The Fourth Estate (64 page)

Could he risk it
all on the word of his driver? He began to wish Kate was with him, so that he
could seek her opinion. Thanks to her, TI)c Senators Mistress by Margaret
Sherwood had spent two weeks at the bottom of the Neu7 York Times best-seller
list, and the second million had been returned in full. To the surprise of both
of them, the book had also received some reasonable reviews in the non-Townsend
press. Keith had been amused to receive a letter from Mrs. Sherwood asking if
he’d be interested in a three-book contract.

Townsend walked
through the double doors and under the clock above the entrance to the foyer.
He stood for a moment in front of a bronze bust of his father, remembering how
as a child he had stretched up and tried to touch his hair. It only made him
more nervous.

He turned and
walked across the foyer, joining a group of people who stepped into the first
available lift. They fell silent when they realized who it was. He pressed the
button and the doors slid closed. He hadn’t been in the building for over
thirty years, but he could still remember where the boardroom was-a few yards
down the corridor from his father’s office.

The doors slid
open on circulation, advertising and then editorial, until he was finally left
alone in the lift. At the executive floor he stepped cautiously out into the
corridor, and looked in both directions. He couldn’t see anyone. He turned to
the right and walked toward the boardroom, his pace slowing as he passed his
father’s old office. It then became slower and slower until he reached the
boardroom door.

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 foryourstock 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 G lobe 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 Cbronicle 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 was 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 13 1,000
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.

11 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 Brucehad 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 E
1,000 and sent it round to Armstrong’s office by hand, but he reccived 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 E 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 C50,000 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.

-THE GLOBE

4 MAY 1979

M
aggie
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 Neiv 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.

Under Any Other
Business, Peter Wakeharn brought to the attention of the board an article in
the Financial Times which reported that Keith Townsend had recently purchased a
large block of warehouses on the Isle of Dogs, and that a fleet of unmarked
lorries were regularly making latenight deliveries to it.

“Has anyone any
idea what this is all about?” asked Sir Paul, his eyes sweeping the table.

“We know,” said
Armstrong, “that Townsend got himself landed with a trucking company when he
took over the Globe. As his papers are doing so badly, perhaps he’s having to
diversify.”

Some members of
the board laughed, but Sir Paul was not among them. ‘That wouldn’t explain why
Townsend has set up such tight security around the site,” he said. “Security
guards, dogs, electric gates, barbed wire along the tops of the walls-he’s up
to something.”

Armstrong
shrugged his shoulders and looked bored, so Sir Paul reluctantly brought the
meeting to a close.

Three days
later, Armstrong took a call from the Howard Hotel, and was told by the junior
porter that Townsend had spent the whole afternoon and most of the evening
locked in the Fitzalan Suite with three officials from one of the leading print
unions, who were refusing to carry out any overtime.

Armstrong
assumed they were negotiating for improved pay and conditions in exchange for
getting their members back to work.

The following
Monday he flew to America, confident that as Townsend was preoccupied with his
problems in London, there couldn’t be a better time to prepare a takeover bid
for the Nctv York Star.

When Townsend
called a meeting of all the journalists who worked on the Globe, most of them
assumed that the proprietor had finally reached a settlement with the print
unions, and the get-together would be nothing more than a public relations
exercise to prove he had got the better of them.

At fouro’clock
thataftcrnoon, overseven hundredjournalists crammed onto the editorial floor.
They fell silent as Townsend and Bruce Kelly walked in, clearing a path to
allow the proprietor to walk to the center of the room, where he climbed up
onto a table. He looked down on the group of people who were about to decide
his fate.

“For the past
few months,” he began quietly, “Bruce Kelly and I have been involved in a plan
which I believe will change all our lives, and possibly the whole face of
journalism in this country. Newspapers cannot hope to survive in the future if
they continue to be run as they have been for the past hundred years. Someone
has to make a stand, and that person is me. And this is the time to do it.
Starting at midnight on Sunday, I intend to transfer my entire printing and
publishing operation to the Isle of Dogs.”

A small gasp was
audible.

I have recently
come to an agreement,” Townsend continued, “with Eric Harrison, the general
secretary of the Allied Printworkers, which will give us a chance once and for
all to rid ourselves of the stranglehold of the closed shop.”