Tina and Harry: they hardly need surnames. She, Tina Brown, the tough, bright, ambitious English girl who turned around the fortunes of Vanity Fair and reinvented the New Yorker; he, Harold Evans, the legendary editor of the Sunday Times in its heyday. They are probably the most famous journalistic duo of their time, which may explain the fate that has now befallen them. A muck-raking biography, Tina and Harry Come to America, recently published in the US, subjects them to tabloid-style scrutiny. It picks away at their reputations, damns their achievements with faint praise and consigns them to the bleak category of "media stars." It reads, in short, as if this was the final revenge of America against all those British journalists who came and saw and took away the best jobs.
Although the principal target is Tina, the real victim, as the book grinds on, is Harry Evans. His work at the Sunday Times is hurried over in an early chapter. His achievements in the US-revamping the news magazine US News and World Report, launching a Cond? Nast travel magazine, writing a book on US history and becoming president of Random House, are denigrated. An opportunity for assessing his contribution to journalism has been lost. Although the dustjacket claims that Harry and Tina Come to America will "reverberate through the media world," it is unlikely to cause more than a slight rattling at the tills. The books real interest lies in the transformation of Evans from eager but unsophisticated British northerner, with horn-rimmed spectacles and crumpled suits, into a dashing New York host with piercing blue eyes, chatting up celebrities at Tina's parties. It is, in fact, an extended gossip column.
Where it does dwell on Evans's role as editor, it glibly recites the roll-call of famous Sunday Times investigations (Thalidomide, Philby, the Crossman Diaries) and, as a prelude to dealing the dirt, proclaims that Evans was "simply the best, bravest newspaper editor that Britain had ever known." Whether this claim can be justified requires a little more deliberation than the book provides. There have been great editors of the past-William Thomas Stead, one of Evans's heroes; or Thomas Barnes, who created The Times as an independent paper and turned it into "the thunderer;" or CP Scott of the Manchester Guardian. And there have been more recent ones who might wish to be considered in the same category. How to choose between them? Establishing a benchmark is hard enough. Can it be measured by circulation alone-the spark of genius an editor brings to the choice of stories, or the presentation of news that makes a paper irresistible to its public? One thinks of Arthur Christiansen and the Daily Express in the 1950s, or David English and the Daily Mail in the 1980s. Or even Kelvin Mackenzie and his outrageous period at The Sun-vulgar, swaggering, funny, successful. All of them were men in tune with their time, viscerally aware of what their readers wanted. On the other hand, is it a campaigning newspaper that challenges the establishment, and sticks to its principles, even at the risk of losing readers: possibly, The Times under John Delane, attacking the management of the Crimean war, or The Observer under David Astor, incurring the wrath of Eden's government over Suez in 1956? Or is it, in the end, a newspaper that draws together the best writers and reporters of its day, then gives them the space and freedom in which to exercise their talents? Alastair Hetherington's Guardian, perhaps, or the Evening Standard under Charles Wintour.
Then again, perhaps the question is not worth dwelling on. A great newspaper or magazine is like a comet which streaks across the sky, amazing onlookers with its flare, only to plunge over the horizon, leaving barely a flicker behind. Who remembers now the biting sarcasm of Hannen Swaffer, the war reports of Sefton Delmer, the earth-shattering scoops of Chapman Pincher? Thalidomide, Philby, the Crossman Diaries-were they really that special? I used to think that one of the best books on journalism ever written was Otto Friedrich's Decline and Fall-The Struggle for Power at a Great American Magazine. It told the story of power struggles in the Saturday Evening Post, which sold millions and was once an American institution. I went back to it the other day and found it hugely disappointing. Who cares whether Clay Blair ousted Robert Sherrod, or Bill Emerson took the magazine downmarket at the wrong time? All that appeared to matter was that it lost money every year for a decade until it went bust. Management, good or bad, had a far greater impact than any editor, brilliant or otherwise. Friedrich concluded: "my purpose here... is to argue against the popular theory that magazines rise and fall because of editorial genius. It does happen sometimes... but not often enough to support the theory."
There is a bleak truth in this. Sales figures for national newspapers in Britain are heading inexorably downwards, unimpeded, it seems, by editorial brilliance (or ineptitude). In 1971 the combined circulations of the national daily and Sunday newspapers amounted to more than 36m copies. Today, despite the appearance of several new titles, the equivalent figure, is 25.6m. The biggest fall has been among the tabloids, which once bestrode the country, relishing their reputation as the worst in the world, scoffing at outraged stars and censorious ministers. That confidence now looks misplaced. A new generation, bred on video games, television and the internet may no longer be interested in tabloids. Sales have fallen in 30 years by 37 per cent. Broadsheet sales, in the same period, have actually climbed by half a percentage point but the age-profile of their readers is inching up and they have held on only by investing in bigger papers and more specialised sections, which rely on advertising. When recession threatens-as it is starting to-they may find that the cushion on which the glossy supplements rest gets withdrawn. That will focus more attention on the core product of a newspaper: news.
No one can doubt that news sells. The terrorist attacks of 11th September had a dramatic impact on the sales of quality newspapers in Britain, which rose by up to 13 per cent. The Guardian and the Sunday Times have recorded the highest sales for more than a decade. But sustaining such increases is another thing (mostly, they fell back within two weeks). Newspapers, day by day, have very little in the way of genuine news with which to startle their readers. Sunday papers have an even greater difficulty, since it is axiomatic that there is no news on a Saturday (an axiom regularly challenged but never disproved). What the Sunday Times used to do was create much of that news itself, through its investigative journalism. Its reputation was established by a small number of famous stories, and its circulation grew from less than 1m in the 1960s to a weekly sale of over 1.5m in the mid-1970s-a level it has never subsequently reached. This period, under Evans's editorship from the late 1960s until his departure to The Times in 1981, is referred to, almost ritualistically by its former staff, as the "golden era," when British journalism was envied at home and copied abroad. Its institutions, like the Insight team, turned the practice of reporting into a kind of art.
I had not looked back at the paper since those days, and it was with some trepidation that I sat down in front of the arcane microfilm projector at the Colindale newspaper library in north London. I chose three main periods-the years immediately following Evans's app-ointment in 1967, the mid-1970s and the period running up to the suspension of the paper after the industrial disputes of 1979. My first impression was one of crushing disappointment. Anyone looking back at the newspapers of an earlier era is struck by the grey, cramped look of them-the postage stamp pictures, the narrow columns, the insipid headlines. Truly disconcerting, though, was the pedestrian quality of the average story. Trade union disputes, motorway pile-ups, unemployment, the Beatles, the winter of discontent: the reporting seemed curiously flat, the presentation sober to the point of dullness. I failed to detect the flair, inquiry or curiosity that I had always assumed was inherent in Evans's Sunday Times. Gradually, as the 1970s wore on, the appearance of the paper improved, pictures increased in size, there were signs of the emerging power of the graphic as a tool of explanation. But those endless serialisations of Bloomsbury memoirs, the quirky features with dated titles like Spectrum or Look, the heavy-handed opinion pieces on the centre pages and even the magazine, considered so glamorous in its time, left me unmoved, save perhaps for a twinge of nostalgia.
It is not, of course, an appropriate way to judge a newspaper. Microfilm reduces everything to an opaque uniformity. You cannot hope to understand the impact of a story, or to tell whether it was breaking new ground at the time, unless you grasp the context in which it appeared. As Benny Green, the jazz aficionado, wrote in his book, The Reluctant Art: "if you want to listen properly to Lester Young, you have to put on 1938 ears." I needed 1970 eyes. Gradually, as I began to focus properly, some journalistic milestones and a better sense of the paper began to emerge. Almost the first major story I looked at was the coverage of the six-day Israeli-Arab war in June 1967. It was, and remains, a marvel of reporting-eleven pages, put together at the end of one dramatic week in those days of hot metal and telex news-chronicling the story of the war and analysing the strategy and military skills that had given Israel victory. The opening paragraph was a classic of old-fashioned reporting. An intrepid correspondent and cameraman (Colin Simpson and Don McCullin) found themselves ahead of the Israeli troops on Mount Zion and were suddenly exposed to enemy fire. "From the top of the hill, the road to Jaffa gate looked wide open..." began their story. It could as well have been penned by Edgar Wallace or Ernest Hemingway. "I braked-at first I couldn't find the right gear-and then I made a fast reverse dash round the corner. Luckily we avoided a mortar bomb that failed to explode..." Whether viewed from inside an Israeli tank, or closeted with Egyptian generals, the war was chronicled from day to day, analysis and reporting woven together. Because it could be reported at first hand and from both sides it cannot be compared with any of today's conflicts, where propaganda and tight security prevent journalists from getting close to the action. By any standard it was a formidable piece of reporting.
To say that I failed to find anything to match it subsequently is not to underestimate the other examples I began to come across. Insight, having begun as an attempt to imitate Time magazine's assemblage of the best stories of the week, steadily developed after 1967 into a full-time investigative team, whose strength lay in the skills of its editors and the time and resources given to its stories. Weeks would go by with nothing appearing, but then it would produce the results of an investigation that would set hares running for months. The stories seem mildewed with age now, but I still remember their impact: Peter Rachman, the corrupt and violent landlord who exploited poor tenants and gave rise to the term Rachmanism; Bernie Cornfeld, who built an international empire by conning investors out of their money with the famous question; "do you sincerely want to be rich?"; the Vestey family who avoided paying tax in Britain for 60 years; the great Beaujolais wine scandal which revealed tanker-loads of Algerian plonk were being passed off as claret; the antiques auction rings which were controlling prices throughout the country; revelations that debunked the myth of TE Lawrence. Recited now, they sound arcane. And not all of them deserved the accolades they were given-Rachman was dead by the time his activities were exposed, Savundra now seems an easy target.
The bigger investigations, meanwhile, can be counted on the fingers of both hands. Apart from Philby and Thalidomide, I would add three which required editorial courage as well as reporting in difficult conditions. One was the Insight expos? of British interrogation techniques in Ulster, which showed that IRA suspects were subjected to treatment that breached the Geneva Convention. It led to accusations that the paper was siding with terrorists, and was unpopular with readers. A similar inquiry into Israeli secret service torture methods meant that anti-Semitism was added to the charge-sheet. The investigation into Robert Maxwell's Pergamon Press revealed his fraudulent methods for the first time, and was accompanied by the usual bullying threats of legal action. Later, the same threats successfully repelled attempts to expose Maxwell's theft of the Mirror Group pensions.
What I also came across was something I had forgotten. Lengthy, demanding inquiries into subjects such as the roots of Britain's post-war economic decline; the way out of Northern Ireland or the myth of the silent majority. The playwright Arnold Wesker, who wrote a much criticised book about the Sunday Times, said of the latter article that "it vindicates all of journalism." He was less impressed by the arrogant, self-congratulatory attitude he came across amongst some of the paper's high-fliers.
There was no doubting the impact that all this had in its day-and not only in Britain. The late Kay Graham, publisher of the Washington Post, invited Bruce Page and Godfrey Hodgson, two Insight editors, to lunch. She asked them: "what's this business about investigative journalism, then?" and "would it transplant to the Post?" Her next question, characteristically, was: "how much does it cost?" But not all reactions were favourable. Over the years the Insight style of inquiry became a parody of itself-you could write their opening paragraphs in your sleep: "At 2pm precisely, a dove-grey Mercedes Benz 300SL pulled up outside the entrance of an anonymous block of flats in central London..." The investigations became lengthier, their outcomes less spectacular. For every successful inquiry there would be three or four that came to nothing. The books, produced by the Sunday Times in the paper's time (30 of them during Evans's editorship) sucked reporters away from the office for months. The Thalidomide saga, which stretched over ten years and succeeded eventually in winning proper compensation for victims of the drug, was a monumental achievement, legally, politically, and journalistically. But in some ways it drained the paper and its editor-how could anyone live up to that kind of story again? And something else, more difficult to define, began to happen. The world moved on, competition grew, advertising revenue declined. Another, snappier product commanded attention. If the 1970s was the decade of the Sunday Times, the 1980s belonged to the Daily Mail.
I used to play squash with Harry Evans at the RAC club in Pall Mall. He would turn up late, clutching a sheaf of papers and gallop to the telephone. Then he'd scurry into the changing rooms, talking nineteen to the dozen. I can never remember him motionless. His walk was a half-run. He was exhausting to compete against, covering twice as much of the court as me, making up for a certain lack of precision by relentless pursuit of the ball. Afterwards he would plough up and down the swimming-pool for 20 lengths before taking a battering from the club masseur. He liked beating me at squash-partly because I was 14 years younger than him-though he'd be grey with exhaustion at the end of the game.
That demonic energy went into his job and into the paper and wore off on the rest of us. Behind his back we parodied his accent and mocked his mannerisms, but we were pleased to have him there because, despite his flaws, he understood the craft of journalism better than any of us. Although he was surrounded by some brilliant minds, who liked nothing better than to air their brilliance at great length, he was easily bored by such chatter. He had the gift of asking the daft question that dragged some high-flown editorial discussion back to the basics of that week's paper. His own model had been the non-conformist editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, William Thomas Stead, who, like him, came from Darlington, and believed in the newspaper as an instrument of change. Evans's own campaigns on the Darlington-based Northern Echo had convinced him that there was nothing so powerful as information, and that the best information was the kind that someone else didn't want you to have. He was not politically driven but rather had an almost innocent curiosity in finding out how things happened, how they worked and whether they were in the public interest or against it.
When he arrived at the Sunday Times, he found others of the same persuasion and he recruited more. They included some of the best journalists of their day: Nick Tomalin, Ron Hall, Bruce Page, Clive Irving, Jeremy Wallington, Godfrey Hodgson and John Barry among them. A reporter was not just a recording agent, he was a detective, trouble-shooter, and interrogator. If a story was worth pursuing then it should be pursued, no matter how much it cost in time or money-and Evans was happy to offer both. His ambitions usually ran ahead of the time available to realise them. He relished giving a story double the space anyone else had anticipated. He was also a technician-far better than most of his executives at putting a page together. He was a "hot metal" man, happiest on the "stone" with nimble-fingered compositors who assembled columns of lead type and were able to read headlines upside down.
Although the Sunday Times was marked by a strongly anti-establishment tradition, there was no obvious political bias in the way that stories were selected. Its ethos was influenced by the "Australian mafia," reporters who wafted in off the boat from Sydney, found a desk and stayed. They were generally better trained and more anarchic than their British colleagues. The paper's jargon was antipodean. A story was a "bottler" if it was good, a "dog" if it wasn't. A poor story had to be "combed" into shape, a useful source inside an organisation was a "fink." Most of the best lines came from the veteran Murray Sayle, who used to say there were only two stories worth writing: "we name the guilty man" or "arrow points to defective part." The Sunday Times was the first paper to have full-time lawyers on the staff, expanding the boundaries of what could be reported within the laws of contempt and libel.
Miraculously, there was no interference, direct or indirect, from the proprietor, Lord Thomson, who carried in his wallet a card on which was printed what he referred to proudly as his "creed." It began: "I can state with the utmost emphasis that no person or group can buy or influence editorial support from any newspaper in the Thomson group." Evans called him "a free trader in ideas and enthusiasm" and used to recall his self-proclaimed "social mission" which was to provide "a home for a large number of salaried eccentrics." It was a theory that Evans adopted himself. The net result was what one former Insight editor called "licensed unpredictability," the idea that you were never quite sure what might emerge in the paper from one week to the next. Its leader columns were safely conservative, its news pages radical.
That may sound unexceptional, but it flies in the face of most conventional newspaper thinking today, which prefers the idea of a carefully controlled editorial profile, running from the front page to the back. The philosophy is epitomised by the modern Daily Mail which, under the late David English, was driven not by the inquiring minds of its journalists but by the market it wanted to capture. It targeted a largely female, middle-class readership and fed them with consumer and lifestyle articles, adopting a robustly right-wing view of the world. It did not allow chance to intervene too often, but prescribed that news should, if possible, fall within the parameters of its own prejudices. The formula was enormously successful, enabling the Mail to overtake all its competitors, notably the Daily Express, which simply failed to match the brisk certainties of its rival. The idea that a successful newspaper should be the product of a clear, if narrow set of beliefs, became irresistible. Other papers began to measure their performance against the Mail's. The turnover of national editors accelerated, their performance judged not just by circulation figures, but by the robustness with which they dictated editorial policy. Paul Dacre, who succeeded English as editor, once described the Mail as "one long editorial."
The idea of a newspaper conforming to a rigid set of principles would have been anathema to Evans. When, disastrously, he accepted Rupert Murdoch's offer to go and edit The Times, he found himself torn between his journalistic instincts and the need to please a proprietor with extremely clear ideas about where his newspapers should stand. This episode has ever since haunted Evans, and many of his colleagues. By throwing in his lot with Murdoch, he admits that he failed at a crucial juncture to aid a campaign that might conceivably have preserved the future independence of the Sunday Times. In the introduction to the third edition of his memoirs, Good Times, Bad Times he delivers a mea culpa which has few equals in the lexicon of modern journalism: "I have come to regard the judgements I made then as the worst in my professional career," he wrote. "The first blunder was not to campaign against Murdoch, the second to be tempted from my power-base at the Sunday Times where, with a world-class staff behind me, I would have been much harder to assail. My professional vanity was intrigued; I thought I could save The Times. In the event, I did not save anything...Short of sitting in the stocks in Gray's Inn, I do not know what more I can do to acknowledge the error of my ways."
I was amongst his fiercest critics at the time, but my resentment has long since faded-and not just because of that handsome apology. His later failures cannot rub out his achievements at the Sunday Times. In any event, it was always hard to be cross with Harry for long. He was frequently infuriating, obstinate, interfering, and oddly na?ve. He would make decisions on the run which would have to be unscrambled later; he would commit the paper to some series we despaired of; or hire a columnist we hated. But he had a capacity to charm and to admit to mistakes. Above all, we knew that his understanding of what made a good story, and his commitment to journalism, was complete. That was our touchstone.
There was another sobering discovery to be made when Evans joined the Times-there was a limit to the money he was allowed to spend. The Sunday Times's expertise in investigative journalism did not come cheap. Insight needed a permanent staff of about five and a floating staff of five to ten seconded from the newsroom. The travel budget was huge, the legal risks formidable. Evans regarded the opportunities for reporters to write books in office time, while remaining on salary and enjoying a share of the profits, as a policy of mutual benefit to them and the paper. Would any newspaper today be prepared to make that kind of commitment? If it did, would today's readers actually want to read the results? The nearest equivalent of the Sunday Times today is The Guardian, which has mounted impressive investigations of corrupt politicians and security issues without any noticeable decline in circulation. Indeed, without having to rely on price-cutting, it has emerged stronger in its niche than any of its rivals.
Perhaps the better answer is to look at the kind of stories that readers have been deprived of through the absence of proper, patient, investigation. The origins of BSE-the risks it posed and the fatal inadequacy of the government's response had to wait until the Phillips inquiry before the full scandal emerged. The old Sunday Times would certainly have charted, as it happened, the crucial negotiations that led to the intervention in Kosovo, and raised earlier doubts about the west's intervention. It would also have run a proper inquiry into the US's Plan Colombia. It would have told us who organises the trade in asylum-seekers and how the outbreak of foot and mouth became the world's worst animal epidemic, and what that says about the erosion of Britain's science base.
I suspect there would have been disclosures we can only guess at. Despite the mountain of words published about the war against terrorism, we know desperately little about it. The increasingly static nature of our knowledge about what is happening in Kabul and Washington makes the case for the Sunday Times's brand of urgent curiosity even more compelling.
As the tabloid approach to journalism palls and contempt for politicians comes to be seen as no substitute for well-presented information about things that matter, there may be renewed interest in a branch of journalism now rarely practised. The phrase "investigative journalism" is regarded as old-fashioned. One day it will be disinterred and returned to the mainstream. When it is, the name of Harold Evans will be indissolubly linked with it.
