After his graduation,Neil briefly worked as a sports correspondent for a local newspaper,the Paisley Daily Express ,before working for the Conservative Party. In 1973,he joined The Economist as a correspondent and was later promoted as editor of the publication's section on Britain.
The Sunday Times
Neil was editor of The Sunday Times from 1983 to 1994. His hiring was controversial:it was argued he was appointed by Rupert Murdoch over more experienced colleagues,such as Hugo Young and Brian MacArthur. [14]
Neil told Murdoch before he was appointed editor that The Sunday Times was intellectually stuck in a 1960s time warp and that it needed to "shake off its collectivist mind-set to become the champion of a market-led revolution that would shake the British Establishment to its bones and transform the economy and society". [15] Neil later said that although he shared some of Murdoch's right-wing views,"on many matters Rupert was well to the right of me politically. He was a monetarist. I was not. Nor did I share his conservative social outlook". [15]
In his first editorial,on 9 October 1983,Neil advised Margaret Thatcher's government to "move to the right on industrial policy (trust-bust,deregulate,privatise wherever it produces more competition and efficiency) and centre-left in economic strategy (a few billion extra in capital spending would have little impact on interest rates or inflation but could give a lift to a shaky economic recovery)". [16]
The Sunday Times strongly supported the stationing of American cruise missiles in bases in Britain after the Soviet Union installed SS-20s in Eastern Europe,and it criticised the resurgent Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. [17] Neil also wrote editorials supporting the United States invasion of Grenada because it would restore democracy there,despite opposition from Hugo Young. Neil replied to Young that he wanted the editorial stance of The Sunday Times to be "neo-Keynesian in economic policy,radical right in industrial policy,liberal on social matters and European and Atlanticist on foreign policy". [18]
In Neil's first year as the paper's editor,The Sunday Times had revealed the date of the deployment of cruise missiles,exposed how Mark Thatcher had channelled the gains from his consultancy business into a bank account and reported on Robert Mugabe's atrocities in Matabeleland. [19] Neil also printed extracts from Germaine Greer's Sex and Destiny and from Francis Pym's anti-Thatcher autobiography,as well as a study of the "Patels of Britain",a celebration of the success of Britain's Asian community. [20]
Neil regards the newspaper's revelation of details of Israel's nuclear weapons programme in 1986,by using photographs and testimony from former Israeli nuclear technician Mordechai Vanunu,as his greatest scoop as an editor. [21] During his editorship,the newspaper lost a libel case over claims that it had made concerning a witness,Carmen Proetta,who was interviewed after her appearance in the Death on the Rock documentary on the Gibraltar shootings. One of The Sunday Times journalists involved,Rosie Waterhouse,resigned not long afterwards. [22] [23]
On 20 July 1986,The Sunday Times printed a front-page article (titled 'Queen dismayed by "uncaring" Thatcher') alleging that the Queen believed that Margaret Thatcher's policies were "uncaring,confrontational and socially divisive". [24] [25] [26] The main source of information was the Queen's press secretary,Michael Shea. [27] When Buckingham Palace issued a statement rebutting the story,Neil was so angry at what he considered to be the Palace's double-dealing that he refused to print the statement in later editions of The Sunday Times. [27]
In 1987,the Labour-controlled Strathclyde Regional Authority wanted to close down Neil's old school,Paisley Grammar School. After finding the secretary of state for Scotland,Malcolm Rifkind,indifferent to the school's future,Neil contacted Margaret Thatcher's policy adviser,Brian Griffiths,to try and save the school. When Griffiths informed Thatcher of Strathclyde's plan to close it she issued a new regulation that gave the Scottish secretary the power to save schools where 80 per cent of the parents were opposed to the local authority's closure plan,thereby saving Paisley Grammar. [28] [29]
While at The Sunday Times in 1988,Neil met the former Miss India,Pamella Bordes,in a nightclub,an inappropriate place for someone with Neil's job according to Peregrine Worsthorne. [30] The News of the World suggested Bordes was a call girl. [31] Worsthorne argued in an editorial article "Playboys as Editors" in March 1989 for The Sunday Telegraph that Neil was not fit to edit a serious Sunday newspaper. Worsthorne effectively accused Neil of knowing that Bordes was a prostitute. [32] He apparently did not know about Bordes, [31] which the Telegraph had accepted by the time the libel case came to High Court of Justice in January 1990, [30] but the paper still defended their coverage as fair comment. [33] Neil won both the case and £1,000 in damages [34] plus costs.
In a July 1988 editorial ("Morals for the majority") Neil said that in Britain there were emerging pockets of social decay and unsocial behaviour:"a social rot...has gone deeper than the industrial decay of the 1960s and 1970s". [35] Having been impressed with Charles Murray's study of the American welfare state, Losing Ground ,Neil invited Murray to Britain in 1989 to study Britain's emerging underclass. [36] The Sunday Times Magazine of 26 November 1989 was largely devoted to Murray's report,which found that the British underclass consisted of people existing on welfare,the black economy and crime,with illegitimacy being the single most reliable predictor. [37] The accompanying editorial said Britain was in the midst of a "social tragedy of Dickensian proportions",with an underclass "characterized by drugs,casual violence,petty crime,illegitimate children,homelessness,work avoidance and contempt for conventional values". [38]
Under Neil's editorship,The Sunday Times opposed the poll tax. [39] In his memoirs,Neil said that his opposition to the poll tax crystallised when he discovered that his cleaner would be paying more poll tax than himself at a time when his income tax had just been reduced to 40% from 60%. [40] [41] During the 1990 Conservative Party leadership election,The Sunday Times was the only Murdoch-owned newspaper to support Michael Heseltine against Thatcher. [42] Neil blamed Thatcher for high inflation,"misplaced chauvinism" over Europe,and the poll tax,concluding that she had become an "electoral liability" and must therefore be replaced by Heseltine. [42] [43]
In an editorial of January 1988 ("Modernize the monarchy"),Neil advocated the abolition of both the preference for males in the law of succession and of the exclusion of Catholics from the throne. [44] Subsequent editorials of The Sunday Times called for the Queen to pay income tax and advocated a scaled-down monarchy that would not be class-based but which would be "an institution with close links to all classes. That meant clearing out the old-school courtiers...and creating a court which was far more representative of the multi-racial meritocracy that Britain was becoming". [45] In an editorial of February 1991 Neil criticised some minor members of the Royal Family for their behaviour while the country was at war in the Gulf. [46] In 1992 Neil obtained for The Sunday Times the serialisation rights for Andrew Morton's book Diana:Her True Story,which revealed the breakdown of Princess Diana's marriage as well as her bulimia and her suicide attempts. [47]
In 1992 Neil was criticised by anti-Nazi groups [48] and historians like Hugh Trevor-Roper [49] for employing the Holocaust denier David Irving to translate the diaries of Joseph Goebbels. [48]
