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’.