2.

Wapping Stories

The Sunday Times is renowned as one of the toughest national papers in Britain. Its red meat are exclusives and scoops, which are fiendishly difficult to find and even harder to stand up. When I first joined, aged twenty-six, it was still based in Fortress Wapping, the warehouse complex in east London where Rupert Murdoch’s titles moved when he broke the print unions in 1986. Entry was via a pillbox-style security post emblazoned with the logos of The Times, the Sunday Times, The Sun and the News of the World. I arrived for my junior reporter’s interview in August 2010 jangling with nerves, eager to move on from City AM, the daily freesheet where I had been churning out ten articles a day. To my immense relief, I was summarily told by the business editor, Dominic O’Connell, ‘The job’s yours if you want it.’

The Sunday Times was based in a hulking old printing plant in the middle of the Wapping site. There was a strange water feature in the foyer, perhaps installed as a token effort to make it feel more like an office, which gave off a smell of stale chlorine. An antique typesetting machine sat in the corridor by the lifts and a portrait of Murdoch looked down on everyone entering and leaving. The newsroom on the fifth floor was a drab place, dominated by stacks of yellowing newspapers and ancient desktop PCs. One of the few sources of daylight was a tiny moss-encrusted skylight. To my beginner’s eyes, the temperature seemed to rise relentlessly throughout the week until it reached boiling point on press day – Saturday. The front-page headline on the Sunday of my first week, 26 September 2010, was ‘Victorious Ed Miliband Begs David Not to Quit’ – a reference to the younger Miliband’s surprise win over his more plausible brother for the Labour leadership. The paper has since moved to its modern offices in London Bridge, but the culture has stayed the same: sweat, stress and occasionally tears are poured into every edition.

The DNA of the Sunday Times is part broadsheet and part tabloid, and its history is an equal mix of landmark investigations – Thalidomide, Cambridge spies, cash for questions, the Qatari World Cup scandal – and high jinks. There were moments of farce that would not have been out of place at a tabloid: in 1995, the newsroom was occupied by an action group known as The Lesbian Avengers after a reporter, Maurice Chittenden, wrote an article claiming that lesbians were ‘on the warpath and their unlikely target is Britain’s gay men’. Chittenden happened to be sitting there as they stormed in. ‘Where’s Maurice Chittenden?’ one Avenger asked him. ‘Maurice Chittenden?’ Chittenden mumbled, standing up. ‘No, he’s out.’ The Lesbian Avengers were eventually removed after the new editor, John Witherow, emerged from his office scowling and called the police. The next day’s News of the World carried the headline, ‘The Editor, Sixty Coppers, Eight Lesbians (and Four Pairs of Handcuffs!)’.

The business desk perfectly embodied the paper’s irreverent side. Almost every Sunday Times business editor since the late 1980s has been state schooled and educated outside Oxbridge, an unusually consistent exception to the elitism still rife in journalism, including in the main part of the paper. Whereas in the 1990s and 2000s the Sunday Telegraph may have had better contacts among blue-chip companies like British Airways, M&S and Rolls-Royce, the Sunday Times championed up-and-coming new-money entrepreneurs who often used debt and white-knuckle tactics to wrest control of companies. There was Mohammed Al-Fayed, who fought an epic battle with the Observer owner Tiny Rowland for control of Harrods, leading to Al-Fayed’s censure by the Department of Trade and Industry; Gerald Ronson, who emerged from a six-month prison sentence for his involvement in the Guinness share-support scandal and rebuilt his Heron property empire with help from Bill Gates and Rupert Murdoch, among others; Sir David and Sir Frederick Barclay, painters and decorators who were accused of asset-stripping but went on to buy trophy properties such as the Ritz and the Telegraph newspapers; Sir Tom Hunter, a greengrocer’s son from a small town in East Ayrshire who ploughed the fortune he made from selling Sports Division into several takeovers; David and Simon Reuben, Indian-born brothers who made more than £1 billion trading aluminium in Russia after the break-up of the Soviet Union; and there was Sir Philip Green. These buccaneering newcomers, unconstrained by corporate structures or PR advisers, were often fantastic sources of information.

Those of us who worked on the business section would regularly pick up the phone to hear Green’s staccato voice dispensing tips and requesting favours. Green had an insider’s understanding of newspapers. He grasped the impact of a direct call from a billionaire to a journalist, and he knew how a well-timed leak could sometimes nudge a deal or dispute in his favour. At one point, when he was trying to think of a title for an authorized biography that eventually never materialized, Green came up with Lucky 5766. As a circle of trusted contacts knew, 5766 was the extension number of the Sunday Times’ business editor.

I was something of an anomaly among my colleagues. Bespectacled, Cambridge-educated and initially fairly shy, I was far from the typical Sunday Times business-desk recruit of the 2000s. When I arrived, I was seated between a hardened mergers and acquisitions reporter from Grimsby and a City news veteran known as the Yorkshire Terrier. At the end of my first day, a small group went for a drink in west London, where a business editor from a rival paper was having her leaving party. The night ended with one of my new colleagues rolling around on the floor of the pub fighting a reporter from another paper, fists flying and – allegedly – an ear being bitten. I slipped into work late the next morning feeling awful, unable to believe I had allowed myself to come in hungover on the second day of my dream job. I felt better when my errant colleague came in at 4 p.m., looking like death. He barely spoke to anyone and left after an hour.

The Sunday Times was different from anywhere I had worked before. Its weekly circulation of 1.1 million copies meant it had real power. Corporate leaders suddenly wanted to take my calls. My boss, Dominic O’Connell, was a diminutive Kiwi with a viperish wit who had worked his way up through trade magazines and the now-defunct Sunday Business paper. I was usually referred to as ‘the posh one’, and there were plenty of jokes about not being able to learn shorthand in a punt. Nonetheless, after three years fishing for stories in the backwater of the property industry, I was given the chance to prove myself by covering retail – a prime beat. In line with more than a decade of tradition, I made my first call to Sir Philip Green.

Britain’s best-selling broadsheet and the barrel-shaped billionaire had a very special relationship. It had begun in the days of Jeff Randall, a grammar-school boy from Essex who was City and then business editor between 1989 and 1995. Randall’s parents had been market traders in east London, and he obviously felt an affinity with Green. In 1992, Green was forced to resign from a stock market-listed discount retailer, Amber Day, over a litany of corporate governance breaches and a missed financial target – the first big humiliation of his career. Against the tide of negative newspaper coverage, Randall waded to Green’s defence. ‘It is a depressing reminder for those whose fathers were not vicars, librarians or building-society managers,’ he wrote. ‘They carry the baggage of their backgrounds forever.’ As Green progressed onwards and upwards, he developed and embellished this portrait of himself as a barrow boy fighting back against the snobbery of faceless City cliques.

Private Eye magazine mocked Randall as Green’s faithful Boswell, the biographer who trailed after the eighteenth-century essayist Samuel Johnson. Some of Randall’s colleagues also thought he was unhealthily close to Green. They heard rumours of parties on Green’s yacht in Marbella and suspected the scrappy outsider was the source of some of Randall’s best stories, including his stunning scoop about the publishing tycoon Robert Maxwell’s secret plan to take control of Tottenham Hotspur in 1990. Andrew Neil, the paper’s editor between 1983 and 1994, was said to have come across Green as part of a crowd that went to Barbados every winter. Neil was reportedly irritated by Green’s ‘noisy’ views on politics. A former colleague said, ‘Andrew found him this bombastic guy – boasting and loud, and rather crude. Andrew asked Jeff to restrain himself – not in any nasty sense, because he had great respect for Jeff – but Andrew felt Green was a bit shady. We felt he was appearing rather more in the paper than he should have done, in the sense that he wasn’t very important.’

In 1995, Randall was succeeded by John Jay, who had been educated at the fee-paying University College School in Hampstead and Magdalen College, Oxford. As they handed over, Randall remarked to Jay that there were ‘two sorts of Jew: the trader and the intellectual. Philip is a trader and you’re a completely different tribe. You’ll never understand each other and there will be a huge prejudice between you.’ Jay was married to Judi Bevan, a Sunday Telegraph journalist. In 1991, Bevan had written a profile of Green in which she described the living room of his house in St John’s Wood as ‘unremitting beige and not a book in sight’. Green called her when it came out. ‘I’m phoning you from my holiday home because I’m having a library put in the one in London,’ he said. True to Randall’s prediction, there was no meeting of minds between Green and Jay. In his farewell column before he left the Sunday Times in 2001, Jay gave the retailer a special award ‘for vulgarity and rudeness’. On the Saturday evening before publication, Jay and Bevan went to their weekend retreat in Seaford, on the East Sussex coast. They returned on Sunday evening to find the landline in their Rotherhithe house ringing off the hook. Jay picked it up and immediately received a torrent of abuse from Green. When he finally managed to interrupt, Jay asked, ‘Philip, how’s your ancient Greek?’ There was another outburst of effing and blinding. ‘Look up the phrase “gnōthi seauton”,’ Jay said. ‘It means “know thyself”.’ He hung up.

Jay was replaced by Rory Godson, the former editor of the Sunday Times’ Irish edition. To his predecessor’s dismay, Godson vigorously renewed the paper’s love affair with Green. ‘I had a great breakfast on Friday with the irrepressible and apparently unstoppable Philip Green,’ Godson wrote in September 2002, less than two years into the job. A month earlier, Godson had received a scoop about Green’s intention to take over Topshop’s parent company, Arcadia, in partnership with an Icelandic fund. Green had just sealed the deal for £850 million – without Icelandic help – when Godson wrote his column. ‘The pair of us dined in his hotel suite as he waited for the official news that the board of Arcadia had recommended his bid for the company,’ Godson said. ‘The phone rang constantly as old pals and the great and good offered congratulations.’ Arcadia’s new owner, the business editor told his readers, was ‘a self-made genius with extraordinary tactical nous, startling brainpower and memory, as well as great retailing instinct’. Godson said that Green would now need to prove himself as ‘a team builder, not just a solo superstar’. He added, ‘We are betting and hoping he can achieve this.’ Godson was followed as business editor by Will Lewis and then John Waples, both of whom admired Green and benefited from his contacts and tips in return.

When Dominic O’Connell took over as business editor in 2010 he had few sources in retail, having spent most of his career covering aerospace and industry. Nonetheless, he and Green were soon on the phone every Saturday morning, shooting the breeze for up to an hour before the print deadline. Green would dispense his thoughts on everything from the yield on bonds issued by the mining giant BHP Billiton to the trading at Marks & Spencer.

A few hours into my first day as retail correspondent, I dialled Green’s number with trepidation and tried to keep any plumminess out of my voice.

‘You’d better come and see me,’ he said gruffly.

A week or two later, I walked into the London headquarters of Green’s Arcadia Group. A pretty blonde receptionist in the shiny black foyer showed me to the lift. I stepped out onto the sixth floor, where a prettier blonde receptionist in a shinier black foyer showed me into a meeting room. The only decorations were black-and-white photographs of Green and Kate Moss posing like a celebrity couple at events. I waited for ten minutes with increasing nervousness. Then Green burst in, all avuncular twinkle and one-liners, and quizzed me with affable irascibility about my background. He pulled out his battered mobile. ‘So, who are you having trouble getting hold of?’ he asked. The billionaire owner of Topshop was offering to act as my introducer. I threw out a few elusive names such as Don McCarthy, then chairman of House of Fraser, who disliked meeting journalists. Green gleefully scrolled through his contacts and clasped the discontinued Nokia 6310 to his ear. ‘I’ve got the new Sunday Times retail man here,’ he said again and again, looking at me intently with beady almond eyes. ‘Better to know him than not to, if you know what I mean?’ I scribbled down the numbers he gave me. The meeting was over in twenty minutes. ‘Young Oliver,’ Green pronounced as we shook hands. ‘Call me if you need anything, OK?’ I felt a ritual had been performed. Like so many of my Sunday Times predecessors, I had received Green’s blessing and taken his shilling.