Shouting in the Street by Donald Trelford

Author:Donald Trelford [Donald Trelford]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781785903533
Publisher: Biteback Publishing
Published: 2017-04-04T04:00:00+00:00

A bigger issue than Northern Ireland was looming in 1979 with the coming general election. Which way would The Observer advise its readers to vote? For an exhausted and divided Labour Party that had just about held on to power with the help of Liberal votes in Parliament? Or for a Tory government led by Margaret Thatcher that would be more right-wing than the one led by Edward Heath? For a paper like The Observer, this was a genuine dilemma. It was to determine the paper’s ownership.

John Cole, the strongest political voice on the paper, was firmly for sticking with Labour. I was in favour of supporting no party, just setting out the choices for readers to decide for themselves, pointing out the strengths and weaknesses of both sides. Newspapers don’t vote, I said: people do. Our job is to help them make up their minds, not dictate to them. To me Labour seemed to have run out of steam and was short of ideas and Thatcher seemed too extreme and untested for a paper with liberal values.

Even though he said in his memoirs that he would personally have voted for Thatcher, Conor never said this when the election was discussed in the office. In fact, I found his account of this episode in his memoirs, written twenty years after the events, either disingenuous or the product of faulty memory.

Conor had sat as a Labour MP throughout his political career in Dublin, and during the 1979 election campaign he went to Belfast to address a meeting of the Northern Ireland Labour Party. According to agency reports, he had assured them that The Observer would be supporting Labour in the general election, an announcement greeted with loud applause by his audience – and with some surprise by me, since we hadn’t discussed it. He wrote to Thornton Bradshaw saying the same thing and received a horrified response. Arco clearly wanted The Observer to back Thatcher.

I suspect that Conor, as an Irishman, didn’t really care much about the election either way, but he wanted to test the Americans’ claims of non-interference with the paper by doing the opposite of what they wanted. It was a dangerous ploy that resulted in Arco offloading the paper as soon as they decently could.

He virtually admits this in his memoirs in an explanation that still leaves me baffled: ‘I thought that, in the logic of the Astorian tradition I should defer to John Cole … I also thought that to be guided by John Cole on this issue might lead to a showdown with the owners.’ How did the ‘Astorian tradition’, as he called it, lead him to defer to the opinion of the deputy editor rather than that of the editor?

Barnetson was so concerned about the effect that the general election leader would have on Atlantic Richfield that he asked me, as a special favour, if he could read it before publication. I took a proof round to his swanky Mayfair apartment on a Friday evening and agreed, after some debate, to make a few minor alterations to the wording.

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