Reliving The Times

To be deemed successful, post-modern editors know that the stories mustcome, the bottomline sing, and the telephone wires hum—with celebrity invites. Nolonger are they cultured Oxbridgish pontificators from booklined offices. Now they areworking class busybodies, who have to manage, write, network, and posture in public. Thepost-modern editor is the most adulterated of professionals: part-politician,part-scholar, part-businessman, and part-social butterfly. In a word, his life story isinteresting.

Andrew Neil is especially so. And not merely because of Pamella Bordes.In a 10-year stint (1983-93) as editor of Rupert Murdoch’s Sunday Times, Neil tastedenormous infamy and success. High profile, controversial, go-getting, Neil became helmsmanof the world’s most famous  Sunday paper at the relatively tender age of 34,plucked by Murdoch from The Economist where he had been working for 10 years. Thelegendary Harold Evans had been eased out of Sunday Times by Murdoch, who was clearly insearch of a more malleable editor who conformed to his politics (and business).Evans’ departure had put Sunday Times into serious decline. And as Murdoch fought toconsolidate his rather large foothold in the British media, the paper’s circulationwas falling. Its clout had been eroded by a weak editorial direction and lazy journalism;and the print unions were tripping it over regularly with inspired cussedness (for someweeks the paper could not print on Saturday nights because every weekend as the paper wasreadying to go to print some workers at the foundry where the pages were cast onto metaldrums stopped work complaining of a mysterious smell that they simply could not tolerate:the management despite strenuous efforts could not locate the cause: the smell was finally"dispersed by waving handfuls of £5 notes in front of their noses").

As Neil confesses, he had no elaborate rehabilitation agenda, just afierce conviction about getting back to the classical strengths of good reporting, cleareditorial-ising and comprehensive packaging. And though he does not mention it, a tastefor the sensational. All of it proved easier said than done: he had to get in good people,buy out the resignations of the bad (and the uncomfortable), and scrap it out with theunions in ways perilous to his physical well-being. He managed all that and went on tounspool a series of scoops that earned Sunday Times the world’s attention,and setcirculation spiralling.

Among his journalistic coups were Peter Wright’s Spycatcherextracts; the blowing up of Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior by French agents; the armingof Saddam Hussein by British firms aided by a minister; the funding of the Tories byoverseas tycoons; and the most famous of them all, the investigation that revealed thatIsrael had secretly acquired nuclear weapon capability. In his time, Sunday Times alsotook on the task of debunking the established myth that an AIDS epidemic was set toexplode, and through facts and statistics set out to prove that its strike rate amongheterosexuals was very low, and it was essentially the outcome of intravenous drug use andanal sex, hence largely confined to addicts and homosexuals. Then there were the localscoops, among them the most famous being the story that established the Queen was veryupset with Maggie Thatcher.

All this involved bruising battles with the government, the palace, and otherentrenched interests. It meant court cases and death threats, sleepless nights andextremely insecure moments. There was also the constant carping from Britain’sEstablishment, which saw Neil as an arriviste, a crude hell-raiser who represented thearch interloper himself, Murdoch. To Neil’s credit he gave as good as he got. Heattacked the British class system and the liberal left consensus as the two mindsets thathad throttled British initiative and energy, and compared it unfavourably with Americansociety, where social mobility and a market economy had rung in such vibrance andprosperity. Murdoch had no problems with all this.

IN fact, Neil goes to some pains to show that Murdoch had very fewproblems with him. Or, more specifically, that he seldom received the Murdoch treatmentwhich was routinely meted out to other editors of his empire. This "telephoneterrorism" had reduced the editors to gibber-ing wrecks, living in dread of the SunKing’s call. For example, Kelvin MacKenzie of the tabloid Sun endured almost daily"bollock-ings". Neil quotes a top executive as saying: "Kelvin used to gointo great depressions after Rupert’s onslaughts. When you run the most successfultabloid in the world it is not nice being regularly told you’re a f****** idiot byyour proprietor." 

The chapter on Murdoch, At the Court of the Sun King, is the mostinteresting in the book—and will prove valuable reading for Indian mediapersons (R.Basu, for one), since he now hovers over our territory, scanning the possibilities,testing the chinks in the legalistic armour. Neil psychoanalyses Murdoch, with interestinganecdotes, to find that the world’s most powerful media baron is a largely privateperson but possessed of a matchless ambition and ruthlessness, with the shrewdest mind inthe game. Perpetually restless, perpetually competitive, obsessed with the art of thedeal, the only two things that interest him are politics and business—and the firstbecause it impinges on the latter. For example, he makes no friends, since it can come inthe way of business. But Neil also found him to be someone he could count on in a tightspot. When Harrod’s threatened to withdraw their huge advertising contract fromSunday Times over an unfriendly story, Murdoch backed Neil and told them to get lost; andwhen Robert Maxwell overstepped the bounds in lobbying Murdoch to stop publication ofdamning extracts, Murdoch bawled him out, and let Neil go ahead. 

The persona of the all-powerful baron who haunts the thoughts and livesof his executives all waking hours, capable of making or marring their day with a singlesentence, is clearly a very seductive one. I’m sure media barons revel in the thoughtthat they can toy with the minds and careers of influen-tial editors who shape and focusthe opinions of millions everyday. In a sense, crudely, it is the revenge of money onmind. It is a paradox unique unto media, where an owner can carry on a bruising ego battlewith his own chief executive, and actually fantasise about landing his employee’sjob! The ultimate triumph for such a baron is to somehow turn the publication into aproduct, like soap or chips,that comes mindlessly off a pre-set assembly line, rather thana creative item that is shaped afresh everyday. Not surprisingly, many Indian media baronsfashion themselves, perhaps unwittingly, after Murdoch—Samir Jain comes to mind. Butfor them Neil has cautionary tales: Murdoch’s bad management style results in largelydemoralised executives, who spend their time second-guessing the boss rather thaninnovating and moving on. Neil is humble enough to admit that Murdoch and he got along, atboth a professional and personal level, and that’s the reason Sunday Times became apowerhouse.

Apart from Murdoch, Neil’s book is very interesting for theinsights it provides into important events that were shaping the world during his tenure.Neil writes briskly, his canvas large, commenting freely on economics, politics andpersonalities. And yes, there is a chapter on Pamella Bor-des, and it’s a bloodybore. Sex for social mobility is tantalising stuff, but there’s nothing new here:we’ve seen fuller disclosures of her in the past.