Books
Mr Pooter's little smash
Charles Moore
Good Times, Bad Times Harold Evans (Weidenfeld & Nicolson £11.95) Urarold Evans was wrong to offer this book for publication. He could perhaps have written it, and left it to appear after his death; but to bring it out 18 mon- ths after the events it describes is to put everyone he refers to in an impossible position. No position is more clearly im- possible than the one he reserves for himself. Are we likely to believe the story of a man who, having lost a fight, tries to get his revenge by telling tales to the public? The reader may well be shocked by the book's stories about Rupert Murdoch, but it is the motives of Harold Evans which he is bound to question.
Yet there is an odd sort of honesty to the book. For, on all the main charges, Mr Evans produces evidence which suggests the opposite of what he is trying to prove. He says that he resisted Mr Murdoch's bid for
Times Newspapers; but he accepted Mr Murdoch's offer of the editorship. He says that he fought for a consortium for the Sunday Times to the last minute, but his quotation from the diary of his wife, Tina, after they dined with Mr Murdoch in Eaton Place, shows that they assumed that he would own the papers, and that Evans would work for him. 'The truth is that, although he'll be trouble, he'll also be enor- mous fun and H. has had so many years of Thomson greyness this vivid rascal could bring back some of the jokes."' Mr Evans claims that John Biffen, the then Trade Secretary, computed the figures of the Sunday Times wrongly with the result that it appeared unprofitable, and thus not a fit subject for reference to the Monopolies and Mergers Commission. At the time, however, Mr Evans acquiesced. Sunday Times journalists threatened a court action about it, but Mr Evans admits that he took no part (It was a matter for the chapel'), and that he reassured Mr Mur- doch on this point.
The book then tries to show that Mr Murdoch turned against Mr Evans because of politics. Certainly Mr Murdoch keenly supported Mrs Thatcher and Mr Evans did not, but Mr Evans is unable to cite ex- amples of proprietorial political in- terference, other than an 'aura' of hard-hat opinions which made him feel uncomfor- table. The two men brawl about monetarism on the Evans's doorstep in Pimlico, Mr Murdoch insults the Wets or the Social Democrats and Mr Evans gets upset; but surely there is nothing unusual or untoward about a proprietor holding forth on political subjects? Tycoons always have political views, and like inflicting them on the men whose salaries they pay. The employee is not obliged to listen much, let alone act. Mr Evans quotes Mr Murdoch's complaint about the 'paper's stand on ma- jor issues.' Of course it takes attitudes,' Mr Murdoch wrote, 'but I fail to find any consistency in them, anything that indicates the clear position of conscience that a great newspaper must be seen to hold.' i.e., Mr Evans thinks he was saying, butter up the government. But might not Mr Murdoch have been saying more or less what he meant? Mr Evans is a taker up of causes' (lead in petrol in the dying days of his editorship); he does not seem to be reflec- tive or interesting on public questions. As he himself says of a conversation with Mr Murdoch about economics, 'perhaps I had bored him'. His farewell leader, 'The Deeper Issues', (which he reprints) is wonderfully bad. 'Finally, when Mr Evans knew that Mr Murdoch was trying to sack him, he had the opportunity to appeal to the national direc- tors. There was a case that he could have made, which he makes in this book, that,Mr Murdoch was breaking the editorial guarantees insisted on by Parliament. But Mr Evans did not go to the national direc- tors. He met one of them, Lord Robens, in the Reform Club, and then went for a walk round clubland and St James's Park 'past the handsome headquarters of my old adversary Distillers and the gloomy Depart- ment of Employment, where I had once been to protest to Michael Foot about the closed shop in journalism'. This accidental pilgrimage to old battlefields stirred his spirit, but still he decided not to fight — . . how different my calculations would have been if Douglas-Home had been true to our pact, and to his family motto "True to the End" '. The truth was that his own staff did not support him, and therefore he had to go.
Should anyone not involved in jour- nalism read this book? Large claims have been made for how well written it is. Cer- tainly, it makes use of 'style'. Mr Evans, the wizard skier, finds a metaphor in his sport for his predicaments: The afternoon's ski run in a blizzard had been an unhappy omen. The slope was too steep, the snow too deep, the visibility treacherous. Gullies vanishing into infinity awaited every false move.
The large lumps known as 'moguls' loomed up in the mist, removing breath and confidence. Friendly paths through the trees ended in ice walls. Nothing was to be trusted.
Sometimes, he draws on a New Journalism even newer than his own, invented by Tom Wolfe and introduced to him, one guesses, by his wife, ,Tina Brown. This involves striking physical descriptions of people — his ally, Bernard Donoughue, for instance — . . his hair sits tightly on his head in orderly rows of crinkly black like the paper one finds in boxes of chocolates.' But more often, Mr Evans prefers a now rather out- of-date style that I was taught by my primary school headmaster. Its cardinal rule (followed by Angela Brazil and Capt W. E. Johns) is, never say 'said'. In this book, Gordon Brunton booms, Rupert Murdoch breezes, somebody else barks, and almost everyone snaps. Men are ushered into book-lined studies. Country houses are set in great acres of forest. On other occasions, metaphors are so daring that one cannot quite work out whether or not they are mixed, 'Horton laid an icy hand on the still-palpitating extremities of Greig's special reports department'. Now and again one simply is not sure what he means — . . it would be unfair to blame him for a complicity of failings.'
With skipping, however, the book is a good read. Read only one of the first four chapters about Harry's triumphs on the Sunday Times, to get an idea of his view of journalism (the one about Philby is the most exciting). Then skip the next three
chapters about Mr Murdoch's bid, except for pp.121-5 with its conversations and din- ner with Mr Murdoch. Then read the rest. It is worth it not just for the bits on Gerald Long, the gastromaniac managing director, but also for the portraits of Charles Douglas-Home (intended as the villain, but emerging only as an enigma), of Owen Hickey, chief leader writer and the embodi- ment of what the Times ought to be, and of course, of Mr Murdoch, whose charm and skill Mr Evans describes generously.
Students of English autobiography will also rind this book interesting as the first major example, on this side of the Atlantic at least, of the journalist as epic hero. It has long been permitted for statesmen, soldiers and diplomats to write of their own lives in a fairly grand manner, but journalists have generally been considered — and have con- sidered themselves — below the salt. Harold Evans admits to being greatly taken with 'the status of the press' in the United States, and in these 400 pages, tries to establish it here. As other men describe their drops behind enemy lines, or their summons to the Palace, Mr Evans describes the morning news conference or an evening putting the paper together in Gray's Inn Road. He even quotes from a diary he kept at the time,
After all, I am not seeking popularity. 1 must not yield to that. I've got to be
tough, tough, tough and get results, im- prove the paper for my own sake and for the sake of the Times. Being popular on the Times is no bloody good to anybody if it continues in its present manner.
Of the day of his sacking, he writes, Only later did I recognize the significance of the date. It was 15 March. It was chilling to remember that 'Beware the Ides of March' was one of the passages from Shakespeare that my father knew well and liked to declaim. But it was not Caesar with whom one is driven to compare Mr Evans so much as Charles Pooter. Mr Evans, of course, is a Somebody, and he is not married to a stern Carrie, but to someone more like Mrs James, of Sutton, the fashion-conscious friend who persuades Carrie that it is a la mode to drape the Pooters' mantelpiece 'and put little toy spiders, frogs and beetles all over it'; but he has all Pooter's gift for describing with great and unconscious skill scenes which make him look ridiculous, for conveying what other people are thinking about him without appearing to understand it, and for setting himself up in a way that makes it certain that he will be knocked down. And, like Pooter again, he emerges from it all rather lovable. Mr Evans set out to break the rule that the best books about journalism are funny, and has ended up proving it.
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