Brian Macarthur
Avuncular journalist involved in the Hitler diaries affair who became founding editor of Today
BRIAN MACARTHUR, who has died aged 79, enjoyed a long and distinguished career in newspapers, editing three titles and contributing to many more. While he wrote prodigiously, notably about the workings of his profession, he was at his best when operating behind the scenes.
Macarthur was founding editor of The Times Higher Education Supplement, editor of the Western Morning News and the first editor of Eddy Shah’s Today newspaper; yet to many journalists he was better known in his executive roles, notably as the broker of such sensational stories as what purported to be Hitler’s secret diaries for The Sunday Times in 1983 and, more successfully, the revelation of John Major’s affair with Edwina Currie that appeared in The Times in 2002.
Although he could be as steely and determined as the next journalist, Macarthur differed from many hacks with his polite and gentle approach, especially to younger reporters. In later years he proved a reassuring presence to several of Fleet Street’s less experienced editors, having in many senses seen it all before. He also differed from many in the profession by being willing to accept his mistakes publicly and to learn from them.
The most remarkable of these, and one which he was not solely responsible for, came when The Sunday Times acquired 62 handwritten diaries said to have been written by Hitler. “When such a scoop is offered, you don’t really want to hear anything that would cast doubt on its veracity,” said Macarthur, who was deputy editor of the newspaper at the time.
No sooner had the edition gone to press than doubts emerged. In particular Hugh Trevor-roper, a director of Times Newspapers and an eminent historian who had “authenticated” the diaries, quickly realised that they were a hoax. As Macarthur recalled: “There are things you wish you’d never done. One of mine was to have held up the front page to the newsroom, saying, ‘Look at that. You’ll never see another front page like that as long as you live.’”
More happily, at least for Macarthur, was the call he took at The Times from the publisher Little, Brown in August 2002. The last time he had received such a call it had resulted in the paper’s serialisation of a book on Mary Bell, who as a child had killed two toddlers in 1968, stoking enormous publicity. This time it was to offer him the serialisation rights to Edwina Currie’s diaries, including the revelation of her relationship with Major.
With the pages prepared in such secrecy that almost the entire newsroom was unaware of the story, the paper was then duty-bound to put the story to Major, who could have denied it, or tipped off another paper, or, at worse, secured an emergency injunction. According to Macarthur, the next two and a half hours of silence were some of the most tense of his entire career. But eventually Major issued a statement admitting the affair and Macarthur and his paper had their story.
Brian Roger Macarthur was born in Chelmsford on February 5 1940, the only child of an education officer. Young Brian was sent aged seven to a boarding school, Brentwood School. The family moved to Ellesmere Port in Cheshire when he was 13, and he attended Helsby Grammar School. By the time he was 14 he was filing cricket reports for hospital radio.
He studied English and French at the University of Leeds, where he was news editor of the Union News. From there he joined the Yorkshire Post in 1962, accumulating a range of practical skills. He moved on to the Daily Mail (1964-66), The Guardian in Manchester (1966-67) and The Times (1967-71).
Macarthur was education correspondent of The Times when he was summoned by the editor-in-chief, Denis Hamilton. Times Newspapers, which published the Times Educational Supplement, was worried that a new rival paper aimed at teachers in higher education would eat away at their advertising revenues. He was given a staff of six, half a year to prepare and three years to turn a profit.
Macarthur had the foresight to realise that universities, colleges of education and the newly created polytechnics would each need a different approach. “We also had separate correspondents for the arts, social sciences and science, so we could cover each sector and most disciplines,” he recalled.
One of his earliest scoops in the THES was the contents of the James Report on Teacher Education and Training in 1972, which proposed radical changes in teacher education. Macarthur printed it in full, leading to a complaint from HMSO, its publisher. But sales of that issue went through the roof and Macarthur received only the mildest of rebukes.
While he had little budget for specialists, Macarthur was outstanding at nurturing contacts. He once met a young PHD student called Peter Hennessy at a party. Learning later that Hennessy was at a low ebb in his studies, Macarthur offered him the chance to write for the THES; Hennessy went on to spend 20 years in the media before enjoying a glittering academic career.
After five years, Macarthur returned to general interest newspapers, serving as deputy editor of the Evening Standard followed by a series of executive posts at The Times and The Sunday Times, culminating in the joint deputy editorship of the latter in 1982. Although his move to the Western Morning News in 1984 took him out of London, it also brought him an editor’s chair.
Today was probably his biggest challenge. Eddy Shah, a publisher of freesheet newspapers in the North West of England, wanted to launch Britain’s first full-colour tabloid newspaper; he also wanted to do without the “closed shop” arrangements that were bedevilling other newspapers.
Today began life in March 1986 using untried technology, and was immediately beset by production problems. The print quality was poor, with the first cover picture in black and white, and expectations that it would sell a million copies a day proved wildly ambitious.
Macarthur had seen Today as an opportunity to break the editorial mould. “We were going to be the nice paper, the nice tabloid,” he reminisced 20 years later. “Eddy saw Today as a paper that would stand out from the excesses of Fleet Street.” Instead, it paved the way for a totally different era of industrial relations and new technology in the newspaper industry.
By the end of the 1980s Macarthur had returned to Rupert Murdoch’s stable, later serving as associate editor of The Times (1995-2006). Here he became an influential media commentator, bringing an insider’s knowledge of the minutiae of the industry at all levels compared with, say, Stephen Glover’s more forthright style at The Independent or Roy Greenslade’s red-top approach.
“Of the three, Macarthur is the most widely informed, the least vicious and so the least discussed,” noted Ian Hargreaves, the then editor of the New Statesman, in 1998. From 2006 to 2010 Macarthur was an assistant editor at The Daily Telegraph, latterly with responsibility for books.
He wrote several books about the workings of Fleet Street, although his first, Eddy Shah: Today and the Newspaper Revolution (1988), is arguably the most instructive for historians.
Brian Macarthur was thrice married: first, in 1966 to Peta Deschampsneufs, a fellow journalist, who died in 1971; secondly, in 1975, to Bridget Trahair, a teacher with whom he had two daughters, who survive him; that marriage was dissolved in 1997 and in 2000 he married Maureen Waller, an author.
Brian Macarthur, born February 5 1940, died March 24 2019