It’s a lot leaner than it used to be. But this physical diminution is only part of the story.
The collapse of centrism has confronted The Times with an existential crisis. It used to be that everybody who mattered seemed to have a subscription.
To be sure, it remains the primary organ of the SW1 political-media complex. If The Times publishes a story, it means the article is a part of the Westminster echo chamber and the wider media consensus.
It’s a product of elite columnists, political editors and Lobby correspondents, while its sister outfit, The Sunday Times, is widely regarded as the superior paper for its investigative work.
Yet The Times seems lost, ill-suited for a world in which the old Establishment agenda no longer makes sense. That’s why the paper stayed “neutral” during the 2024 election—although The Sunday Times backed Labour—and why it remains strangely sympathetic towards Keir Starmer today.
Times columnists like Matthew Syed openly question why the public so hates the outgoing prime minister. After all, the Labour government – with its attacks on protests and cuts to winter fuel subsidies – strikes them as deeply sensible.
The old Yes, Prime Minister joke goes: The Times is read by the people who run the country, while the Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country. But something has changed.
Neither newspaper has had a government of its liking since David Cameron was prime minister. The exact place of both papers is hard to pin down in an era where the centre of British politics has collapsed.
Despite its decline, The Times will survive, while other Rupert Murdoch papers, like The Sun, have gone under. It’s still a prestige product, after all, a high-bourgeois paper playing a key role in elite opinion formation.
Killing Fleet Street
Many people would stress that The Times is no longer the elite centre of print journalism in Britain after 45 years of Murdoch’s ownership. But this change reveals as much about the state of the newspaper industry as it does the Murdoch legacy.
The 1981 deal to buy The Times was the crowning moment in Murdoch’s rise to power in UK media. He had beaten the likes of Robert Maxwell, Tiny Rowland and Lord Rothermere by snapping up the broadsheets. The Times was his trophy.
Under News Corp’s ownership, The Times transformed its editorial model.
Murdoch picked a fight with the printworkers’ unions and ultimately destroyed them to streamline production and maximise profit. The Wapping dispute meant the end of Fleet Street as it had existed for more than a century. This inevitably led to a smaller operation. And one that fell short of the paper’s august reputation.
The Sunday Times published the fabricated Hitler Diaries. Then editor Andrew Neil backed a campaign at The Sunday Times to disprove the connection between HIV and AIDS. This was a sharp about-face, considering that The Times had broken the thalidomide scandal in the 1960s.
Several journalists later left the paper to form The Independent during this time. This included Robert Fisk, who claimed that his reporting in the Middle East had effectively been censored at The Times.
Meanwhile, Murdoch’s union-busting ways exemplified the shift to a smaller, more precarious workforce with fewer opportunities and rights than ever before. First, it was the printworkers, then it was the journalists themselves.
Newspapers have gone from a heavy manufacturing sector in the 1980s to a post-industrial, digital sector today.
National newspapers have downsized with the rise of the Internet or disappeared altogether. The days of over-staffed newsrooms and long lunches are long gone. News media now resembles the professional services industry in its organisation and even class composition.
By the early 2000s, The Times was on the side of New Labour, after Tony Blair had moved the goalposts of respectable politics. The War on Terror was an easy sell for a newspaper platforming pro-war writers such as David Aaronovitch.
As The Times’ stature shrank, so did its physical appearance. In 2004, Murdoch agreed to publish the daily in a compact format. As a result, The Times is still technically a broadsheet in style and content but physically resembles a tabloid. Only The Sunday Times retains its traditional hefty format.
No Return
The Times used to write history. Now the paper itself feels historical, a relic of a bygone age.
Print media cannot compete with television or the circulation of information on social media.
That’s why The Times has pivoted to broadcast journalism, particularly through YouTube and podcasts, while still targeting an elite audience. It’s the only way to survive as a media brand these days.
One of the most awkward cases is the podcast How To Win An Election, which disgraced Labour Lord Peter Mandelson co-hosted until he returned to frontline politics. Not surprisingly, Mandelson isn’t often mentioned on the podcast these days.
Although The Times suffered tabloidisation under Murdoch’s stewardship, it still provides a home for patrician liberalism on the centre-right.
The paper is generally liberal internationalist, advocating for humanitarian intervention abroad even as it backed austerity measures in the UK. It has also taken a strong line against Russia in support of Ukraine. But its coverage of the Gaza war, by contrast, has always been pro-Israel.
The Times is also generally pro-Europe. Back in 2016, for example, it staked out a pro-Remain position in the Brexit referendum.
While the paper may be out of step with the current political environment, it bears responsibility for shaping it. This is the same newspaper that cheered on neoliberal policies throughout the first three decades of News Corp ownership. In other words, The Times played an important role in making itself less relevant.
Two years after refusing to take sides in the election, it hasn’t got much to offer on the rise of Andy Burnham apart from insider gossip. The Times may treat politics like horse racing commentary, but it lacks a horse to back.
The collapse of centrism in British politics has left many mainstream journalists unable to see that the Westminster consensus from the 1990s through 2016 isn’t coming back.
The Times isn’t what it used to be. Then again, neither is the rest of the newspaper industry.
Photograph courtesy of Manuel Faisco. Published under a Creative Commons license.
