I SAY, SHEA!
The press: Paul Johnson
looks at the figures behind the Sunday Times's 'facts'
IN ORDER to understand the Sunday Times's tale about Mrs Thatcher and the Queen, it is first necessary to look at the latest ABC circulation figures, covering the first six months of 1986. These show that, in general, the Murdoch empire has done surprisingly well out of its calculated dash for freedom. Despite the mass pickets at Wapping, physical attacks on distribu- tors, wholesalers and newsagents, and de- spite all the efforts by the unions and Labour Party to damage Murdoch's titles, their sales have, in general, held up well. At 4,061,781, the Sun's figure for January- June 1986 is only 3,866 down on the comparable one for last year. Its June average has dipped below the four million mark to 3,960,287, but this seems to be largely the result of an expensive promo- tion drive by the Mirror, which raised its sales from 2,923,979 in April to 3,203,665 in June.
The Times has also weathered the change to Wapping with spirit. At 471,483 its average sales in the first six months of this year are only 8,121 below the 1985 figure, and its June average (475,107) cuts the drop by half. It is true that the Guardian has done exceptionally well over the same period, raising its six-month average to 524,264, a gain of 37,280. But the Guardian has yet to undergo the expense and dislocation of switching to new technology (under union rules, too), whereas the Times is over the hump and has transformed its commercial position. The News of the World has done even better. Its 1986 first-half figure (excluding February) is actually up 62,274 over the corresponding figure for 1985, and at 27,457 for June is the best part of two million sales above its rival: the People clipped below the three million mark in June and the Sunday Mirror was only 7,815 Copies above it. The achievement of the N. en's of the World since it went tabloid is, indeed, formidable, and with the reduction
of costs at Wapping its profits must now be immense.
But the figures for the Sunday Times tell a different story. Average sales for the first half of 1986 were 1,149,116, a drop of 108,593 over 1985. The June average, revealing a further drop of 35,470 to 1,113,646, suggests that the decline con- tinues. Meanwhile, the paper's most dangerous rival, the Observer, turned in a first-half average of 778,207 this year, a gain of 32,515 over 1985. I need hardly say that the Sunday Times has made huge financial gains from the Wapping transfer, and in the long run stands to benefit even more than its stable-mates because there will be no union or technical restrictions on the size of the papers it prints. But it has also "suffered more because the changeover has been made the excuse for intensifying the personal smear-campaign against its editor, Andrew Neil, which has become one of the most protracted and vicious in the history of the British newspaper indus- try. This has the full backing of the Left, and it must also be remembered that union efforts to hit the Murdoch papers have been concentrated on the Sunday Times and Saturday distribution. All the same, the decline in its sales is to some extent due to non-Wapping factors. The smear cam- paign, or an actual fall in the editorial
quality of the paper, or both, must be having some effect.
For editors in Neil's predicament it is always tempting to have a gamble, and the Sunday Times's Queen v. Thatcher splash was a rather desperate piece of work. To begin with, it was untrue. The Queen is not 'dismayed by many of Mrs Thatcher's policies'. The paper's lead story was not 'an unprecedented disclosure of the monarch's political views'. The actual headline, 'Queen dismayed by "Uncaring" Thatcher', was false. The thrust of the story, that the Queen was so upset by Thatcher policies that her staff, variously described as 'the Queen's advisers' and 'Her Majesty's close advisers', had decided to make her views public. These officials, the paper said, gave 'the information' to the Sunday Times 'in several briefings'; they were 'fully aware it would be pub- lished' and 'in no doubt about the dramatic impact it would have'. None of this was true.
What seems to have happened is that the paper, in a fairly routine inside feature, built up a picture of Palace-Downing Street tension over the Commonwealth of the kind which has frequently appeared in the media recently. Passages were read out to the Queen's press adviser, Michael Shea, and questions put to him to which he returned anodyne answers. As the Queen's private secretary pointed out in his letter to the Times on Monday, the press secretary does not really know all that much. He is not privy to Cabinet secrets, let alone the private conversations between the Sovereign and the Prime Minister. All the press chap can do is to offer guidance to the best of his knowledge and ability. If he is asked, is the Queen worried about unemployment, he is bound to say she is. Aren't we all? If it is put to him that the Queen is perhaps closer to majority Com- monwealth opinion than the Prime Minis- ter on the sanctions issue, he will refuse to confirm any such speculation but will agree it is a reasonable inference. It sounds to me that Shea went further than was wise on this occasion. But Shea was not to know that his very limited co-operation in the production of the article — itself based on gossip from the Commonwealth Secretar- iat, a former High Commissioner, an ex- Prime Minister and the like — was to be made the basis, and so far as I can see the sole Palace basis, for the Sunday Times front-page story.
Hence Sir William Heseltine, speaking for the Queen, one imagines, was right to let Shea off the hook in his letter to the Times. I hope there will be no further calls for Shea's resignation. We do not want to go back to the stuffy methods of Sir Richard Colville, press secretary 1947-68. The blame for this unseemly non-event lies entirely with the Sunday Times. It is a sad tale which reflects badly on the paper and its editor, and does harm to the press as a whole.
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