MEDIA STUDIES
When the subject is Mr Hague, left-wingers and snobs unite
STEPHEN GLOVER
Poor Tories. Poor William Hague. I freely admit that in another publication I was recently critical of his leadership, and yet I have rubbed my eyes in disbelief in reading about him over the past week. Do editors, leader writers and columnists get a peculiar kick out of stamping on a creature that is already cowering in the gutter? Almost every pundit in the business agrees that the Tories have a problem. They are the prob- lem. But perhaps we journalists of Right and Left have a problem too.
The oft-repeated mantra of the left-wing press is that we require a strong opposition. Much as one detests the Tories, we need someone to stand up to the Blairites: you know the sort of thing. And yet, faced with the opportunity to strike down the leader of the Tory party, leftish journalists cannot resist. The temptation is too great even if the consequence — a further weakened opposition — is formally disavowed.
Lord Cranborne is, of course, the kind of Tory aristocrat whom proper lefties nor- mally love to hate. Here he was caught betraying his leader, arranging private deals with Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell behind Mr Hague's back and unashamedly putting the interests of his class before those of the party of which he was a leading light. Pretty grubby stuff? And yet I searched in vain for a radical journalist pre- pared to condemn his duplicitous behav- iour and to inveigh against the noble lords who lined up by his side. For real hatred of the aristocracy one had to turn to the right- wing Janet Daley in the Daily Telegraph.
Left-wing journalists reserved their pure venom for Mr Hague. According to Robert Harris in the Sunday Times, 'Mr Hague [had] demonstrated his lack of class.' (Couldn't one say that more justly about Lord Cranborne?) 'Mr Hague has been very dim,' Andrew Rawnsley informed us in the Observer. His conduct had been `bonkers'. Decca Aitkenhead in the Guardian also judged that Mr Hague is 'not a very clever leader of the Conservative party'. (Ms Aitkenhead did give vent to some class-hating bile, writing of 'dribbling in-breds queuing up to tell the cameras who their grandfather was', but she did not char- acterise Lord Cranborne in these terms.) Naturally the Tory party was widely repre- sented as a disagreeable rabble.
The so-called Tory press was no fairer. In fact, with a few honourable exceptions, it was if anything more blindly destructive. There was also a certain amount of bowing and scraping towards the Cecil dynasty which I found distasteful. Peter Oborne in the Express compared Mr Hague to 'an incompetent general', while describing Lord Cranborne as a 'great feudal mag- nate', and 'scion of . . . one of Britain's most illustrious families'. My esteemed col- league Bruce Anderson was similarly in awe of the Cecils' longevity in a column for the Daily Mail, reminding us of their end- less family tree. The effect was to make Mr Hague sound like a common arriviste — in addition, that is, to being a silly clot.
Though he is known to love a Lord, dear old Max Hastings in the Evening Standard was surprisingly restrained in his praise of Lord Cranborne. However, he certainly let poor Mr Hague have it, unleashing a fusil- lade of schoolboy metaphors. The Tory leader was 'the school prefect in baggy shorts, who keeps telling us he still has the confidence of the headmaster when he has lost that of everyone else'. Mr Hague `looked like a boy for a man's job, one of life's presidents of the school debating soci- ety, always poking his nose into the boys' lavatories to tell Jones minor that he would never be fit to do his best for the team on Saturday if he went on with that nasty smoking'. Hmm.
Thus Lord Cranborne's despicable behaviour was widely skated over and Mr Hague generally condemned. Of course one could understand the disappointment of Tory writers. Just when they had expect- ed their leader to deliver a crushing blow to Mr Blair at Prime Minister's Question Time, exposing the government's embar- rassment over plans for European tax har- monisation, Mr Hague contrived to trip himself up and land flat on his face. It was clear too that the Tory leader had run Lord Cranborne on far too long a leash, if one may be allowed to elaborate his Lordship's `Col. Gadaffi insists on a jail run by Group 4, Foreign Secretary.' canine imagery. But wasn't Mr Hague rather brave and decisive? Didn't he show principle where Lord Cranborne evinced slipperiness and short-sighted pragmatism?
Only in the leader column of the Sunday Times and on the editorial pages of the Daily Telegraph and its Sunday stablemate was there much attempt to see Mr Hague's point of view. Charles Moore, editor of the Daily Telegraph, wrote a fine column in his paper. Like Mr Hastings, Mr Moore is rarely happier than when trudging across some blasted moor with a belted earl by his side. He is also a close personal friend of Lord Cranborne, while being no intimate of Mr Hague. Yet he found that Lord Cran- borne's behaviour had been 'ungentleman- ly', and thought the criticisms directed at Mr Hague were, 'I never thought I'd say it — snobbish'. This was a column written against Mr Moore's personal interests and the current of opinion. Janet Daley added her voice a few days later.
The Tories are plainly in some consider- able disarray, though to describe them as `an unpleasant, feuding rabble', as Robert Harris does, seems to be overegging the pudding a bit. As for Mr Hague, for all I know his days may be numbered. But it does not follow from his and his party's dif- ficulties that everything he and his party do should be automatically condemned, and that abuse should be poured on them by friend and foe alike. What else could Mr Hague have done with the scheming, rebel- lious Viscount? Let's give him and his boys a chance.
Word reaches me as we go to press of rumblings of discontent at the Independent on Sunday. I intend to write about that paper, as well as the Independent, next week. Both have improved considerably since the appointment of new editors early in the year and Tony O'Reilly's acquisition of complete control. If the changes on the Sindy seem less dramatic, it is probably because that paper stood in less urgent need of radical surgery than its enfeebled daily sister. The Sindy's comment pages remain among the best in the business something that cannot really be said of the Independent, for all its improvements. It's going to be a hard fight for either paper to recover lost circulation, but I don't see any cause for panic.
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