Scrape on, Guardian!
Disregard your Mr Young
STEPHEN GLOVER
H
ugo Young of the Guardian is no mere columnist. He inhabits the journalistic equivalent of Mount Olympus, and has very little intercourse with ordinary mortals. As a writer of books he has disposed of the pretensions of Lady Thatcher and, most recently, chronicled the failures of our political class to place Britain in the bosom of Europe, where Mr Young is certain we belong. As chairman of the Scott Trust he presides over those two high-minded news- papers, the Guardian and the Observer, a grander figure even than Mr Alan Rus- bridger, who is merely their editor-in-chief. It would be difficult to think of a more morally elevated creature than Mr Young. Whenever I see him shimmering in the dis- tance, I inwardly quail as I used to do whenever a fearsome bishop visited our school.
Imagine my surprise then, on returning from foreign parts, to be presented with a recent column by the great man. It was written in the aftermath of Peter Mandel- son's resignation. Readers will recall that it was the Guardian which broke the story that the Prince of Darkness had borrowed a few bob from Geoffrey Robinson, and was therefore responsible for his downfall. However, there was no trace of self-con- gratulation in Mr Young's piece, and cer- tainly no crowing. High up on the slopes he commands, he seemed hardly to notice the trivial figure of Mr Mandelson, observing only that the embarrassed minister was no Titan. The great columnist was more exer- cised by the 'triumph of a new and cleans- ing morality' in the media. 'The media's demand for transparency,' wrote Mr Young, 'coupled with their horror for the imperfection it exposes, produces a savage cocktail of righteousness. The characters of public people are scraped bare, in the name of standards that often lack all proportion.'
These are sentiments that many might agree with. I would put it slightly differently Myself. Editors had better be sure that they live up to the standards they expect of Mr Mandelson. Journalists who fiddle their expenses should not persecute politicians who take cash for asking questions. But shouldn't the press, provided that it is clean, expose crimes and misdemeanours? That is exactly what Mr Young's paper has been doing these past few years. My only complaint has been that it has sometimes lacked proportion and that some of its alle- gations have depended too much on the evidence of a proven liar, Mohamed Al Fayed. Yet here we have Mr Young, the deity who has presided over these revela- tions, apparently distancing himself from this kind of thing. Although he concedes that 'taking cash for questions is poison', he embraces moral evasion — the title, inci- dentally, of an excellent pamphlet, critical of the media, written by David Selbourne for the Centre for Policy Studies. Mr Young is commendably clear. 'Give me, likewise, non-tellers of truth,' he writes. `This is a human flaw, but a political obliga- tion.'
What are we to make of this apparent gulf between Mr Young's beliefs and the practices of his paper? What are Guardian journalists to make of it? There seem to be two possible explanations. Mr Young may quite simply have disliked his newspaper's hounding of crooked Tories. Somehow I doubt this. I rather think he enjoyed all that. Indeed, I seem to remember him writ- ing about it in approving terms. No, it seems to me more likely that the great columnist may be guilty of double stan- dards. It is one thing for the press to 'scrape bare' the characters of Conservatives, quite another for it to repeat the process with New Labour to the extent of possibly jeop- ardising the 'project' which, of course, includes the longed-for integration with Europe that has been so elusive. I'm jolly glad that Mr Rusbridger, not Mr Young, was in charge when the Guardian got the Mandelson story, and I hope that despite Mr Young the paper will continue to scrape away at this government.
One or two people have asked me why I sometimes criticise the Times for its vul- garities but rarely the Daily Telegraph. One reason is that the Times does seem general- ly to outdo its rival in this dePartment. Another is that the Times used to be a very much more upmarket paper. When I joined the Telegraph in 1978, I was made aware that, for all its strengths, it occupied a much less exalted position than the Times. Even in those days the Telegraph regularly gave over swathes of page three to court cases involving strange sexual practices. The Times, by contrast, breathed a more rar- efied air, and in consequence sold less than a quarter of the copies. Its transformation over the years has been much more dra- matic. The Telegraph has in some respects become more upmarket than it used to be, devoting much more space to columnists who use long words (generally deprecated in the old days) as well as to obituaries and letters.
Nevertheless the paper has not lost its old taste for the vulgar, though this now takes a different form. My eyes nearly popped out of my head on Monday when I saw a photograph of the latest supermodel. Her skirt was no bigger than a handkerchief and her jacket was generously open to reveal much of what my colleague Pere- grine Worsthorne would call her 'embon- point'. The next day my eyes popped again when I read a story about a pop singer called Robbie Williams dominating page three. Do Telegraph readers even know who Robbie Williams is — or care? Perhaps a story on page ten would be justifiable. In the same issue a news article about a surf- ing scare in Australia was somewhat gratu- itously illustrated with a picture of four young `Baywatch' beauties, one with her almost naked bottom akimbo. There will have been shudders in Chipping Sudbury. What's going on? I detect a marketing stratagem to lure young readers. The trou- ble is that it may appal some older ones.
For the second time a merger between Mirror Group Newspapers and Trinity, owner of a stable of profitable provincial newspapers, has been thwarted. One stum- bling block appears to be the reluctance of our old friend David Montgomery, chief executive of Mirror Group, to stand aside in favour of Philip Graf, who now runs Trinity. Some shareholders would prefer Mr Graf to Mr Montgomery as the chief executive of the enlarged company. Now the merger appears to be off again, but one can't help feeling that Mr Montgomery's days at Mirror Group may be numbered. It seems to be generally accepted that the company cannot go on as it is — for one thing, it is too small in a world of media giants. Talks with the German conglomer- ate Axel Springer also got nowhere. Unless Mr Montgomery can broker some wonder- ful new merger, I fear that restive Mirror Group shareholders may want to get rid of him.
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