THE PRESS
Poachers and gamekeepers
DONALD McLACHLAN
No one, I am sure, feels anything but pleasure that Trevor Lloyd-Hughes, Press Secretary to Harold Wilson from 1964-9, is to become Sir Trevor. He was popular and efficient, and he worked the Lobby of poli- tical correspondents as only an old lobby correspondent can. He had, too, one invalu- able quality: readiness to leave his master alone with some of those who interviewed him. Not all information officers have this confidence and I recall how pleased we felt —Peregrine Worsthorne, Henry Fairlie and myself—to be admitted without chaperone in 1965 to see the Prime Minister and hear him pronounce on his achievement in the 'first hundred days'. I hope that Edward Heath will inspire similar confidence in his aides.
I suppose that it is now widely assumed among journalists that honours can be accepted without embarrassment and that certain persons in a certain kind of news- paper job—I hope that managements will not be forgotten—can await their awards with the same confidence that admirals and diplomats have long awaited their Ks. In- deed, the more routine the process becomes, the more likely it is that a Prime Minister will be tempted to achieve some originality by, say, singling out the so-called under- ground press. Why should not the editor of Private Eye become Sir Richard? For that matter why should not an editor of Punch regard the House of Lords as his final des- tination?
Now that the old conventions about honours no longer prevail, or prevail for a decreasing number of newspaper men and women, there is indeed no reason at all. Both those publications render by their efforts, public service, though to very different sec- tions of the public, and the purpose of the Honours List is to honour and encourage public service. It may seem hardly fair to mention in the same breath the arduous work of the Chief Information Adviser to the Government, which was Lloyd-Hughes's final title, and the more Bohemian activity of Mr Ingrams. For the one man sits at the heart of affairs in No 10 Downing Street, feeding the public through the daily news- papers with whatever can be safely passed on from cabinet meetings, conferences, crises and so on. Whereas the other man, on the fringe of affairs at No 34 Greek Street, is feeding the public through his periodical with what he thinks the first man left out. It depends very much on your politics which man you judge to be doing in any one month the better job.
The purpose of this comparison is not to tease two admirable characters. It is to draw attention to a slightly comic aspect of honours for journalists. The old convention was that a journalist's first duty was to be independent and that his prime role was to be wary of governments and hostile to Minis- ters. There would be between them, it is true, bonhomie, courtesy and sometimes even intimacy but the relationship at its root was that of gamekeeper and poacher, and the only 'consensus' was that vermin should be shown no mercy. It followed that a journalist should regard the offer of honours as a bribe, and that the politician making the offer should expect a rebuff. A crude formula, perhaps, but effective. No doubt it was rooted in the inferior social position of journalists in the nineteenth cens tury, as well as in the distrust sown by the numerous press peerages of the twentieth. But it had the merit of discouraging any ambitions that might be felt towards ad- vancement within the establishment. Nowa- days the relationship has become confused owing to the movement into Whitehall over the last thirty years of journalists wanting to be information officers, poachers becom- ing gamekeepers.
One of the Voortrekkers was Sir Harold Evans who, after working in provincial newspapers throughout the 'thirs ties, made a career in the Colonial Office as public relations man, was adviser to the Prime Minister from 1957-1964 and then Head of Information and Research to the ITA. For the last four years he has been ad- viser on public relations to Vickers. Many of less ability have joined the trek, and the information services of Whitehall now offer a safe and well-paid career to those who feel they can make their peace with the estabi lishment. At the top there are knighthood; when the master of the moment leaves office, and then opportunities outside.
At a certain point in such a progress the ex-journalist changes his skin. His news sense gives place to political sense. His loyalty to the public changes to loyalty to his minis. try or master. Unless he is a strong per- sonality of unusual ability, the senior civil servants with whom he has to deal will gradually convert him to the idea that the public does not need to know all that the journalist thinks it ought to know. From be- ing suspected of being on the side of the press he will become a man judged to he 'sound' because he now sees the shortcom- ings of his old colleagues.
Such a metamorphosis is in no way dis- honourable and is in some ways inevitable. To describe it is to explain that Sir Trevor will be in due course regarded not as a journalist who has been knighted but as a civil servant who had been honoured rather earlier than some. Whether the recruitment of journalists as information officers will be allowed to continue under the new govern- ment's scrutiny of its machinery remains to be seen. The development is not too old to be examined at its roots. When you come to think of it there is no compelling reason why providing information to the press should not be done by the ablest civil servants on their way up the ladder. That is how the Foreign Office has always done it—and is it not in this respect the envy of Whitehall?
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