Irresistible force,unmovable object

When Harry Evans died in September, the obituaries rightly focused on his achievements in the 14 years that he edited The Sunday Times, as the inspiring leader of talented and fiercely loyal journalists who created a newspaper famed for its persistent and successful campaigning, often against seemingly insurmountable odds. Less was made of the inglorious end of that phase of his professional life. When the time comes to appraise the contribution to journalism of his nemesis Rupert Murdoch, I wonder how much weight will be placed on how he cut short the career of the most gifted British editor of the 20th century.

Murdoch bought Times Newspapers from the Thomson organisation in 1981. To gain the necessary approval for the acquisition from the British Establishment – an entity that he has always despised – he paid lip service to editorial independence. Yet his record as a proprietor showed that, unlike the Thomsons, he was not prepared to leave the running of his papers to their editors and management. He recognised that in this context the much-admired Evans was not so much an asset as a problem. To keep him on as leader of his close-knit team would be to endorse an alternative power base that would threaten his proprietorial autonomy. His solution was to offer Evans the editorship of The Times: an offer that Evans was ultimately unlikely to refuse, despite the doubts he admitted to in this riveting and frank – if inevitably self-serving – memoir. It is not impossible that Murdoch thought, as he claimed, that Evans would be as brilliant an editor of the daily title as he had been of the Sunday, but it is more likely he regarded his tenure as strictly temporary. He has, after all, a history of falling out with editors who threatened to outshine him – think Andrew Neil, Larry Lamb, Kelvin MacKenzie.

In the book, Evans revealed that even before the Thomson group decided to sell the papers, because of their failure to quell the disruptive tactics of the print unions, he had been thinking of quitting newspapers for television. Yet when the group was put up for sale, his first reaction was to try to organise a consortium of investors to buy The Sunday Times, divorcing it from the daily paper and giving the staff a powerful voice in running it. He did receive credible promises of financial backing, but it soon became apparent that the Thomsons would not consider selling the titles separately and that Murdoch was their favoured bidder for the company as a whole.

Evans met Murdoch and then rejected a suggestion from colleagues that he should write an editorial attacking the prospect of a Murdoch takeover. “In the light of events, they were right and I was wrong to resist them,” he conceded. When offered the job on The Times, he was aware that Murdoch’s principal motive was to remove him from his power base, but he was confident that, with his friends in high places, he could ensure that the new proprietor adhered to the pledges of editorial autonomy that he had made so publicly. His confidence was misplaced. He was not the first nor the last to flatter themselves that they could tame the Antipodean beast where so many had failed.

The second half of the book gave a detailed and embittered account of the Bad Times – the author’s skirmishes with the proprietor in his turbulent year as editor. Murdoch was able to exploit what Evans himself described as his “editing theory of maximum irritation”. The new editor took with him a few of his closest allies from The Sunday Times, but for the most part those destined to become irritated were those he described dismissively as “the old guard”. In fact, there was no such all-embracing grouping. There were, it was true, still some on the staff who in 1970 had signed a notorious letter accusing Evans’s predecessor, the demure William Rees-Mogg, of taking the paper too far downmarket. These could legitimately be described as the old guard, but most of the staff he inherited were competent professionals keen to be given clear instructions and to get on with the job. They found Evans’s style not only irritating but unhelpful and disruptive. As The Times correspondent in New York for the first months of the new regime, I was isolated from the direct effects of the chaos, but was made aware of it in the occasional exasperated sighs and contradictory messages from the foreign desk.

Murdoch was kept up to speed on all this by the ambitious Charles Douglas-Home, Evans’s disloyal deputy – and, ironically, a scion of the Establishment that Murdoch deplores. Despite his pledges of editorial non-interference, Murdoch constantly goaded Evans about his editorials on foreign policy and economics, and in particular his lack of full-throated support for Margaret Thatcher’s government. There were, too, endless squabbles over editorial expenditure. After a year of this guerrilla warfare, he asked Evans to step down, using staff unrest as a pretext. The embattled editor resisted for a week before accepting the inevitable, and was replaced by Douglas-Home.

By 2009, when he wrote his definitive autobiography My Paper Chase (Little, Brown, pp515, £25), his animosity towards Murdoch had worn off. By then, he had moved to New York with his second wife Tina Brown, started a second family, and embarked upon a successful new career in publishing. “I have no residual hostility towards him,” he wrote. “On the contrary, I have found many things to admire: his managerial effectiveness, his long love affair with newspapers, his courage in challenging the big three television networks in America with a fourth, and altogether in pitting his nerve and vision against timid conventional wisdom.” Like most of us who had suffered from the restrictive practices of the print unions, he singled out Murdoch’s achievement in outflanking them in his moonlight flit to Wapping – even if the subsequent golden age of print journalism has turned out to be rather shorter than we all hoped.

As for The Times, it survived the histrionics of that first year and, under Murdoch’s continued ownership, has adapted well to the digital age to become the leading British upmarket daily. We can never know whether Evans, had he been allowed, could have been one of its greatest editors.