The golden age of bullshit: The Times editor's delusions and how Britain's media helped politics get grubbier...
Johnny's at the Web Summit talking up the hackery, I'm on the pavement thinking about the government...
Speaking at the Web Summit — Europe’s largest tech bro backslapping and circle jerk session — earlier this week, Times editor John Witherow claimed that we are living through a “golden age for serious journalism”. He said this with a straight face and at the same time that Matt Chorley broadcasts on Times Radio five days a week, getting his lead-in on four of those days from a grown man who uses the name ‘Stig’ as his professional identity.
According to a report included in today’s Times purely to burnish the boss’ ego, Witherow told the audience of crypto hawkers, NFT boosters, startup goblins, rabid marketing people, and venture capitalists in jeans and suit jackets, that:
… we are told it’s the tech giants who are killing us. Readers want everything for free, we must do click-bait, it’s a race to the bottom. Except that’s not true. Good journalism does not need saving. It’s thriving.
This is a golden age for serious journalism. It’s expanding into audio and visual and reaching new audiences.
Presumably Witherow meant serious journalism like today’s cover of the Times 2 which promoted a feature instructing readers on how to wear a gilet because “we all want to look posh now”, apparently.
Or perhaps he meant the surfeit of culture war stories in the main paper, which are almost identical in tone and framing as the versions of them printed in The Times’ great rivals The Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail, or the comment section where Matthew Parris offers a “what I did on my holidays” account of attending Petronella Wyatt’s Halloween party.
Witherow has been a national newspaper editor for 27 years1, having succeeded Andrew Neil at the helm of The Sunday Times in 1994 and moved to The Times in 2013. Public school educated2, he has been at News Corp/News UK since 1980, having joined The Times as a trainee after a pre-university stint as a BBC World Service correspondent in Namibia and three years with Reuters after university. He’s a Times and Sunday Times lifer with the world view to go with it.
As a young reporter, Witherow covered the Iran/Iraq war and the Falklands conflict for The Times, turning up in a contemporaneous New York Times report on military censorship during the latter (“British reporters tell new side of Falklands story”). But his personal “golden age” began soon after he took the editor’s chair at The Sunday Times when a report that implied that the former Labour leader Michael Foot — then 81 years old — had been a Soviet agent.
The article, published in February 1994 and headlined “KGB: Michael Foot was our agent”, claimed Foot had operated under the crushingly obvious codename of Agent Boot and that the KGB had made cash payments to Tribune during the time he was the magazine’s editor. Foot sued and facing the prospect of Rupert Murdoch having to appear in court, The Times settled.
The allegations about Foot came from Next Stop Execution, the memoirs of the Soviet defector Oleg Gordievsky, which had been purchased for serialisation by The Sunday Times. Without evidence to back up Gordievsky’s claims, the paper — on Witherow’s instructions — sent a reporter to Moscow to interview ex-KGB officers including Mikhail Lyubimov and Viktor Kubeykin.
Lyubimov later to The Independent that it was “a ridiculous smear” to suggest that Foot had been a KGB agent, while Kubeykin said The Sunday Times had produced “a 100 per cent distortion” of what he had told the reporter. It’s quite something when your distortions are too wild even for an ex-KGB spook.
In Flat Earth News, Nick Davies describes what happened next:
As soon as the story came out it was ridiculed by Labour MPs, Tory MPs, the former Prime Minister Edward Heath who had had access to intelligence material, the KGB officer who was supposed to have been Foot’s controller and by Foot himself. That Sunday lunctime John Witherow gave a live interview to BBC Radio 4 in which he was pinned down by the falsity of the story, wriggled desperately and ended up declaring that his paper had never meant to suggest that Foot really was an agenty of influence, merely that it was interesting that the KGB mistakenly seemed to have thought that he was.
Foot issued writs to The Sunday Times and The News of the World, which had published a follow-up story. The latter settled within hours, paying £35,000 to Foot, but Witherow — surely on the instructions of Murdoch — decided to fight the case. Having failed in an attempt to prevent Foot’s legal team from ensuring that Murdoch would have to appear in court, The Sunday Times settled for somewhere in the region of £100,000 and, in a statement read out in open court, confirmed that it had never intended to suggest that he had been a spy.
During his appearance at the Leveson Inquiry in 2012, Witherow was asked about the Agent Boot story and admitted:
It came from a very senior KGB defector, Oleg Gordievsky, in a book, and I think it's fair to say I overcooked it and cocked it up.
But Witherow he could still not resist returning to the smear. In 2018 — 8 years after Michael Foot’s death — Witherow, now editor of The Times, reheated the claims, safe in the knowledge that you cannot libel the dead. The front page splash of The Times on 15 September 2018 was headlined MI6 believed Michael Foot was a paid Soviet informant.
The journalist Tom Foot, Michael’s great nephew, wrote at the time:
We can only think that Mr Witherow – now editor of The Times – has since Leveson succumbed to a bout of amnesia.
The source of the “new” revelations? A book about the very same Gordievsky by the newspaper’s veteran writer and historian, Ben Macintyre, who lives in Hampstead. The article appeared to contain no new evidence, no paper trail – just further embellishment. I contacted Mr Macintyre yesterday (Wednesday) and he responded to say:
“At no point do I suggest that Michael Foot was a spy, or even an agent in anything but the KGB understanding of that word, nor do I imply that Foot was unpatriotic, let alone treacherous, or had anything to do with Soviet intelligence after 1968. But I do conclude that, in the 1960s, he was remarkably naive, open to manipulation and prepared to accept ‘Red Gold’…”
He suggested that several MI6 agents believed Gordievsky’s story that Michael had met KGB agents, speculating that he may perhaps have enjoyed the “covert glamour associated with such meetings”.
“I do hope, if you read the book, you might agree that it contains no attempt to ‘smear’ your great-uncle.”
Whether there was an attempt or not, it was interpreted in many quarters as just that. Of course, newspapers can’t libel the dead. But can a libel, already settled to be such, be repeated by the same editor and publisher? And if it can, should it be? Reputations survive death; families can be affected.
In June 2020, Witherow subjected himself to his first and, to date, only Times Radio appearance; the interview, conducted by rumpled Rupert Murdoch super-fan Stig Abell, was less a grilling and more an ego massage that threatened to descend into a full-on happy ending that would have had the station Ofcommed out of existence within its first hours.
Abell asked Witherow what his biggest mistake as a national newspaper editor had been and he replied that it was losing the libel action against Foot. Not because, as he told Leveson, he “cocked it up” but because “it later turned out to be true”. It did not. But Michael Foot has not been dead for 11 years and can no longer contest Witherow’s claims.
Back in 2018, Tom Foot wrote that he “salvaged… an eight-page letter to the ‘Wriggling Witherow’” that Michael Foot had written the day after the Agent Boot story was published in 1994. It’s yet to be published in full, but Foot the younger quoted this line from it:
If the injury they seek to inflict on the dead, hardly less the living, is allowed to stand, our politics will have become dirtier still, and journalists like John Witherow will have been responsible for the degradation.
On Monday, Witherow stood up and pontificated about a “golden age of serious journalism”. Today, the Conservative Party — which the papers Witherow has edited for 27 years have spent most of that time backing — voted to reject the miniscule punishment meted out to Owen Paterson for his egregious breaches of lobbying rules and to rip the guts out of the meagre means of enforcing what remains of standards in public life. There is a connection.
In 2010, it was Witherow who, in defending A.A. Gill describing Clare Balding as a “dyke on a bike” in a TV review, sent Balding a letter which said:
In my view, some members of the gay community need to stop regarding themselves as having a special victim status and behave like any other sensible group that is accepted by society. Not having a privileged status means, of course, one must accept occasionally being the butt of jokes. A person’s sexuality should not give them a protected status.
Balding complained to the Press Complaints Commission. Her complaint was understandably and rightly upheld. She also wrote about it here.
This is the same Witherow whose paper writes obsessively, often deceitfully, and usually cruelly about trans people. The same paper that carried Clare Foges and Matthew Parris’ virulent attacks on Gypsy, Romany and Traveller people (the latter a call to strip them of their ethnic minority status).
In 2016, The Times, initially didn’t cover the Hillsborough inquest verdict on its front page. Witherow claimed it was a mistake.
Tony Barrett. then the paper’s football correspondent, resigned over the ‘mistake’. Barrett, who is from Merseyside, and had previously worked for The Liverpool Echo, tweeted simply “unbelievable” when the paper’s front page was revealed that night. The next day he wrote:
To everyone who's been let down I'm so sorry.
Barnett — who went on to work for Joe.co.uk and is now Head of Club and Supporter Engagement for the Campeones del Mundo — was not the one who owed an apology. It was Witherow and the dark lord he has served for almost 30 years, but none was forthcoming.
The excellently sourced Liz Gerard wrote in the aftermath of the ommission that:
[One account from within the Times newsroom] says that one of those executives and the newsdesk argued consistently and in vain for the story, but that Witherow had ruled that he didn't want it on the front because it was "old news". Old news because it had been around since 11am or old news because the police cover-up had been rumbled years before?
Whichever it was, Witherow —who hasn't responded to my inquiries on the matter — apparently gave the impression of truly believing that it was not worth the front.
[One Times source said] "Everyone was outraged. Witherow was the only one thinking along those lines. It seems that there are too many sycophants at the top level around him."
Another said: "This is the inevitable outcome when an editor is too aggressive, too much of a bully. They can't be told anything and the backbench is too cowed to stand up to them."
A third respected Times writer rued the omission, but was of the opinion that broadsheet fronts didn't matter as much as tabloids and that "hopefully it will blow over". He pointed to "good coverage inside".
Hmm. The first mention of Hillsborough comes on page 12, behind mushroom scrumping in Epping Forest, a photograph of the actress Elizabeth Olsen and a new treetop walkway at Westonbirt.
That might supports the theory that a proper page one story was intended or further demonstrate Witherow's cavalier attitude to the subject. He dislikes football and reporter David Brown is said to have had a fight to be allowed to go to Warrington to cover the end of the inquest in person.
This is the man telling us we are living in a golden age? A man unfit to sit in the seat once occupied by Sir Harold Evans but whose loyalty and fealty to Rupert Murdoch has served him well. A man who trades under the ‘respectability’ of The Times masthead by choosing almost identical stories with almost identical angles to The Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph.
Witherow has called The Daily Mail “an angry paper” in the past, pretending that the publication he leads is one of cool, calm rationality. But The Times is the paper that hisses that it wants to see the manager while the Mail screams it. It’s the paper of the passive-aggressive note in the work fridge, of vengeful noise complaints to the council, and cruel jibes rebranded as repartee.
I’ll return to both the topics of journalistic boasting and the decline of standards in public life to sub- sub- sub- basement levels in future editions as there just is not enough room in this one to do them justice. But for Witherow — protected from the buckets of shit rightly thrown at people like Piers Morgan and Kelvin Mackenzie by dint of his ‘refined’ accent and tendency to duck the limelight — to present himself as at the forefront of an imagined golden age simply couldn’t go unexamined. There are also many more dubious cases in Witherow’s history that I could go into if I had far more space (Google: “Andrew Norfolk”)
Witherow used the “golden” word previously in an interview with Varsity, the Cambridge University student newspaper, in 2017. He said then that The Times was experiencing “a golden period because we’ve seen a huge polarisation in society of attitudes, partially fuelled by social media.” The causes of that, he said, were:
… the rise of Corbyn in this country, which has led The Guardian to move leftwards to try and satisfy that very vocal readership it has and The Telegraph has moved to the right because of Brexit. It is becoming quite similar to the Mail in some areas. I think this territory that has been vacated gives us huge opportunities to put forward a whole range of opinions.
I think he really believes that. Although he’s been transparent in other interviews that The Times has a “centre/centre-right perspective”, the paper markets itself as a broad church, despite almost all its pews being on the right of the aisle and, in the case of columnists like Melanie Phillips and Rod Liddle, so far to the right that they’re out in the cemetery, adjacent to John Rentoul’s home office.
The only people who truly believe we are in the midst of a “golden age of journalism” are hacks with head injuries and editors like Witherow who benefit from the patronage of powerful proprietors and sycophantic staff who know it’s in their interests to nod and smile when the boss is talking.
What ‘gold’ there was in British journalism has long since flaked off, revealing the baser metals beneath.
Beating Paul Dacre’s 26-year run at The Daily Mail, though no doubt Dacre would note that he racked up his quarter-century plus at one title. With any luck he won’t manage even a day as the Chairman of Ofcom, despite Boris Johnson’s desperate attempts to have him installed.
He went to the Bedford School before attending York University.