10 MARCH 2001, Page 14

OF HACKS AND HEROES

Peter °borne says that the space devoted

to the death of John Diamond is the sign of a self-obsessed press

THIS LONG, cold winter has claimed plenty of lives. The remaining heroes of the second world war are dying fast. Brigadier James Vickers, a proud Gurkha who earned his first DSO in the jungle war against Japan and his second in the Malayan campaign that followed, has gone. December claimed Loftus Peyton Jones, another DSO who twice survived the sinking of his ship and walked 400 miles through enemy lines as an escaping prisoner-of-war. Another naval man, Commander John Messervy, who once nonchalantly lifted six live torpedoes from the hull of a sunken Japanese submarine, survived many hazards both in war and peace to die in the New Year, aged 80.

Few would have laid odds on Johnnie Johnson surviving for more than a few months when he set out on his career as an RAF fighter pilot in the summer of 1941. But this superlative man survived to notch up a record 38 combat victories in northwest Europe and lived on to die, a highly decorated air vice-marshal, at the end of January this year.

War heroes were not the only breed to die this winter. Sir Hugh Tett, the former chairman of Esso, went within a few days of Johnson. He, too, made his contribu tion to the war by concocting the highoctane fuel that enabled the Spitfire to more than match the Messerschmitt. A few weeks earlier, William Hewlett, founder of the computer company which still bears his name and one of the great entrepreneurs of the last century, died at the age of 87. Yet as far as the British pyess is concerned, it is as though most of these men had never lived.

Of those mentioned above, Johnnie Johnson just about managed to creep out of the obituary pages. But his tributes came nowhere close to the extravagant coverage of the deaths of two Fleet Street journalists, Auberon Waugh and John Diamond. Broadsheets and tabloids alike poured forth their tributes to Waugh for days. His own paper, the Daily Telegraph, dedicated four whole pages to his memory — rather more than the paper gave over to the former Tory prime minister Sir Alec Douglas-Home when he died just over five years earlier.

Likewise the columnist and broadcaster John Diamond, who died last week at the age of 47. Huge front-page pictures and news stories accompanied his death, while his funeral was covered as though he were minor royalty. Even Tony Blair was inspired to produce a message of sympathy (a distinction that Diamond has in common with Linda McCartney, who is not thought to have met the Prime Minister, but not Johnnie Johnson). Last Sunday, three days after his death had been announced, the appreciations were still in full flow: they were showing little sign of abating by the middle of this week.

To ask whether some fundamental sense of proportion has been hopelessly lost in all this is not to question the quality of Waugh and Diamond as journalists, or their decency and goodness as human beings. Waugh was the greater columnist. For the two decades when he was at his peak — from about 1965 to 1985 — there was no sharper pen in Fleet Street. He sold newspapers and magazines on the strength of his name alone; and while his public style was acid, he was loved by those who knew him.

Diamond's achievement was almost as notable. In his later years he did something which is the mark of a very good columnist: he spoke directly to his readers about cancer, the great killer of our age and an issue that the press has never before confronted in a grown-up manner. He challenged the way the medical profession expects people to react to their disease, and there is no finer tribute to his enduring achievement than the fact that his book C: Because Cowards Get Cancer Too is now on the required reading list for medical students.

His achievement, for a journalist, was very great. That is for sure. But the fact that the death of a fine journalist is now deemed to merit coverage on a far grander scale than the death of a war hero, a great industrialist and a great entrepreneur is a striking contemporary phenomenon.

For the first 300 or so years of its existence journalism was regarded, both by those who practised it and by those who did not, as a sordid and second-rate craft. Grub Street was known as Grub Street for a reason. Even when Fleet Street emerged from the shadows in the 20th century, journalists were craftsmen whose duty it was to record, in a scrupulous and selfeffacing manner, the world around them. They were to be found with a notebook at the gates of great houses, not inside them. They passed on what politicians said, and did not think it was their job to interpret them. They were happy for film stars, footballers and singers to become celebrities, and did not seek to become celebrities themselves.

It is only a generation since the Times gave way and permitted reporter bylines (the City pages of the Sunday Telegraph held out on this point till 1986). Picture bylines, with their implicit suggestion that the reporter is as remarkable as the story he is covering, came in. At first they were used only to celebrate a great exclusive or herald a remarkable piece of prose. Soon they were everywhere, like rain. By the 1980s a new media class had emerged, confident and strutting, mingling on equal and even superior terms with those they wrote about, and setting the tone in society, in politics and on the national stage.

It is a striking and novel development, linked by a network of sexual, family and financial relationships that are every bit as complex and self-assured as those of the 18th-century aristocracy. The great dynasties of Dimbleby, Waugh, Lawson and so forth come close to commanding the same kind of reverence as the ducal families in Walpole's London.

There is a danger here. The media risks becoming too self-serving, exclusive and unable to look beyond the mental parameters of the Garrick Club, the Grouch() or the Met Bar. And media-class values — showy rather than deep, transient not longterm, clever not wise, sentimental and not compassionate — are dangerous to the health and longevity of any nation.

Not that Auberon Waugh or John Diamond fell for this nonsense. If they were still here, they would be the first to ask why the papers which celebrated their lives could not find the same space to mourn Johnnie Johnson, that indomitable second world war fighter ace.

Peter °borne is political columnist of the Express.