Notebook
The many millionaires of my acquaintance show no willingness to gloat over the dreadful humiliation which has befallen Sir James Goldsmith. The argument in these exalted circles runs approximately thus: Now! magazine may not have been very good, and it was certainly a ghastly flop, but its demise is nevertheless a cause for sorrow rather than rejoicing; it was, after all, a huge risk, and for this he is to be commended; this country needs risk-takers, and there are too few of them around; so while, out of idle curiosity, we fiddle around with our pocket calculators and find to our surprise that Sir James could have lost as much as £15 million on the enterprise, we should draw no satisfaction from these speculations; we should, if anything, weep even bigger tears. I can see the force of this argument, and as one to whom the act of crossing the road is a daunting undertaking, lam grateful that the future of Great Britain is not exclusively in the hands of people like myself. But to high and low, risk-takers and cowards alike, there should be at least one principle in common; that there is no point in doing something which there is no point in doing. What, for example, if Sir James, the grocer, had launched not a new weekly magazine but a new chocolate bar, brightly-wrapped and attractive to the eye, but tasteless and indigestible; if he had spent millions of his own and his shareholders' money on launching and marketing it, and had then been forced to withdraw it from the shops because not enough people were prepared to eat it? Would we then be expected to Weep? I think not. Sir James, it should be said, is not asking for our sympathy. 'Like all new products in the consumer area, you have more of a chance of failing than succeeding,' he told the Guardian. So was there any point in launching this particular 'product in the consumer area'? I think that the answer has to be No — not because it failed, but because it was ill-conceived. It came into existence neither to meet a definable need nor because it had anything in particular to say that was not already being said elsewhere. It came into existence because Sir James had been frustrated in his efforts to acquire a national newspaper, Which was not a good enough reason. It was only, I suspect, because of his ambition to be a power in the land that he managed to persuade himself that he had invented a new and marketable 'product'. His vanity got the better of his commercial judgment, and the victims were the journalists who tried to make the thing work. The magazine Was well produced, and it was unique in Offering topical, high quality colour photo graphs, which were often very enjoyable. But Sir James did not want a new Picture Post, he wanted influence; so Now! could not make the most of this single asset. The closure of Now! is, however, the end of an era. It is, I suspect, partly the fruit of Sir James's disillusionment with England and with what he no doubt regards as its petty, boring little inhabitants. To have got the Prime Minister to be guest of honour at Nowl's 'first annual dinner' last year was no mean achievement, but it was not enough. So he has even been unwinding his grocery empire. 'We are very passive in Britain now,' he told The Times. But the doubt remains: is the volcano dead, or merely asleep?
Charles Osborne, the 'literature director' of the Arts Council, has got away rather lightly with his decision to end the National Book Awards. The last three awards (each of 0,500) were made last week. In future the money, says Mr Osborne, will go to the publishers of suitable books, not to their authors. One reason given for the change is that the Arts Council has in the past donated its money to a number of 'mediocrities'. If this is so, and public money has been wasted in this scandalous manner, perhaps the person responsible might offer his resignation? This possibility does not seem to have occurred to the self-confident Mr Osborne. In any event, he did not presumably intend his disparaging comments to refer to the three authors, Mr Richard Jenkyns, Miss Ruth Rendell, and Mr Andrew Wilson who received their prizes last week. The prizes were presented at an agreeable reception held on the Martini Terrace of New Zealand House. Miss Marghanita'Laski, who presented the fiction prize, said rather oddly that, although the National Book Awards were very desirable trophies, the most prestigious prize for fiction remained the Somerset Maugham Award. This will not luckily, have upset Mr Wilson, who is well known to Spectator readers as one of our regular fiction reviewers, because his novel The Healing Art has also won the Somerset Maugham prize this year.
The Campaign for Press Freedom, a vaguely left-wing organisation to which, however, a number of good and respected journalists adhere, has published a,pamphlet this week called 'The Right of Reply'. Its argument is that because 'the British press is owned and controlled by a handful of multinational corporations and rich individuals', there is a need 'to counteract the worst excesses of editorial bias'. The suggestion is that if a group or individual has been denied the right of reply to a newspaper report which distorts the facts, it, he or she should appeal, not the Press Council (of which the Campaign does not approve) but to the trade unions on the offending newspaper who could, in the last resort, take industrial action. But the unions, so the pamphlet implies, will not be interested in taking up the only sort of cases that really matter — those in which innocent individuals have been victimised — but cases of importance 'e.g. a nationwide strike by a union, or a political campaign against the EEC' or 'a public inquiry into a motorway development'. The five examples it gives of cases in which trade unions have already succeeded in obtaining the right of reply are of a desperately predictable nature and include this: 'Following a front page "exposd" in the Evening News (February 1978) of a doctor who made artificial insemination available to lesbians, a group of lesbian mothers occupied that newspaper's offices and secured the right of reply'. After that it is hardly surprising to discover that the preface to the pamphlet is signed by four trade union leaders.
I am always a little unnerved by anything that is fashionable, and there are few things more fashionable than the 'Dear Bill' letters in Private Eye which purport to reflect the philosophy of the Prime Minister's husband, Mr Denis Thatcher. These 'letters' have not only contributed to an astounding increase in Private Eye's circulation over the past year or so; they have been assembled into a best-selling book, and have most recently been used as the basis for a play — Anyone for Denis? — which had its first preview on Tuesday at the Whitehall Theatre. I went along to see it with some trepidation. Although the 'Dear Bill' letters are unquestionably funny, there must come a point, I felt, at which the joke would wear itself out, when the smile would fade on one's lips and be replaced by a sinking feeling in the stomach. What if that point were tonight! As I was the guest of John Wells — not only the author and star of the show, but also an old friend this possibility was almost too frightful to contemplate. But, thank God, it was absolutely all right. I laughed, if not all the time, for a great deal of it. The play deserves to be a success.
Alexander Chancellor
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