MEDIA STUDIES
We must keep watch on Paxo to thwart this attempt to turn Newsnight into New Labour Night
STEPHEN GLOVER
Ihope I will be forgiven for returning to the subject of Newsnight, which I wrote about in the issue of 14 June. There has been a sensational development confirming our worse fears. In last Sunday's Observer Nick Cohen quoted a memorandum from Newsnight's editor, Peter Horrocks, which had miraculously fallen into his hands. It is shocking stuff. The memo was written shortly after the election in the spirit of a new 'mission statement'. Mr Horrocks makes it clear that things will have to change. 'The model of five years of Tory coverage must be thrown away,' he writes. 'The template of spite, disunity, Europe and chaos may one day apply, but it doesn't yet and we must not behave as if it does. Labour has a huge mandate and our job should not be to quar- rel with the purpose of policy but to ques- tion its implementation.' Let us try to sympathise with Mr Hor- rocks. It emerges that his memo was writ- ten on 6 May, a few days after the election, and followed a brain-storming session with Newsnight staff. We all remember those heady days, when even the flintiest Conser- vative heart was briefly touched by the sight of Tony Blair and his young family standing on the steps of 10 Downing Street. Mr Hor- rocks's statement conveys the innocent optimism of that time. 'Ennui is over,' he writes elsewhere in the memo. 'We must be aware of the strength of feeling.' Even so, this was a disgraceful memoran- dum for a senior BBC executive to write. In a few sentences Mr Horrocks reveals that Newsnight sought to make life miser- able for the last government but intends to be soft on this one. Labour will be treated differently, partly because it is in Mr Hor- rocks's view a united and well-ordered party (tell that to Messrs Mandelson and Prescott) and partly because it has an over- whelming mandate. Didn't the Tories have just such a mandate in 1983 and 1987? Even in 1992 they secured more votes than did Labour in 1997. Yet Mr Horrocks and his predecessors never showed any tenden- cy to be sweet to them. Of course it is not news that Newsnight is becoming more emollient. As I mentioned in my earlier column, Mr Horrocks had already said in March that the programme would be 'lighter, with not so much of a night-time feel'. The 'big confrontational desk' would be done away with — and it has been. In part these changes were attributed by myself and others to a cut in the Newsnight budget (a consequence of the imminent and fatuous 24-hour news channel) and in part to the prevailing belief among BBC mandarins that confrontation- al interviewing should be eschewed. In a speech in 1995 John Birt, the Director- General, had attacked 'sneering, overbear- ing interviewers' with their 'ritualistic encounters'.
Both these considerations — dwindling resources and the Birtist ideal of political interviewing — will have guided Mr Hor- rocks's hand in the writing of his memo in which he also calls for more 'chat' and 'a looser style'. But it also betrays a bias for, and perhaps a fear of, New Labour. It is no secret that the Labour spin doctors Peter Mandelson and Alastair Campbell some- times threw their weight around at News- night even when Labour was in opposition. Now that it is in government Mr Horrocks has decided that it is prudent to ride with the tide — and it is a tide he is evidently happy to ride with.
He has one problem: Jeremy Paxman. Mr Paxman has been writing a book and is due to return to Newsnight at the beginning of October. He is no friend of the Tories. I would guess that his political sympathies are broadly Blairite. But he is also one of nature's bloody-minded brigade, suspicious of anyone in power. In short, he is an excel- lent interviewer, if sometimes a shade too sneery. His instinct will be to treat this gov- ernment as he treated the last. If he does not, we will have to assume that Mr Hor- rocks and the other BBC mandarins have nobbled him. We will be watching.
Nearly a year has passed since the Sun- day Express was merged with the Daily Express to become the Express on Sunday. Richard Addis, editor of both titles, assured us that the merger would work. He delivered me a charming lecture, when I happened to run into him by chance, about Never mind, we'll have another go next week!' the wonders of 'a seven-day operation'. I was not convinced, knowing that similar experiments at the Independent on Sunday and the Sunday Telegraph had failed. This is what I wrote at the time: 'I expect that executive editors will soon be appointed to the Daily and Sunday Express. Before very long they will be called editors, and we will be back almost where we started, the only difference being that after this has hap- pened the papers will be even weaker than they are now.'
Now the first part of this prophecy has been fulfilled. A certain Mark Palmer has been appointed executive editor of the Express on Sunday, with a small team of reporters dedicated to the Sunday paper. In truth one needed no special occult powers to see that this would happen. As the circu- lation of the paper continues to ebb away (it has declined a little from last year), I expect that Mr Palmer's little team will expand and quite soon everyone will be referring to him as the editor. So the whole experiment will have been in vain — only no one will say so. Newspaper manage- ments may cheerfully repeat the mistakes which others have made, but they will never admit it.
Iwas sorry to read that Mohamed Al Fayed has lost £7.25 million on Punch in the 12 months to February. Since the maga- zine was launched only last September, this represents quite an achievement. Paul Spike, Punch's wild new editor appointed at the end of February, has doubtless been making his own contribution to the losses since he clambered into the editorial chair.
New publications do, of course, generally lose money for a while. Nonetheless, Mr Al Fayed is entitled to ask what he has got in return for his enormous investment: a loss- making publication which no one mentions except in tones of regret or condemnation. Yet it is possible to obtain a nation's grate- ful thanks for very much less. Only half a million pounds have been invested in the much funnier Oldie magazine, most of it by Naim Attallah, and after five years and a hundred issues it has moved into profit. I say 'most' since, along with a few others, I was persuaded to invest a trifling amount, long discounted in my mind. On the strength of the success of Mr Attallah and Richard Ingrams, the Oldie's editor, it now seems certain to sustain me in my dotage.
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