The press
Napping a one-horse race
Paul Johnson
Oh What a Lovely, Dirty War', pro- claimed the. Evening Standard last Tuesday, after the general election an- nouncement the day before; but more, I suspect, in hope than in genuine anticipa- tion. Fleet Street wants a bit, or rather a lot, of dirt to fly around, and will doubtless supply some if needed. Anything to whip up some reader interest in what promises to be an exceedingly difficult campaign for editors. Fleet Street hates a one-horse race and is eagerly looking for a narrowing in the polls. Even in the Tory fastnesses there were positive groans of dismay when the Polls published last Friday showed the Con- servatives leading by anything from 13 to 21 Points. 'It's Almost Embarrassing', con- fessed the Daily Mail front-page headline.
A further regret is that the Alliance, or at least the SDP part of it, now looks like a busted flush. Roy Jenkins is a squeezed lemon and Steel, though popular with the scribes, has too much of the boy scout about him to make exciting copy. The polls confirmed the trend and the Daily Express headline said it all: 'Alliance Support Col- lapses'. The timing was particularly unfor- tunate since the Alliance had got out its manifesto first, on Thursday, and Friday morning was supposed to be its big day. The Financial Times gave the manifesto in full, pretty generous in the circumstances, since it was all soporific stuff. Earlier in the week the Guardian, deploring the polarity of the two main parties, had lamented: 'We shall not see the ghost of Butskell walk again.' Well: a not dissimilar phantom Makes a dim epiphany in the Alliance text. The Times felt it ought to 'earn reasonable Marks, though it has some glaring Weaknesses', as near to damning with faint praise as you can get. The Guardian, the SDP-Liberals' best friend in Fleet Street (at least so far as the leader columns are con- cerned), was not much more helpful. 'Sear- ching for a Touch of Shirley' was its title. To judge by 'this menu', it said, the Alliance campaign 'will badly need a Powerful dose of Mrs Williams's old crusading spirit if it is going to make the essential election appeal to hearts as well as minds'.
Elections nowadays tend to produce a structural slant to the centre-right in the British media. The normal strong bias to the left in TV is modified by the strict regulations governing campaigning, and I suppose even Channel 4 will have to bank down its Marxist fires until after 9 June. But the press carries on as usual, only more so. To make matters worse, on this occa- sion there is a marked lack of enthusiasm for Labour among even its usually reliable supporters. The Daily Mirror, which is strongly opposed to Labour's policies on the EEC, defence and many other things, published last week a leading article pledg- ing support for Labour which must rank as the mose lukewarm endorsement since Rab Butler slyly informed us that Eden was 'the best Prime Minister we have got'. I cannot see the Guardian, with its continuing three- way split, going to town for Labour, unless Mrs Thatcher says something quite extraor- dinarily provocative. Indeed, I know hardly anyone in Fleet Street at present who believes Labour can win, or wants it to.
For this Labour is entirely to blame. The absurd policy document it produced in March, which reads as though it was written by a covey of demented social workers with Napoleonic delusions, was supposed to be cut, hacked about and generally sanitised before becoming the manifesto. The idea, I gather, was that Michael Foot himself was to do the job. Hence, when the Shadow Cabinet and the NEC held their joint meeting last week, Foot was supposed to produce the improved version. But he must have been caught short by Mrs Thatcher's abrupt decision, or
had simply forgotten, or found it all too much for him; at all events, he arrived without anything to show, and the document simply became the manifesto unamended. It is a confused, rambling text, full of repetitious dynamite. As a Labour MP remarked when it was first concocted, it is 'the longest suicide note ever penned'.
Fleet. Street, as readers of this column know, is not a proprietorial conspiracy against Labour. Proprietors have little con- trol over editorial policies nowadays, except in one or two cases. Policies are determined by editors and the general consensus of senior staff, themselves influenced by rank- and-file journalistic opinion (and readers). And what does Labour do for journalists? Good journalists, who are the ones most likely to influence editorial policy, loathe the monopoly power of the print unions, to which Labour is umbilically attached; they scorn the Left-dominated NUJ, to which in many cases they are compelled, by the
hated closed shop system, to belong. Without the present union set-up in Fleet Street, the likelihood is that most newspapers would be making substantially higher profits and the abler journalists would be enjoying much higher salaries.
There is nothing for journalists in the Labour manifesto; quite the contrary. The section dealing with the media reads as though it was drawn up by some fanatics from the pro-censorship organisation known as the Campaign for Press Freedom, which is despised in Fleet Street. The pro- posal to 'set up a launch fund to assist new publications' is, of course, a Livingstone- type joke to keep the sectarian Far Left happy; as is the promise to compel wholesalers to handle any political fringe paper 'and arrange for its proper supply and display' — though it is, all the same, an intolerable interference in the freedom of the industry. But replacing the Press Council by a statutory body with powers to punish is, naturally, much disliked and feared by nearly all journalists. Other pro- posals — to break up big press groups, to pre- vent acquisitions by press chains and to divorce newspapers from their TV and radio holdings — are also viewed with ap- prehension for the simple reason that, if seriously intended, they could lead to the closure of titles and the loss of jobs. The British newspaper industry is a fragile struc- ture at the best of times and rightly worries about being pushed into idealism by a socialist bulldozer. In short, Fleet Street has no good pragmatic reason to replace Mrs T; and as for copy, you can't beat her. It's like having two royal families.
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