The memorial service for former Times editor Charlie Wilson (1935-2022), reported in this magazine (page 44), was also a memorial for old Fleet Street, and the days when editors and proprietors appeared to count for something.
Nowadays, the under-40s scarcely ever buy a newspaper, and those who read the papers online are probably in a minority. Like the Church of England, the trade-union movement and the monarchy, the press is on its last legs.
Obviously, as an old journalist, I find this sad. Since my first foray into the hurly-burly of the popular press, I have echoed Beaverbrook’s words – ‘I PITY anyone who isn’t a journalist.’
Fastidious people, especially lefties, squirm at the mention of the great newspaper proprietors. Alan Bennett, for example, would not buy the Times Literary Supplement because he believed Rupert Murdoch to be a monster. Instead, he preferred to work for Mary-Kay Wilmers, the editor of the London Review of Books.
Chacun à son monstre. I’d rather be stuck in a lift with the Dirty Digger than with that literary Medusa.
Murdoch – along with Charlie Wilson, then Times editor – was responsible for the brilliant and surreptitious move from Fleet Street to Wapping, and the embrace of IT technology. This outwitted the fathers of the chapel who were signing up for triple or quadruple salaries, and bankrupting the ‘gentlemen’ proprietors such as Lord Hartwell of the Telegraph.
By sidestepping the blackmailing print unions, Murdoch without doubt saved the Times from extinction and, with it, all the other decent papers, including the Guardian.
I’m not the only one who is grateful. The late and ever-lamented Auberon Waugh called at the time for Murdoch to be given a dukedom and it’s still not too late, should the King have his wits about him. (Questionable.)
It would be heart-warming to think that Ann Lesley Smith, as well as becomng his fifth wife, could also become a Duchess. Either way, we wish the couple all the best. They describe themselves (he is 92) as being in the second half of life and are surely eligible for Oldie Lovers of the Year.
Of course, the great proprietors are and have been monstrous. Andrew Roberts’s wonderfully enjoyable biography of Lord Northcliffe, The Chief (2022), tells the story of how a relatively poor, shabby-genteel Irishman made a colossal fortune by founding the Daily Mail, a paper Lord Salisbury said was written by and for office boys.
There are a lot of office boys – or their modern equivalents – and that is something the fastidious hate. When people in recent years have attacked Paul Dacre, the greatest of all newspaper editors in my lifetime, they have deplored the fact that he terrified the politicians, who feebly danced to his tune.
Another way of looking at it, though, is to say that Dacre spoke up for people, in defiance of the idiocy of politicians. It would be difficult to say which were truer – that the Mail influences its readers, or that it merely reflects their views. They aren’t views that go down well at Primrose Hill dinner parties, but they are surely allowed an airing.
The fastidious quote Rudyard Kipling’s words about Beaverbrook and Northcliffe, who exercise ‘power without responsibility – the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages’. It’s a memorable phrase, which only an old journo like Kipling could have supplied. He gave it to his cousin Stanley Baldwin when he was being attacked by the newspaper barons. (Very properly attacked, too!)
Beaverbrook’s policy with politicians – ‘Kiss ’em one day, and kick ’em the next’ – strikes me as perfectly fair. The Kipling phrase cleverly ignores the fact that the real power, in the modern age, is exercised by big business and the various pockets of resistance on the left. These have nothing to do with either Parliament or the media.
When I worked at the Spectator, it was my own proprietor, Algy Cluff, who alerted me to the greatness of Beaverbrook.
Cluff – whose umpteenth volume of memoirs, The Importance of Being Algy, is just about to be published: HOORAY! – was a generous proprietor who spent a fortune shoring up the dear old mag, which in those days made huge losses.
There is no question that it would have closed down without him. He did so because he was in love with the romance of journalism, and because, like all the best proprietors, he liked journalists.
Vere Rothermere, my proprietor when I worked for seven years at the Evening Standard, also liked us. In addition he was charm on a stick. Even Conrad Black, whose proprietorship of the Daily Telegraph came to a regrettable end in a US prison, liked journalists. Liked? Reader, he married one – Barbara Amiel.
Probably most of the proprietors I have mentioned could be described as monsters but I am hugely grateful to them for keeping the great monster-menagerie of Fleet Street on the road.
We’ll miss it when it’s gone.
The Oldie May 2023
