I worked under nine editors at The Times. None went close in terms of youth when they took over and longevity in the job to John Thadeus Delane, who became editor at the age of twenty-three in 1841 and did it for thirty-six years.
Delane, a confidant of Cabinet ministers and others high in government, was born into the Establishment as the son of a prominent barrister and author, and was responsible for creating the national and international prestige of The Times and the importance and influence of the role he held.
All who have followed him have regarded it as their duty to maintain that authority, a quality that to this day means that the view of The Times on the matter in hand is important to all its readers, including those in power everywhere. The London Times, as it is known abroad, remains the paper that rulers and people in foreign lands still look at to ascertain the current state of Britain. It was to The Times that eight former US Treasury secretaries wrote in April 2016, warning of the dangers of the UK leaving the European Union.
I’m often asked what the editor does and how he does it. He is responsible for every word that appears in his paper. Because he cannot possibly read every word or headline in every edition – although they have been known to try – he needs people in charge of every department that he can trust to do things in a way with which he can be comfortable. So top appointments are a priority.
At The Times, the editor will preside over the two daily internal news conferences when department chiefs from home news, foreign, sport, business, features, obits and others set out their wares, and broad decisions can be taken about where they will appear in the paper. He will by then have a good idea of the size of tomorrow’s paper, after receiving an early indication of how much advertising space has been sold. That is what dictates the number of pages in each edition.
At 11.30 each morning, the paper’s leader writers will convene in the editor’s office where the subjects to be covered, and lines to be taken, are discussed and agreed. He will then lunch, sometimes in the office but often outside with a key politician, business figure or colleague. In the afternoon, he will keep tabs on the news stories and the progress of the leaders, asking to be told at all times of anything new and breaking. He will want to be briefed on the paper’s latest digital developments and will often convene meetings to discuss coverage of upcoming big events. He will still be there in the evening, probably making the final decision – if it is not quite obvious – on what should be the lead story of the day and what should be the picture on the front.
In other words, the paper would come out quite happily if he was not there. And does. Editors have days off like everyone else, and a reader would not be able to tell whether he was in or not. But that is because the editor has set the tone of the paper. He has deputies, reporters, subeditors, night editors and picture editors – and all of them know what he wants, the paper design he likes, the stories he likes. So long as he is in the editor’s chair, that’s the way it goes. When he is replaced, a successor will lay down how he wants the paper to look and feel. Each will in the end be judged by how well it does.
With The Times, in particular, editors will have in mind the paper’s history, its position at the top of the quality market, and the need to maintain the authority and prestige that Delane, his predecessors and successors, gave it so long ago after it was launched as The Daily Universal Register in 1785, before swiftly becoming The Times.
Those successors have gone about it in their different ways and with varying degrees of success. In my time, the editors could roughly be divided into those whose preoccupation was the voice of The Times through its leading articles and comment pieces, and those for whom the priority was the news, and giving readers the most authoritative, comprehensive and exclusive stories and features that could be found.
Into that first category would come William Rees-Mogg, who was editor from 1967 to 1981 and in place when I joined the paper in 1973. A scholarly, serious man who happily left the production of the paper to his team, he was always capable of surprises, such as his famous ‘Who breaks a butterfly on a wheel?’ 1967 leader criticizing the severity of a custodial sentence for Mick Jagger on a drugs offence.
Like most of the young journalists on the paper, I was rather in awe of this learned chap who looked like a professor, but found he was a gentle, kind man very early on when, again surprisingly, he decided that in 1973 the Liberal Party was the one to watch. He heavily staffed its party conference that year at Southport, which was my first of scores of such gatherings in the service of The Times. I sat next to him at the dinner he threw for the party and did my best to match his piercing questions to the Liberal politicians about the issues of the day.
Rees-Mogg would leave the office usually in the early evening, long before final decisions about front-page content had been made, and he would see the first edition much later on when it was delivered to him at his home. But he would have written or overseen the leaders before he left. He was in the Delane mould.
So, probably, was Charles Douglas-Home, next but one editor after Rees-Mogg. The nephew of the former Conservative prime minister, Charlie’s contacts in the political, diplomatic and defence worlds were immense. He spoke to Margaret Thatcher regularly. Those conversations were not too unusual. All Times editors have access to the prime minister of the day if they want it, but in Charlie’s case he spoke to her as a friend. He came to The Times via the Daily Express and worked his way up through various executive jobs to become deputy to Harry Evans, and then took over, editing till 1985 and his death at only forty-eight from cancer. Charlie was a buccaneer who did not mind his team pushing stories to the limit. A hugely brave man, he continued editing the paper from his hospital bed during his illness.
In the category of editors driven by the news, I would immediately place Harry Evans. He came to The Times from The Sunday Times, where he won a huge reputation as a campaigning editor. He was appointed by Rupert Murdoch when he acquired Times Newspapers in 1981, and his hands-on style contrasted sharply with his predecessor.
It left some of the senior staff uncomfortable. Accustomed to the quiet, unobtrusive style of Rees-Mogg, they had become used to looking after their own territory and did not like interference. He left after only a year after senior figures wrote a letter complaining he had lowered standards. He himself later claimed it was because he had frequently criticized Margaret Thatcher’s monetarist policies. I was far too junior at the time to know much of these machinations but I owed Harry much as he promoted me to the Lobby from The Times gallery team. I used to put the parliamentary pages ‘to bed’ in the composing room at New Printing House Square, and came to Harry’s notice because – being able to read the type upside down – I spotted a mistake on the front page just before it was due to go to print. Harry was there when I noticed it, and I like to think he remembered that when I applied for the Lobby job.
Charles Wilson, who succeeded Douglas-Home, was the reporter’s editor. He loved news, understood news, demanded news. He did what was required on the leader front but he judged the paper, and himself, by the strength of its news, sports, business and feature coverage.
He was the ultimate journalist hard-man, who was feared and respected at one and the same time, never averse to bawling out a sub or news desk chief in front of the rest. Utterly direct and unpretentious, you were never in any doubt where you stood. A newsman to his boots, Charlie had a way of letting you know that you might not be delivering. After successive mornings on which Wilson entered the office and hailed a news editor as ‘fingertips’, the poor man asked why he was being called that. ‘That’s what you’re hanging by, son,’ said the editor.
Most editors have little chance, or even inclination, to write once in the job. But Simon Jenkins, who followed Wilson, was a writer then and, after his brief spell in charge, continued to write columns for The Times and, later, The Guardian. The newsroom found him rather distant and aloof but I enjoyed Simon’s short spell in charge because of his deep interest in policy. At the time, John Major and Michael Heseltine were finding a replacement to Margaret Thatcher’s unloved community charge (poll tax), a story that Simon and I were equally obsessed with. His regular tips to me on the latest developments that he had picked up as the Government finally devised the council tax were gratefully received. He used to unnerve his staff with quirky ideas for leaders. He perplexed sports editor Tom Clarke twice, once suggesting that the golf hole should be enlarged to make putting easier, and on another occasion suggesting that the goal in football should be widened to avoid boring scoreless draws.
Peter Stothard, who took over from Jenkins and edited for ten years, and Robert Thomson, who followed him, were genuine all-rounders, both interested in hard news stories and comment. Stothard, who had written for The Sunday Times, appointed me political editor in 1993. He presided over a big rise in the circulation of The Times during a newspaper price war, and he was another editor whose own contacts in Westminster and Whitehall gave him an abiding interest in politics and policy – extremely helpful if you happen to be writing about politics for the paper.
Thomson, an Australian who edited The Times from 2002 to 2007 after joining from the FT, has since gone on to become chief executive of News Corp. Having spent most of his career outside the UK, Robert took a deep interest in UK politics during his time in charge, particularly in the machinations in New Labour that saw Gordon Brown eventually succeed Tony Blair. A man with a sharp sense of humour, Thomson saw the funny side of Brown’s regularly thwarted efforts to reach the top, and he clearly enjoyed the lunches and dinners we arranged with the top politicos at party conferences. After taking over, he asked me to fix up a series of dinner dates so that he could get to know British politicians. After meeting one senior figure Thomson pronounced him to be a ‘tosser’ when he had barely got out of the door of the restaurant. I was frightened that he might have heard.
Another FT man, James Harding became one of the youngest editors of The Times in late 2007, after a spell as business editor, during which time we did several joint interviews of politicians (including then chancellor Alistair Darling and, later, Gordon Brown when he became PM). After I had been the election editor in 2010, Harding persuaded me to become editor of the Times website and the other digital editions (including the iPad and phone) after we adopted a ‘paywall’ for digital products. James was a popular editor with the newsroom but he was removed in late 2012, with some speculating that it was because of his strong criticism of the way News International had handled the phone-hacking dispute, while others cited falling circulation and rising costs.
One story that emerged during his time was the MP expenses scandal, a story that The Times and other papers could have had – rather than The Daily Telegraph – if it had bought a disk being hawked around newspapers containing all the details. A member of my team was contacted and at a meeting with an intermediary, reporters were asked for a large sum of money for the disk. The contact did not know what was on it but the very real impression gained was that it had been stolen. So we were being asked to pay upfront for a disk of whose contents we were unaware. The Times’s legal department advised that taking the disk could be seen as handling stolen goods and that we could not be sure of any public interest defence for doing so. That was the position Harding took and others, including The Sun, also turned it down. It was, however, the one that got away.
The disk containing information on the widespread abuse of MPs’ allowances was eventually bought by The Telegraph. They handled it and presented the stories contained in it brilliantly. Asked why the paper turned down the story when he appeared at the Leveson Inquiry, Harding said The Times had a general policy of not paying for stories and that ‘on this occasion we took the view that we shouldn’t be in the business of paying for stolen goods’. There were also concerns that there ‘might not be necessarily’ a public interest defence for buying the information. Harding said that ‘hindsight is a wonderful thing’ and that he now felt there would have been such a defence.
Another from the Wilson school of hard news is John Witherow, my ninth and last editor. He came back to The Times as editor in 2013, having first joined the paper as a reporter in 1980 and covered the Falklands war while on board HMS Invincible. He was editor of The Sunday Times for eighteen years and during his spell at The Times, it has picked up the ‘newspaper of the year’ gong in the annual Press Awards, now run by the Society of Editors. Like others who have been reporters on their way to the top, Witherow has the reporter’s enthusiasm for a good, hard story and the paper, which has managed to make a profit under him, has reflected that. It was his idea to go for the ‘Red Box’ morning e-mail which had me working from 5 a.m. every day for eighteen months at the end of my Times career.
I asked Times veterans recently to name their favourite editors and there was no unanimity. Some, like Stothard and Wilson, were regular patrollers of the newsroom and reporters got to know them better than others. Wilson came out well in my straw poll because of his appreciation of the art of story-getting. Harding – always charming and friendly – was liked by most. Some found Jenkins and Thomson occasionally remote but in private the latter has a marvellous sense of humour. Many appreciated Witherow’s moves to ensure more space was devoted to news. As with politicians, I made it my business to get on with them all – and I did.
For five decades, these were the men charged with maintaining the traditions of The Times and preserving the legacy of Delane and other giants of the past.