The press
Thunderer in Chaos Shock
Paul Johnson
If Budget week was a rough one for the Government, it turned out a disaster for The Times under its new editor, Harold Evans. This newspaper, above all others, stands or falls by its reputation as a 'journal of record', that is by its daily presentation of the news fully, calmly, objectively and accurately. Gimmickry and sensationalism, speculation and guesswork, have to be avoided, however tempting they may be. The budget poses special problems for a journal of record, both because it unleashes an enormous quantity of important news in a rush, some of which is very difficulty to present clearly, and because a great deal of that news is of great significance to readers, notably to Top People, who have institutional as well as family responsibilities. Budgets generate high emotions: it is particularly important, then, that The Times should keep a clear head.
This budget should have come as no surprise, since The Times correctly forecast, the Monday before, that it would be 'bleak', under the headline 'Chancellor Set to Raise Taxes by f3,000m.' — not much below target, as it happened — and predicted, with justice, `sharp increases in the price of beer and other drinks, petrol and cigarettes'.. Indeed, ten days before, the need for a tough budget had been adumbrated by The Times in an ominous front-page group of stories under a five-column head: 'Worsening economic crises put Cabinet under pressure'. Not crisis in the singular, mark you, but crises/ It was strange then, that the paper chose to sensationalise the budget when it actually came, using the headline which we all thought was the copyright of the Morning Star and kept in permanent type there: 'Harsh budget for workers but more for business'. The sub-head summary moaned about 'Unexpectedly harsh tax increases', though they can't have come as a surprise to readers of The Times and it included a mystic sentence: 'But, for business, minimum lending rate was reduced by two percentage points'. Even attentive readers might suppose this to mean that cuts in interest rates did not apply to individual borrowers, especially 'workers', and that those with house mortgages would not benefit. A further headline, 'Inflation stays in double figures' turned out to be, when you read the story below, merely a forecast adjusted upwards to take account of the budget's inflationary side-effects, and the rest of the story was a curious muddle of budget snippets, lobby gossip and speculation.
In fact the paper did have a front-page story, under the heading 'Chancellor's measures stake all on restoring the eco nomy' which gave a matter-of-fact summary of the budget's main strategy, of the type which ought to have led the paper. But it was shoved well down-column, perhaps because it seemed to contradict much of the stuff above it. So, needless to say, did the main lead in the Times Business News which, repudiating the front-page splash's notion of bloated capitalists throwing their top hats in the air, announced grimly: 'Budget dismays City and industry despite cut in lending rate'. With all this discord around him, no wonder Mr Evans felt the leader had to begin: 'Sir Geoffrey Howe's Third Budget is something of a conundrum' — thus breaking the golden rule of leaderwriting taught to me by the late Aylmer Valiance many years ago: 'Never begin a leader with a sentence implying you don't know what it's all about'.
The sub-editors in charge of the front page kept up the sensationalism throughout the week. 'Chancellor under savage attack from all quarters', they bellowed on Thursday, adding in somewhat , smaller type below: 'Hostility to the Budget swept upon the Government from almost all sides of the nation yesterday'. I like that 'almost': was it the still, small voice of the old 'nines conscience? In general, however, the frontpage chaps don't believe in qualifications. 'The universities', they thundered, 'predicted a disintegration into chaos' as a result of the budget. This was scaled down in the story beneath into 'Britain's university, system is likely to disintegrate into chaos and this itself, as one has wearily learned to expect, was not hard news at all but speculation as to what the University Grants Committee and Vice-Chancellors might tell the Government. 'Chaos' and 'disintegration' turned out to be the possl' bility that some dons might be sacked, 3 catastrophe with which the rest of us might learn to live quite comfortably. The Times's 'Apocalypse Now' brigade were at it again on Saturday. 'Thatcher fear of leaks stopped Budget discussion' ran its main headline. Wow! Did this mean that the Iron Lady brutally terminated the, budget Cabinet on the grounds that 'wet ministers would otherwise instantly sneak off to New Printing House Square? Well,, no: not exactly. The piece below scaled down the story to a mere refusal 'to discuss in advance the general strategy of the budget. Her main reason is fear of leaks to the media'. The actual story was still less appetising: Mrs Thatcher had just said `Sh? cannot agree to any change of procedure • This reminded me that, 30 years ag°' Aneurin Bevan used to make exactly the same complaint about there being 11,0 proper examination of the budget 01 Cabinet, and Barbara Castle and pick Crossman grumbled that when they joined, the Cabinet, 13 years later, nothing at ah had changed. So what's new? Even the bl,t about Mrs Thatcher's fear of leaks didn t stand up when you read the story beloW: which was couched in more cautious terms.. 'Her main reason, apparently, is that she fears there would be leaks to the media . . . ' That 'apparently', as always, was the giveaway, especially as the story was padded out with a rehash of what Mrs. Thatcher said on television in January and pronunciamientos by such earth-shakul figures as Mr Robert Hicks, MP for Boelmin, and Mr Clive Landa, chairman of the 'Tory Reform Group'. These gentlemen must have been deeply gratified to make the, main news-story in The Times but their appearance there suggests — how shall oile put it? — a certain paucity of material. Un another page of this issue Claud Cockbur21_ was recalling that, in the Thirties, the OP! on The Times used to compete 'to see whu' could write the dullest headline'. There must be a happy median somewhere.
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