The Press
By CHRISTOPHER BOOKER
ON Monday morning a new man started work at the Daily Express as associate editor. His same is Harold Keeble— his mission, to refurbish the fastest-fading myth in Fleet Street.
For forty years. while the Express rode high, one nagging question always remained: 'What will happen when-Beaverbrook dies?' At last the answer is becoming plain for all to see. On Tues- day, as the Daily Mirror announced a gala ball to celebrate its circulation passing the five-million mark, Bcaverbrook's squabbling heirs faced rumours that they might soon have to break to advertisers the news that the Express was below the magic four million.
Signs that the Express had lost its flair were already increasing with Beaverbrook's senility.
Executive changes at the top of the paper started to become a running joke. The paper's proud boast that 'it always lived up to the big occasion' was finally shattered by the amateurishly woebe- gone edition which greeted its proprietor's death— hardly an event that could be said to have been un- anticipated in the Express office. But in the past six months things have gone from bad to worse. With- out the continual threat of that Canadian rasp down any Expressman's telephone, the paper has become flaccid, dull, no longer the first one turns to on a bleak morning, but a paper which spends as much time picking up other people's ideas and stories as finding its own. When even the World's Press News can say 'it appeared to be living on past glory' the Express has come to a sorry pass.
Meanwhile, in the paper itself, bitterness, temper, even wild accusations of 'megalomania' abound. Staff changes continue. Recently, amid internecine shouts, deputy editor Peter Baker—in- termittently a longtime Beaverbrook white hope— left his post. Bright young men, such as the political correspondent Ian Aitken and defence correspondent Charles Douglas-Home—who, in ancient times, might well have made their lives with Beaverbrook—find happier pastures else- where. Things have happened which six months ago could never have been imagined—such as the sub-contracting out of chunks of the paper to the staff of the Queen, the virtually unreadable `Leisurescope' feature on Saturdays. Not to say, of course, the ludicrous reversal of old Express policy on newspaper participation in ITV— coupled with the buying of shares in ATV and the appearance of sycophantic features on the artistic good taste of Mr. Lew Grade.
All this was the challenge which on Monday faced Harold Keeble, a fifty-two-year-old North- Countryman who has been with the Express before—for twenty-three years. His speciality is 'projection' and layout—it was his flair that was a considerable behind-the-scenes ingredient in making up the public legend of Arthur Christian- sen. In the four years since he left the Express, Keeble has twice been caller' in to perform face- lifting operations on ailing or stultifying news- papers—on the Sketch and the Mirror. He has won much admiration. But the problem that faces him on the Express today is one defying mere tricks of 'projection'; it is to find the paper a new personality. It is hard to imagine that a man who , grew up in the shadow of Lord Beaverbrook will find it easy.
Another rescue-attempt is under way on the Observer's Colour Magazine—the BBC-2 of jour- nalism—where it seems that Editor Michael Davy is shortly to be moved back to the deputy editor- ship of the main paper, to be replaced by Anthony Sampson. A crop of rumours earlier this week that Mark Boxer is also to move, wafted upwards in the Thomson group on the tide of Sunday Times Magazine profits, is strictly untrue— although this is not preventing him from laying the foundations for at least one new Thomson maga- zine venture for later in the year. Rumours that the Weekend Telegraph is to be moved to Sunday after all—to pick up the suffering Sunday Tele- graph—are still being denied.
PLANE MAKERS WIN NEW HOPE FOR TSR-2— Daily Sketch, Tuesday.
PLANE CHIEFS FAIL To SAVE TSR-2—Sun, Tuesday.
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