When Charlie One died of cancer in 1985, Wilson succeeded him. As a rising favourite of the boss, he was even seconded to one of Murdoch’s other papers, the Chicago Sun-Times, for three months in 1984. He returned to London as executive editor of the Times and, within a year, as deputy – Charlie Two – to the ailing patrician editor, Charles Douglas-Home. In 1982, Murdoch, who had recently acquired the Times titles, was looking for an executive from the popular end of the newspaper market and lighted on Wilson. In 1976 he became an editor for the first time, of the Glasgow Evening Times, adding its morning sister paper the Herald and then becoming inaugural editor of the short-lived Scottish Sunday Standard. Rising up the Mail editorial ladder, in 1971 Wilson was sent to Manchester as deputy northern editor, then recalled to London three years later as assistant editor of the London Evening News. I saw him as a bully and a pig,” she wrote in her memoirs, though he did not impede her regular access to their daughter. “Charlie saw me as a self-centred, selfish, uncaring wife and mother. Their divorce after five years was acrimonious, Wilson being given custody of their baby daughter, Emma, because of Robinson’s incipient alcoholism. He sacked her without compunction after their marriage because of a company rule forbidding couples to work together. In her autobiography, Memoirs of an Unfit Mother, published 30 years after their divorce, Robinson remembered cooking Wilson his breakfast and then tidying up while he went on to the office, only to be bawled out by him when she turned up 20 minutes late for work. It was also there that he met and in 1968 married Anne Robinson, a young Liverpudlian reporter who was later to find fame on the television quiz show The Weakest Link. It was there, over the following decade, that he learned the traditionally hard-driving, brutal management skills of the Mail newsdesk. By the age of 24 Wilson was ready to return to London, becoming a reporter on the News Chronicle and transferring to the Daily Mail the following year when the papers merged in 1960. He did two years’ national service with the Royal Marines, winning a boxing championship, and then launched his journalism career at the Bristol Evening World, sharing a flat at one stage with the future playwright Tom Stoppard, a fellow trainee. Charles did not resume his education but, already fascinated by newspapers – and horse racing, to which he had accompanied his father – he got a job as a copy boy at the People, then Fleet Street’s pre-eminent investigative popular Sunday paper.Ĭharles Wilson at the Conservative party conference in Blackpool, 1989. It was an unhappy and occasionally violent marriage and Ruth removed her son and his brother from Eastbank Academy suddenly one Saturday night when he was 16 and fled south to her relatives in Kingston upon Thames, south-west London. Wilson was the son of Adam, a former miner who had turned steel worker after a pit injury, and his English wife, Ruth, born at Shettleston in east Glasgow – some way from the Gorbals. When that battle occurred, Wilson and his Scottish compatriot Andrew Neil at the Sunday Times played their part in stiffening Murdoch’s resolve to stick it out when the fight grew rough. The ulterior purpose was to appoint a robust and pugnacious editor in preparation for the coming battle with the print unions and the flit to Wapping. The open purpose was to change all that by enlivening the paper and broadening its appeal, edging it downmarket in the direction of the Daily Mail, tackling a wider range of particularly human interest stories and consciously attracting more women and less stuffy readers. He was nevertheless an unusual choice by Rupert Murdoch to become the 18th editor of the Times in 1985, occupying a chair more often filled by patrician Oxbridge types. I could not have done what I’ve done if I was just a Glasgow thug … you have to find a funny bone in this business.” He was occasionally moved to deny the hardman image, telling an interviewer for Scotland on Sunday in 1994: “I never actually threw a typewriter at anyone.

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