How Dear Bill became editor

In 1974 the Daily Telegraph was teetering on the edge of unaccustomed conflict. Maurice Green’s long and successful reign as editor was ending at the very moment when the paper’s editorship was rising in significance. The Tories were to lose two elections that year. A challenge to Ted Heath’s leadership, probably from Keith Joseph, already looked inevitable. How would the Telegraph lean?

Green himself was a premature Thatcherite who as early as 1973 told friends she would be the next Tory leader. But who would succeed Green? His deputy, Colin Welch, the witty intellectual who had recruited many of the paper’s star reporters, columnists and critics and whose hand was not at all invisible in its monetarist editorials? Or the City editor, Kenneth Fleet, whose pages had been friendlier to Heath and Tory interventionism?

Rumours spread that Lord Hartwell, a liberal proprietor who was the author of an admiring book on Keynes, favoured Fleet.