“I would be dishonest,” he said with a wry smile, “if I didn’t say it had occurred to me during the last 12 months. At Trinity, I’d get about four sheets a month from our press cuttings service. Now I get 16 to 20 sheets a day. I recognise this job has a different profile, but I don’t think it should be about me being in the public domain. The people who should be in the public domain should be the editors…”

In the case of one of his editors, I interrupted, the public domain is an area from which he has rarely strayed, albeit unwillingly, in months. Piers Morgan’s foray into share dealing and its consequences have filled more column inches than the daily share prices.

Phil Graf paused. “I mean for the right reasons,” he said, hesitantly, but still smiling. It takes a lot to remove the Graf smile, although one suspects the ongoing saga of the Mirror’s City Slickers and certain in-house investments in shares they tipped might have worn even his ready beam a little thin. But during two long interviews, when he and I discussed at length, and among much else, what in tabloidese might be called the Slickers Scandal, Graf’s good humour never deserted him.

Like his predecessor as chief executive of what is now Trinity Mirror newspapers, Graf is an Ulsterman. But this particular Northern Irishman is not only ready to laugh, with what appears to be genuine spontaneity, at the slightest provocation, but is affable and self-effacing. Any resemblance between Philip Graf and David Montgomery, whom Graf succeeded in the Canary Wharf hot seat, is entirely implausible.

When the skeletal, domineering Montgomery smiles, one can almost hear ice splintering. But jollity and the lack of it is just one of the many differences between the two men. Whereas it is a fair bet that if one were to mention the name of Montgomery to all those who have had dealings with him, a considerable proportion would spit venom, it is rare to find anyone with a bad word to say about Philip Graf. I did meet someone who was sniffy about the chief executive’s skills in maintaining a healthy share price for Trinity, and forecast that he would be collecting his P45 inside six months. But as this came from a former Trinity Mirror employee, it would be unwise to give his prediction too much credence.

The much-liked Graf is also, infuriatingly, too intrinsically nice a man to be nasty about anyone, even his predecessor. The popular version of events after Trinity, the powerful regional newspaper company, came courting Mirror Group, a bruised old lady who had seen better days, was that the presence of Montgomery was considered by the swain as an impediment to the match. Mirror shareholders, poised to deck themselves out in wedding finery, were not best pleased with the chief executive; neither was the Mirror board. Exit Montgomery, trundling a wheelbarrow full of compensation and share options, thus allowing, once the deliberations of the Monopolies and Mergers Commission had been concluded, the ceremony to take place.

I suggested to Philip Graf that had Montgomery not departed, the brakes would have been applied to Trinity’s pursuit of Mirror Group. Mr Graf, most politely, hummed and hawed.

“Who knows?” he replied. “It depends. It depends on whether we could have worked out a proper board or management structure for the company. That had to be sorted out…” But was Montgomery unacceptable to Trinity? “If it couldn’t have been sorted out, leaving personalities aside, then the deal wouldn’t have happened.” So Montgomery was unacceptable? “Trinity felt that it was the right thing for someone from Trinity, myself, to be chief executive. There couldn’t be two chief executives and there couldn’t be any dubiety about what that role was.” Rarely has a bridegroom been so chivalrous about the cad who once defiled his love.

Graf is painstakingly careful when replying to any question. Had I asked him whether or not the weather was inclement, I suspect he would have spent considerable time at the window, or even out in the street with his eyes gazing skywards, before replying. An example: during our second meeting, Graf told me how as a pre-university student he had lived for a year in California. This was at the time when the civil rights movement had begun inexorably to roll, the Vietnam War had not long begun and the unrest at Berkeley was about to explode with students’ protests. The experience changed his outlook on life, he told me.

“The civil rights movement helped me understand what was happening in Northern Ireland. It made me much more aware of what Northern Ireland and the United Kingdom was about. It also probably helped me to get on with a much wider range of people – it made me feel much more comfortable in dealing with people, whoever they were.” So, I asked, did it make you more liberal? Graf responded with peals of laughter. “I think it reinforced a lot of my views. The word liberal is capable of a number of definitions,” he said, measuredly. “It was…interesting.”

Minefield

“I don’t believe they will find anything untoward. If they do, we’ll have to review the situation, but I really don’t think they will find anything as far as Piers is concerned. It was a very difficult time and a very thorough [in-house] investigation was done.

“There was an awful lot of, I have to say, ill-informed and malicious journalism about Piers, about the company, about quite a number of people. And I don’t mean just The Sun stuff, which was not unexpected. The vast majority of the stuff about the people involved was completely unbelievable, really. I found it amazing, quite honestly, how people would take a rumour and print it as fact without checking it, without understanding the implications of it. The single thing I found most disappointing about the standard of newspapers since I have been in this job was the way that was dealt with. It is not so much that we were attacked, although of course I didn’t like that. The real issue is what it is doing to readers when papers operate to those standards and use their own agenda to write stuff.

Had our investigation shown Piers had done something wrong, that would have been different. But he hadn’t. I think the Press Complaints Commission was very clear about what he did, which was ill judged [the PCC found that Morgan had ‘fallen short of the high professional standards’ demanded by its code]. The matter was actually dealt with very quickly, before that report came out. The Slickers [Anil Bhoyrul and James Hipwell] went through a proper, careful disciplinary procedure in which I was not involved and were fired. As far as I am concerned, the issue has been dealt with, unless something remarkable, unexpected and new emerges.”

He added: “I have to tell you that we had very few letters from readers about what happened. I think that’s important. I think people didn’t see it as greed as much as foolishness and were able to distinguish between the Slickers’ behaviour [the two journalists had been buying shares they then tipped] and what Piers was being lambasted for. And Piers, as you know, apologised when he was on Question Time .”

Subsequent to my first meeting with Mr Graf, the Department of Trade and Industry summoned members of The Mirror ’s staff to give evidence for the inquiry. Also, several internal e-mails emerged and were published by The Sunday Times , with the paper suggesting that they indicated the Editor should have been aware the Slickers’ would be recommending Viglen shares the morning after he bought them. These e-mails had not, apparently, been disclosed to the PCC. Surely this was damaging for Morgan and the company?

“I am not trying to avoid the question,” said Graf after a pause. “No, the e-mail was not shown to the PCC. There was quite confidential information in the investigation we conducted. It’s a perfectly reasonable question, ú I’m just trying to remember so that I don’t mislead you... The PCC was not investigating the company. It was Piers Morgan who gave evidence to the PCC, not the company, so we didn’t show them any documents. What’s normal with such inquiries is to give the PCC an analysis of events and that’s what we did.”

But what of the e-mail in which Morgan referred to a discussion he had with Bhoyrul on “Viglen day” about the merits of the Editor selling other shares in order to buy Viglen. Morgan, good naturedly it seemed, called Bhoyrul a “halfwit” in the e-mail. Was it conceivable that such a conversation could have taken place without the following morning’s pro-Viglen story being mentioned? At best, this was stunning incompetence; at worst, malpractice.

“It’s a perfectly fair question and I am being very careful how I answer it so that I don’t mislead you,” Graf repeated. “On the face of it, it is a perfectly fair point…” The matter was, he explained, not at the forefront of his thinking at that moment – itself perfectly fair considering how much time had elapsed since the publicity surrounding the e-mails – and he obtained information from those who conducted the internal investigation before replying: “We have never denied that they [Morgan and Bhoyrul] had spoken about Viglen, but as far as we are concerned that e-mail does not show that they talked about Viglen that day. It had appeared in the City Slickers column on several occasions, remember.”

The whole affair is as clear as a murky pond and seems to become more impenetrable the more questions one asks. I did, however, ask one more. Another e-mail revealed, as The Sunday Times put it, Morgan’s appetite for investment and the occasional free gift (he allegedly purloined from Bhoyrul a Psion Revo personal organiser given to the Slicker at a launch party): does not this not indicate embarrassing greed on the part of the Editor of the group’s flagship title?

“If you are saying, was it a desire to make lots of money and to exploit his position to make lots of money, well, I stand by the fact that I don’t think that’s what he was about. I think he was foolish. I think the pattern of behaviour was a foolish pattern, not a greedy pattern.” He will, added Graf, be glad when the matter is “finally sorted, which I think it can be and will be.”

* * *

After university, he joined an oil company while looking for an opportunity in the newspaper industry. This came with Thomson Regional Newspapers in London, working in marketing, advertising and research before returning to Belfast, and the Thomson-owned Telegraph , where he became group circulation and marketing controller. His love affair with the paper was to continue, off and on, until it became a casualty of the Trinity-Mirror merger, the Monopolies Commission deciding that the combined group must shed the title to stay within regulatory limits.

Disappointing

On his way up the managerial ladder he worked in circulation, marketing, market research and promotions. During the early days of bingo in newspapers, he recalls, his legal background came in useful and “for a brief period I was one of the few people in the country who actually understood the gaming laws as they applied to bingo”. He joined Trinity in Liverpool, becoming an assistant managing director of the Liverpool Post and Echo in 1984, a member of the Trinity board in 1987 and its chief executive in 1993.

The acquisition of the Thomson group in 1995 transformed Trinity. The company moved into the big league and, Graf recalled, “it was then that we looked at how we were going to move on. It was clear company policy that we would go beyond regional newspapers, but where we would go was a question we constantly worked at. [Then] It became clear the Mirror was a possibility.” What to some City observers seemed an audacious move – MGN was much the bigger of the two companies – was, confesses Graf, fraught with problems: “It is hard, looking back, but I think there were times when we doubted it would ever happen.”

Trinity edged out Regional Independent Media and captured Mirror Group for £1.24billion. With Montgomery gone and while the Monopolies Commission brooded, MGN’s John Allwood, who was to become Graf’s deputy under the chairmanship of the already incumbent Sir Victor Blank, began to rationalise the group, a policy Graf continued when he arrived. Among the early casualties of the Trinity regime was Live TV, the machinations around which had over recent years proved far more entertaining than anything shown on screen.

But, typically, Graf refuses be too horrid about the Kelvin MacKenzie-Janet Street-Porter battleground that bred topless darts and chaos and helped fill gossip and media columns and an entire book. “Live TV had…how can I put it?…an interesting history,” said the chief executive. “As a brand it had become damaged, and damaged beyond repair, but I wouldn’t criticise people for having a go at doing what they tried to do. It was unfortunate the way it turned out. What it became was a bit of a laughing stock, which is unfair in many ways because it had some very good people and some very good ideas.” Bearing in mind that all most people can remember about Live is MacKenzie’s efforts to bring page three culture to television, Graf is again being charitable. The “No more nice guy” reputation of most media moguls is translated to “Lots more nice guy” with Graf.

The national newspapers were in “pretty reasonable shape” when he arrived, he recalled. “There were some issues in Birmingham that we had to sort out [Trinity discovered circulation figures at the Post, Evening Mail and Sunday Mercury had been fraudulently enhanced over a long period], but morale was good and there was an underlying sense of confidence. I felt all along that I wasn’t coming here to be the manager of national newspapers, but to run a group, and within the group there were, and are, some very good people at a whole range of levels. Clearly there are differences [between national and provincial papers] – there is a different competitive dynamic, a different dynamic in circulation versus advertising, a different dynamic in terms of the profile the papers have. I set out to meet people, to listen to people, to understand people and deal with them fairly and rationally. I believe people respect that.”

There was much inference at the time, I reminded him, that Trinity would, as a provincial company, struggle to manage the cosmopolitan colossus created by the merger and, also, speculation that they would sell-on the national newspapers. Graf chuckled at this: “Inferred? It was said, not inferred – you’re being very polite about it. As I said at the time, the difficulty for me was getting the straw out of my hair and clearing the pigs out of the kitchen in the morning before I read that stuff. It was inevitable, understandable, perhaps, because the Mirror was a bigger company in capitalisation terms – I suppose people thought the way the transaction took place, in terms of history, was not that usual.

“Selling on the national titles was never part of the game plan. Trinity felt the national titles were an important complement to the regional titles and the opportunity was there to see them develop together. I know there was an awful lot of talk at the time about that and it was partly encouraged by people who chose not to understand what we were trying to do. But here [at Canary Wharf] I found a good bunch of people wanting to take the business forward and realising that putting two businesses of this size and scale together is not easy, particularly if you are newspaper companies, where you are more in the public eye than if you were a widget company.

Progress

(They did, too: shortly after our first conversation, Trinity Mirror acquired the 84 free and paid-for titles of the southeast regional group, Southnews, for £284.6million. This brings the number of newspapers and magazines under Graf’s control to 260.)

Might Trinity Mirror be interested in acquiring more national papers, I wondered? “I think that is very unlikely,” said Graf. I returned to the subject when we met for a second time, shortly after Richard Desmond had acquired the Express group. Had Trinity not been tempted to enter the bidding, especially as the Daily Star and Sunday People would have made comfy bedfellows?

“No. We felt that to make a success of it [the Express Group] in its particular competitive environment is always going to take a lot of money and effort. It just looked as if to develop any of the titles sensibly, you were going to have to spend quite a lot of money on them. I mean, there is no point in buying newspapers like that and saying, ‘Right, we’ll buy them and just run them into the ground’.” Does this mean Richard Desmond may have bitten off more than he possibly can chew, I asked? I should have known better. “I am sure he has thought about that very carefully,” said Graf, very carefully. “He has certainly taken on a very formidable competitor in the DMGT [Daily Mail and General Trust]. They haven’t messed about, have they?”

Soon after taking over the Express group, Desmond had mentioned that he might launch a Sunday version of the Daily Star . David Sullivan, proprietor of Sunday Sport , had made similar noises about a new Sunday tabloid. The last thing Trinity Mirror needs, I suggested, were further challengers in a fiercely competitive national Sunday market, where the Sunday People and, to a lesser extent, the Sunday Mirror , trail further and further behind in the wake of the News of the World.

“If and when that situation arises we shall have to react appropriately,” said Graf, “but there is no indication it is imminent.” Earlier he had told me: “I think all established media are in some sort of slight decline. Look at radio, look at television. But we still remain a very powerful mass media. The Sunday market is tough and I am not going to sit here and pretend I’ve got a solution for it. Social changes have transformed the British Sunday and made life tougher for, in particular, the Sunday red-tops. I think the Sunday Mirror has done well for us over the last couple of years. The Sunday People is a tougher challenge – it is tough being one of two Sunday papers in the same stable and not having the brand association with the Mirror . We are looking to see how we can develop the paper – it is an important contributor to the business.”

Does this mean the Sunday People makes a profit? “Oh, absolutely. But nobody here underestimates the week-to-week challenge it has. Its rate of decline has slowed, but we’ve got to keep working at it.” Would he, I ask, contemplate selling the Sunday People if the decline continued? “I don’t like selling titles.” Or close it? “At this stage, I see no reason to do either.”

So 16 months down the road the CEO is not dissatisfied. It has, however, been a bumpy journey, with Piers Morgan coming perilously close to tumbling down a pothole and both Daily Record editor Martin Clarke and Trinity Mirror’s managing director (national titles) Roger Eastoe falling by the wayside somewhat abruptly. It was the wish of Eastoe, a long-time Mirror servant who had rubbed along with a succession of Mirror overlords, including Robert Maxwell, like a faithful sheepdog, to leave the group, insisted Graf: “We needed to change the way the company was organised, to take the business forward, and Roger felt he would rather leave the company than take a role in that change.” Three new senior managers – a chief executive of the company’s newspapers and two managing directors, one for the regionals, another for the national titles – are now in place.

Attacks

When I first spoke with Mr Graf, the circulation figures for all three titles were disappointing and there was an even gloomier report from the National Readership Survey, showing a sharp drop for The Mirror and only a minor one for The Sun . “. “We are slightly at a loss to understand what has happened to the readers per copy issue and we have been talking to the NRS about it,” he confessed. “It is not because all of a sudden we have lots of bulk sales. Frankly, I don’t have a straightforward answer to it, but it is the fundamental ABC performance of the paper over a certain amount of time that concerns me and I am very happy with what The Mirror has done in that respect.”

(The latest circulation figures for the paper, however, make unhappy reading for all at Trinity Mirror: in February it was showing a 3.25 per cent year-on-year decline – far greater if bulk sales are discounted – against a year-on-year increase of almost one per cent, and an even greater bulk-excluded figure, for The Sun .)

At our second meeting, I discussed with Graf the difficulties facing the industry, especially its red-top titles, and asked if added value was the only way to slow, if not prevent, decline. “I think there is a limit [to added value],” he said, “and some of the papers at the weekend must be getting very close to that limit, if they are not already at it, from the point of view of the reader. The extra challenge we have got is that newsprint prices are going up this year for the first time in a number of years and they are going to go up in double digits. That’s a significant challenge for all of us, as to how we deal with it.

“Historically, newspapers’ reactions to newsprint prices going up was a very simple one – to put the price up and cut the value. And then wonder why the readers disappeared. We’ve got to avoid that. What you cannot do is start giving the readers worse value for money. You have to think very carefully about inflicting widespread cover price increases on readers. I am not sure how price sensitive The Sunday Times is, or how price sensitive some weekly newspapers are. Daily newspapers are a different proposition – you can’t just lam the cover price in and not invest some of that money back into the paper. The challenge for us is to identify the areas which are maybe less price sensitive and identify where you can put value in.”

* * *

But what when the traditionally Labour-supporting papers stray from what one imagines is part of the agreed editorial philosophy – The Mirror ’s occasional strident attacks on the Government, for example, and the not infrequent right-wing political stance of the Sunday People ? “Basically, our policy is to be a critical friend [of the Labour Party],” said Graf, “which does not mean slavish adherence. That’s the policy of the national newspapers and I cannot envisage any of our nationals suggesting anyone should vote anything other than Labour in a General Election.”

Decency

“I think people inside newspapers do care. It is an area where people are called upon to make difficult judgements often very quickly and they have to make those judgements sometimes in the heat of competition, but I actually believe that editors and journalists work very hard to make sure they do not transgress. And if they do transgress, they find a way of recompense.”

There are those who will consider Graf’s conviction and trust, and his distress when other papers attack those he controls, the height of naiveté, but he is nothing but realistic about the future of the national press in a diminishing and increasingly difficult market. “If you ask me whether in 10 years’ time there will be the same number of titles, I [would say] I would be surprised. In their present form, I think it will be difficult for them all to survive. But, then, if you ask me whether there will be the same number of companies in the television industry in 10 years’ time, well, I don’t think there will be. Or in the radio industry. Life will change.” But, I wonder, will Trinity Mirror still be publishing the same number of national titles? “I see no reason why we won’t be.”

He is, he agreed, more likely to wake in the middle of the night thinking of the Trinity Mirror share price than the Piers Morgan shares affair – “Although I think about the share price as a reflection of the long-term health, future and prospects of the company, not today’s share price compared to yesterday’s.”

His ambitions for the company include the growth of its internet operations, although he cautioned: “I don’t believe any of us involved believe all the hype [about the web], much of which is clearly unsustainable. We see the internet as helping us protect and develop our existing franchises and as another way of supplying information to people and services to commercial customers. Whether it is a way of making money is certainly less clear than 12 months ago. However, we believed that, given the strengths we have, can genuinely supply a service to people. It won’t replace the profit stream from newspapers, absolutely not, but it is an important addition and a way of exploiting our strengths. It all depends on the regulatory framework, but there is a lot of merit in working with television and radio companies to deliver the content of our papers, for example, and to work [with them] on internet projects.”

His personal ambitions, however, are humble. He has retained the pre-merger family home in Wilmslow, Cheshire, where one of his and his wife’s three daughters remains at school. The family now also has a flat in Limehouse and, he says, they balance their lives between the two places. Graf enjoys watching sport – “I’m much too idle to play” – and going to the theatre and reading.

“On a personal level, I just want to keep enjoying what I am doing, because I actually believe that having fun and enjoying your job is incredibly important for your own personal health,” he said. “It also helps to keep a sense of perspective and, hopefully, keeps you in contact with your family. From a business perspective, if you are having fun you are much more likely to manage things and deal with people well.” Fun? There are those who will tell you that not so long ago the very mention of the word in the managerial corridors of Mirror Group would risk fire and brimstone and wrath.

“Once you stop having fun, it is time to think about doing something else”, he continued. That, I observed, is very Cudlippian – the late, great Mirror editorial director, Hugh, believed papers had to be fun. “Thank you,” said Philip Graf. “I take that as a compliment.”