AND ANOTHER THING
When the quality papers splash about happily in the gutter
PAUL JOHNSON
The Financial Times is the archetype non-investigative newspaper. I cannot remember it ever exposing a City crook or a dodgy businessman. So far as the FT was concerned, everything at Lloyd's was fine until events themselves revealed the scandal, which ruined more decent citizens (and FT readers) than any other event in City history. Bob Maxwell had no trouble from the paper either. The FT has a high reputation for accuracy in business circles precisely because it does so little digging, thus risking mistakes, and sticks firmly to the handouts. The only occasion I can think of when it actually unearthed something smelly was not really a City or business story at all, but a rumbling of the free-spending bureaucrat deluxe, Jacques Attali. Which makes last week's sensational FT scoop even more remarkable: Tony Blair's hairline is receding and he is trying to conceal it.
Educated people are becoming uncom- fortably aware of the tabloidisation of our national broadsheets, what were once called 'the quality papers'. But this FT story must mark some kind of watershed, since all the other broadsheets, like the Gadarene swine, thundered after it, down the cliffs and into the bottomless Sea of Triviality. Even at the weekend, the Sunday Telegraph was still devoting two entire pages to the theme. This repellent and degrading obsession with the personal appearance of politicians is something new in British journalism.
Mr Gladstone, for instance, had a miss- ing finger, the result of a shooting accident, but no newspaper ever referred to it and the cartoonists deliberately went out of their way to draw his hands whole (I do, however, possess a plate showing the GOM wearing a fingerstall). Again, I don't recall any commentator drawing attention to Aneurin Bevan's stammer, which could be quite serious at times. Nor do I remember any reference to the fact that 'Ilab' Butler had a slightly deformed arm, though it could be disconcerting if, not knowing about • it, you tried to shake his hand. Papers did draw attention to the fact that Ted Heath was trying to dye his hair, already sufficiently obvious to anyone who saw the poor man, but items were brief and were discreetly tucked away inside.
For the broadsheets to make Blair's loss of hair their front-page story brought home to me, more perhaps than anything else, the fact that, during the John Major regime, we have become a nation of yobs and slobs.
From start to finish, the media's treatment of Blair has told us more about it than him. It shows the extent to which the newspapers (followed by television) no longer really report politics but construct a soap opera around them. To begin with, Blair, being new and in his own way revolutionary, was made the soap's hero and given star treat- ment. But editors thought that was boring after a bit, so reporters and feature writers began the sniping. There was the business of his son's school, and Cherie Blair's profes- sional defence work in court supposedly con- flicting with Labour Party policies, and the further conflict, equally imaginary, between her 'left-wing convictions' and Blair's own. None of these were genuine stories, but they are resurrected from time to time and updat- ed with more inventions.
Then there is the persistent item that Blair is going upmarket and moving house from Islington to Notting Hill Gate. That is a com- plete fiction, probably circulated by an estate agent (they constantly manufacture stories about Princess Diana's house purchases). There have been fictions about Blair's thatch before, including the lie that he pays his bar- ber £60 to cut it. But last week's orgy gives away the intense frustration newspapers feel about Blair. They have been looking for an inside story that just isn't there.
There is no hidden Blair or unknown Blair or secret Blair or Blair-with-some- thing-to-hide. You get what you see or hear. Blair is one of the most straightfor- ward politicians I have ever met. He is 100 per cent sincere, open, candid, truthful and direct. He is an old-fashioned family man of a type which is far more common than the media will allow, and he is obviously anxious to protect his children from unscrupulous harassment. And I can see he would like to protect Cherie too, though he realises that nowadays a girl has to look after herself, as indeed she can and does.
His desire to shield his own from the media sadists is the one limitation on his You've got to take your hat off to her followed by your shirt and underpants.' accessibility. Otherwise he is transparent. I sometimes worry about his innocence. My attempts to plant Machiavellian thoughts in his mind have met with no success. He flat- ly refuses to do anything unless he is abso- lutely convinced it is right in principle, as well as politically sound.
This poses problems for the media. They are trained to look for hidden motives, usual- ly bad ones. They have noses for dirt. They expect politicians to be on the take, vain and over-ambitious or mendacious, or disrep- utable, or concealing something unsavoury or malevolent or brutish. They simply do not know how to handle someone who, whatever you may think of his views, is absolutely straight, consistent almost to a fault, touch- ingly anxious to serve the country to the best of his considerable ability and who is not going to do anything mean or dishonourable to win himself the chance. Tony Blair is not a paragon or a saint or a knight in shining armour, but in nearly half a century of observing politicians, often from close quar- ters, I have never come across one I admire more for the basic virtues of decency, courage and honesty.
Our depraved and degenerate media are baffled by all this. They had the same kind of trouble with Margaret Thatcher, but solved it by deciding that she was not only strident, divisive and neurotic but actually mad, as well as being a woman. Blair is none of these things. He is quiet, pretty well without mal- ice, uncombative except in a pro forma House of Commons way. He would like everyone to be friends, working to get the country cleaner, fairer, more prosperous. He is not a socialist or an ideologist of any kind.
Oddly enough, he reminds me of old Clem Attlee. Towards the end of his life, I gave Attlee a lift in my studio car and asked him, among other things, what he thought Labour was about. He answered, without the slight- est hesitation, 'Giving the little man a help- ing hand.' That, I think, sums up Blair's approach too. He comes from the same background as Attlee and thinks it right that those who have enjoyed advantages and priv- ileges should repay them by working for those who have never had such good fortune. It is an instinct as traditional as the New Tes- tament — or indeed the Old. Blair possesses it in a form which is uncomplicated and pow- erful. No wonder our dingy press cannot make him out. So they fall back on hairlines. But voters will not be misled. They can recognise a good man when they see one.
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