Examination of Witnesses (Questions 940
- 959)
WEDNESDAY 21 NOVEMBER 2007
Mr Andrew Marr and Mr Dominic Lawson
Q940 Chairman:
But it has always been thus, has it not? The point that you are
making, I think, is not that the newspaper is trying to get advertising
into it. When I started my short journalistic career on The
Times I started on something called special supplements, and
there were special supplements which were literally written for
the advertisers. The difference was that they were obviously marked
in that way.
Mr Lawson: Exactly so.
Q941 Chairman:
The point you are making is a different one; that the advertising
is going into the editorial?
Mr Lawson: Yes.
Mr Marr: Could I very briefly add on to that?
One of my great rows at the Independent was about wraparound,
where there was a fashion, for instance, for the advertiser effectively
doing the front of the newspaper, which was then stapled to the
front of the newspaper, which we resisted desperately. But Dominic
is absolutely right—it is creeping in everywhere in a way
that it did not before.
Chairman: Lord Inglewood.
Q942 Lord Inglewood:
Listening to the two of you, it seems to me that being an editor
of the kinds of papers that you have edited has more in common
probably with being the manager of a football club than almost
any other profession.
Mr Lawson: I think it is a brilliant analogy
and I think that is where you see that the good groups appoint
a manager and leave them to get on with it. And you see the slightly
less good football clubs who halfway through a season ditch the
manager and get someone else, whereas with Manchester United Ferguson
had a tricky start to begin with but they stick with it and it
works out okay. I think it is a very accurate analogy.
Q943 Lord Inglewood:
In the way that the best managers probably operate—and it
is something we heard from other witnesses we have spoken to,
both in this country and abroad—you start, if you are a
proprietor, by trying to identify what the paper is all about
and having an editor who is then put in position, and it is really
a failure, is it not, if we get the kind of stand-off that, for
example, you touched on where the proprietor comes and says, "I
want this story put in," because you are trying to create
an environment where there is no need for these things actually
to be said in such a precise and expressed way—it is all
part of the culture of the editorial/managerial relationship that
everybody is going in the same direction. Is that right?
Mr Lawson: That is pretty much right.
Q944 Lord Inglewood:
Then the difficulty, it seems to me, is sometimes to identify
what it is they are trying to do. What is success for the proprietor?
Mr Marr: Status, partly.
Mr Lawson: Yes. It is a very odd thing because
again it is a slightly general question but proprietors of newspapers
typically pay much more for them than they were worth commercially.
The Barclay Brothers paid £615 million for The Telegraph
Group, which is probably twice what it is worth. So clearly there
is more to it than commerce. If you were only motivated by commerce
you would not pay that sort of sum of money; you would put it
in a bank, which would be much more sensible; they would get a
much better return at any building society, even Northern Rock.
So there clearly is more to it; it is a very intangible thing.
However, I do not think it is a bad thing because the press barons
put far more money into newspapers than, if you like, a group
of accountants ever would and we, the editors, have had much bigger
train sets to play with, much more fun and much more opportunity.
If you look at The Times, for example, Murdoch has probably
been losing £50 million a year on The Times for quite
a number of years and it has a very big foreign bureaux and it
covers things in a very expensive way. If you had a man who had
previously produced widgets who went in there and said, "I
will do that" it would be a much smaller paper; it would
have much smaller resources; it would see journalists as costs
rather than as assets and it would probably be less good. So although
you can point to various things about press barons and say, "Is
it right that someone should have this amount of potential political
power?"—and I understand the question—actually
for the British newspaper industry, and you think of Beaverbrook
and what happened there or the Rothermeres with the Mail,
they produced something which is far bigger and far more successful,
I suspect, in the long term than if it were left in the hands
of people who otherwise were just looking at the bottom line and
nothing else.
Q945 Lord Maxton:
The football analogy could apply to that as well.
Mr Lawson: Yes.
Q946 Lord Inglewood:
Just to go back to the relationship between the editor and the
owner, when things go wrong do owners, proprietors endeavour to
undermine the editor?
Mr Marr: Yes, absolutely.
Q947 Lord Inglewood:
You touched on it. Also by getting at their immediate subordinates,
who are ostensibly part of the editor's team, and to try to make
them disaffected and so on?
Mr Marr: Yes, any editor in trouble picks up
the media pages and finds the little snippets about them, rumours
about their successor not quite but almost denied by somebody
in management.
Q948 Baroness Thornton:
This happened to you, did it not?
Mr Marr: Yes, and probably rightly so I hasten
to add! I am not complaining particularly. There is no doubt that
there are many ways that an editor can have pressure placed upon
him or her, but it tends to happen when there is trouble. We see,
not just in The Telegraph Group but across a lot of British newspapers
now, quite a fast turnaround of editors and I think that is because
the entire industry is under such pressure and you have managements
all over the place scratching their heads and thinking, "Maybe
there is a cleverer way of doing this; maybe if I put X or Y in
they have a magic touch." But the truth is that apart from
being—Dominic mentioned the word "fun", which
is the crucial word here—fun for the proprietors and it
is an enormously enjoyable fun job to do as editor, it is also
quite a hard job if it is done well, and people need time to learn
about the culture, to absorb it and to make some mistakes. I agree
with Dominic, I think that is not happening very much at the moment.
Q949 Chairman:
You said almost immediately, when asked about the motivation for
being an owner, status.
Mr Marr: Absolutely, yes. Of course it is not
the only motivation, but if you look at the Independent
it is also losing shed loads of money and why does Tony O'Reilly
stick with an organisation losing shed loads of money when he
can make huge amounts of money with Waterford Crystal and all
sorts of other businesses around the world? Part of the reason,
let us be honest, is that when he comes to town he goes to see
Gordon Brown, and when Gordon Brown announced that he was not
going to hold an election after all who was staying at Chequers?
Rupert Murdoch. These are people and the like whose lives are
enriched by knowing Prime Minister after Prime Minister, Chancellor
after Chancellor, who are waited on with great respect when they
arrive in London by the political figures of the day, and of course
that is part of it.
Q950 Chairman:
But that is only part of it, is it not, because presumably Mr
Murdoch also thinks he has influence, not just status?
Mr Marr: Absolutely.
Q951 Chairman:
In your experience which of the newspapers at the moment have
real clout, have real influence in a political sense in this country?
Mr Marr: Most of them have some influence. For
instance, on some parts of the landscape the Telegraph
has huge influence on the way the Conservative Party conducts
itself and the authority of the current Conservative leader of
the day and so forth; and the same would be true of the Daily
Mail. I think the papers which have most influence are the
ones which appear to be still debating how they are going to jump.
So at the moment certainly the Mail and The Times
would be the papers I would have suspected of maximum influence
because you can see the war being fought out by Brownites and
anti-Brownites and Cameroons and traditional Conservatives taking
place in those papers on a daily basis, and you can follow the
front line column by column and letter by letter and so of course
they are the papers which politicians want to influence most.
Q952 Chairman:
But they are not necessarily the biggest circulation, although
the Mail has a good circulation. What about the Sun?
It, after all, won the 1992 election, so they said—
Mr Marr: So they said.
Q953 Chairman:
... for the Conservative Party.
Mr Marr: Yes, the Sun is also important
but, for instance, the Sun seems to have pretty much chosen
which way it is going the next time, looking at it—it does
not seem to me to be a Brownite newspaper for much longer—whereas
it is harder with some of the other papers.
Q954 Lord Maxton:
Mr Lawson said that he thought it was a good thing that politicians
were frightened of the media. In your book you do not actually
agree with that, do you?
Mr Marr: Me?
Q955 Lord Maxton:
Yes.
Mr Marr: I take the view that—I can say
this in this room at least—being elected is the most important
thing. If you are in a parliamentary democracy being elected is
what ultimately gives you authority and I do argue that sometimes
as a trade we get above ourselves, and I do not think the politicians
should be frightened but I do think you need vigorous places where
politicians are pressed, mocked, put under pressure about what
they have been doing and so on.
Q956 Lord Maxton:
Should that not be by their constituents?
Mr Marr: In theory but the constituents are
too busy playing football or earning a living usually.
Q957 Chairman:
In both your views are politicians, ministers and Prime Ministers
frightened of the press? Are they concerned about the press?
Mr Marr: More often than not far too much. It
is no secret that John Major, for instance, was ridiculously thin
skinned about the press; he would phone me up when I was a relatively
humble columnist and complain about other columnists and you would
think, "This is the Prime Minister, there are other things
to be doing." Tony Blair was certainly very aware; he was
always able to project this cheeky half-smile and did not appear
to be so worried, never got angry and all the rest of it, but
he certainly knew very, very closely what was being said about
him by whom.
Q958 Chairman:
It is not quite that, it is changing one's policies because you
know that that is going to coincide with the view of the newspaper
or the proprietor. Mr Lawson.
Mr Lawson: I think there is a risk in over-estimating
the influence of the press. My impression is that people are not
influenced by what goes in leader columns. I bet you could write
two leader columns saying completely the opposite thing on two
successive days and hardly anyone would notice.
Q959 Baroness Thornton:
And indeed they do!
Mr Lawson: Yes. And whether the Sun backs
Labour or Conservative I would think it is quite marginal. I hate
to admit it but I think that politicians do overestimate the influence
of the press. I think that people are not led by the nose by the
press, and I think it is much more marginal than they sometimes
imagine.
Mr Marr: Having said which, in a thought experiment
if the three or four most important proprietors happened to be
passionately Europhile and in favour of the Euro I suspect we
would be in the Euro. There is a complicated relationship between
genuine independent public opinion, the media and the political
class.
Mr Lawson: I do not want to get into an argument
on this, but if you remember the entire British press, with the
exception of the Spectator he said very conceitedly when
he was an editor, said that we were right to enter the ERM when
we did—the entire British press, the entire establishment—and
something happened during the process which turned everything
around. So I think that the Euro phobia of the British press is
more recent than people imagine. The Mail was not Europhobic
before then—it really was not. It really changed dramatically—
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