as he had four days a week since 1979. But the editor was deluged with complaints when he put caricatures drawn by Charles Griffin at the head of the day’s prominent person’s birthday column. For some, a cartoon on the Court & Social page was further proof of The Times’s apostasy although many of those featured were delighted and asked if they could purchase the original.
The introduction of a resident political cartoonist caused more prolonged debate. Ranan Lurie was an Israeli born US citizen who had trained with the French Foreign Legion and been dropped behind enemy lines in the Six Day War. Having worked for Life, Newsweek, Die Welt and Bild, he was the world’s most widely syndicated political cartoonist. Like Vicky in Beaverbrook’s Express newspapers, Lurie’s cartoons often created a dynamic tension by taking a different angle on politics from that being proposed elsewhere in the paper. His draughtsmanship was excellent, his small, rotund figures especially suited to depicting ‘hard hats’ enjoying a bit of military brinkmanship. But inevitably he was not to everyone’s taste, particularly those who believed his art trivialized the news pages on which they were carried. Evans had far more consistent success with the appointment that also gave him the greatest satisfaction. This was the arrival of the relentlessly droll Frank Johnson as parliamentary sketch writer. When it came to material, the House of Commons of the early eighties was to provide Johnson with an embarrassment of riches.
Amid these arrivals came a major departure. Bernard Levin was the most famous columnist on the paper. One of the enfant terribles of the sixties satire boom (he was the subject of a famous attempted physical assault while presenting That Was The Week That Was, his assailant seeking revenge for a supposedly cruel review of his wife’s acting talents), Levin combined a sharp intellect, high-culture sensibilities and a talent for upsetting the full range of vested interests, be they union barons or barristers. Scarcely a week went by without Levin ‘going too far this time’. But he had the support of the one person who mattered – the editor. Rees-Mogg had persuaded him to become a Times columnist in 1971, ultimately taking the view that ‘he alone has the ability to resist the gentle English equity which sometimes drifts like desert sand from one column to the next’.25 He was not really, therefore, a Times man in the established sense of the term and various of the offended vested interests got their revenge by blackballing him from the Garrick Club, where Rees-Mogg was a member.
Evans admired Levin’s vituperative prose, if not his ability to punctuate it. Comparing the length of his sentences to ‘the corridors of a Venetian palace’ Evans failed to persuade him to make more concessions to readers’ mental stamina.26 But the greatest exertion fell upon Levin himself whose column appeared on Tuesdays, Wednesday and Thursdays (he also wrote for the Sunday Times). He needed a rest, or at least a lightening of the load. His decision to take a break suited Evans’s new features editor, Anthony Holden, who was keen to introduce new blood.27 Nonetheless, in his final column, Levin helpfully reassured his readers:
My decision is in no way based on any disquiet on my part at the change of editor or proprietor, nor on any lack of confidence in the paper’s future, and anyone saying or writing anything to the contrary is, and for all material purposes should be treated as, a liar.
It would not be long before Evans would be pleading with Levin to return. But by then the trickle of famous names from the Rees-Mogg era departing the paper had turned into a flood.
III
On his twenty-first day in the chair, Evans got his first major test on how to handle a major breaking story for The Times. During the evening of 30 March 1981 news came through that the American President, Ronald Reagan, had been shot. Evans raced back to Gray’s Inn Road and immediately assumed control. His direction proved masterful.
The front page was given over to the story in its entirety (previously even the most momentous news was mixed with other front-page lead stories and continued elsewhere inside the paper). Three sequential picture strips caught like a cine-freeze frame effect, Reagan turning to face his assailant and then going down as he was hit. The headline was itself a cliffhanger: ‘President Reagan shot: bullet still in lung’. The subheading quoted Reagan’s plucky comment to his wife; ‘Honey, I forgot to duck … don’t worry about me I’ll make it.’
Evans’s dramatic cover was certainly different from the front page of The Times on 23 November 1963 which – with classified adverts still on the front page – merely carried a small three-word ‘President Kennedy Assassinated’ note at the top right of the paper’s masthead. Predictably, some traditionalist readers wrote to complain at what they regarded as Evans’s sensationalist, almost tabloid, front page. But had they to hand a Times copy of the death of Kennedy they might have been surprised. Although the news of the Kennedy assassination had appeared on page eight (because that was where foreign news was then to be found, regardless of its importance) the actual page layout was surprisingly similar, complete with an action photograph of a security guard leaping on the back of the dying President’s car with Mrs Kennedy tending to the slumped figure of her husband. Another photograph showed, closeup, the look of shock on New Yorkers’ faces as they learned the news from a tele-type machine in a news agency office window.28 It was true that Evans ran the headline across the width of the page, whereas in 1963 it had followed the separate column spaces, but this was the only major cosmetic difference. The story’s treatment – narrative of the shooting, history of past presidential assassinations, the reaction of world leaders, the next in line – was remarkably similar between 1963 and 1981. Evans merely had the advantage – denied his predecessor – of being able to splash it across a front page.
Unlike Kennedy, Reagan did not die and, by the night’s last edition, the headline had been amended to the more hopeful if less dramatic ‘Bullet removed from lung’. Nor would the story spawn an industry of conspiracy theories. By 2 April, the paper was in a position to report that the would-be assassin, John Hinckley, was a troubled obsessive, intent on killing the President as a means of proving his (unsolicited) love for the eighteen-year-old-actress Jodie Foster.29 But if the shooting proved, by a matter of centimetres, not to be a turning point in world politics, it provided the first example of Evans’s ability to capture the drama of breaking news and present it in an effective manner. It was commonly agreed across Fleet Street that The Times had excelled.
For an editor with an eye for presentation on the page, improving the paper’s layout was an immediate priority. Frequently, readers had turned the front page to find a full-page advertisement greeting them on page three. Although this was a prime commercial site, it did not convey the impression that the paper was serious about conveying hard news. When, in 1966, classified ads had finally been taken off the front page, they were moved to the back page. They had remained there ever since. Evans questioned whether such a prominent part of the paper should be given over to small ads for budget travel brochures, secretarial courses and personal announcements. With Murdoch’s support, page three was henceforth given over to news while Evans proposed something new for the back page. It was important that the crossword stayed in the bottom left-hand corner where, with paper folded, it could be easily attempted by those lunching on park benches or being jiggled about in congested train compartments. But besides retaining this, the back page was now to be divided in two. The top half would continue main stories carried over from the front page (again, this was easier for tightly packed commuters) alongside the column designed most to sparkle and entertain – Frank Johnson’s parliamentary sketch. In the bottom half, Evans introduced what was christened ‘The Times Information Service’. This was a daily almanac of eclectic information: weather forecasts, a brief digest of what other newspapers were saying, opening hours for historic houses, even, for some reason, London restaurants offering al fresco dining facilities (there appeared not to be very many of these). ‘There is nothing like it in the British press,’ Evans boasted, ‘it is, indeed, another example of The Times, as so often in its history, being the first.’