Ones that got away

In the days when the Army understood the meaning of PR (press AND public relations), and in the days when Britain had something called ‘industry’ they – the Army – organised a conference for ‘foremen’. Nowadays they would call it a seminar. But, since nowadays it wouldn’t occur to them to organise it in the first place, that bit of incidental intelligence is irrelevant.

Perhaps I should explain for younger readers… ‘Industry’ is an old English expression, now lost to the vocabulary along with ‘manufacturing’ which, loosely, involved making things. Long before the UK hived, or ‘outsourced’, this responsibility to the third world, industry was what Britain did for a living.

I write of an era when Britons more or less made everything, from shoes to aeroplanes, and even cars. We actually made and sold refrigerators to Eskimos (even before they, the Eskimos not the refrigerators, were called Inuits) and prayer mats to Arabs. We sold instant curry to Hong Kong and ice (it was actually Scottish water – you had to freeze it yourself) to the Japanese to add to their Scotch whisky. I know, because I wrote stories about all those things.

This was all before we became a ‘service economy’ which, given a rapidly evolving language, I should also probably explain used to mean a system in which you could sort of at least half expect to get served.

A ‘foreman’, in those distant days, was the top man on the shop floor of a factory or mill. Perhaps, some other time, I should explain the meaning of the words ‘shop floor’, ‘factory’ and ‘mill’. Not part of management, but not exactly one of the workers, these people were most importantly the link between the executive and the workforce.

The foreman ran the industry from the bottom up; men in suits stayed in their offices and smoked cigars. The foreman was typically in a brown smock coat to distinguish him from the workforce that generally dressed in overalls or dungarees. He drank industrial-strength tea with three sugars, and usually smoked a pipe.

What had this to do with the Army? Well, they had foremen, too: they called them sergeant-majors. They had the brilliant idea that they could share knowledge of man-management with industry, each learning from the other, and discussing the pivotal role between management (officers, directors) and man-power (a word that included women, no argument).

What had this to do with newspapers? The Army, no slouch in those days, invited the press along. And I rolled up at Catterick Camp to listen, in case there was a story.

One came from an early speaker from ICI. It wasn’t where I’d been expecting it, in the stories about management versus man, or bosses against trades unions; rather – as happens most often at such events – it came when he wandered slightly off track.

It was this: ICI on Teesside had secured an impressively big export order, selling tons of chemical fertiliser to Chinese farmers. A triumph for British industry. This was the 1960s, and we were all Backing Britain in those days.

Just how much it was worth in sterling matters nothing now – but it was millions of pounds in today’s money.

In fact its sterling value mattered even less to the Chinese at the time, because they had no foreign currency with which to effect purchase.

They opted to pay ICI… in alarm clocks. And negotiation was not an option.
In the coffee break I interviewed the speaker, who told me the world’s biggest chemical empire now had more alarm clocks than it could find storage for. They couldn’t give them away, even to staff – for how many alarm clocks does a household need, at the end of the day? Or even at the start of one? They gave them away with every four gallons of ICI petrol. Then with every two gallons, and they still had clocks to spare.

So I did the story.

ICI’s press department, when asked for an official quote, asked me not to run it at all. They said it would damage international trade. I said trade seemed fairly pointless if it earned only alarm clocks. They said it would damage our relationship with China; I asked what sort of relationship was it that was repaid in bloody alarm clocks. Then I realised that I was arguing with a PRO, which was always a waste of time. I said I would pass on his message to my boss, but that we should expect to see the story in the Daily Mirror next morning.

The news desk told me it had duly ‘noted’ the misgivings of the PR guy in my attached note and that, thank-you, it was already an early page lead.
Oh no: it wasn’t.

The PR guy rang his chairman, Sir Paul Chambers, who immediately rang Hugh Cudlipp and convinced him that such a story would have an adverse effect on the industrial health of the nation.

Well, I was nobbut a kid then. I could not comprehend that the Mirror, of all papers, through Cudlipp of all journalists, could be so easily talked out of what anybody with a hole in his bum could see was a page lead.

If Cudlipp didn’t agree with that, how could I be so wrong?

It was the first story I’d had spiked, and – fairly obviously – it still rankles, 40-odd years later.

The second one followed fairly quickly.

For some reason I needed to ring George Brown (of immoral memory). We were still Backing Britain in those days and Our Harold, with his fortnight in the Scillies, was exhorting everybody to spend their holidays, and more importantly their holiday money, in the UK.

George, his office told me, was in Ibizia.
Well, that was a story. Wilson was telling everybody to stay home while his foreign secretary and deputy PM had gone off with the missus to Spain.

‘We can’t run this,’ said the news desk when my memo – did London want to handle this (and maybe check on the whereabouts of other members of Cabinet): if not, I would write it myself – bounced back up the line from London.

‘George Brown used to write for the Daily Mirror. Our policy is that we never attack our own.’

Bollocks, I argued. I knew George Brown quite well, I said. I had actually caught him when, pissed out of his brain, he’d tumbled down a full set of steps while disembarking from an aircraft. Many were the times I’d helped manhandle him into his official car. I could ring him and guarantee either a funny or a pompous quote to explain his choice of foreign holiday destination.

‘No,’ said the desk. ‘You’ve been told.’

This was the Daily Mirror, for God’s sake. We couldn’t attack any politician that used to write for us?

Barbara Castle, when she was Barbara Betts, had been our agony aunt and had married Ted Castle (who’d been our picture editor, before becoming editor of Picture Post).

Now she was Minister for Transport. We couldn’t criticise the Transport Minister because she used to be Marje Proops?

‘Put it that way and, no, we can’t,’ said the desk.

Staggering, because the so-called Cudlipp Edict, which every member of staff was required to read, and then sign in front of a witness to show that it had been read, said that we were even allowed to criticise the company that owned us – provided only that it was fair and accurate. But nowhere did it say we couldn’t censure politicians who used to write for us. Explain that, if you can.

I don’t know whether newspapers still have such loony loyalties.

But I suppose it’s unlikely that Boris Johnson lives in much fear of being panned by the Daily Telegraph when he becomes Lord Mayor of London.

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’tis the season to be silly

It’s summer (on the calendar, if not at the Met Office) and as Parliament and the courts go into the long holidays newspapers perforce have to lower the definition of news, in order to fill all those potentially embarrassing gaps between the adverts.

One method, considered rather radical on some newspapers, is to ask reporters to think up ideas for stories.

The best that the Daily Mirror news desk could come up with recently was: ‘I know – let’s see how easy it would be for a terrorist to plant a bomb on a train.’

OK. Let’s get my declaration of interest out of the way from the start. For more than a quarter of a century the three English and two Scottish titles of the Mirror Group funded my lifestyle, either individually (at various times the Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror and Sunday People) or collectively – those three plus the Daily Record and the Sunday Mail – and it would have been more lavish if it were not for the losses incurred by the Sporting Life.

Now for my declaration as a journalist and sometime editorial panjandrum: if anybody had come to me and made that suggestion, I would have sent him – or had him sent - home, with instructions to stop at his GP’s surgery on the way.

If I’d heard that a news editor had taken up the idea, I would have made the same recommendation about him to his editor, his boss: that he follow the reporter on the way out and for an immediate medical examination.

If you bend over backwards – and it would need to be beyond the horizontal – to look at the newspapermen’s point of view, you may accept that they were not actually going to plant a bomb, but merely a ‘device’ that could have been one.

If you listen to the paper’s defence for its action it goes like this: They were testing security in a time of heightened terrorist alert, therefore it was ‘a legitimate and justified journalistic exercise.’

Journalists, you see, have a God-given right to ensure that the people responsible for our security are doing their job efficiently.

And up to a point, Lord Copper, that last bit is true.

But you might think that, fully understanding that the security services are currently more than over-extended in uncovering and prosecuting real terrorists, to add to their burden with a time-wasting stunt was the height of irresponsibility. Not to say stupidity.

And if it works, what’s the message exactly?

It is exactly this: ‘Hey Ahmed – your idea of driving a jeep into the entrance of Glasgow Airport to blow it up and kill lots of people didn’t work… have you thought about just putting a bomb on a train, maybe one going through the Channel Tunnel?’

There are millions of separate passenger journeys on the trains every day. Most people carry some form of luggage. Last time I travelled by rail there was no personal or baggage checking – nor would it be practical for there to be any. Imagine the chaos it would cause.

So to get a device that’s not a bomb onto a train doesn’t sound like much of a challenge, to me.

But now here’s the good news.

Railway staff at Stonebridge Park depot (towards the end of the Bakerloo line in north west London, where Chunnel freight is loaded) spotted the journalists – dressed as railway workers in high-visibility yellow jackets and hard hats - carrying their fake ‘bomb’ and called British Transport Police before the guys had even planted it.

And they were immediately arrested under the Terrorism Act.

They were held for 12 hours while their homes were searched and their personal computer and photographic files examined. The Mirror described the police reaction – which many sensible people might think was the least that should have been done – as ‘heavy handed’.

The ‘midnight raids’ on their homes were ‘at best disproportionate and at worst intimidation of the most sinister kind.’

Nothing, then, disproportionate, intimidating or sinister – obviously – about pretending to plant a bomb on a train.

Gary Jones, the paper’s head of news, said: ‘You have to ask in whose interests the police are acting, and why.’

Perhaps I can help him, there. They were acting in my interests.

If anybody who isn’t a legitimate railway worker dresses up, trespasses on the railway, and pretends to be one, it is greatly in my interest for him to be arrested.

If he is planting a bomb I want him banged up for life, preferably in Guantanamo Bay with only a copy of the Koran as reading matter.

If he is pretending to plant a bomb, I want him locked up for pretending to plant one and for wasting police time, and for intentionally trying to scare travelling members of the public.

The Mirror, scratting around for some form of legitimate grouse, says the arrest of the two – at least one of whom, photographer Roger Allen, is an old Fleet Street hand and ought to have more bloody sense – ‘raises questions over whether the authorities can be trusted with new powers under Gordon Brown’s 56-day detention proposals’ [for suspected terrorists].

Well, I’d say that the answer to that one is a resounding ‘Yes – they can be trusted’, for the simple reason that they could have been locked up 28 days (and at some future date for up to 56 days), but were allowed to go home after only 12 hours. The system therefore clearly works, and it is excellent news that they appear to have proved that there is little fear of the jailing of innocent people.

Even if these two were not actually innocent.

Now for a reality check, lads.

Security systems need checking regularly, and that’s the job not of journalists looking for an ‘Oh what a clever boy am I’ story, but of the police and security services.

It happens, and it happens often. And it often happens that they find flaws in the system.

What happens then? Well (you’ll have to trust me on this one) they do not always report the security lapses – because it totally pisses off the people who are responsible for them.

The people with the awesome responsibility of performing checks at airports, for example, are not entitled to pick people out of a queue who they think look suspicious nor, incredible though it may seem, even to ask an Arab woman to show her face in order to check it against the photo on her passport. They have to be seen to be working without any visible sign of ‘discrimination’, which is why old ladies are siphoned off to one side while bearded mullahs who walk as if they might have something stuck under their thoub or dishdasha are allowed to pass through.

When a policeman manages, in a test, to get a gun through the screening and the security staff are called to account for it they therefore react angrily. Instead of deeply screening, say, one passenger in ten, they make a point of examining one in five – with the effect that the queue to get into departures stretches thrice round the terminal and out onto the taxi rank.

The Mirror has had its wrist slapped. It should have had its head whacked. And its Ed, too.

But at least it has proved that, on this one occasion at least, the railway staff was fully alert, the police reaction was prompt, and the Terrorism Act with its planned 56-day detention of suspects is nothing that the fully innocent need to fear.

The Mirror has done us all a service – like it used to – even if it was actually trying to put the fear of God into its few remaining readers. Now it should stop bloody whining and start looking for a proper story.
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Black Friday

Friday the 13th of July, 1984: All the FoCs of the Mirror Group’s sixty-odd chapels were summoned to a four o’clock meeting with the new proprietor in the Rotunda, the Mirror’s circular dining room at Holborn Circus. They represented the National Graphical Association’s powerful and militant skilled printers and compositors, SOGAT ’82’s clerical and machine-room workers and advertising and circulation representatives, the NUJ’s journalists in London, Manchester, and Glasgow, the electricians, engineers, catering staff, security, heating engineers, builders, plumbers, carpenters, messengers, nurses, painters, drivers, cleaners, and all the other ancillary staff required to produce newspapers 361 days of the year.
By four-twenty they were debating among themselves what sort of insult a twenty-minute delay represented. Consensus favoured waiting until half-past four before returning to the more important job of producing newspapers: at four-twenty-two a mountain of a man ambled in and picked up a microphone which he plainly did not need.
‘Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen,’ he boomed. ‘My name’s Robert Maxwell, and I own this company…
Although he was about to protest, as he did frequently that day, that ‘this is not an ego trip’, Maxwell, clearly, was on a supreme high. His introduction, especially with handmike in one hand and large Havana cigar in the other, was fairly reminiscent of ‘Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, my name’s Frank Sinatra and it’s great to be back in London.’ If he expected applause he was disappointed: nobody clapped. In any case, he was not telling us anything we did not know.
What we didn’t know, and what certainly most of those present did not grasp, was how much this meeting warned of the shape of things to come.
Both journalists’ and printers’ chapels had held post-midnight meetings at which suggestions that the paper be stopped had been considered, but they had decided to continue and produce the last edition. Maxwell said he was pleased that we had ‘shown good sense’ by producing a paper that morning. If we hadn’t printed, he said, we would have closed – ‘and never again reopened’. He wanted the newspaper to work, he said; it was his intention to produce newspapers, but if the staff stopped him, then so be it: it was not as if he needed the money.
It was a strange-sounding threat from someone who had just bought the newspaper he’d been hoping for half his life to buy.
We didn’t know what, if anything, to make of it. It sounded like a brash, bullying and probably empty posture. But it was nothing of the kind; we were to hear the same threat, and suffer from it, several times over the coming eighteen months.
The main board, he said, would be very much as before, with one exception. He had met all the directors and asked all, except one, to stay. He didn’t mention Clive Thornton by name, but he was the only one not sitting behind the new owner. Maxwell reeled off all the names: Douglas Long, chief executive; Tony Miles, chairman and editorial director; Lawrence Guest, finance ; Roger Eastoe, advertising; Roy Woolliscroft, manpower; Jack Ferguson, production ; Tony Boram, editorial administration ; the three editors – Mike Molloy (Daily Mirror), Bob Edwards (Sunday Mirror) and Richard Stott (Sunday People). He momentarily forgot the name of Roger Bowes, the deputy chief executive, referring to him with feigned familiarity as ‘Roger... er... the dodger’.
Events were to show that he could have forgotten more names. By the end of the month Miles and Long had left ‘by mutual agreement’; Boram, whose early retirement had already been planned, also left; Wooliscroft retired and remained for a short time as a ‘consultant’; Bowes went back to his old trade in an advertising agency and the following year joined the Express Group, briefly, as its chief executive.
Maxwell spoke, without notes, for perhaps half an hour. It was a great honour, he knew, to own the Mirror titles, the achievement of one of his biggest ambitions. He was going to restore the Daily Mirror to its rightful place at the top of the popular newspaper market and was starting immediately by reducing the cover price by a penny to restore price parity with the paper’s main rival, the Sun. Before long, he’d be printing the Mirror titles in colour. He was going to launch a new and much-needed evening newspaper for London in September (at a Press conference later that day he gave the launch date as September 15, but when a reporter pointed out that Saturday was an odd start-day for an evening paper, he changed it quickly to September 17 – the first inkling we had that the plans were not totally thought-out).
Everybody knew that the biggest problem in national newspapers was overmanning, said Maxwell, and the Mirror’s manning was ridiculous even by Fleet Street standards. But there would be no compulsory redundancy; staffing could be reduced painlessly by natural wastage – retirement, and people leaving voluntarily for other jobs. Most unions had promised Thornton that they would consider non-automatic replacement in other than key jobs, and Maxwell would expect similar agreements. Other than that, despite everything that had happened in the past, there were no ‘hit lists’; everybody in a job with MGN would remain in employment.
Maxwell was, he assured us, a total supporter of the principle of the closed shop, and these would continue throughout the company. All union agreements would be upheld by him, provided they were adhered to by the chapels. This was to mean no disruption of production and no industrial action other than through established procedures. It meant the end to ‘wildcat’ strikes, but sounded otherwise unoppressive.
‘I believe in negotiation,’ he said. ‘I like negotiating. I consider myself a tough negotiator and I think that most things can be resolved in that way. If the procedures don’t work, if we get to the end of the line and you have to strike, that’s all right with me. Eventually the strike will end and we will see who was right, but we will resume work with no hard feelings on either side – because we will have followed procedures.’
There would be union consultation and involvement in everything, at all levels, including representation on the working party for the new evening paper. But confidentiality was to be the watchword; if there were any leaks, ‘and this building leaks like a fucking sieve’, the union representatives would be sacked.
There were two problems here. First was the expletive before the word sieve and several FoCs, possibly grateful to get a chance of self-expression, complained noisily, as if to suggest that bad language was rare in the newspaper business. Maxwell apologised and said that, anyway, the building leaked like a bloody sieve. The second issue came when questions from the floor were invited. Introducing myself as convenor of all the Mirror Group journalists, I said that if I had heard him correctly, and that if he had meant what he said, he would get no union representatives on his working parties, nor on anything else; it wasn’t the unions that leaked, I said, but the management and the board. Another apology: he hadn’t meant it quite like that; nobody would be sacked, but the working party would be disbanded, so everybody would suffer if there were leaks.
David Thompson, FoC of the Daily Mirror NUJ in London, asked what would happen to the independence of editors, since Maxwell had said that he was in total control of reshaping the papers and, by inference, of the editorial content. Maxwell’s reaction was that this question was an insult; what did we think his editors, Mike Molloy, Bob Edwards and Richard Stott, would say if he asked them to print anything they didn’t want to print? Having identified me as a journalist, he gesticulated in my direction as he asked this rhetorical question. Almost certainly, he was not looking for an answer, but I said they’d probably say yes; otherwise they’d have to stop being editor: in either case the result would be the same. Maxwell grinned. ‘Perhaps you’re right,’ he said. ‘So I’ll guarantee now that I’ll never ask them to do anything they wouldn’t want to.’
Maxwell was an enormous man, a giant, a great bear, with a voice like Bovril. At my first meeting with Clive Thornton I had found myself obsessed by the fact that he had only one leg; with Maxwell my chief awareness was, strangely, of his Czech origins. I was listening to his voice, his sentence structure, trying to identify the alien nuances, but there were none. Rather, his vocabulary was amazing in its range, his accent impeccable. Perhaps the whole package was so perfect that he could only be a foreigner. In fact one of the few outward signs of Maxwell’s background, I’d discover later, was his tendency to wear his shirt buttoned up to the neck, without a tie, when off-duty – a strangely un-English but very mitteleuropaisch fashion (another, perhaps harking back to his childhood poverty, was to eat quickly – and not necessarily from his own plate – without using cutlery.)
What did strike me was his resemblance to Orson Welles: the voice, the size, the appearance, the impressive personality. What didn’t strike home immediately was that the meeting was not actually with Welles, but with that actor-director’s most famous creation – Citizen Kane.
He even laughed like C. F. Kane, especially at a printer’s comment about the number of times he’d handed Maxwell his matches to relight his frequently-extinguished cigar: ‘I don’t know, Mr Maxwell, you’ve told us your plans, and how rich you are… but sitting here all we see is you bumming a light all the time.’
The similarities between Maxwell and Kane – modelled on America’s most famous and eccentric newspaper magnate, William Randolph Hearst – were many, although some took longer than others to emerge.
Kane styled himself ‘Publisher’; so did Maxwell, after toying with ‘Chairman’, ‘Chief Executive’, and even ‘Editor-in-Chief’ – or possibly all three titles. (Actually, for me, this was the clue to Kane-ism; every newspaper except the Mirror had had a ‘proprietor’ – but who had ever heard of a newspaper ‘publisher’? Hell’s bells, it was Charles Foster Kane!)
Kane was a ‘Democrat’, Maxwell was former Labour MP for Buckingham, although they both were variously described as ‘Communist’ or ‘Fascist’ by their enemies.
Kane printed his ‘declaration of principles’ on Page One of his ‘New York Inquirer’: ‘I’ll provide the people of this city with a daily paper that will tell all the news honestly. I will also provide them with a fighting and tireless champion of their rights as citizens and as human beings.’ Maxwell published his – Forward With Britain – on Page One of his first Daily Mirror.
Kane was ‘always trying to prove that he was an honest man’… In response to a question from one FoC – that Maxwell had been quoted as saying that he was an admirer of Margaret Thatcher, and had once voted for her, ‘so how can you expect us to believe you when you say you’re a Socialist ?’ – Maxwell said that he had never voted anything but Labour since the War. He had said that Margaret Thatcher was the best Prime Minister we had, no more than that, but thought that some of her policies were in the best interests of Britain.
‘But I do not tell lies’, he said. ‘I never tell lies. I might change my mind sometimes, but I have never told a lie. If anybody can provide proof that I have lied about anything, I’ll promise here and now to give that man a million pounds.’ There were no takers.
Like Kane, Maxwell considered himself ‘more newsworthy than the names in his own headlines’. And in some respects this belief was substantiated by the fact that rival newspapers often rated him or his business dealings as Page One material.
They both saw themselves, too, as ambassadors of their country. Kane returned from a European visit on the 30s having ‘talked with the responsible leaders’ and declared to a Press conference that ‘There’ll be no war’ (although this sounded like a lift from the life of Beaverbrook, rather than of Hearst). Months later, when talking to Ethiopia’s leaders about the delay in world reaction to that country’s famine, Maxwell told them: ‘I speak only for the people of Britain.’
It was all there, even to the monogrammed shirts in which they each prowled the editorial floors in the early hours of the morning.
Like Kane, he was to start writing for his own publications. Maxwell resurrected an old, defunct, house-name for his articles. Charles Wilberforce was a pen-name Hugh Cudlipp had used for ‘anonymous’ articles written while editorial director for the Daily Mirror and the six-million circulation Sunday Mirror – in the days when it was called the Sunday Pictorial.
Both men even stuck their fingers in their mouths and whistled to attract the attention of their employees...
And both wanted to be loved.
At the end of the FoCs’ meeting, Maxwell walked over to me as I was leaving. He put a big arm around my shoulder and, although perhaps three inches shorter than I am, he appeared to dwarf me.
‘How do you think I went down?’
‘Considering how much hostility there was towards you when you came in, I think you went very well.’
‘It’s going to work, you know.’
‘It had better. I’ve got eight hundred journalists’ mortgages to worry about...’
Maxwell, I knew, had served for a time with British Intelligence during the War. His business intelligence service, I suggested, had done well with the timing and background information for his purchase of MGN.
‘Intelligence service? I didn’t need one. Not the way this company leaks information. But it appalled Clive Thornton.’
‘Appalled him?’ I said. ‘It totally screwed him.’
‘Yes. That’s what Clive told me this morning.’
‘Oh, it’s Bob and Clive now is it?’
‘Well, I called him Clive. I don’t think he called me anything. But everybody calls me Bob.’
‘Be that as it may, Mr Maxwell, everybody liked Clive.’ That was a slight exaggeration.
‘You’ll get to like me, too. You’ll see.’
‘What I actually see, Mr Maxwell, is that it is Friday the 13th. I am trying to decide whether or not I am superstitious.’
‘Are you? I am. Thirteen is my lucky number. That’s why I waited until just after midnight, last night, before concluding the deal with Reeds.’
Tom Harrison, convenor of the NGA, stopped with his team on the way out of the Rotunda. Maxwell still had his hand on my shoulder. ‘You ok, Revel? Do you want me to keep a couple of the lads back, for protection?’
I remember reporting back on the FoCs’ first meeting with the new owner, and describing Robert Maxwell as ‘probably the most impressive man I’ve ever met’.
Someone asked: ‘But do you like him?’
I said I didn’t know, but he was the best proprietor we had.
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