Poor old Harry
Paul Johnson
Journalists will find Harry Evans's Good Times, Bad Times a rattling good yarn. It is too detailed and technical for the general reader but all of us in the profession are fascinated to be taken behind the scenes at New Printing House Square and given a blow-by-blow account of how the Times runs, or does not run. The propriety of Evans's disclosures is, of course, another matter. On the whole I think it desirable that a sacked editor, especially one who has taken the paper's pay-off money, should keep silent; or speak with restraint and dignity. I commend to Evans's attention the piece that Bernard Shrimsley, dismissed from the Mail on Sunday, has just con- tributed to Campaign. It says what needs to be said but its tone is in marked contrast to Evan's lengthy and acrimonious apologia. It cannot surely be right for an editor to describe publicly and in detail the characters, habits and failings of subor- dinates with whom he so recently worked on a basis of confidence. Such a breach of manners, to put it no more harshly, comes Particularly badly from an editor of the Times. But then Harry never really looked liked an editor of the Times, did he? That, indeed, was the trouble.
It is hard to judge the accuracy of Evans's account of how he fell out with Rupert Murdoch and was dumped. I distrust narratives which include verbatim conversations, unless they can be substan- tiated by transcripts from diaries written the same evening. I do not know the truth about Evans's very serious accusations of financial misrepresentation, which he levels at John Biffen, Gerald Long and others: presumably this will all be sorted out in time But Evans's character studies do not ring true in many cases. He is cruel to Gerald Long, then Managing Director of Times Newspapers. It is easy to poke fun at Long, a self-mocking eccentric, but he is a fundamentally decent man, whose services to British journalism, through Reuters, are
at least as distinguished as Evans's own, and it is perfectly obvious that he was doing his best, according to his lights, to save the Times from extinction.
Again, Evans's presentation of Murdoch is not the Murdoch I know and he does not make it more convincing by having Mur- doch talk like Lord Beaverbrook ('What d'ya stand for? Nothing!'). The trouble, I suspect, is that the two men were too alike to get on. Both wanted to make the Times a great newspaper again but had different ideas about how it should be done. And both were chaos-creators by virtue of their styles of working. Evans was Fleet Street's most notable exponent, while Murdoch creates chaos world-wide, not least by ap- pointing editors on impulse and then repen- ting at leisure. But chaos-creators are notorious for disliking other people's chaos, as opposed to their own. I think Lord Hartwell, whose review of this book, in the Sunday Telegraph, was by far the shrewdest, is right to suggest that Evans was unlucky in being in charge of the biggest loss-maker in Murdoch's empire at the time of its worst financial difficulties, when there was a serious risk large chunks of it might go under. In today's climate Evans might have survived. But granted the cir- cumstances of the time, he was insensitive not to be more sympathetic to Murdoch's difficulties in meeting the bills, and he was wildly foolish in taking on more staff at in- flated salaries. Some of these newcomers were paid more than old Times hands in senior positions — a perfect formula for in- ternal trouble. Evans denies he lost the con- fidence of the staff but the fact is that the Times has been a happier place since he left.
Which brings me to Evans's portrait of, his successor, Charles Douglas-Home. Again, I just do not recognise the man, and other people who know him will feel the same. I do not believe Evans's account of their transactions, and I am strengthened in my scepticism by his ludicrously inac- curate picture of my supposed role in his dismissal. Shortly before his downfall, he writes, `[Murdoch] went into a huddle for a long afternoon with Johnson in the study of Johnson's home in Iver, Bucks'. He presents me as one of the forces who, in Mrs Thatcher's interest, put pressure on Murdoch to get rid of this wicked left-wing editor. In fact Murdoch came to see me to talk about something quite different, though we did eventually turn to the parlous financial state of Times Newspapers. I don't feel at liberty to print what was said since, unlike Evans, I believe private conversations should remain private. But I think I can say that, far from advising Murdoch to get rid of Evans, I did exactly the opposite. I never discussed Evans with Mrs Thatcher, and I doubt if she was much interested in his editorship. though, like other responsible people, she was anxious that the Times should survive. All this Evans could have learned by a sim- ple telephone call to me, and the fact that he did not make it, but went into print without checking, suggests that he prefers to nurse a grievance rather than discover the less emotionally satisfying truth. As I recall writing at the time, Fleet Street is a paranoid place.
As Hartwell rightly judges, Evans was sacked for business, not political, reasons. No one saw him as left-wing or any other wing. Mrs Thatcher got him right when she wondered, to Henry Brandon, whether he had 'enough anchor, enough firm convic- tions', to edit a paper like the Times. Evans is a marvellous campaigning journalist but he does not have a settled, coherent philosophy of the world. Instead he has a weird collection of unconnected notions, which rattle around in his head like dried peas in a drum. His enthusiasms date essen- tially from the Sixties, when ecological scoops and the like were all the rage. This type of journalism was running out of steam even in the Sunday Times before Evans left it; it will not do for the Times at all, which is a serious daily dealing with the central public issues. It is characteristic of Evans that, on the eve of his downfall, he was obsessed by a story about lead-free air, supplied by him by that ghost from the Six- ties, the once-famous 'Des' Wilson.
Evans, indeed, suffered from the malign influence of what I call the Martha's Vineyard School of Journalism, represented by such people as James 'Scot- tie' Reston and Ben Bradlee, editor of the
Washington Post. These progressive East Coast trendies are too rich to be proper socialists (Bradlee has just acquired a Georgetown mansion for 2.5 million dollars), but go in for smart marginal causes like lead-free air, as a safe way of bashing the capitalist system. A nail from
the North like Evans was ill-advised to get mixed up with that set. When I read that Evans's second marriage had been a much- publicised ceremony held at Bradlee's sum- mer place in Long Island, I remember thinking: 'Oh dear, poor Harry won't last much longer'. He didn't.
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