The History of the Times: The Murdoch Years. Graham Stewart

the public expect its leaders to preserve the outward forms of a morality which it no longer practises, if it ever did?’¹²³ But when Parkinson responded to questioning on the matter during the course of an interview on Panorama, Sarah Keays decided to offer her side of the story exclusively to The Times. Douglas-Home was at Blackpool for the Conservative Party conference, but as soon as the offer was put to him he dispatched a reporting team to visit her in Bath. In the small hours of 14 October, the Daily Telegraph journalist Graham Paterson was awoken in his Blackpool hotel room by an irate editorial office in Fleet Street desperate to find out what was going on and furious at having been scooped by its rival.¹²⁴ The headline said it all. ‘Sarah Keays talks to The Times of “loving relationship”’ appeared across the top of the paper that morning, overshadowing the enthusiastic reception Parkinson had received at the Conservative Party conference the previous day. Within hours, Parkinson had resigned. The one hundredth anniversary Conservative Party conference had turned from celebration to deep gloom, with many outraged that The Times had sunk to the depths of printing what they took to be the fury of a woman scorned. The familiar cry went up that the ‘paper wasn’t what it used to be’ and ‘what is The Times coming to?’. The use of a picture of two of Parkinson’s daughters looking distressed outside the family home came in for particular attack. The editor was deluged with letters of complaint, one reader who had been subscribing to the paper for sixty years assuring him, ‘the tone of The Times is beginning to resemble that of the so-called gutter press … you have become VULGAR’.¹²⁵ Yet Sarah Keays was not paid for her story and, as Douglas-Home told Alastair Hetherington, ‘what ground have I got for not publishing it? Answer: only those of protecting the Minister, and that’s not my job.’¹²⁶ Further offence was caused when the paper quoted Miss Keays’s claim that the Daily Telegraph had recommended aborting the child. In fact, the Telegraph had stated that such an option ‘hardly seems a moral advance’ and prominent space had to be hurriedly found for the Telegraph’s editor, Bill Deedes, to point this out.¹²⁷ For its part, The Times continued to be sympathetic to Parkinson’s predicament. Jock Bruce-Gardyne wrote an Op-Ed appreciation of the fallen minister, ‘hounded out by hypocrisy’. Bernard Levin also raised his eyebrows at the moral panic, finding his usual seam of satire in the lofty pronouncements of the Daily Mirror, the Daily Telegraph and the Bishop of Bath and Wells.

      Despite her reputation for supporting ‘Victorian values’, the Prime Minister was not noted for taking the moral high ground with those she liked and, in time, Parkinson was allowed back into the Cabinet where he proceeded to set in motion the process that would lead to ‘Big Bang’ – deregulating financial services and opening up the City more widely to global competition. But the ‘love child’ revelations had ruined his chances of succeeding Margaret Thatcher in Downing Street. The episode’s coverage was said – by those with little knowledge of the paper’s history – to be symbolic of the way The Times under Rupert Murdoch’s ownership had departed from its values. It had given supposedly excessive space to a minor scandal, sensationalizing the accusations of a wronged woman. It had also failed to chastise sufficiently the lax moral standards expected of a man in public office who, for some, had committed the additional sin of being a brazen Thatcherite. As the paper approached its bicentenary, questions over its news presentation, priorities and Thatcherite bias threatened to undermine its continuing claim to being a unique national treasure of objectivity and truth. Matters were not helped when the paper announced it had access to the diaries of Adolf Hitler …

^* Fisk thus joined the illustrious Times company of William Howard Russell’s report of the Battle of Balaclava and Charge of the Light Brigade, November 1854; Nandor Ebor’s dispatch on Garibaldi’s liberation of Palermo, June 1860; and James (Jan) Morris on the conquest of Mount Everest, June 1953.

       CHAPTER FOUR ANCIENT AND MODERN

      The Hitler Diaries; the Arts; Sport; Portfolio;

      The Times’s Bicentenary; Death of an Editor

      I

      In its one hundred and ninety-eighth year The Times made one of its most embarrassing mistakes: it announced it had bought the rights to sixty volumes of Adolf Hitler’s private diaries. It would prove to be the most expensive fraud in publishing history. With hindsight, the newspaper’s verification procedures appeared astonishingly nonchalant. It helped persuade its parent company, News Corp., to offer $1.2 million for diaries whose contents had been subjected to no more than the most superficial examination. Had the manuscripts been checked, it would have been quickly apparent that they contained little more than bloodless drivel lifted primarily from Max Domarus’s published book Hitler’s Speeches and Proclamations