The Fourth Estate

He was about to turn back, leave the building and tell Sam exactly what he thought of him, and his friend Arthur too, when he remembered the wager. If he hadn’t been such a bad loser, he might not have knocked on the door and, without waiting for a response, marched in.

Sixteen faces turned and stared up at him. He waited for the chairman to ask him what the hell he thought he was doing, but no one spoke. It was almost as if they had been anticipating his arrival. “Mr. Chairman,” he began, “I am willing to offer $12 a share for your stock in the Courier. As I leave for London tonight, we either close the deal right now or we don’t close it at all.”

Sam sat in the car waiting for his boss to return. During the third hour he rang Arthur to tell him to invest next month’s wages in Melbourne Courier shares, and to do it before the board made an official announcement.

* * *

When Townsend flew into London the following morning, he issued a press release to announce that Bruce Kelly would be taking over as editor of the Globe in its run-up to becoming a tabloid. Only a handful of insiders appreciated the significance of the appointment. During the next few days, profiles of Bruce appeared in several national newspapers. All of them reported that he had been editor of the Sydney Chronicle for twenty-five years, was divorced with two grown-up children, and though Keith Townsend was thought not to have any close friends, he was the nearest thing to it. The Citizen jeered when he wasn’t granted a work permit, and suggested that editing the Globe couldn’t be considered work. Beyond that there wasn’t a lot of information on the latest immigrant from Australia. Under the headline “R.I.P.,” the Citizen went on to inform its readers that Kelly was nothing more than an undertaker who had been brought in to bury something everyone else accepted had been dead for years. It went on to say that for every copy the Globe sold, the Citizen now sold three. The real figure was 2.3, but Townsend was becoming used to Armstrong’s exaggeration when it came to statistics. He had the leader framed, and hung it on the wall of Bruce’s new office to await his arrival.

As soon as Bruce landed in London, even before he’d found somewhere to live, he began poaching journalists from the tabloids. Most of them didn’t seem to be concerned by the Citizen’s warnings that the Globe was on a downward spiral, and might not even survive if Townsend was unable to come to terms with the unions. Bruce’s first appointment was Kevin Rushcliffe, who, he had been assured, was making a reputation as deputy editor on the People.

The first time Rushcliffe was left to edit the paper on Bruce’s day off, they received a writ from lawyers representing Mr. Mick Jagger. Rushcliffe casually shrugged his shoulders and said, “It was too good a story to check.” After substantial damages had been paid and an apology printed, the lawyers were instructed to check Mr. Rushcliffe’s copy more carefully in future.

Some seasoned journalists did sign up to join the editorial staff. When they were asked why they had left secure jobs to join the Globe, they pointed out that as they had been offered three-year contracts, they didn’t care much either way.

In the first few weeks under Kelly’s editorship sales continued to slide. The editor would have liked to have spent more time discussing the problem with Townsend, but the boss seemed to be continually locked into negotiations with the print unions.

On the day of the launch of the Globe as a tabloid, Bruce held a party in the offices to watch the new paper coming off the presses. He wa

s disappointed when many of the politicians and celebrities he had invited failed to turn up. He learned later that they were attending a party thrown by Armstrong to celebrate the Citizen’s seventy-fifth anniversary. A former employee of the Citizen, now working at the Globe, pointed out that it was actually only their seventy-second year. “Well then, we’ll just have to remind Armstrong in three years’ time,” said Townsend.

A few minutes after midnight, when the party was drawing to a close, a messenger strolled into the editor’s office to let him know that the presses had broken down. Townsend and Bruce ran down to the print room to find that the workforce had downed tools and already gone home. They rolled up their sleeves and set about the hopeless task of trying to get the presses started again, but they quickly discovered that a spanner had literally been thrown in the works. Only 131,000 copies of the paper appeared on the streets the following day, none of them delivered beyond Birmingham, as the train drivers had come out in support of their brothers in the print unions.

“NOT MANY PEOPLE INHABITING THE NEW GLOBE,” ran the headline in the Citizen the following morning. The paper went on to devote the whole of page five to suggesting that the time had come to bring back the old Globe. After all, the “illegal immigrant”—as they kept referring to Bruce—had promised new sales records, and had indeed achieved them: the Citizen now outsold the Globe by thirty to one. Yes, thirty to one!

On the opposite page, the Citizen offered its readers a hundred to one against the Globe surviving another six months. Townsend immediately wrote out a check for £1,000 and sent it round to Armstrong’s office by hand, but he received no acknowledgment. However, one call to the Press Association from Bruce made sure that the story was released to every other newspaper.

On the front page of the Citizen the following morning, Armstrong announced that he had banked Townsend’s check for £1,000, and that as the Globe had no hope of surviving for another six months, he would be giving a donation of £50,000 to the Press Benevolent Fund and a further £50,000 to any charity of Mr. Townsend’s choice. By the end of the week, Townsend had received over a hundred letters from leading charities explaining why he should select their particular cause.

During the next few weeks the Globe rarely managed to print more than 300,000 copies a day, and Armstrong never stopped reminding his readers of the fact. As the months passed, Townsend accepted that eventually he would have to take on the unions. But he knew it wouldn’t be possible while the Labor Party remained in power.

30.

The Globe

4 May 1979

MAGGIE VICTORIOUS!

Townsend left the television in his office on all night so he could watch the election results coming in from around the country. Once he was certain Margaret Thatcher would be moving in to 10 Downing Street, he hastily wrote a leader assuring readers that Britain was about to embark on an exciting new era. He ended with the words “Fasten your seatbelts.”

As he and Bruce staggered out of the building at four o’clock in the morning, Townsend’s parting words were, “You know what this means, don’t you?”

* * *

The following afternoon Townsend arranged a private meeting with Eric Harrison, the general secretary of the breakaway print union, at the Howard Hotel. When the meeting broke up, the head porter knocked on the door and asked if he could see him privately. He told Townsend what he had overheard his junior saying on the telephone when he had arrived back early from his tea break. Townsend didn’t need to be told who must have been on the other end of the line.

“I’ll sack him at once,” said the head porter. “You can be sure it will never happen again.”

“No, no,” said Townsend. “Leave him exactly where he is. I may no longer be able to meet people I don’t want Armstrong to know about here, but that doesn’t stop me from meeting those I do.”

* * *

At the monthly board meeting of Armstrong Communications, the finance director reported that he estimated the Globe must still be losing around £100,000 a week. However deep Townsend’s pockets were, that sort of negative cash-flow would soon empty them.

Armstrong smiled, but said nothing until Sir Paul Maitland moved on to the second item on the agenda, and called on him to brief the board on his latest American trip. Armstrong brought them up to date on his progress in New York, and went on to tell them that he intended to make a further trip across the Atlantic in the near future, as he believed it would not be long before the company was in a position to make a public bid for the New York Star.

Sir Paul said he was anxious about the sheer scale of such an acquisition, and asked that no commitments should be made without the board’s approval. Armstrong assured him that it had never crossed his mind to do otherwise.