The Press: The New Thunderer

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The message was hard to find, as messages often are in that uncompromising typographical thicket, the London Times. But when Conservative Party leaders found it, their faces turned the angry red of rare roast beef. "There come moments in the life of every party when it needs to wash off the last application of humbug and start fresh," said the Times. "Such a moment has come for the Conservative Party." For three straight days, the Times continued to dwell on Tory sins and shortcomings. It was a cruel birching from any quarter. What hurt most was that this one came from an old friend.

Predictably, the Times's series blew up a lively political storm. "The papers are all against us," cried an anguished Tory Cabinet minister. Then he sputtered-"The Times is the worst of them all. That damned fellow Haley can't wait until he has put a Labor government in Commons." That damned fellow has no such aim.

But Sir William John Haley, 62, ninth editor of the Times and a loyal Tory to boot, is determined to show that his paper is harnessed to no party. He is even more determined to restore the Times's reputation as the "Thunderer." In the process, he has succeeded in making the Times the most controversial and talked-about paper in Britain today.

Privy to Everything. The Times's title of Thunderer was won in the last century when it was the biggest and most influential daily in the world. "I don't know of anything which has more power, except perhaps the Mississippi," said Abraham Lincoln to a Times correspondent sent over to report the Civil War. Disraeli was only half joking when he said that there were two British ambassadors in every foreign capital, one appointed by the Queen and one appointed by the Times. Its newsgathering apparatus seemed to be privy to everything. On Jan. 17, 1856, for example, the British government had to read the Times to discover that Russia had accepted the peace proposals ending the Crimean War.

A more urgent century, however, seemed to have beached the paper, like Britain itself, in the glorious past. Once the Times commanded more readers than all other national dailies combined; today it is the least of them, with 254,000 circulation: 2% of total newspaper readership and less than 5% of the circulation of that popular giant, the Daily Mirror (4,647,000).

In an era of hot copy and banner headlines, the Times even looks and sounds like an anachronism. Its patient reader must plod through the frontpage classified ads, the sporting section, the Appointments and Situations columns, the parliamentary reports and the dry-as-dust Law Reports before reaching the Bill Page, which is the Times's Victorian name for the news.

Once arrived, the reader is not likely to be surfeited. Even Sir William confesses that the Times is guilty of "blatant omissions," as when, a few years ago, it reported the resignation of the Spanish Ambassador to Britain without mentioning the adultery case that caused it.