Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1715
- 1719)
WEDNESDAY 23 JANUARY 2008
Mr Roy Greenslade
Q1715 Chairman:
I am sorry to keep you waiting, but I notice that you have been
here watching.
Mr Greenslade: Riveting, yes!
Q1716 Chairman:
I hope you are going to be as riveting as well!
Mr Greenslade: Andrew was my editor
for three years, so I can see the joins!
Q1717 Chairman:
In your career you have been assistant editor of The Sun;
you have been managing editor (news) at The Sunday Times;
and you have been editor of the Daily Mirror.
Mr Greenslade: A rackety career!
Q1718 Chairman:
I would like to come back to Mr Murdoch in a moment, but tell
us about The Mirror. We keep on hearing about Mr Murdoch
but who was your proprietor then?
Mr Greenslade: Actually my proprietor
did not get a mention previously but he was somebody called Robert
Maxwell! The difference between Maxwell and other proprietors
was really that he was an overt interferer. You have really heard
about discreet interference. The difference with Maxwell was that
he made it quite clear it was not only done privately, it was
done to members of your staff so it leaked out. He liked to appear
in the newspaper as often as he possibly could and he liked to
have an involvement in virtually every story, not just in domestic
politics but often in foreign politics. He seemed to know the
mind of Monsieur Chirac and Gorbachev and any Bulgarian, Romanian,
Hungarian Prime Minister that you care to name. So this put enormous
pressure on an editor in the sense that you never quite knew where
you were with him. You have heard Andrew Neil say that if you
are not on the same planet it never works, and I was editor of
The Mirror really only 13 months because it became
clear within some monthsand I tried to make it workthat
we were not on the same planet and I had to go.
Q1719 Chairman:
And he interfered all the time?
Mr Greenslade: He interfered in
virtually everything. I could entertain you with amusing examples
and I will do one for you. When Soviet troops went back into Lithuania
briefly after the perestroika era Maxwell asked me what was on
the front page and I said, "We have a picture of Soviet troops
battering people outside the radio station in Lithuania; it amounts
almost to a reinvasion," and he said, "Do not be so
incredibly stupid, Mr Greenslade, Mr Gorbachev would have rung
me if he was doing that." You will also know that he interfered
in strange ways, so when I sent two people to cover the Gulf War
in 1991 without my knowledge he called them up as they were on
their way to the airport and said when they arrivedI think
they were going to Dohathat they would meet one of his
representatives who would supply them with Caxton encyclopaedias
to sell to the troops in the trenches. Of course, they called
me in some bate and said, "Will we have to do that?"
and I told them not to be so silly. An example, also if I was
away for a weekend he would regularly sack a member of staff so
that I would have to come on the phone and sort that out and so
on. So he interfered in staff matters, in the content of the newspaper
and in resources, budgets, hirings, firings and so on, in a way
that when I had previously worked for several proprietors, Lord
Matthews, Rupert Murdock, they would never have got involved in
such a way. But I think he was extraordinary and one should not
take too much from that except that what he did personally in
his relationship with the editor and with the staff is done in
a much more discreet way, through channels of influence, through
other figures in other newspapers, and I think one has to take
on board the fact that he was a laughable buffoonish character
but that he was not that much different in a way from, say, Beaverbrook
before him, Cudlip in some ways at The Mirror before him,
and other proprietors since, noticeably Richard Desmond at the
Daily Express.
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