AND ANOTHER THING
What happens when you're too mean to get your turkey cooked in the Ritz
PAUL JOHNSON
It is always good sport when a self-satis- fied quality paper produces a real journalis- tic turkey — more particularly so when it is written by the editor. That is exactly what happened to the Guardian last week. The editor, Peter Preston, put his own byline to a long, three-page story in its insert section, entitled 'The Minister, the Mandarin, the Premier and the Editor'. In case you haven't read it — and there is absolutely no need to — it was an attempt by Preston to prove that Jonathan Aitken MP, the arms procurement minister who has the job Alan Clark once rejoiced in, behaved improperly by having his and his wife's Paris hotel bill paid by a Saudi businessman and not reporting it as a gift, as required by govern- ment procedure. At least, that is what I think it is about. The trouble with Preston — I should say, one of the many troubles with Preston — is that not only is he editor of the Guardian but he is also chairman of one of the myste- rious trust bodies which own or control it. This means it is difficult, if not impossible, to fire him, a most unsatisfactory position for any paper to be in, and that his staff are even less inclined than usual to criticise him openly.
Hence, when he produced for publica- tion his confusing and ill-organised account of the Aitken affair, or non-affair, none of his colleagues, I imagine, had the clout or courage to say, 'Look, Peter, old comrade, this just isn't good enough,' or even 'Put it through the typewriter again, boss.' So I admit I am not sure what is the nub or c/ou of Preston's tale. But I think it is rather like the fuss over the late Anthony Crosland accepting the gift of a £75 coffee pot, which made him so furious (and he was a man who really could get angry), except that there is no doubt that the coffee pot did exist, whereas Aitken is quite clear, and everyone else except Preston, from the Cabinet Secretary down, is quite satisfied, that the bill was properly paid — by Mrs Aitken.
I suppose Preston is trying to imply or insinuate — he hasn't the guts to come out With it openly, asserting merely that the minister didn't follow 'procedures' — that Aitken's relationship with his Arab friend is corrupt. But anyone who knows Aitken, as I have done for many years, will swear that he is about the last person on earth to accept a miserable freebie from an Arab — that is more the style of Preston's regular contributor David Mellor. Aitken is a rich man and an unusually generous one: it is thanks to his kindness in providing hospi- tality that the Tory Philosophy Group exists. He is just as likely to pay his Arab friend's bill if he can get in first. But Arabs are quick in these matters: some of them may be corrupt but many more are simply munificent. Some people just are. This may come as a surprise to Preston, who hails from Loughborough, a gruesome and tight- fisted dump.
Why, with so much important news around, and so many genuine wrongs in the world to be put right, did Preston waste so much space in his unsuccessful attempt to 'get' Aitken? One motive may be plain envy. Aitken is one of the tallest and hand- somest men in public life, sure to arouse resentment among dog-eared journalists, especially one as ill-favoured as Preston. (And, if you think this is unkind, you should read the words with which Preston's paper recently described the physical appearance of the American Secretary of State, Warren Christopher; or, for that matter, study the cruel drawings of its New Brutalist cartoonist, Steve Bell.) However, I suspect the real explanation for the story's appearance, despite its mani- fest inadequacies, is meanness. The Guardian has always been a mean paper. It got its tip-off about Aitken from a person it delicately describes as an 'occasional infor- mant', whose job apparently is to lurk around the Paris Ritz and report who is lunching with whom — an odd sort of chap for an old-fashioned liberal paper to have on its books, you might think. No doubt this 'informant' does not come cheap — one would like to know who pays his bills at the Ritz: not the Guardian, that's for sure. And since then Preston has had to spend a lot more money using the electric tele- phone, badgering the Ritz, possibly even going over to Paris himself. Wow! With all that heavy investment, the idea of throwing the story into the wpb at the end must have seemed insupportable. So Preston printed it.
It did not do any good, of course. No one took the slightest notice. If Aitken had been trembling for his job, the other papers, not to speak of radio and television, would have followed it up. But there was not a squeak out of the entire media, so far as I am aware. The Daily Telegraph's columnist Niall Fergusson put his finger on it all. Now we know, he wrote, 'what the Guardian's tabloid section is for — stories they can't stand up in the broadsheet'.
What particularly tickled me were the high-sounding words with which Preston launched his turkey. 'Newspapers exist,' he began grandly, 'to print news stories.' Not the Guardian, in my experience. To be sure, it was once a different matter.
My old boss Kingsley Martin used to assert, in the 1950s, that the Guardian was the best paper in the world, and many peo- ple would then have agreed with him. It was also a paper of strong principle, which refused to report racing on the grounds that to do so encouraged gambling. Under Preston, however, it has developed a taste for malicious gossip and innuendo. A cou- ple of weeks ago it printed a nasty and untrue story about myself in a column writ- ten by one Francis Wheen, a low-down gos- sip writer even by tabloid standards. He made no attempt to check it with me. What? Authenticate the facts and risk los- ing the story? That is not the way of today's Guardian. It has rewritten C.P. Scott's old slogan to read: 'Comment is free but truth is expensive.' So when the Guardian and its editor start going on about standards in the government — even in this Govern- ment — the only answer is, pull the other one, Pete.
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