A Little Local Difficulty
Nobody in their right mind would have wanted to become editor of Tribune in May 1982. No rent or rates had been paid since the beginning of the year. There was an outstanding debt to the printers of £25,000, tax and national insurance contributions of several thousand pounds were owing for 1980 and 1981 and there was an outstanding libel bill. Sales of the paper had been in continuous decline for the previous twenty years and in the previous two years had started to haemorrhage.
Although not all of this was known to those of us on the staff at the time, we knew enough to realise there would not be a long queue of talented and ambitious applicants for the post of editor – at a salary of just £6,000 a year. I had other reasons for not applying. I had just completed my first novel and was anxious to write another. Above all, I realised that if I were to become editor and the paper were to go down the plughole – as seemed likely at the time – there would be a chorus of ‘this is what happens when the extremists take over’. So when the job was advertised I did not apply. Only after being approached by several colleagues, hours before the deadline, did I allow my name to go forward.
Although by the time I came on the scene it had fallen on hard times, Tribune had an illustrious history. Founded in 1937 by two wealthy left-wing MPs, Stafford Cripps and George Strauss, former editors included such Labour luminaries as Nye Bevan and Michael Foot; George Orwell had once been the paper’s literary editor and many other leading lights on the Labour left had been regular contributors. The annual Tribune rally was one of the highlights of the Labour Party conference. Although always loyal to the party, it had been a thorn in the side of successive Labour leaders. Even at the best of times its reputation had exceeded its circulation and, if truth be told, the paper had always been dependent on subsidy from wealthy supporters and sympathetic trade unions. Nevertheless, within the Labour movement it was a force to be reckoned with. I had been writing for it occasionally since the early 1970s and a part-time member of the editorial staff since leaving the BBC World Service in 1978.
The board of directors was responsible for appointing the editor. It consisted of six outsiders and four members of staff plus the outgoing editor, Richard Clements. The outsiders were two senior trade unionists, an academic and three Labour MPs – John Garrett, Neil Kinnock and Michael Meacher. I won seven of the eleven votes on the first ballot. Of the other three candidates, none received more than two votes. Clements made no attempt to conceal his disappointment at the outcome. Although we didn’t always see eye to eye, in many ways I admired him for his unfailing good humour and unstinting efforts to keep the paper afloat during his twenty-one years as editor. Although from the start I considered the paper to be grievously mismanaged, it was not until the election of former editor Michael Foot as party leader that serious differences between us began to emerge. These came to a head during the bitter contest for the Labour deputy leadership in the summer and autumn of 1981, during the course of which the paper remained neutral regarding Denis Healey and Tony Benn. It was then that the steady decline in the paper’s readership turned into a haemorrhage.
I took over as editor on 3 May 1982, as the Falklands war was getting under way. My first task was to detach the paper from the ridiculous stance then being taken by the Labour leadership – supporting the sending of the fleet, but not its use. We looked back through our archives to the Suez crisis in August 1956, when Foot had been editor. Sure enough, we found that Tribune then had been forthright in its opposition to the British fleet being sent to Suez. The parallel was not precise, but close enough. We reproduced Tribune’s front page of August 1956 and called for the task force to be brought home. Later we published an article strongly critical of Foot’s handling of the Falklands. This provoked strongly worded replies from Neil Kinnock and Michael Foot. Foot wrote: ‘I fear for Tribune … Never for long has Tribune been afflicted by infantile leftism. I hope it survives the present bout.’
My second issue carried an editorial setting out the policy the paper would follow: ‘This paper is not the property of any sect, tendency or personality … To have a say in Tribune it will not be necessary to agree with the editorial line of the paper. We will provide a forum, not only for our friends, but for our opponents. Informed controversy is healthy and we shall encourage it.’ I went on to pledge the paper’s ‘relentless’ opposition to the fudging of party policy, ‘unequivocal’ support for Labour Party and trade union democracy and ‘unbending’ resistance to those who wanted a purge of dissidents. Not everyone was happy with this approach. Joe Haines of the Daily Mirror told a mutual friend that the Mirror’s advertising would cease. It did, though not immediately. At the TUC Congress in September the Mirror placed a full-page advert denouncing Tony Benn and at the Labour Party conference a month later, in a parting shot, the Mirror took another full page to denounce Tribune. Then the adverts ceased.
Almost immediately Clive Jenkins, general secretary of the white-collar union, ASTMS, withdrew his union’s weekly advertisement. He was ordered by his executive to put it back in, but a few weeks later it was withdrawn as part of an ‘economy drive’. From every corner word reached us of trade union leaders planning to cut off or reduce their unions’ advertising and much of my time was spent trying to reassure them or frantically lobbying our friends in an effort to limit the damage.
Meanwhile, it soon became evident that the financial situation of the paper was a great deal worse than we had been led to believe. The printers were pressing for payment of their outstanding bills. A summons arrived from Camden Magistrates Court inviting me to appear and explain why no rates had been paid. The worst shock came in July – a bill from our landlords, the Transport and General Workers’ Union, demanding seven months’ unpaid rent. A month before his departure Richard Clements had told the board that he was negotiating with the deputy general secretary of the TGWU an arrangement under which Tribune would be given a one-year rent holiday. This was, he said, a confidential arrangement and should not be minuted. The subject had come up at more than one board meeting and Clements had been closely questioned about it. Suppose, he was asked, that after he had departed, the union denied all knowledge. Don’t worry, he said, just call me and I will sort it out. When the rent demand arrived we sent him a copy and asked for his comments. He did not respond.
Subsequently we obtained a copy of an internal union memorandum dated 27 September 1982 setting out Alex Kitson’s version of events. Kitson, the TGWU deputy general secretary, wrote, ‘Dick Clements came to see me to tell me of [Tribune’s] financial difficulties and asked to be spared payment of rent for one year. I said I couldn’t take a decision on this and it should be referred to the TGWU …’ In his next sentence Kitson said that, when Clements had resigned as editor, ‘he told me to forget the request’. He went on, ‘I have now spoken to Dick Clements on the phone, who confirms the position outlined above, that no such arrangement was ever entered into.’
The amount of rent outstanding by September was £7,000. We also owed £5,000 in rates and £3,600 in unpaid tax and insurance, in addition to the unpaid libel damages and costs. The printers’ bill stood at around £22,000. Just how serious the situation was became apparent only after the paper’s business manager, Carl James, left in July. He had been the candidate for my job favoured by Richard Clements. He did not work enthusiastically under my editorship and his letter of resignation was greeted with general relief. On the day of his departure he told me that we would be through the bottom of the overdraft by the end of the following week. An examination of the books showed that for some time James had been making little or no effort to collect money owing to us from advertising revenue. Some of the sums owed to us were considerable and would have gone a long way to meeting our debts. To avert disaster Sheila Noble and Sheila Marsh, two long-serving members of staff, set to work chasing up our largest debtors. Each week they managed to collect just enough money to keep us solvent. That was how we lived all summer.
On 25 August, three weeks after Carl James left, we received a letter from a former Tribune director, Lord Bruce of Donington. ‘I am increasingly perturbed,’ he wrote, ‘about the paper’s future within the perspective established originally by Aneurin Bevan and continued by his successors until comparatively recently.’ Lord Bruce went on to allege irregularities in the way the company was run. He pointed out – correctly – that no annual returns had been made to Companies House since 1979. He suggested – incorrectly – that the company was trading while insolvent and went on to call for a shareholders’ meeting to be convened ‘so that the development and present state of affairs of the company may be fully disclosed to the shareholders, employees, creditors and readers’. What Lord Bruce omitted to mention, however, was that most of the irregularities of which he complained had originated during his period as company secretary between 1973 and 1981. Despite his expression of concern for the health of the paper, he had attended only one board meeting in the final two years of his tenure. Twice he had been asked to stand down if he was unable to attend the monthly meetings. He had finally resigned in March 1981.
We realised at once that we were facing an attempted coup. At about this time we learned that a proposal was circulating in the House of Commons outlining a plan for taking over the paper and running it along lines more acceptable to the Labour Party and trade union leadership. The plan had been drafted by our erstwhile business manager, Carl James, and another former member of staff. We also learned that Richard Clements – who was by now a political adviser to Michael Foot – had given Foot a copy and tried to persuade him to back a takeover bid. In September the chairman of the company, Michael Meacher, went to see Foot and asked if the takeover would have his blessing. Foot said it would not and promised to make this clear to Lord Bruce. A little later Foot telephoned Meacher and said that he had seen Lord Bruce and we had nothing to fear. Relieved, we went ahead and fixed a shareholders’ meeting for 9 December.
Meanwhile, there had been a new outbreak of civil war in the Labour Party and Tribune was in the front line. At the end of May 1982 we had published a front-page article by Tony Benn warning that the Labour leadership had plans for watering down the party’s election manifesto. Then we learned that the party’s national executive committee was drawing up plans for a list of non-affiliated organisations in what was clearly a thinly disguised preparation for a purge of the left. The history of such purges is that they rapidly get out of hand. Last time around, in the mid-1950s, a purge which had started with the expulsion of a few Trotskyites ended up coming within a whisker of expelling Nye Bevan. ‘If there is one cast iron way of Labour losing the next election,’ we said in a leading article on 25 June, ‘it is by reopening the civil war which has engulfed the party for the last three years.’ The editorial went on: ‘Labour Party members around the country must be in despair that, even at this late hour, the parliamentary leadership is unable to fight Margaret Thatcher and the Social Democrats with a fraction of the enthusiasm they are able to muster for fighting members of their own party.’
The next week the Tribune Group of MPs voted narrowly to support the proposed register and, by implication, the coming purge. That week, in an editorial headed ‘The Death of the Tribune Group?’, we called on the left in Parliament to regroup and in the next few months more than thirty MPs abandoned the Tribune Group to set up a rival organisation, the Campaign Group. A few weeks later the annual conference endorsed the proposed register of non-affiliated organisations. That week Tribune’s leading article was headed, ‘You Cannot Have Unity and a Purge’. It was illustrated by a reproduction of a Tribune front page from August 1954 headed, I CALL THIS BAN AN OUTRAGE, over an article that denounced the purge as ‘stupid, cowardly and totalitarian’. The author had been Tribune’s then editor, Michael Foot.
By November there were indications that Labour’s policy on nuclear weapons was undergoing a subtle shift. While Michael Foot was prevaricating over Labour’s commitment to remove nuclear weapons from American bases, Denis Healey was being commendably frank. He said he would not serve in a government committed to getting rid of nuclear weapons. As for Labour’s defence spokesman, John Silkin, I had been trying to interview him on the subject for more than a year. When he declined I offered him space to write an article setting our readers’ minds at rest on Labour’s nuclear policy. When he did not respond, Tribune published a front-page leading article headed ‘When Will John Silkin Speak Out?’ The answer came sooner than we expected.
Despite Michael Foot’s assurance that we had nothing to fear, the staff viewed the approach of the shareholders’ meeting with apprehension. We were well aware that Tribune’s moribund shareholding structure left the paper vulnerable to takeover. The company had been set up in 1937 on an authorised share capital of 1,000 £1 shares. Of these only 423 had ever been allocated. There were twenty-seven original shareholders of whom eighteen or nineteen were dead. Among the living, Michael Foot held sixty shares, as did Jennie Lee (the widow of Aneurin Bevan). Another sixty were held by Lord Bruce, our former accountant. Of the remaining shares the Labour MP Russell Kerr and the former general secretary of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, Jack Jones, each had ten; so did John Platts-Mills QC, while a former editor, Jon Kimche, had five. So far as we could determine, the rest were held by the executors of shareholders long dead. No shareholder had been seen at Tribune since their last recorded meeting in 1972, and they had played no active part in the paper’s policy for as long as anyone could remember. Yet, in the event of a takeover bid, the only shares we could count on were the twenty held by Jack Jones and John Platts-Mills.
A month after I became editor, the paper’s board, in an effort to address this antiquated ownership structure, decided to turn the company into a friendly society in which readers would be invited to buy shares. The society would be controlled by a committee of management drawn from staff (who already had four seats on the existing board), representatives of reader-shareholders and a small number of distinguished outsiders. Besides placing the ownership of the paper on a sound footing the scheme would have had the additional advantage of raising some badly needed investment capital and of bringing readers closer to the paper. Precise details were still being worked out with the Registrar of Friendly Societies. Once we had the registrar’s approval we needed to seek the consent of the surviving shareholders. In the meantime, capital raised by the sale of shares in the friendly society was to be paid into the bank account of our solicitors. Fund-raising began in June 1982. One hundred thousand leaflets were distributed and the response was encouraging. By mid-1983, when we were finally forced to call a halt, about 750 readers had purchased more than £8,500 worth of shares. Shareholders included the new Labour leader Neil Kinnock.
‘When Will John Silkin Speak Out?’ appeared on 26 November. We did not have long to wait. That very afternoon a messenger arrived bearing an envelope from the offices of Lewis Silkin and Partners, the Silkin family firm of lawyers. The envelope contained a statement signed by Jennie Lee appointing John Silkin as her proxy at the forthcoming meeting of shareholders. It also contained a letter from Russell Kerr MP nominating John Silkin and Lord Bruce to the board along with three other existing directors. He did not nominate the editor or the other three worker-directors. Between them Messrs Silkin, Kerr and Lord Bruce had 130 shares. We were clearly in trouble. Over the weekend I took soundings from such good friends of Tribune as Tony Benn, Ian Mikardo and Jo Richardson. Their advice was unanimous: go public immediately. I then rang the chairman of the Tribune Group and asked to address their meeting scheduled for the following Monday.
I was not popular with many Tribune Group MPs. Although as editor of Tribune I had a standing invitation to attend its weekly meetings, I had only made the occasional appearance. Partly because the timing of the meetings – four o’clock on Monday afternoons – did not fit with the paper’s tight production schedule and partly because I was anxious to play down the cosy relationship that had developed under the previous editor between Tribune and the parliamentary Labour party. Nevertheless, I was given a fairly sympathetic hearing at a well-attended meeting. By the time I emerged everyone knew what was happening because I had left an embargoed statement with the parliamentary press gallery. Since the staff lacked the shares to win a vote at the shareholders’ meeting our only hope was to arouse sufficient indignation within the Labour movement to dissuade Silkin from taking over. Messages of support began to flood in, many from people who did not agree with the paper’s editorial line. The publicity also had the effect of forcing Silkin and his colleagues to come clean about their plans. Lord Bruce told the Guardian it was ‘possible’ they would be appointing a new editor. He said, ‘The paper’s never fallen into the hands of any ruddy sect. I think it has gone too far in that direction.’ In a BBC interview Russell Kerr said, ‘We think a major sectarian element has entered the paper … it is now a Trotskyist publication.’ Our editorial on the day of the shareholders’ meeting, signed by every member of staff, was headed, ‘We Shall Not Be Moved’.
The meeting itself was an ill-tempered affair. Silkin demanded an apology for the editorial in that day’s issue in which he was described as ‘a rich and ambitious lawyer’. When none was forthcoming he hinted darkly at a libel suit. More light relief was provided by Russell Kerr, who fell asleep during the meeting and woke up to find himself voting for me by mistake. Silkin and Bruce had initially planned to remove me and the three worker-directors from the board until Jack Jones pointed out that it would not look good if a member of Parliament sponsored by the Transport and General Workers’ Union were seen to be turfing worker-directors off the board. At this point Silkin, Bruce and Kerr went into a huddle and announced that they were prepared to accept two worker-directors. Sheila Noble and Sheila Marsh, the two longest serving members of staff, were then re-elected Advertising manager; George Hopkins, and I were then replaced by Silkin and Bruce. The four outside directors were re-elected.
My removal from the board was widely interpreted as meaning that I was no longer in charge of Tribune’s editorial policy, but I remained editor and Silkin’s supporters were still a minority in the boardroom. It was, however, open to them at any time to call another shareholders’ meeting and conduct a clean sweep. We realised this was what would happen if we tried to transfer the business to the proposed friendly society. We consulted lawyers and were advised that, under the terms of the 1980 Finance Act, it was possible for the board to establish an employee shareholding scheme. We were also advised that, since only 423 of the original 1,000 shares had so far been allocated, there was nothing to stop the board distributing the remainder among the staff.
The staff representatives, therefore, summoned a special shareholders’ meeting for the morning of 23 December. The meeting was attended by the two staff representatives, the chairman Michael Meacher, and our solicitors, Michael Seifert and Sarah Burton. Of the other directors one could not attend, but gave his consent to the proposed employee shareholding scheme by telephone during the meeting. Another came in later that day and signified his consent by signing the share certificates. Silkin and Bruce gave their apologies.
The board went on to award me a three-year contract and approved applications from nine of the ten staff members for fifty shares each. The staff now had 450 shares between them, against the 130 that Silkin and Bruce could muster. We issued a press statement announcing the changes and went home for Christmas and to await Silkin’s reaction.
A fortnight later each member of staff received by special delivery a letter from Silkin and Bruce denouncing the employee shareholding scheme as invalid and threatening legal action. At the next board meeting on 13 January they attempted to cancel both the scheme and my contract, but were defeated by three votes to two. Silkin and Bruce then proposed that Michael Meacher and I meet with them to see if a compromise could be found. If no agreement was reached within seven days, said Silkin, he would sue.
Negotiations took place in Silkin’s room in the House of Commons. At first they were amicable. It was agreed that my contract be reduced to one year (I had no intention of staying much longer anyway). Silkin and Bruce offered to accept employee shareholders if the staff promised not to use their shares for a period of one year. The staff agreed, provided that Silkin and Bruce gave a similar undertaking. They declined and the talks broke down. A few days later writs were served on the company, on Michael Meacher as chairman and on each of the nine new shareholders seeking damages on the grounds that (a) two of the directors should have been disqualified from taking part in the meeting that allocated shares, since as workers they stood to benefit; and (b) that our motives in setting up the scheme were self-serving. As the 1980 Finance Act is silent on the subject of motivation, the outcome of any legal action would depend on a judge’s interpretation of what was reasonable. Apart from which the spectacle of a Labour MP petitioning the courts to disqualify worker-directors from taking part in board decisions on the grounds that, as workers, they stood to benefit, is one that all connoisseurs of Labour movement intrigue will savour. As a member of the Shadow Cabinet Silkin had helped compile Labour’s draft manifesto, which promised ‘we will bring in legislation to provide, where employees choose, for parity representation between workers and representatives of shareholders on the main policy board’.
Immediately we set about raising the money to repel the invaders. A Friends of Tribune fund was launched by three sympathetic Labour MPs, Ian Mikardo, Judith Hart and Jo Richardson. This quickly raised £7,500. In January Silkin and I addressed the Tribune Group MPs, after which a resolution was carried calling on him to drop the action. One MP told him, ‘If you sink Tribune, you’ll never be forgiven.’ Newspaper coverage was sympathetic (the fight with Silkin was one of the few campaigns with which I have ever been involved that, from the outset, enjoyed a sympathetic press). The Observer published a leading article roundly condemning Silkin. It said, ‘The next time he or any of his colleagues chooses to summon up the bogey of the capitalist press, the only proper response will be a loud and resounding chorus of jeers.’
We began to receive telephone calls from members of John Silkin’s constituency party in Deptford asking what they could do to help. ‘Invite me to your branch meeting,’ I replied. To my astonishment I received invitations to seven of the eight branches and each in due course passed a resolution calling on him either to drop the writs or stand down as an MP. I was then invited – along with Silkin – to address the Deptford Labour Party management committee. He spoke, I spoke, and then the resolution was put to the vote. By forty-three votes to nine the committee ordered that he should drop the writs or step down. Five days later a general election was announced. Silkin was safe for the time being, but his reputation was in tatters.
In contrast to the support we received elsewhere there was an eerie silence from trade union leaders. When the Tribune staff wrote to Moss Evans, general secretary of the Transport and General Workers’ Union – of which Silkin was a member – they received no reply. When I raised the matter with his deputy, Alex Kitson, he informed me that he was neutral. The Campaign for Press Freedom, which was heavily dependent on trade union funding, confined itself to anodyne pronouncements urging conciliation on all sides, until its annual meeting seven months later voted for a resolution critical of Silkin. There was an eerie silence, too, from former Tribune editor and Labour leader Michael Foot. Had he chosen to speak out, he could at any time have stopped what was happening.
The dispute dragged on for another two years. It soon became apparent that, while Silkin and Bruce were not keen to see the legal action reach court, they were not prepared to drop it. Two further attempts were made to achieve a negotiated settlement, one presided over by Ian Mikardo and one by John Jennings of the Campaign for Press Freedom. Both attempts broke down when it became clear that Silkin and Bruce were not prepared to accept any formula which did not leave them in control. They continued to suffer from the delusion that they were the only rightful owners of the paper’s tradition and remained on the board throughout most of the following year, but made no further attempt to interfere in the running of the paper. In November 1983 they turned up to a board meeting and unleashed a torrent of abuse, mostly directed against me. They then announced they were resigning and stormed out. I held the door open for them.
Although we succeeded in preserving Tribune’s independence, it would be wrong to pretend that Silkin and Bruce inflicted anything other than great damage on the paper’s fragile economy. We had to abandon plans for a friendly society and consequently for the relaunch. The money we had raised remained in the bank account of our solicitors until August 1984, when we were obliged to offer it back to those who had subscribed. Happily, most of them returned it to us as a donation. Although we stopped the spiral of decline into which Tribune was locked at the time I became editor, we did not succeed in reversing it. We did, however, produce a substantially better product than had been seen for some years, an improvement that even our severest critics acknowledged. We did so with an editorial staff which at no time consisted of more than four people. Anyone falling ill stretched the system to breaking point. In my first two years as editor I had just six days’ holiday.
However rough the going got we continued to uphold the Tribune tradition – providing a platform for all shades of opinion within the Labour movement, including some of our bitterest critics. Michael Foot, Neil Kinnock and Roy Hattersley were among those who wrote for the paper during my time as editor. Even John Silkin was eventually persuaded to set out his version of events in our pages. Anyone who felt they had been maligned or misrepresented was given space to reply. When we made mistakes we owned up forthwith. We were, in short, the kind of newspaper to which many trade union and Labour leaders pay lip service. Yet my experience at Tribune taught me that many of those same leaders would have about as much difficulty in coming to terms with a free press as, say, Rupert Murdoch.