Times writers over to the USSR to study the changes that were unfolding. Unusually, Mrs Thatcher intervened to secure The Times an interview with Gorbachev, her Private Secretary, Charles Powell, speaking to the Soviet Embassy on the matter with ‘the Prime Minister’s personal instruction’.25 In April 1989, Wilson was among those Thatcher invited for dinner with Gorbachev.
Getting an inside perspective on the unfolding drama in the Soviet Union was, however, a difficult assignment. Briefly in Moscow in the summer of 1987, Mary Dejevsky had met up with Jewish refuseniks via intermediaries who would arrange to meet her in a specified carriage of a metro station before taking her to their whereabouts. Each had a story of persecution. For eighteen months between May 1988 and November 1989, The Times vainly attempted to get Dejevsky a visa. A one-month visa, granted as a goodwill gesture, was issued in December 1988, the words ‘only the truth’ written above the signature of the Soviet diplomat who issued it. On arrival, even her private telephone was audibly tapped. She had brought with her a Bible that she was going to give to a Moscow worker in a car plant who had written to The Times asking for one. ‘I handed him his Bible in an opaque, unpatterned carrier bag and we walked down the street, he marvelling that he could meet a Western correspondent without immediate arrest, I that so many precautions still had to be taken. Then we both heard the camera click from a shop window above us.’26
When Dejevsky finally got to take up residence in Moscow she still had little idea how long she would be allowed to stay. She was there at the sufferance of the Soviet authorities. Angus Roxburgh, the Sunday Times correspondent, had been expelled shortly before her arrival. Dejevsky pondered whether the authorities had deliberately deported Roxburgh so that she would not have a near colleague to compare notes with and in order to break all continuity in News International’s reporting operations. Taking up residence in the deserted Times flat in the security-enclosed foreigners compound in Moscow, Dejevsky added Gibbons’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire to the bookshelves. She sensed its contents might have contemporary resonance. In the event, she only got halfway through the first volume. The pace of reporting the Soviet empire’s implosion left her no time for perusing history books.
During the spring of 1989, the first Soviet multi-candidate elections for the Congress of People’s Deputies were held and Gorbachev rid the Soviet Central Committee of many of its old guard. His efforts to produce a new mood of openness in Soviet society were watched with the keenest interest. It had already made possible an extraordinary improvement in relations with the United States. In July 1987, the Kremlin had offered to dismantle medium- and short-range missiles from the USSR’s Asian states. The following month, Reagan had responded, suggesting a summit in Washington to ban intermediate nuclear weapons. On 8 December, agreement at Washington was signed, eliminating medium- and short-range nuclear missiles. It was the first mutually agreed disarmament treaty in history. The world appeared to be stepping away from the spectre of nuclear destruction.
Gorbachev, however, was concerned not only with extracting his country from the crippling cost of a nuclear arms race in which it was clear the Soviet Union could no longer compete. In May 1988, he began withdrawing Russian troops from their disastrous campaign in Afghanistan. The last of them was pulled out ignominiously in February the following year. By then Gorbachev had told the UN of his proposals to cut his armed forces by half a million men and to withdraw fifty thousand troops and five thousand tanks from Eastern Europe.
Yet, not everywhere Gorbachev went was he able to foster a new spirit of peace and harmony and those who thought the world was engaged in an overnight embrace of liberalism were about to be rudely jolted. Martial law had been declared in Peking (as The Times was still calling Beijing) on 20 May. However, the first serious attempt to enforce it had ended in embarrassment when five thousand inexperienced and nervous soldiers had failed to disperse a crowd of students and other protestors that appeared to be swelling towards 100,000 people. The massed demonstration in Tiananmen Square was particular embarrassing for the party leaders. They had become a focus for the world media, providing an extraordinary spectacle of nascent democracy. Art students had even erected ‘The Goddess of Democracy’ which consciously resembled the Statue of Liberty in the heart of the square. It was a mortifying spectacle for China’s leaders at a time when Gorbachev was visiting for talks. They decided they could tolerate it no longer.
On 5 June, The Times splashed its front page with the terrible consequences, ‘Peking protesters massacred: Thousands feared dead as tanks crush heroic resistance’. A photograph showed the tank-crushed corpses of students beside the twisted wreckage of their bicycles. The paper’s stringer in China, Catherine Sampson, had lain flat on her belly with her notebook from her position on the Peking Hotel’s balcony, from where she had watched the atrocity unfold before her eyes. Her report began, ‘The people of Peking last night continued their heroic but doomed resistance as some of the tanks and heavy artillery that had crushed the student protest movement less than 24 hours before patrolled the capital.’ Unofficial estimates of the death toll had passed one thousand. In the suburbs, university campuses and around the diplomatic quarter there were sporadic bursts of gunfire and resistance. In the darkness, chaos and panic, it was difficult to establish the exact course of events. ‘According to one account, tanks and armoured personnel carriers had driven on to the square, indiscriminately crushing the makeshift tents with students still inside. Another report said that when the students had filed out of the square, holding hands, troops had fired at them, felling the first row of 100, and then the second.’ The Goddess of Democracy was brought smashing down. Official news reports spoke only of the suppression of a ‘counter-revolutionary’ riot, without listing casualties.27 Later, independent estimates suggested around 2600 had perished although nobody was ever really able to speak with authority on the final toll.
Sampson was so traumatized by the horror she had witnessed that, close to collapse, she caught a flight to Hong Kong to be with Mary Dejevsky (in her last weeks there before taking up residence in Moscow) who was filing valuable supplementary reports from the British colony. Dejevsky protected her (not least from an irate foreign desk at Wapping who felt she had deserted her post) and, several days later, Sampson summoned the courage to return to Peking where she reported on the ensuing crackdown. Dejevsky, meanwhile, had been stalwart not only in the defence of her distraught colleague but also on the pages of the newspaper (although Wilson was angry with her not being in situ in Peking). As the massacre unfolded, she immediately filed a comment article arguing that the deed would cause the Chinese government the loss of its people’s confidence as well as that of foreign investors and the nervous community in Hong Kong which was due to be transferred to Peking’s care in eight years time. ‘It could also strike the first nail in the coffin of Chinese communism,’ she wrote. ‘In Peking in the last three weeks I witnessed the spirit of hope and common purpose represented by the student protests. The barricades erected to keep the army out of the city were built and manned by ordinary people, not those of an anti-government persuasion.’28
The leading column was unsparing in its criticism. It was written by Rosemary Righter, a forthright intellect who exemplified the most noble traditions of ‘The Thunderer’. Righter was an accomplished duellist with the pen against tyranny’s swords. Deng Xiaoping, long seen as the leader of reform in China, had opted to hang ‘on to power at the expense of his own revolution’. The Times argued that Britain should review its 1984 agreement with China over Hong Kong, suspending negotiations on the Basic Law under which the colony was to be governed after the handover. For its part, the Hong Kong government should proceed without delay to introduce democratic institutions while, in Whitehall, the Home Office should review its policy on Hong Kong citizens’ entitlement to British residency.29 When the Government subsequently insisted on restricting entitlement, The Times and, in particular its columnist Woodrow Wyatt, were appalled.
Would the Communist old guard clinging onto power in Eastern Europe crush the emerging voices of dissent with equal ruthlessness? On 4 June 1989, just as China’s rulers were ordering the suppression of the student protests, Solidarity swept to power in Poland’s first free elections since the Second World War and two months later its first post-war non-Communist prime minister took office. There was no bloodshed. Also that August two million people formed a human chain across the three Baltic republics to mark the fiftieth anniversary of their Soviet annexation. It was a potent message of dignified defiance to rule from Moscow. The winds of change were blowing across the continent. In September, Hungary opened its border with East Germany and within four weeks socialists had replaced Communists in power in Budapest.
The flow of migration from East Germany was turning into a flood. Yet, some felt that the events of the Second World War meant that the Soviet Union would never tolerate a united Germany and the toppling of the Communist emblem over East Berlin. As the pressures for political reform and migration mounted in East Germany, two fears loomed large: would its leaders crack down and, if they did not, would Moscow do so on its satellite’s behalf? Brezhnev’s intimidation of the government in Warsaw in the face of the rise of Solidarity in 1981 was one precedent. But the Brezhnev Doctrine of defending Marxist-Leninism in Eastern Europe, with tanks if necessary, appeared to have disintegrated. Gorbachev was made from more malleable metal. After all, Solidarity had been allowed to form a government in Warsaw. Indeed, far from having their resolve stiffened, the leadership in East Berlin came under pressure from Moscow to pursue a policy of glasnost rather than repression. That, at any rate, seemed to make more sense that risking a complete surrender to democratic forces that, if allowed to triumph, could even dismantle the Warsaw Pact, a risk Moscow was not prepared to countenance. The East German regime, however, appeared more resistant to glasnost than those who wielded power in the Kremlin. Alarmingly, Egon Krenz, who succeeded Erich Honecker in October 1989, had publicly supported the Chinese government’s massacre in Tiananmen Square.
No emblem was more totemic of the Cold War than the Berlin Wall. Two and a half million East Germans had fled to the West while the borders were porous between 1949 and 1961, when the wall was erected to stop them, officially as an ‘anti-fascist protection barrier’. Border guards operated a shoot-to-kill policy rescinded only in 1989. Presidents Kennedy and Reagan had both stood before it and condemned it in ringing tones of high oratory. Yet, on 9 November, astonishing news broke. The wall had been breached.
Although the East German politburo announced the wall would remain as a ‘reinforced state border’, the decision to open crossing points through which all the Democratic Republic’s citizens could pass from east to west spelt its doom. Whatever delusions were clung to by Krenz and his circle, The Times headline summed up the situation: ‘The Iron Curtain torn open: Berliners cross the Wall to freedom.’30 A photograph showed Berliners actually standing on top of the heavily graffitied structure. Such was the rate of copy and pictures coming through to Wapping on the evening the wall fell that the front page was changed eight times over the course of the night. In nearly thirty-five years at the paper, Tim Austin looked back on it as the most memorable night at The Times.31
A tide of humanity poured across the border, propelled by curiosity, better shopping, the exercise of a new liberty formally denied or to visit relations they had been separated from for years or generations. Over the first weekend, two million East Germans crossed the border. Holes were widened to accommodate the torrent. Rather than waiting for official sanction, Berliners took chisels to sections. The mayors of the divided city shook hands. Krenz announced free elections. A quarter of East Germans asked for visas. Anne McElvoy led The Times’s reporting from East Berlin and she was soon joined by Michael Binyon who arrived in West Berlin in time to witness the influx of ‘Oesties’ claiming their one hundred Deutschmark (£34) ‘welcome money’ to spend. Many milled about ‘unsure of where they were going’, Binyon observed. ‘They had no idea where the streets went, as East German maps print West Berlin simply as a huge white space.’ For some, freedom meant licence. ‘One of the most popular attractions were the famous sex shops, which were doing a roaring trade.’ A photograph of Leipzigerstrasse showed East Berlin deserted.32
Unlike Poland, where there was Solidarity, or in so many other revolutions, the crumbling of Communist power in the German Democratic Republic was the result of mass action but not of an organized opposition. Anne McElvoy was quick to point out the irrelevance of ‘New Forum’, the hastily cobbled together rainbow alliance. ‘An organization which is still debating by lunchtime whether or not to let the Press watch its debate will take at least a year before it knows its own mind on anything else,’ she wrote, warning that ‘the call for free elections, however, is only meaningful if there are parties worthy to fight them’.33 It was not exactly clear what East Germans wanted. Were they discontented with the politicians and their policies or did they actually want to replace the whole system of government? Within days the first banners demanding reunification were appearing at rallies in Leipzig, one of the centres for those agitating for reform. How strong the pressure for reunification was could not be easily gauged. Initial opinion polls suggested it was not strong and on 13 November The Times reported that ‘Herr Krenz, in his conversation with Herr Kohl, appears to have dismissed any talk of reunification’.34
Initially, West Germany’s Chancellor Kohl gave the public impression that reunification could be years away from realization. In Britain, Margaret Thatcher worried that a hasty endorsement of a united Germany would undermine Gorbachev and thereby hand back the Soviet Union to the rule of the hardliners. There were still 360,000 Soviet troops on East German soil and the other possible option for reuniting Germany – that it would leave NATO and become neutral – was also uncongenial to the Prime Minister’s way of thinking. As East Germany went to the polls for its first free elections in March 1990, Thatcher held a private summit to discuss the German question with a team of historians that included Lord Dacre and Norman Stone. Most of the conclusions were positive although the subsequent leaking of a memorandum drawn up listing supposed Germanic character traits made the Prime Minister appear to be trapped in a 1940s mindset. The East German elections, however, produced sensational results: with a turnout of over 90 per cent, the pro-unification Christian Democratled ‘Alliance for Germany’ won 48 per cent and the former Communists were reduced to 16 per cent. From this moment, there was no diverting the emotional tide for one Germany. In June, the Deutschmark became legal tender in the east. On 2 October, Germany was reunified. Anne McElvoy conveyed the scenes in Berlin as its two halves counted down the hours to becoming one again. ‘Music rang out on every street corner and fireworks lit up the sky over the Brandenburg gate,’ she reported. ‘Older Germans burst into tears as midnight approached. “This is the end of a long punishment for my country,” said an old man.’ The East German Volkskammer convened for its last session. The British, American and French flags were lowered, as the occupying powers ceded their authority to the new free state. The former Chancellor, Helmut Schmidt, penned a column on the Op-Ed page, appealing to his British friends to prevent a new German financial superpower by endorsing a new European central bank and single currency. ‘Germany is reborn today, and Europe should rejoice,’ proclaimed the leading article written by Daniel Johnson, before proceeding to call for a wider European Community that should incorporate Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia.35 Enlargement of the EC became the Euro-sceptics’ solution to what was assumed would be a more powerful Germany just as the Euro-federalists believed the answer came in replacing the Deutschmark with the euro. In the event, both would follow.
The new Germany was, for the first time since the rise of Hitler, surrounded on all sides by democracies. A ‘Velvet Revolution’ had swept away Communist rule in Czechoslovakia in November 1989. Alexander Dubcek, hero of the Prague Spring, had addressed his first rally since the fateful days of 1968. On 10 December, the country’s first non-Communist government took office and two days before Christmas the playwright and victim of totalitarianism, Vaclav Havel, was declared the new President. Yet, while Prague celebrated the bloodless means through which it could re-engage with the rest of Europe, events were taking a very different turn in Romania. On 17 December 1989, there were massacres in the Transylvanian city of Timisoara, close to the country’s border with Yugoslavia. The Times was faced with a problem. Romania was clearly the lead story but with no reporter inside the country it had to rely on what Dessa Trevisan on the Yugoslav border and Ernest Beck on the Hungarian border were able to glean from a mixture of often second-hand accounts and rumour, together with what was being reported by Tanjug, the Yugoslav news agency. The Romanian state media was making no mention of any atrocities, focusing instead on the state visit to Iran of President Nicolae Ceausescu, the country’s ‘Conductor’. Of the available sources of information, Tanjug was the most reliable. Yugoslavia alone had a consulate in Timisoara. From there, unconfirmed reports were streaming in of a second Tiananmen Square massacre. Tanjug was reporting two thousand civilian deaths and the demolition of the city centre. The trouble had started when demonstrators had tried to block the eviction of a popular pastor, Laszlo Tokes, who had criticized Ceausescu’s persecution of the local Hungarian minority.
Romania was a country where even ownership of a typewriter was forbidden without a state licence. The Times was cautions about predicting Ceausescu’s demise, a leading article entitled ‘Balkan Caligula’ pointing out that whereas Gorbachev’s support for reform and refusal to enact the Brezhnev Doctrine had undermined the will of the rest of Eastern Europe’s regimes to cling to power at all costs, Ceausescu had isolated his country from Moscow’s political influence. Furthermore, ‘Romania lacks an obvious institution such as the Catholic Church in Poland around which popular discontent will clearly mobilize.’36 Pessimism was understandable. Until July 1988, the United States had rewarded Romania with most favoured trading status. The country had paid off most of its debts to the West and the IMF and had embarked upon reducing trade dependence as well. Romania was in the unusual situation of being a creditor with net assets while its citizens lived in penury. Western leverage on Bucharest was thus all but nonexistent. On the Op-Ed pages, Mark Almond, the Oxford don and Romania specialist, warned that the lamb-like collapse of Communism elsewhere in Eastern Europe was likely to make Ceausescu even more inclined to tough it out. He would draw the parallel instead from the repressive successes of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Indeed, ‘the visit to Peking by President Bush’s national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, will probably have persuaded Ceausescu that the US talks human rights but does business regardless. Gorbachev has now sent an envoy to Peking to pay his respects.’ Almond thought it possible that, ‘given Gorbachev’s growing domestic unpopularity and fundamental failure to reform the Soviet economy, the Ceausescus may still rule in Romania when perestroika is as fond a memory as the Prague Spring’.37
The hypothesis was perfectly plausible. However, Almond had overestimated both the intelligence and the tenacity of The Conductor. With news of the massacres at Timisoara spreading, Ceausescu returned to Bucharest from Tehran and called for a mass pro-government rally that he would address from the balcony of the presidential palace. With the hubris of a regime used to stage-managing emotion, the decision was taken to broadcast the performance live. It was a disastrous miscalculation. With the cameras rolling, the crowd did the unthinkable – Ceausescu was heckled mid-oration. Visibly losing control, he faltered and stepped back from the balcony. At this very moment, the live broadcast was cut.
As the television coverage came to its abrupt and alarming halt, The Times’s reporters were moving across the border. Peter Law arrived in Timisoara where the bodies of more than four thousand victims were being uncovered in a ditch. Michael Hornsby made straight for Bucharest. It seemed the Securitate had shot dead the Defence Minister ‘because he had tried to keep soldiers in their barracks’. Fighting was breaking out all over the city between insurgents and army units loyal to a regime whose leader had just been dramatically helicoptered off the roof of The Central Committee building to an unknown fate. The Securitate were using underground passageways to make a bloody stand in The Conductor’s absence. Back in Wapping, the dramatic, if conflicting, reports were contributing towards an equally dramatic front page. ‘Bloodbath in Bucharest’ ran the headline beside a photograph of cheering Romanian troops joining the revolt. It was an image that would not have looked out of place in a 1945 edition of Picture Post. A second photograph caught Ceausescu’s helicopter lifting off from the roof of the Central Committee building.38
On Christmas Day news spread that both Ceausescu and his hated wife Elena had been caught, tried for two hours and shot. Michael Hornsby travelled round a Bucharest that was increasingly under the control of the makeshift anti-Ceausescu alliance, the National Salvation Front. While some signs of normality had returned, there were also lynchings of Securitate members, Hornsby witnessing one of them being shot through the head with his own revolver. ‘Others were dragged from cars and beaten to death.’39
Whatever the scenes of summary justice in Bucharest, Christmas 1989 was celebrated across Europe with an unusual degree of hope, expectation and, for some, a measure of unease. The process would take another giant stride forward a mere five weeks into the new year when the Soviet Central Committee voted to end the USSR as a one-party state. For all its overuse, it was hard to avoid the metaphor of the toppling dominoes, as first Poland shrugged off Communist rule, then Hungary, East Germany and Czechoslovakia. In the last days of the year it looked as if Romania, too, was poised to follow suit, albeit after blood on the streets. In fact, while it freed itself from the shadow of Ceausescu, it would shy away from electing a non-Communist government until November 1996. It had been a momentous last six months of 1989 nonetheless. When, back in July, Paris had celebrated the bicentenary of the French Revolution, world leaders had gathered there only six weeks after reform in China had been crushed at Tiananmen Square and half of Europe was still under Communist rule. Reflecting on the ‘Year of Revolution’, The Times observed, ‘For Europe, at least, the year of France’s revolutionary bicentennial has lived up to the nobler part of its inheritance.’40
It was an end to old certainties. The American academic Francis Fukuyama rushed to provide the first of a series of explanations. His suggestion that the world had reached the ‘end of history’ naturally attracted considerable attention. According to Fukuyama, the future might contain all manner of trouble and strife, but it would not be an ideological battle of wills because the world had arrived at a point where it was merely divided between those countries that had embraced liberalism, those that were in the course of doing so and those for which the day could not long be postponed. Only a few small states with crank rulers still failed to acknowledge that liberal values were not, at least in principle, a good thing. This theory would soon be put to a sterner test by the re-emergence of Islamic fundamentalism, leading other theorists to warn that the world was, in fact, in thrall to a ‘clash of civilisations’. This, however, was for the future. Among those in The Times who rejected the Fukuyama theory when it was first expounded in 1989 was the Oxford philosopher John Gray who thought not that history had ended but rather that it would rediscover its old rhythms:
The aftermath of totalitarianism will not be a global tranquilization of the sort imagined by American triumphalist theorists of liberal democracy. Instead, the end of totalitarianism in most of the world is likely to see the resumption of history on decidedly traditional lines: not the history invented in the hallucinatory perspectives of Marxism and American liberalism, but the history of authoritarian regimes, great-power rivalries, secret diplomacy, irredentist claims and ethnic and religious conflicts. It is to this world, harsh but familiar, that we are now returning, and for whose trials we should be preparing.41
Daniel Johnson, who joined The Times in the new year, wondered whether a diminution of the ideological struggle between capitalism and Communism would topple the primacy of socio-economic historical interpretation in favour of biography and the theory of the ‘great man’. ‘Over the last decade,’ he noted, ‘several personalities have emerged in Eastern Europe who seem to possess that titanic quality which the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt defined as historische Grösse: Gorbachev, Walesa, Havel.’42 Yet, not even the great men in the last decade of the century appeared able to contain all the tides that swelled around them. Nationalism was replacing Communism in Eastern Europe and was tearing apart the multi-ethnic Soviet Union. Communism in Eastern Europe, it now seemed, had only been sustained for so long by the acknowledged reality that there was a Soviet army of occupation ready to enforce it. It collapsed as soon as its citizens and leaders alike realized that the Brezhnev Doctrine was dead. Bernard Levin wrote, ‘the moment Mr Gorbachev made clear that whatever happened in the evil empire he would not lift a finger to help the colonial rulers, he had done the deed – the irreversible deed – that would put paid to communism not only in its colonies but in the mother country itself’.43 Conor Cruise O’Brien shared this analysis, but believed that these same forces would not triumph in China. There, the situation was different because the army, like the regime, was Chinese. Indeed, much of the armed forces personnel were drawn from the villages where 80 per cent of the population lived. They were far removed from the Western values of the chattering minority in the cities, let alone the students who had been to the fore in Tiananmen Square.44
The world had been transformed in a matter of weeks. Reporting revolution on this scale was an enormous test for The Times, as for the other papers. Analysis was difficult and speculation about the future almost cavalierly hazardous. Some believed the Independent had provided the best coverage of European Communism’s collapse. David Walker, a Times dissident who defected to the Guardian, noted that ‘during German unification, for example, it was striking how Die Welt cited as a matter of habit not The Times but the Independent’s views’.45 Nonetheless, re-examining the paper during this period, The Times’s coverage appears impressive. Young and thoughtful reporters like Anne McElvoy provided excellent copy from Berlin. Mark Almond offered weighty analysis on the Op-Ed page. Naturally, the paper’s first task of analysis was to assess how the upheavals would shape Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the years ahead. It took longer to appreciate that the end of the Cold War would also dramatically change the nature of politics in Western Europe, Britain and the rest of the world. Political parties would have to adapt to new priorities among the voters and there was much (exaggerated) talk of a peace dividend in which huge savings from cutting defence spending could be redirected towards public services. For many in Britain, Margaret Thatcher’s unease about German reunification and opposition to deeper integration in the European Community jarred with the spirit of the moment, where European brotherhood animated those with hopes for a continent reborn. French political calculations were perhaps more cynical – the price for a reunited Germany was the abolition of the Deutschmark and the pressing ahead with European economic and monetary union. This ensured that the politics of Western Europe rather than those of the newly liberated Eastern European states would continue to dominate the news and comment pages of The Times in the 1990s. Whether a more deeply integrated European Community would facilitate reaching out across the shattered Iron Curtain to a wider Europe beyond remained to be seen.
While the editor made preparations for a new decade with his usual unflagging drive and enthusiasm, there was much he could look back upon in the past eighteen months with quiet satisfaction. In particular, the Saturday paper had undergone a remarkable expansion. The Times had long been a paper that serious-minded people took with them to work and this was reflected in the circulation figures. Sales had been much better during the weekdays than at the weekends. Enhancing Saturday’s sale would need significant investment but advertisers had traditionally been shy of investing in Saturday journalism, preferring the graphic-friendly glossy magazines of the Sunday papers or the daily certainties of the weekday offerings. The paper that did most to change this formula was the Financial Times. Although not naturally thought of as the journal with which to relax at the weekend, the FT successfully reinvented itself on Saturdays, pioneering the two-section format that emphasized lifestyle-focused journalism. In particular, it had a strong property section. So successful was this weekend edition that the paper began selling more on Saturdays than it did during the week. The Telegraph followed suit. Clearly there was a waiting market ripe to be explored and exploited. In Charles Wilson, The Times was fortunate to have an editor who understood the challenge.
By the end of 1988, all the national broadsheets had additional weekend sections for the Saturday editions. The Independent was the last to do so, but the launch of its second section and a weekend magazine edited by Alexander Chancellor in September 1988 made an immediate impact. Wilson’s strategy was different. Rather than introduce a colour magazine he opted to produce a four-section, sixty-four-page edition for Saturdays, one section of which was gravure-printed in colour. There was more of virtually everything too. A family money section took the place of what, during the week, was devoted to company business news. Readers were guided through the proliferation of financial services designed to make every last drop of savings go further. Apart from anything else, this was popular with the advertisers. Where, previously, the ‘Saturday’ section had merely been tagged onto the main part of the paper, ‘Review’ became a distinct third section covering the arts, live performances and books. Previewing sporting events rather than just providing match reports for the Monday paper ensured that Saturday’s fourth section, covering sport and leisure, was also much more comprehensive than what had been offered in the past. Francesca Greenoak was given more room to tend her gardening column and the general layout was greatly enhanced with watercolour illustrations by Diana Ledbetter. It no longer looked like a grubby old piece of inky newsprint. Indeed, in the last two years of the 1980s, two areas of the paper’s Saturday journalism were especially developed: the property section (unfortunately just in time for the market downturn) and the travel pages. In the latter case, the transformation was especially remarkable. What had previously amounted to a couple of articles surrounded by a stamp album of small monochrome ads for weekends in Torquay or Le Touquet sprouted into several pages in which travel writers explored increasingly exotic locations. The quality of the accompanying photography also became more artistic and alluring. This expansion was overseen by the travel editor, Shona Crawford Poole, who had previously been The Times cookery writer. Providing the weekend recipes in her place had become Frances Bissell’s responsibility while Jane MacQuitty continued to write expertly every Saturday about wine, a task she had been performing without let or hindrance since 1982. Jonathan Meades wrote the restaurant reviews. An atheist of the militant variety, Meades had gone from a minor West Country public school (another bugbear) to RADA ‘at the fag end of the Sixties’. But waning aspirations towards the stage were quashed comprehensively by Hugh Cruttwell, RADA’s principal, who all too plausibly assured Meades that he had little future until he reached middle age, at which point he would make a good living as a character actor.46 At thirty-nine, Meades was still approaching this age when he was signed up by The Times in 1986, having spent the intervening fifteen years writing for various magazines including Time Out, Tatler and Harpers & Queen. Although Wilson regretted Meades’s ‘vituperative excesses’ and the amount of column inches he devoted to damning wherever he had been let loose upon,47 few could doubt that he was an acute critic of the choicest vintage and a writer of exceptional flair and originality. One pub in East Anglia erected a ‘Shrine of Hatred’ to Meades after a particularly excoriating review.
The Times was broadening its appeal but, given the improving quality of the competition, it had to do this merely to stand still. Wilson’s choice as the editor of the Saturday features section, Richard Williams, decided that he preferred the look of the competition and departed for the newly launched (and short-lived) Sunday Correspondent. Wilson, who hated losing old comrades, tried to dissuade him and even got Murdoch to offer him a job at Sky, the satellite television company he had launched eight months earlier in February 1989. Williams declined. Indeed, Sky had been one of the contributing factors in Williams’s decision to leave The Times after thirteen years writing for the paper. In June, after only two months in his post as arts editor, Tim de Lisle had resigned over what he considered the misuse of the arts pages to promote Sky. He had spent an agreeable Bank Holiday Monday afternoon watching a one-day match at Lord’s only to discover on his return to Wapping that Mike Hoy had run an advertising puff for a competition across all eight columns of the top of the arts page. Tied in with Sky’s forthcoming televising of a popular opera production of Carmen, the prize was a satellite dish. De Lisle attempted a damage-limitation operation, cutting down the size of the Sky logo and subsequently demoting down the page the Carmen review. This sparked a shouting match with – or rather from – Wilson. De Lisle defended his action by saying he was attempting to save the credibility of the paper. Wilson interpreted this to mean he had used non-objective criteria in laying out the content of his page. De Lisle removed himself to the Telegraph and eventually became editor of Wisden. It was The Times’s loss. Yet the matter was a particularly unfortunate one. News Corp.’s finances were being stretched to the limit by the purchase of what would become the Fox network in the United States as well as by the launch of Sky in Britain. As the economy turned downwards and banks began calling in their loans, it became increasingly possible that News Corp. might go bankrupt. Some journalists were outraged that Wilson appeared to be compromising the integrity of The Times by providing Sky with what looked like free advertising. The Times’s NUJ chapel asked the board of independent directors to examine whether this constituted a breach of the 1981 undertakings Murdoch had made on preserving the paper’s editorial independence. Approaches were also made to the Department of Trade and Industry, the Monopolies Commission and the Office of Fair Trading. The independent directors refused to investigate, on the grounds that they only had a remit to do so if the editor asked for it. The editor did not ask for it. One of the directors, the Earl of Drogheda, attempted to calm tempers with the explanation, ‘the editor assures us there has been no such interference’. However, de Lisle’s self-sacrifice was not in vain. The Times was subsequently much more careful about how it covered Sky.48
Those who left the chaos of the attempted Daily and Sunday Telegraph merger in 1989 were horrified by the atmosphere and low morale they encountered on arrival at the rum warehouse. Whenever there was breaking news, Wilson would become a galvanizing force, demonstrating his mastery of command. Journalists who came to him with personal problems were usually treated with sympathy and kindness.49 But on a day-to-day basis, working successfully with the editor necessitated an imperviousness to jibes and cutting comments. He took to perpetually calling one reporter ‘Fingertips’ – on the grounds that these were all he was hanging onto his job with. His standard rebuttal to any suggestion or idea he did not like was ‘the readers of The Times don’t want to read about … [followed by whatever had been proposed]’. The readers of The Times and Charles Wilson appeared to have a lot in common. Problematically, many of the more traditional Times hacks believed that this relationship existed only in the editor’s imagination. His habit of jabbing a finger at whomever he was addressing lacked insouciance. It was only after much experience that journalists realized his technique of invading their personal space during these dressing downs was only partly a form of intimidation; he was also attempting to discover if they had been drinking at lunchtime. It had certainly been a mistake in the early days of his editorship to inform the fashion editor, Suzy Menkes, that the actress Ali McGraw had an insufficient cleavage for the photographs lined up for the fashion page. This was not in the spirit of the journal of record. Indeed, women journalists particularly disliked his vernacular powers of expression. For a Scot, his use of the English language could be distinctly Anglo-Saxon.
Wilson’s many private kindnesses, his vitality and drive, were being overlooked by those who had become tired of his brusque jocularity and his tendency to dismiss or ridicule ideas and propositions without appearing to weigh them properly first. His energy could also be a stimulant for those around him. While many previous editors could have waxed lyrical about what policies had to be enacted in some far-off part of the world they were easily thrown into confusion when confronted by a locked door. Wilson, however, was not the sort of man ineffectually to ask another member of staff if they could go and search somewhere for a key. When on one occasion he turned up for a meeting to find the conference room locked, he merely took a couple of steps back, sized up the narrow gap between the top of the wall and ceiling, leapt up and shinned over a ten-foot-high partition to get in and open the door from the inside. Those who missed this impressive display of their editor’s athleticism were at least left to admire its legacy – a series of footprint dents going up the wall. In all his years editing from a rocking chair, William Rees-Mogg never left such an impression.
Wilson had hired some of the finest journalists on the paper, including Graham Paterson, a well-rounded and enthusiastic journalist brimming with ideas, and Mary Ann Sieghart, a young and energetic Op-Ed editor committed to dispelling the belief that the comment pages had fallen into the hands of a Margaret Thatcher support group. He was, however, hampered by the departure of Peter Stothard for Washington DC, in September 1989 when he took up the post of US editor. Stothard retained the somewhat honorary status as deputy editor of the paper, but his removal from Wapping was a handicap for Wilson. Although Murdoch only visited The Times five or six times a year, he was aware that there were rumblings of discontent. The two men would, however, speak once a week on the telephone. Wilson enjoyed these chats, which tended to be an opportunity to gossip about the national political scene rather than to map out the future of the paper. ‘We had a good relationship’ was how he later summed up his dealings with Murdoch, ‘and I would have walked on hot coals for him because I admired him then and admire him now.’50
For his part, Murdoch considered Wilson ‘a hardworking, brilliant, technical journalist like Harry [Evans] but much more decisive’.51 He certainly owed Wilson a great deal as the lieutenant who had done so much to make the Wapping revolution possible and who had begged, cajoled and inspired Times journalists to be a part of it. Yet it was because so many of the older hands at The Times and in the industry at large regarded Wilson as one of Murdoch’s lieutenants that they wanted a new editor who was seen to be utterly removed from the corporate identity of News International. Even Murdoch came to accept some of the criticisms, later commenting that Wilson ‘didn’t have enough respect at the intellectual end of the paper. He was trying to recruit good people but couldn’t get them – which was the test.’52 If The Times had still been competing against its old rivals, the Telegraph and the Guardian, all might have been well. But it was Wilson’s misfortune that the Independent had arrived and was offering journalists who did not like being shouted at in Glaswegian an alternative and highly respectable berth. During 1989, the financial fate of News International and its parent company, the News Corporation, hung in the balance. Rumours that it was about to collapse were rife. Clifford Longley, Mary Ann Sieghart and (prior to his departure) Richard Williams decided that Murdoch’s problems were The Times’s opportunity. The three of them began holding private meetings, rather in the manner that Andreas Whittam Smith, Matthew Symonds and Stephen Glover had done in planning the Independent when they were still employed by the Telegraph. Longley had already talked the situation over with Sir Gordon Borrie, the director-general of the Office of Fair Trading. Together, Longley, Sieghart and Williams drew up proposals to buy The Times from News International with the intention of re-establishing it along the lines of the (profitable) business structure that had been adopted by the Independent. They approached John Nott, the chairman and chief executive of Lazard Brothers merchant bank, and took soundings from venture capitalists. The response was that the prospectus looked favourable, but it was dependent on Murdoch agreeing to sell. Bravely, Sieghart and Williams decided to go and see him. He listened carefully to their sales pitch, interjecting only with the occasional facial wince. Then he said ‘no’. He would not sell. He did, however, ask what they thought was wrong with the paper and was given a fulsome account of its deficiencies compared to the Independent and the feeling that it was time for a new editor.53 The points were noted.
Wilson’s nemesis appeared shortly thereafter in the guise of Andrew Knight who Murdoch poached from the Telegraph Group as the new executive chairman of News International in March 1990. When Knight arrived for his first day at Wapping, Wilson telephoned his office at ten in the morning asking to speak to him. He wanted to welcome him and let him know how much he was looking forward to working with him. Knight’s secretary said he was ‘tied up’ and would return Wilson’s call when he was free. When he had heard nothing from his new chief executive by lunchtime, Wilson telephoned again and was met with the same reply. He tried again as soon as the afternoon conference was over. Again Knight was too busy to talk to the editor of his group’s flagship title. At about 6.30 p.m. Wilson received a call, but it was from Murdoch’s secretary. She informed him that he had flown into London and wanted to see him at his flat at 8.30 the following morning. ‘I said “fine”,’ Wilson recalled, ‘and I knew that my term was over.’ That night he dined for the first time with Neil Kinnock. The bitterness and division of the Wapping dispute had prevented the Leader of the Opposition from being seen breaking bread with the editor of The Times for four years. Fittingly, the occasion, long in the planning, had been organized by Brenda Dean’s husband. The dinner was à deux. The sons of miners got on extremely well, musing on how two men from the same background could have ended up with such different political views. Wilson said nothing about the great issue preying on his mind. It was, he rued, a ‘lovely evening’.54
The next morning, Murdoch, looking somewhat embarrassed, told Wilson that Andrew Knight wanted a change – he wanted to make Simon Jenkins editor. What was more, Knight wanted Jenkins in Wilson’s chair with immediate effect. Wilson was able to extend this to the end of the week, a minor dignity that was the least he was owed. Murdoch wanted to offer more. The fall of the Berlin Wall had opened up seemingly tremendous business opportunities in the former Eastern Europe. There were newspapers with huge circulations that were – it was reasonably assumed – ineptly run and in need of the Murdoch touch. He wanted to make Wilson his East European emissary, or ‘International Director’. It appeared to be an intriguing opportunity but if it did not work out by the end of the year he assured Wilson that it would not harm his remaining three-year contract. Murdoch had a reputation for the presumptuous manner in which he sacked long-serving officers, but he also had a record for generosity and consideration in devising the financial terms of the divorce. Wilson stepped over and shook on it. He was back at Wapping in time for the morning conference where he announced he would be stepping aside and that the new editor was Simon Jenkins.
For Wilson, life after The Times took some unforeseen twists. It quickly became apparent that News Corp. was in mounting trouble and having difficulty rolling over its debts. One consequence was that fresh investment dried up. Wilson’s mission to Eastern Europe increasingly resembled a posting to Siberia. He did not have the budget to make major acquisitions. Murdoch’s mooted purchase of Pravda was out of the question. Wilson considered buying another Russian paper, Argumenti i Fakti, which had a 33.5 million circulation, the largest in the world. ‘We could have bought it for peanuts,’ he lamented, but the cash was not forthcoming even for that level of investment. When Robert Maxwell telephoned and offered him the editorship of the Sporting Life, allowing him to pursue his great love of the Turf, he accepted. Wilson began a new life as an executive in Mirror Group newspapers, becoming managing director in 1992. Some of his old Times colleagues raised their eyes to the heavens, murmuring that the appointment only showed what an inappropriate choice he had once been to guide the fortunes of The Times. Yet Maxwell was to provide a path back into the broadsheet press. In 1995, the Independent that had caused him so much anguish during his Times editorship appeared close to collapse, battered by a price war unleashed by Murdoch and ailing from the costs of subsidizing its unprofitable sister, the Independent on Sunday. Its new co-owner, the Mirror Group, appointed Wilson to spend six months as the Independent’s de facto editor with a remit to cut costs before passing onto the thirty-six-year-old Andrew Marr. Inevitably, some who had loved the Independent in its glorious early days saw Wilson as a terrible nemesis, brought in to wreak havoc upon his one-time tormentor.
Under Wilson, The Times had become less of an institution and more of a newspaper. Its future would have been far more precarious if its editor had pursued any other course. Wilson had Harold Evans’s flair for breaking news – clearing the top half of the paper for a dramatic photograph of the space shuttle exploding even before the image was available, for example. Indeed, he was at his best when disasters struck. On these occasions he immediately assumed total mastery of the situation, deploying people to specific tasks with almost military self-assurance. It was typical of him to see things clearly in a crisis. This skill turned out to be an important asset, since his editorship coincided with some terrible disasters: in May 1987 the Herald of Free Enterprise sank off Zeebrugge drowning 188 and in December a Philippines ferry sank with 1500 on board, the twentieth-century’s worst maritime disaster; the following year the Piper Alpha oil rig exploded killing 166, an Armenian earthquake killed 70,000 and two weeks later Pan Am flight 103, with 258 passengers on board, was blown up by a bomb over Lockerbie, killing a further eleven on the ground. Philip Howard regarded the moment Wilson unsentimentally jettisoned several pages of carefully prepared pre-Christmas quality writing in order to make way for fast and comprehensive coverage of the Lockerbie disaster to be the defining moment when the old Times – careful, judicious, slow to judge – died. The observation was not wholly intended as a criticism.55 ‘He was the very best kind of tabloid journalist,’ commented Richard Williams, ‘and when he was able to bring this to bear on the paper’s news coverage it was just what The Times needed.’56
On the debit side, Wilson had driven away key intellectuals, losing some of the paper’s weight in the process. The leader writers were no longer privately referred to as the college of cardinals. Wilson was not someone who conveyed an air of spiritual benediction. But he had brought to the paper new talents, like Matthew Parris and Mary Ann Sieghart, who soon came to be seen as essential. Yet, while some of the old guard may have taken offence, Wilson’s dragging The Times, kicking and screaming, to places it had little natural inclination to go was not necessarily proof that he was a bad parent to the paper. ‘Unless you broadened the audience of The Times,’ he made clear, ‘the paper was going to die.’ He taught The Times to ‘recognize that half of the people who walk round the cities of this country are women’.57 Married to the magazine editor Sally O’Sullivan, he had a better sense of what women wanted and this was recognized in the way features developed during his editorship. Fashion was given a higher profile and news was not restricted to party political subject matter – which had preoccupied so much of the paper’s column inches in the past. Like Harold Evans, he was criticized by those who believed The Times was, or ought to be, the home of the crafted essay rather than the ticker-tape machine for breaking news. Sir John Junor in the Mail on Sunday and Edward Pearce in the Guardian wrote articles defending him from what they saw as the snobbish sentiments of those who believed he had never been cut from The Times cloth. He had, they wrote, helped to make the paper more professional and freed it from the cult of deference. These were important achievements.
Much though Wilson had wanted to soldier on, his sacking came at an opportune moment. Although formalities had not been concluded, the Cold War had been won and with it the comment pages of The Times needed to adjust to a new era. Similarly, on the domestic front the Thatcher revolution in which Wilson had played his part was collapsing amid the rancour and ruin of the poll tax; the Prime Minister only had eight more bruising months left in Downing Street. At home and abroad, a more emollient style appeared to be required for the future. By contrast, Wilson appeared too closely identified with the decade of struggles – epitomized by the siege of Wapping – that had now drawn to a close. It was time for a change. What was more, he was leaving the paper at an opportune moment in other respects too. News Corp., its parent company, was plunging into a dire financial crisis. During 1990, it looked as if the whole empire might collapse. Cuts would be needed across the board. It was Simon Jenkins who would have to wield the axe.