The Press

Time and Again

By CHRISTOPHER BOOKER

ON the morning of Sunday, January 31, the Sunday Times trailed a new series—two long (9,000 words) instalments of a forthcoming book on the events leading up to Harold Wilson's premiership. The authors of the book, announced the blurb-writer, 'are brilliant exponents of a technique which is enlarging the boundaries of serious political journalism in this country . . . the "digging and sifting" technique.'

Ignoring the cries of those journalists who imagined they'd been doing little but 'digging and sifting' all their professional lives, the blurb- writer had a point in spotlighting the recent pro- liferation of what has been variously described as 'blow-by-blow' journalism, 'group-journalism,' the 'Insight style' and the 'Daylight approach.' The method of the technique, which has been most effectively used in the full-length recon- struction of complicated political events—the Profumo Scandal, the Cuba Crisis, the Fight for the Tory Leadership—is to get one, two, or more journalists digging for every available fact in the chronology and background of a story. The assembled storehouse is then written up as ur- gently and vividly as possible, making maximum use of colorative detail.

The immediate history of this style goes back to the Fifties when, as newspapers were freed from newspaper restrictions, they gradually felt their way towards giving fuller and more vivid background to the news. By the early Sixties it was apparent, particularly to the 'posh' Sundays, that respectable gossip columns like Pendennis, giving the hobbies of the members of the latest Royal Commission, were not enough. The Ob- server, in particular, showed its restlessness when, in January 1962, it introduced a new column, 'Daylight,' which would 'present a weekly pic- ture of •what's going on behind the glossy façades.' Soon afterwards Roy Jenkins's blow-by- blow account of the ICI-Courtauld affair was a model for the style that was to come.

But even 'Daylight' only proved to be a glorified Pendennis—until in the summer of 1962 a new book from America, Theodore White's The Making of the President, showed the way to an apparently entirely fresh means of dramatis- ing political reporting. The lesson soon took root. By November 4 'Daylight' was beginning its round-up of the Cuba crisis with the sen- tence: 'An hour before President Kennedy was due to broadcast in Washington on "a matter of urgent national importance" Adlai Stevenson stepped into a high-speed lift to the 38th floor of the United Nations Building in New York.' Paragraphs later 'the spotlight turned on a remote old man in Wales, Bertrand Russell, who was

sitting in his carpet slippers in his rented villa Plas Penrhyn with his dog Peanut.' The style, the trivial detail, the drama were at last all there—woven into coherent narrative.

Meanwhile, over at Topic, three young, ex- 'popular' journalists in their late twenties were

trying to make a final go of that newsmagazine.

They failed--but on the day Topic's closure was announced, editor Clive Irving received an

invitation from Denis Hamilton, editor of the

Sunday Times (and this year's Hannen Swaffer 'Journalist of the Year') to move over with his team to the Sunday Times. The result, at the beginning of eventful 1963, was. the first 'Insight' column—and over the succeeding months the constant flow of political drama found in 'Insight' appropriate journalistic reflection.

Today, of course, the technique is firmly estab- lished. We can see its strengths—as the most effective way to weave together all the threads of a big story, to put in perspective events which may have spun out over months. It has done more than anything else to free newspapers from slavery to topicality—so that, as one 'Insight' man put it to me, Two years ago you would have been shot if you didn't begin a story "Last night . . ."; now you would almost be shot if you didn't begin "Two years ago . . ."." Equally, it has reflected the growing realisation

(vide, in another field, cine-vdrite) that it is often the private detail that is most revealing, that what the politician says on the platform is nothing like as interesting as what he says when he comes off it.

But the weaknesses of the method are also apparent. It has a tendency to formula and self-parody; during the Tory troubles of 1963 it seemed at one time as if every 'Insight' story began with the words: 'When Harold Mac- millan went to bed at 11.30 p.m. on Mon- day . . .' The temptation to over-dramatise and overload with adjectives is strong—vide the classic 'Daylight' piece on 'How the Pound Was Saved'—' "it was bloody dangerous," says one of the Bank defenders . . . Cromer and his closest aides kept their nerve superbly . . . Par- sons is an extremely tall, immensely powerful banking wizard, a 54-year-old crisis veteran.' And there are signs that the style Is spreading un- necessarily, to areas of the paper where it is quite unsuitable:—take the opening to a per-

fectly ordinary, rather out-of-date news 'story by the Observer's motoring correspondent last Sunday: 'At 9 p.m. last Tuesday Alec Issigonis sat down for a quiet supper with his mother at his home in Edgbaston.'

But undoubtedly the style has done more than anything else to make Sunday papers read- able. As to whether we should owe our gratitude

to Theodore White, or, as Clive Irving would have it, to the New Yorker for such reconstruc-

tions as John Hersey's of Hiroshima, the answer, of course, is that the style goes back much far- ther than either. Take this example:

One afternoon early last week, a short, stout, chubby-checked gentleman tivearing a black hat and smoking a black cigar entered the House of Commons and took his place on the Govern- ment benches. He was the Right Hon. Winston Churchill, most versatile member of the Con- servative Party, once First Lord of the Admiralty . . . and now just plain MP for Epping, 17 miles North East of London on the Chipping Ongar branch of the London and North Eastern Railway.

Or the description of Our Man in Washington as 'moose-tall, affable but awkward Sir Ronald Lindsay.' Parodies of 'Daylight'? No- -T./me Magazine as it was in the Thirties.