21 MARCH 1998, Page 10

SHARED OPINION

The other letters behind that very long letter from Harold Evans

FRANK JOHNSON

The Times is generally agreed to have come badly out of the Murdoch-Patten- China affair because it took too long to write about it. Spectator readers may have seen references — in the London Evening Standard, Newsweek, the Daily Mail, the Independent and the Observer, as well as in American journals which most Spectator readers are unlikely to see — to a matter concerning Mr Harold Evans and this mag- azine. I had better write about it now.

We last week published a letter from Mr Evans some three and a half months after the Spectator article about which it com- plained. Readers may therefore have guessed that our learned friends had been involved. That is so.

In late November we published an article from New York about Mr Evans's leaving the publisher Random House for a job to do with the New York tabloid, the Daily News, and the weekly U.S. News & World Report, which share an owner.

For the benefit of our younger readers, it should be explained that Mr Evans, until he went to New York around the early 1980s, was one of the best-known British newspa- per editors.

Mr Evans need not consider it a discour- tesy if I suggest that these days he arouses interest partly because of his wife, Tina Brown, British editor of the New Yorker. She is controversial in New York because some people think she has enlivened a stuffy pub- lication and others that she has debased a distinguished one; though it occurs to me that the two feats are not incompatible.

But she is controversial in Britain for, I suspect, two other reasons. First, some Britons may resent that, in the eyes of some Americans, it is she who now represents British womanhood. It used to be Deborah Kerr or Margot Fonteyn. Now it is Tina Brown. I make no comment as to which of these diverse kinds of British woman embodies our ideal. I am sure that all have their strengths. The other reason why Ms Brown arouses controversy here is the hope or fear that she might come back.

Mr Young's article suggested that Mr Evans's departure from Random House had been involuntary (which was what he denied at such length last week). But plenty of New York newspapers and magazines had said that too. What particularly dis- tressed Mr Evans, I suspect, is that the arti- cle mocked him, and did not take him at his own valuation. Toby Young thought him, and his wife, a good subject for satire. Moreover, he had mocked them before, writing from New York for the Evening Standard.

Mr Evans sent me a huge letter seeking to refute Mr Young point by point, with a demand that it be published in full, publica- tion to be accompanied by a retraction and apology 'that you submit to me for my approval'. As I hope Spectator readers will have noticed, I make a point of ensuring that anyone who takes exception to what is written about them in this magazine is allowed to reply in kind on the letters page; now one of the best-read parts of the paper. I replied to Mr Evans that I would print a long letter from him, though please, not as long as the one he had sent, which was longer than Mr Young's article. He faxed back still demanding the retraction and apology as well. I replied that his demand for an apology was 'unrealistic'.

After all, if everyone who was denounced or mocked in these pages received an apol- ogy it would take up rather a lot of space; space which could be„.used for praising peo- ple, or taking them at their own valuation — something which, despite Mr Young's article, we also do often.

He faxed back saying that I should recog- nise that I was 'something more than a blank wall on which people can write what- ever graffiti they choose'. A good phrase, if I may say so; it was a pity that there was nothing so lively in his letter last week. He added that if I did not apologise, 'I would be regretfully prepared to have the evi- dence weighed by 12 good people'.

I still declined to apologise. Eventually, I received his lawyer's letter demanding, not just an apology, but damages. A lawyer's letter also went to Toby Young in New York, demanding that Mr Young 'desist forthwith from further defaming, denigrat- ing or ridiculing Mr Evans or Ms Brown.. . either in this jurisdiction [i.e. Britain] or elsewhere'.

It was the 'elsewhere' which secured for Mr Evans and Ms Brown publicity in the United States, which was picked up by the press over here. It turned out that, just before Mr Evans's first letter to me, a New York newspaper had had an item saying that Mr Young was writing a play satirising the New York media and containing a cou- ple similar to Mr Evans and Ms Brown. Both apparently deny that they were con- cerned about the play. But Mr Young could now depict himself to American journalists as being the victim of a 'gag'.

From then on, Mr Evans abandoned his demand for an apology and damages from The Spectator. For a while, he held out for costs, but eventually abandoned that too. Understanding, as I do, that lawyers have to be able to tell their clients that they have won them something, I undertook to give Mr Evans notice if I ever intended to repeat the allegations about which he complained. Otherwise, he settled for last week's letter, which he could have had months ago.

I would argue that there is a broader sig- nificance in all this: the decisive importance in our time of image and publicity. Perhaps, to Mr Evans and Ms Brown, image and publicity are almost all. First, they thought it damaging to their image, and their publicity, for Mr Young to mock them. According to the Daily Mail, reporting from New York on Mr Evans's threats to Mr Young, the cou- ple had objected to Mr Young, in the Stan- dard, describing her party for Tony Blair as `B list'. To suggest that the New Yorker had declined in distinction under Ms Brown is one thing, it seems, but to suggest that she gives a naff party is a serious matter.

Now Mr Evans had to weigh the bad publicity from Mr Young's ridiculing him against the bad publicity from being depict- ed as a rich media executive trying to bully a struggling playwright. The latter consider- ation prevailed, it seemed. Suddenly, apologies, damages, and redress before '12 good people' seemed less urgent.

But perhaps it was ever thus. The power- ful, or would-be powerful, have always believed that their power was sustained by appearances. The first use of 'image' — in the modern sense — which I can find is in Gibbon. In 2nd-century Rome, 'the image of a free constitution was preserved with decent reverence'. But Gibbon goes on to suggest that the image might not have been the reality: 'The Roman senate appeared [my italics] to possess the sovereign author- ity.' Yet the senate 'devolved on the emper- ors all the executive powers of govern- ment'. Gibbon knew that image was not reality. Mr Evans, Mr Mandelson and all the other burnishers of images act as if they believe that image can change reality, or that reality can be changed if the needs of the image demand it.