But it was not as popular. The Daily Mail sold fifty times as many copies as The Times. If he had had to send one to the abattoir there is no doubt which Northcliffe would have chosen. But he did not have to choose. He lived on the Daily Mail. He half admired and half despised The Times. How could a newspaper be regarded as a serious enterprise when most of its senior staff never used the telephone, and the editor opened all letters submitted for publication with his own thumb? Before Northcliffe had thought of reducing the price the former chief proprietor suddenly asked him what he would do with the paper. ‘I should make it worth threepence, Mr Walter,’ was his rather good reply.
Buckle was not Northcliffe’s man. He did, however, survive for more than four years before being replaced by Geoffrey Robinson (the only man to occupy the editorial chair twice and who made the story more complicated by doing so under different names, changing from Robinson to Dawson in order to inherit from an aunt a substantial landed property in Yorkshire). Although Buckle’s going, partly because it closely followed the deaths of Moberly Bell, the long-serving manager, and Valentine Chirol, head of the foreign department, marked a considerable clearing out of the old gang, Robinson came from a roughly similar stable. He was, indeed, not only Northcliffe’s but also Buckle’s choice as successor, although Buckle did not welcome the speed with which he achieved the chair.
He had been at Eton and Magdalen College, Oxford, was a fellow of All Souls, and had been Lord Milner’s private secretary in South Africa. He was thirty-eight when be became editor and had been on the staff of The Times for eighteen months. His first stint as editor lasted six and a half years until he in turn, having had a moderately rough ride, fell foul of Northcliffe. It embraced the whole of World War I, a period of great press influence, partly because the House of Commons, then as now almost totally geared to a two-party system, was thrown into limbo by coalition government.
The Times was central to this period of journalistic politics, but to an extent that had not been seen since the advent of Barnes it was The Times of the proprietor rather than The Times of the editor which called the game. This was largely because of the extraordinary symbiotic relationship between Northcliffe and Lloyd George. Their periods of high power almost exactly coincided. Lloyd George became Chancellor of the Exchequer in April 1908, and was driven out of the premiership in October 1922. Northcliffe acquired The Times in March 1908, and died in August 1922. They both had daemonic energy, rootlessness, and inner irresponsibility.
This did not mean that they liked each other. Lloyd George told Beaverbrook in November 1916 that he would ‘as soon go for a sunny evening stroll around Walton Heath with a grasshopper as try and work with Northcliffe’, and Northcliffe had little sooner helped to make Lloyd George Prime Minister than he was talking about destroying him. Each deserved the other, and there was considerable mutual fascination.
The Times, through its military correspondent’s reporting of the shell shortage in France, played a substantial role in the forcing of the 1915 Coalition. But the apogee of its influence in wartime political intrigue was reached during the manoeuvrings of December 1916, which led to the replacement of Asquith by Lloyd George. Its main leader of Monday, 4 December made it publicly clear to Asquith that the concordat he had reached with Lloyd George was, and would be interpreted as being, a humiliation of himself. Accordingly he withdrew from it, overplayed his hand, and ejected himself from 10 Downing Street after eight and a half years’ tenancy. The article was thought to be Lloyd George-inspired. To some extent it was. Northcliffe had been flitting heavily between the pillars of the Whitehall scenery. It had, however, been written by Robinson, mostly at Cliveden, but titivated after a Sunday evening dinner with Northcliffe.
This was the high point of their collaboration. Their relationship was sometimes eased by Northcliffe’s absences in America, but otherwise they grew increasingly incompatible. Dawson (as he had then become) was sacked three months after the armistice and replaced by Henry Wickham Steed. In contrast with Dawson, an Empire-orientated, conventional English scholar-squire, there was a touch of the continental adventurer about Steed, which made him more acceptable to Northcliffe. He had been on the foreign staff of The Times for twenty years, but the combination of his education (Sudbury Grammar School and the Universities of Jena, Berlin and Paris), his elegant beard, and his involvement with the intricacies of Balkan politics, set him a little apart. His greatest qualification, however, was that he shared what had become Northcliffe’s detestation of Lloyd George. The paper survived the next three and a half years under this unstable partnership better than might have been expected. J. L. Garvin of the Observer at this time considered it ‘far and away the best morning paper’.