The Prince of Wales gave me my first front-page story for The Times. When, on 13 June 1974, he delivered his maiden speech to the House of Lords, I was deemed to have the shorthand necessary to handle the occasion.
It was a debate about leisure and I wrote that he had called for better coordination of facilities ‘to remove the dead hand of boredom and frustration from mankind’. Not the most exciting intro to grace the front page, but the paper was altogether more formal in those days. Sitting alongside my story, as I look at an original copy of the paper, is a political story that begins: ‘Mr Heath last night announced a reshuffle of his front-bench spokesmen after the appointment of Mr Whitelaw as Conservative party chairman.’ Note no ‘Edward’ or ‘William’ in front of Heath and Whitelaw.
This book has been about my career at The Times but I will just mention one big byline that came before I joined the paper. At the end of my full-year journalism course at Harlow in Essex, for which I had been sponsored by my first paper the Eastern Daily Press, I had the thrill of writing the splash below in The Harlow Sentinel, our course paper produced at the end of the year.
The chap with whom I share the byline is indeed the same Mark Knopfler who went on to become one of the most successful guitarists in the world, the founder and frontman of Dire Straits, and who is now still touring the world and writing his songs as he enjoys a wonderful solo career. Mark joined the Yorkshire Evening Post after college but went on to become a world star in another sphere and remains a great friend. We often have breakfast together to put the world to rights.
The style of that 1974 paper is yet another reminder of how much newspapers – and The Times in particular – have altered in the last five decades. My job changed beyond all recognition. On that momentous day when we moved to Wapping in 1986, I used a computer for the first time. But I never used a typewriter after that. Our method of sending stories while out of the office moved from the copy-taker, to the Tandy machine which had to be linked up to a landline, to the occasional story texted on a mobile phone, and then to the simple e-mail by phone or any other device. We started using e-mails in 1996 and invited readers to send in letters via e-mail the following year. Transmitting stories to the office today is so much easier than when you had to run around looking for public phones or knocking on people’s doors and asking if you could borrow theirs.
The Times, the paper that ran classified adverts on the front page until 1966, has modernized time and time again. But its ethos – informative, straight, accurate reporting and sharp, innovative, incisive comment – has remained the same through the generations. And working for it has been utterly rewarding.
I could never have dreamt when I joined in February 1973 as a junior reporter in the Commons Press Gallery that I would still be at the paper forty-three years later, having written many thousands of stories and served as chief political correspondent and political editor through an amazing period in British politics. Or that I would finish my Times days as an assistant editor of the paper, still writing about politics in a groundbreaking daily e-mail to tens of thousands of subscribers, including anyone who moved and shook in Westminster and Whitehall.
Through most of my four decades and more, print has been king. But with the demise in early 2016 of the print editions of The Independent and its Sunday sister, both becoming digital-only productions, the future of print journalism has again come under scrutiny. Circulations have fallen, advertising revenue has dropped, journalists have been laid off all over the world as the internet and social media have become the preferred method of receiving breaking news for millions of people (as well as siphoning off the advertising cash that would otherwise have gone to the papers).
Online newspapers can supplement their storytelling and comment with audios and videos, as well as directing readers to their archives for historical stories at a handful of keystrokes. For many young people, the BBC and newspaper websites or social media are the way of getting news that they have grown up with. Many have never bought a paper. For me, in recent years Twitter was easily the fastest source of incoming news as I ran the Times website.
For people whose lives have been immersed in print journalism, this has all happened with worrying speed. It is quite obvious that papers can only survive long-term if they embrace the digital model as well. But the death of newspapers is greatly exaggerated. The Times may be an exception but its print circulation today is massively greater than it was when I joined it. True, that circulation has come down since the heady days of the price war in the 1990s when we virtually gave it away.
The Times was also the first truly to acknowledge the digital era by introducing a paywall for its website and being among the first to launch an iPad version. Fully realizing I was taking the short straw, I accepted James Harding’s invitation – still gasping from the 2010 election and my thirty-seven straight years at Westminster – to become the first editor of the paywalled site and see the number of reader hits drop by millions virtually overnight as they were suddenly asked to cough up. But The Times is The Times and its readers are the most loyal in the business. It was not long before our digital-only subscribers passed the 100,000 mark and, with a newly designed website based on editions at different times of the day launched in early 2016, both the print and digital sides of the paper continue to do well. The word ‘profit’, not traditionally associated with The Times, has been whispered quietly in recent years.
I believed that when we erected the paywall, others would swiftly follow, meaning a more level playing-field between the papers. It did not really happen but it may be the only route to survive for some in the future, although so long as the BBC website remains free – and therefore highly unfair competition – it will be an uphill struggle.
The Independent went digital in the end because it was not selling enough papers. But most papers still get the majority of their revenue from print advertising. Online ad sales would never at this stage be enough to support big newspaper companies. Reading habits are cyclical and just as reading books has become fashionable again for young people, papers – particularly the ‘qualities’ – must find ways of attracting them if they are to keep the print as well as the digital circulations steady.
Readers devoted to the print versions cite the pleasure they enjoy in just holding the paper before them and turning over the pages, knowing where to find the pieces in which they are interested. Readers who are often bamboozled by the 24-hour news cycle, needing to make sense of what is going on in the world, turn to the long-form stories in print to tell them. And stories still make more of an impact in print than those that appear only online. They last longer than their online counterparts, which disappear swiftly within hours when another story comes along. Communications companies are always happier if the stories and lines they are pushing appear in print rather than online.
Let’s be honest about this – newspapers have dumbed down over the years as the availability of instant tweets telling you what has happened at the Commons or in court, and 24-hour news television, have shortened the attention span of readers. But because there will always be a need for in-depth reporting and comment to flesh out the 140-character news flashes, I am more optimistic about the future of journalism and newspapers than some of my friends and former colleagues. But all will have to change to survive.
Politics, too, has changed beyond recognition. It has always been a ‘rough old trade’, as Alan Watkins used to tell us in virtually all his columns in The Observer. And if you recall that in 1948 Aneurin Bevan called the Conservatives ‘lower than vermin’, or the reputed exchange between Winston Churchill and Bessie Braddock – ‘Mr Churchill, you are drunk.’ Reply: ‘And you, madam, are ugly, but in the morning I will be sober.’ – you might think little is different, but it is. Politicians have watched helpless as power has drained away from them and the House of Commons – some of it to Europe, some to Whitehall, some to the multinational companies.
I’ve written of how newspapers like The Times used to have many more reporters covering the proceedings of Parliament – i.e. what was said – than what went on in the corridors outside. Little today gets reported after Question Time and government statements. The Commons can still make or break a minister, or indeed a government, if they fail to get the votes needed in a particular division, but speeches made after showpiece events of the day tend to be aimed purely at the local papers and broadcasters of the MP in question. Most MPs would happily spurn the chance to speak in the chamber if they had been invited by a broadcaster to appear on the green outside the Houses of Parliament.
And it was interesting that after his dramatic resignation in March 2016, the political world waited excitedly for Iain Duncan Smith’s grilling on The Andrew Marr Show rather than any appearance he might make in the House. An interview on the Today programme or Newsnight is now held to have more influence on events than anything the politician might say in the Commons. Politicians believe the relationship with the press has swung against them, with the media now almost taking on the role of elected politicians. But their answer has been to court the owners and editors in a way that has somehow looked demeaning.
MPs, too, have lost power over their own parties. When I started and for some time after, it was the MPs who elected their leaders and prime ministers. But both the main parties have now handed over that task to the party memberships, meaning again that the performance of the politicians on the television or the Today programme – not in the House of Commons – is what will be judged by the members when they come to cast their vote for a new leader
And the make-up of the Commons is very different from when I started. A former Guardian political correspondent, Julia Langdon, reported in a BBC programme in 2015 that the background from which today’s MPs are elected is almost exclusively that of the comfortable middle classes. While this might have been expected given the rise in living standards and the growth of university education, it is still remarkable that forty years ago there were more than thirty miners, twenty engineering workers, many other manual workers and a total of over 150 teachers sitting in the Commons.
Many MPs in the 1970s, notably the lawyers – of whom there were more than 150 – had other jobs, paid employment which enabled them to afford a relatively affluent lifestyle. That was one reason why Parliament did not sit until the afternoons – to enable those who wished to do so to earn their money in the mornings. Some had family money, others had business interests. But the majority had to live on a pretty meagre parliamentary salary. Today’s would not be regarded as generous by people who have the means to earn more. Most head teachers and GPs today earn more than our MPs.
But there are few who are not university educated and few who have much experience of working in industry. As Langdon related, David Cameron was canny enough to get a job working in public relations for a TV company, when he had already worked as a Conservative adviser for six years and had perhaps spotted that his lack of outside experience could have been a career handicap. Now the miners and the plumbers and the telephone engineers are almost all long gone and at the last count there were just twenty-four teachers.
MPs have become more diverse in terms of gender and ethnic background. But they have become less varied in terms of their educational background, and the extent to which they represent the changing world outside Westminster. The first female MP was elected in 1918 and, according to a Commons paper, 143 women MPs were elected in the 2010 general election, twenty-two per cent of the total. The first contemporary black and minority ethnic MPs were elected in 1987 and the number has grown since then. Following the 2010 general election, there were twenty-seven minority ethnic MPs – eleven Conservative and sixteen Labour.
Over seventy-five per cent of current MPs are graduates; in the period 1918 to 1945, around forty per cent were. As the numbers of MPs with manual and legal backgrounds has fallen, so the number with a professional political background has increased. In 2010, fourteen per cent of MPs from the three main parties had previously been politicians or political organizers, compared to around three per cent up to 1979. Somehow – and these changes in make-up explain it – politics is more workaday than it was.
Occasionally politics throws up big characters, such as Boris Johnson. But in general, Parliament lacks the giants of yesteryear – the names, the brilliant speakers who could hold the chamber in the palm of their hands, who would send MPs and reporters scurrying back to their seats in the House and the Press Gallery.
Just look, whatever your political leanings, at the big figures in the troubled Labour Government of 1974–79 – Wilson, Callaghan, Jenkins, Crosland, Foot, Williams, Castle, Healey, Benn. Look at the first Thatcher Government – Whitelaw, Carrington, Hailsham, Howe, Joseph, Pym, Walker, Heseltine, Prior. Look at the former Liberal leaders – Grimond, Ashdown, Kennedy. Compare them with the politicians on today’s front-benches. This is not one veteran reporter complaining about the end of a political golden age but I don’t think I’m being unduly sentimental in suggesting there is little comparison on the personnel front.
For the political journalist so much has changed, but so much remains the same – particularly the joy of breaking a big story or the satisfaction of following a story all day and then presenting it well in a way that the reader can easily understand. Politics remains in my view – along with sport – the most exciting area of journalism to be involved in. It is dominated by personalities and it is the area that on a consistent, day-by-day basis provides more good stories than any other.
I can’t say that every single day at The Times was great. But ninety-nine per cent of them were. Thanks for reading.