Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1660
- 1679)
WEDNESDAY 23 JANUARY 2008
Mr Andrew Neil
Q1660 Baroness Thornton:
Just for clarification, if Mr Murdoch said that he would prefer
The Sun to support Mr Cameron or whoever is the
Leader of the Conservative Party when the next general election
happens, that is what she would have to do, even though she said
to us that she is a Labour supporter and voter herself, you are
saying that that is what she would do?
Mr Neil: She does not have to
do it, it is a free country. She can argue with him and try and
convince him otherwise or she could say, "This is an issue
of principle for me. I think this country needs a continuing Labour
Government and I am going to resign. You need to get an editor
that wants to support your political views". She does not
have to do that. All I am saying is that, since The Sun was launched
in its current formation, which I think was 1968 under Larry Lamb,
it has never taken a position at an election that did not have
the full-hearted support and, indeed, it was because of the full-hearted
influence of Rupert Murdoch. Because you are on leasehold, you
can get away with defying him. I got away with it over the election
when Mrs Thatcher was challenged by Michael Heseltine. All the
News International papers supported Mrs Thatcher and The Sunday
Times supported Michael Heseltine. He tried to argue me out
over it and he got people like Woodrow Wyatt and all sorts of
Thatcherite functionaries to call up and put pressure on me. I
resisted, we backed Heseltine, the Tories backed Major, but that
was their problem, and I survived for another four years, so it
is not black and white, which is why I would say be very careful
when you start talking about regulating this. These are complicated
relationships, these are personal relationships and, as long as
there is diversity, as long as there is a whole range of newspapers
and different owners and different forms of ownership, stay out
of it; regulation has no role here.
Q1661 Chairman:
But diversity is not necessarily the one we would look at at the
moment in terms of ownership.
Mr Neil: Where politicians, where
the State has a role in regulation is to ensure diversity.
Q1662 Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury:
You work at the moment for the Barclay brothers, do you?
Mr Neil: Yes, I publish three
magazines that are owned by the Barclay brothers, The Spectator,
The Business and Apollo, and they are on my manifestations,
which are growing increasingly important.
Q1663 Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury:
Will Lewis came before this Committee, Editor of The Daily
Telegraph and he was one of the editors who actually denied
that there was any influence exerted by his proprietors. What
is your experience of dealing with the Barclay brothers?
Mr Neil: All proprietors interfere
in some things at some stage. Like editors, they have bees in
their bonnets and, every now and then, they want to see the paper
reflect what they believe and what they would like to see happen,
but, I would have to say, as proprietors go, it would be hard
to imagine more hands-on proprietors than the Barclays. I will
give you an example. When I was running The Scotsman newspapers,
which consisted of three newspapers, The Scotsman, Scotland
on Sunday and The Edinburgh Evening News, in 1997 the
general election came along and I had taken over just a year before,
and I spoke to all three editors then and I said, "Right,
who are you going to support?" and, after conversations,
all three said, "We're going to say `Vote for Mr Blair'".
I called David Barclay and I said, "I want you to know in
advance that all three of your Scottish papers are going to say
`Vote Labour'" because I knew that the Barclay family had
been close to Mrs Thatcher and, I think, had helped her in various
ways in the Thatcher Foundation. David Barclay said to me, "Is
that what they want to do?" and I said, "Yes".
He said, "Well, what do you think?" and I said, "I
think that the three editors are right and that all three papers
should come out for Labour in the 1997 election". He said,
"Well, if that's what you think, Andrew, that's what we pay
you to do, then go ahead".
Q1664 Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury:
But, if you had thought otherwise, you would have had the power
to persuade or to tell the editors?
Mr Neil: You cannot tell educated,
informed and thinking people. You can have an argument with them,
but at the end of the day you have to let editors take the decision.
If editors keep on taking decisions that you completely disagree
with over time, you change the editor.
Q1665 Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury:
But would you say you were a conduit for the Barclays?
Mr Neil: Yes. They did not know
much about the Scottish newspaper market and indeed these were
the first major newspapers they had owned, other than The European.
They wanted someone in there as editor-in-chief who would broadly
look after the papers in their interests.
Q1666 Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury:
And your role so far as The Spectator is concerned?
Mr Neil: Is roughly the same.
Q1667 Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury:
But you are not involved with The Daily Telegraph?
Mr Neil: No.
Q1668 Bishop of Manchester:
You spoke earlier about serious disagreements that you had with
Rupert Murdoch and a moment ago you referred to the Thatcher/Heseltine
issue, but you did refer to disagreements in the plural and you
said they were serious. I wonder if you could just amplify that
statement.
Mr Neil: We had a number of disagreements.
In the 1980s, he got a complete bee in his bonnet about the American
Religious Right and he even wanted to support Pat Robertson in
the 1988 presidential election campaign. I thought that the American
Religious Right was largely a bunch of looney tunes and did not
want to have anything to do with them, so we had a huge fight
about that. There were many issues that we had a fight over and
of course the final one, which led to the parting of the ways,
was over Malaysia.
Q1669 Chairman:
We will come to that.
Mr Neil: I do not want to overplay
it, but mostly I had an amicable relationship with Rupert Murdoch
because, on a broad range of issues, we shared roughly the same
views, not entirely, but roughly the same views, enough for me
to survive for 11 years, but, every now and then, the amicable
relationship was punctuated by argument.
Q1670 Lord Maxton:
In a sense, I know exactly where Rupert Murdoch is coming from
on most issues and, in a sense, there is an honesty about that
when his newspapers then carry on the news that they have. The
Barclay brothers, however, they owned The Scotsman, a leading
Scottish paper
Mr Neil: They did. They do not
now.
Q1671 Lord Maxton:
They do not now, I know that, but I had no idea, and you just
told us, that they were close to Thatcher, but I could not tell
you what their political views are and, even if they have a minimal
influence, I do not know what they are trying to get across. Is
that not in some ways a less honest position than Rupert Murdoch's?
Mr Neil: No, it is not less honest
because the Barclays do not attempt to have the same influence
on the newspapers as Rupert Murdoch. Rupert Murdoch is obsessed
with what his newspapers say. The Barclays are not. The Barclays
give you a much, much wider and freer leash to go on, and the
story I have just told you about how they were happy, or I would
not say "happy", they were content to let the three
papers that they had just bought say, "Vote Labour"
and that they did not have an argument about it shows the extent
to which, and, if that had been a conversation with Rupert Murdoch,
he would not have said, "Well, if that's what you think,
go ahead and do it".
Q1672 Lord Maxton:
But it is surely strange in that case, and in that debate it had
been not so much "Vote Labour", but presumably the position
was that they were voting Labour for devolution and those three
newspapers had a long tradition of supporting devolution.
Mr Neil: Yes, but it was not that
sophisticated, it really was not.
Q1673 Lord Inglewood:
We have concentrated our remarks on two particular proprietors
and their relationships with editors, but, if we stand back from
that, from your perspective, as somebody with a long career in
this world, can you point to any particular relationship between
a proprietor and an editor or a particular proprietor and a series
of editors which you think provides an example of the way things
should be done?
Mr Neil: No, there is no template
and each editor and each proprietor makes their own adjustments
in their own relationship. Because, in Britain, we have a variety
of proprietors and a variety of forms of ownership, everything
from PLCs to private companies to trusts, and because we have
different proprietors and different editors, they come to their
own terms. In a sense, Murdoch gets demonised because he is the
most visible, but all proprietors that I know have some influence
and some say and get involved in what their papers do and say.
All proprietors do it, but they do it in different ways, so there
is no model, there is no template.
Q1674 Lord Inglewood:
That I understand, but you did say in your opening remarks that
there was a point, I think, if I understood you right, beyond
which probably a proprietor should not go. Now, could you then
define that with a bit more clarity for us?
Mr Neil: Yes. I think it is particularly
true of the quality newspapers that, if a proprietor is in effect
trying to edit at one removed, giving orders on a day-to-day basis,
determining what the line should be, even getting involved in
the editorials, having a major say over what is going on on the
front page, I think, when a proprietor does that, it becomes untenable
for the editor and you will not be able to hire bright people
when you do that. If you treat people like dummies, you will end
up only being able to hire dummies, and that is why the relationship
between proprietor and editor is a very sophisticated one and
on a case-by-case basis. You have to give intelligent editors
leeway to edit their papers. That is not to say they do it in
a vacuum, but they do it with no influence from the proprietor
at all. An editor edits his or her newspaper with a whole range
of influences bearing down on them from politicians to the law
to business considerations to the proprietor to their own journalists,
and you handle that mix as best you can and the proprietor is
part of that mix, and I think that is the way it will always
be.
Q1675 Lord Inglewood:
Just for clarity, you prefaced that last remark with saying that
it was particularly in the case of the quality papers, so it is
not necessarily the case with the red-tops, is it?
Mr Neil: I think with the red-tops,
particularly News International, and I think less with The
Mirror because The Mirror is a public company
and there is no Murdoch-type figure and there is no ideologically
driven person in the management of The Mirror, but I think
with the red-tops proprietors feel that they should have more
of an influence. Murdoch did because he always thought The
Sun was far more influential than The Times.
He thought The Sun mattered more than The Times
or The Sunday Times and he cared more about
what The Sun said than what the other papers said.
I think traditionally, if you take how Richard Desmond runs The
Express, if you look at how Beaverbrook ran The
Express, if you take the old days of The Mirror
with Cudlipp and so on, I think you will find traditionally there
has been more proprietorial influence brought to bear on the content
of these papers than there has been at what we used to call the
`broadsheet' end of the market. I would just say another point
in relation to this, that at the end of the day, if the editor
and the proprietor are not, as I would put it, on the same planet,
then the situation is untenable. No matter what regulations you
put in place, no matter what trustees or trusts, if the editor
and the proprietor do not have a working relationship, the situation,
as Yeats would say, "the centre cannot hold", cannot
last.
Q1676 Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall:
If I can just pick up on the remark you made about Murdoch being
demonised, how much do you think that has to do with the fact
that he is not a UK citizen and do you have any views about the
ownership rules that allow a substantial part of the UK media
to be owned by somebody who is not?
Mr Neil: I would prefer, by and
large, our media to be owned by people who live in this country,
pay taxes in this country, have a vote in this country and are
part of public life and the political debate. That would be my
preference, but I believe in open borders and free trade and the
free movement of people and capital and, if our media ends up,
a substantial chunk of it, in foreign hands, then I would not
want to see regulations to stop that. Of course, in European terms,
you could not; you could not stop any Europeans from owning British
newspapers. I think you are right, it plays a part in the public
debate that, if a newspaper takes a particularly strong line,
say, on our attitude to the euro or to the European Treaty, the
fact that that line is being dictated by someone who does not
even live in this country or have a vote should be part of the
debate, and that is how I would see it, come out into the open
and be a factor in how much weight we give that opinion.
Q1677 Chairman:
Does it strike you as strange in the editorial freedom argument
that, when you come to the issue of Iraq, for example, as far
as we can see, there is almost total unanimity amongst Mr Murdoch's
newspapers worldwide that it was a good thing for the invasion
of Iraq to go ahead?
Mr Neil: I think it is interesting
that the Murdoch empire was more united on Iraq than the Bush
Administration. There were more discordant voices in the Bush
Administration than there were in the Murdoch empire, and that
is just the way he runs things. He picks the editors that will
take the kind of view of these things that he has and these editors
know what is expected of them when the big issues come and they
fall into line. It may not even be a case of them doing something
they have been told to do, and I suspect that the vast majority
of his editors agreed with him on Iraq in the first place and
that is why he chose them.
Q1678 Baroness Howe of Idlicote:
I would like to go a little bit into the Malaysian story. You
have told us actually in the Condé Nast article just what
you found out later about why all this pressure was put on you,
but let us put it from the other viewpoint. Supposing it was not
convenient for you to go at that time, supposing you had dug in
your heels, what do you think the outcome would have been?
Mr Neil: I think my position would
have become untenable over time, over quite quick time. I would
then have ceased to be on the same planet as him on a serious
issue, one of business interests, and he would have found ways
of making life pretty intolerable for the editor. It would not
have been a case of just being fired right away, but it would
have been a case of money drying up, budgets not appearing. This
already happened to me in the final months anyway when I wanted
to expand the paper into other areas and that was denied for no
good reason other than we had fallen out of love. I do not think
a newspaper group or a title can survive and prosper if the editor
and the proprietor are in a state of civil war, and that is why
arrangements, such as the trusts that The Times
and The Sunday Times have, I think, are a
complete waste of time, effort and regulatory effort. To paraphrase
Stanley Baldwin, I think it was Stanley Baldwin who said that
he would rather consult his valet than the National Union of Conservative
Associations. You will know this, Chairman.
Q1679 Chairman:
It was even before my time!
Mr Neil: Nothing was before your
time, Chairman! I would rather have consulted my driver than consulted
the trustees of Times newspapers.
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