Press
Who sprang the leak?
Bill Grundy.
One day last week an envelope arrived on the desk of the editor of the Daily Telegraph, Mr William Deedes. It contained. so I am given to believe by that same Daily Telegraph, three documents. One was a statement of the case for the Common Market, if such there be. Another was a statement of the anti-Market case. The third, I am told, was for the don't know's, if there can be any after all these years of waffle. The three documents, I am reliably informed, cost £2 million to produce, almost enough money to satisfy Mr Wedgwood Benn's next, as yet undisclosed, lunatic ambition.
Now you and I might think, those documents having dropped like manna on his desk, that Mr Deedes would have immediately rushed them into print, thereby shaking the Government and scooping the rest of Fleet Street. You and I would be wrong. For Mr Deedes, who is old enough to remember the Zinoviev letter, decided that a check on their authenticity would be desirable. Mr Deedes is, of course an ex-Minister, so he had no difficulty getting through to the Cabinet Office, and asking them, in his extremely affable old-boy way, just what was going on. The Cabinet Office (some say it was no less a nonentity than Mr Edward Short himself who, in Mr Wilson's absence in Jamaica, is enjoying deluding himself with the foolish idea that he is actually in charge of the country) guaranteed the truth of the tablets and, it is alleged, went on to say that Mr Deedes undoubtedly had a scoop on his hands, since no other paper had them.
Mr Deedes; who was not born yesterday, apparently listened to this statement with some disbelief, since he made bold to ask how the Cabinet Office knew that — since they clearly hadn't known, until he rang up, that the Telegraph had them. This question must have stopped the Cabinet Office in its tracks for the next thing that happened was that they were on the phone to Our Beloved Leader in the West Indies.
Mr Wilson tore himself away from his rum baba, silenced the steel band with a wave of his hand, and told Mr Short to publish and be damned. This is not the sort of decisiveness Mr Short is accustomed to, but an order is an order. So we are now all going to get the damned documents a few weeks earlier than we would have done, which gives us longer to get bored by them before we all roar off to the referendum. I suppose we should be grateful to Mr Deedes, who is not only sort of responsible for what is going to happen, but also did himself out of a scoop in the process.
One or two questions arise, though. Firstly, was Mr Deedes right to do as he did? Well, obviously it was good thinking to check the authenticity of the documents. OnlY a fool would have failed to do that, and Mr Deedes is no fool. But was he right — from a purely journalistic point of view — to go about checking it in such a way that the Government was alerted to the leak? Shouldn't he have checked the documents in some other way and then, once he was satisfied, print them and be damned to the consequences? I can think of one or two editors who would have done just that, and I think theirs would have been the right decision. In other words, Mr Deedes may have been misled by his years as a Minister of the Crown into the sort of loyalty to Westminster that his journalistic judgement should have suppressed.
The other question, of course, who sent the documents to the Telegraph? They were sent anonymously, and the envelope contained no clues. There was a London postmark, but that's a fat lot of use in tracing the sender. And there wasn't a word of any kind enclosed. Mr Deedes himself assures me that he has absolutely no idea who sent him the things, and I believe him, since he is not a man given to telling whoppers.
The choice of newspaper could tell us something. The Telegraph is, of course, strongly pro-Market, and would therefore be unlikely to have handled things in such a way that the Market came badly out of the affair. So presumably it was a pro-Marketeer who stole the documents and posted them to Peterborough Court. But were they actually .stolen? Might they not have been sent to the Telegraph with the blind-eyed knowledge of someone in high places? By someone who knew Mr Deedes well enough to guess how he would react, and thus ensure an earlier distribution of the documents than was originally intended? The Cabinet office, let us recall, purported to know that no one but the Telegraph had them. I don't suppose we'll ever find out who did it, but I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to be told that the Prime Minister isn't entirely ignorant of the name of the culprit.
TheDirector isa monthly magazine
published by the Directors' Institute and printed by Sidney Press Ltd of Bedford. If you look in the index of the May issue you will see a reference to an advertisement placed in the magazine by Mr Ross McWhirter. The ad is very similar to those me McWhirter has placed in The Spectator from time to time, asking for funds to set up a printing works which would not at any time be vulnerable to industrial action by any members of any union.
You will, however, be wasting your time if you actually look for the advertisement itself. For, despite the reference in the index, the ad simply isn't there. And it isn't there because of a decision made by a member of one of the print unions responsible for producing the journal. The gentleman apparently came on shift duty, saw the ad, didn't like what it said, and promptly had it removed. The Directo'r's editor, Mr George Bull, is said to be rather less than pleased, and a lot of stuff has been hitting the fan round at the paper's Belgrave Square offices.
For of course the question instantly arises — who is responsible, for what appears in a paper? You and I in our innocence might suppose that it is the editor's responsibility. Mr Bull supposed that, too. He now sees that he was wrong. It is apparently the right of any old Tom, Dick or Harry, employed by Sidney Press Ltd to delete anything they don't like from the paper they are printing. The more one looks at the case, the more the need for Mr McWhirter's advertisement becomes overwhelming.
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