Why was the Times so eager to do the government's dirty work?

The Times’s campaign against the billionaire businessman Michael Ashcroft is now largely forgotten. At the time it was a sensation. In the summer and autumn of 1999 the paper ran scores of articles about Lord Ashcroft, then treasurer of the Tory party and its major donor. The Times not only suggested that Lord Ashcroft was a pretty unsavoury character but also linked him to an investigation by the US Drug Enforcement Administration into money-laundering and smuggling. It appeared that the paper was out to destroy Lord Ashcroft and to discredit his main defender, William Hague, then Tory leader. Senior Tories claimed that the Times’s stories were in part inspired by the government, a charge the paper denied. In December 1999 it published what was described as a ‘correction’ in which it conceded that it had ‘no evidence that Mr Ashcroft or any of his companies have ever been suspected of money-laundering’.

All this is recalled by the dramatic ending of a court case last Friday which has barely been noted by most of the media. Lord Ashcroft received an apology from the government, which has paid his substantial costs, after he brought an action to force it to release information which he said was part of a ‘political vendetta’ against him. The Foreign Office and the Department of International Development acknowledged that ‘various disobliging references’ relating to Lord Ashcroft’s business activities ‘were without foundation’. Some of these lies (let us not mince words) were leaked to the Times and the Guardian, though the government claims not to know who was responsible. Among the ‘disobliging references’ were remarks by various British diplomats, in effect amounting to tittle-tattle, which portrayed Lord Ashcroft in a very poor light.