`I'LL NOT BUY A BOOK BY THAT TERRIBLE LITTLE MAN'
. . . said the publisher after mishearing Dorrell, a Tory, for Dorrill, a Leftist. When corrected, he calmed down.
Peter Oborne on book trade bias IT IS a well-known fact that Britain's pub- lishers and booksellers are modishly left- wing. There are a handful of exceptions, like the Earl of Stockton and Stephen Hill, chairman of Duckworth, but such charac- ters are broadly regarded as eccentric by the rest of the trade. Expressing Tory sym- pathies in a publishing house is a bit like not being able to hold your knife and fork properly. It's an error of taste. Young men and women go into publishing because they are civilised people. Civilised people vote Labour. That is the view in London's grand publishing houses, and woe to anyone who disagrees.
The last 18 years have been rather grim for the publishing trade. Great names have gone to the wall; profits have been hard to come by. But there has always been a culprit ready to hand — the Tories. Publishing News, the journal of the trade, is full to the brim with horror sto- ries of how the Tories have refused to fund this or that. Nat- urally, government spokesmen are rarely if ever quoted. Labour shadow ministers, by contrast, receive endless attention.
So this year there is excite- ment in the air in Bloomsbury, home of London's small and well-knit com- munity of publishers. They are convinced that their side is going to win and are deter- mined to do all that they can to help. This month, for instance, they were out in force for a Labour fund-raising dinner at the St James Court Hotel. 'Big' publishing names included Victoria Barnsley from Fourth Estate, Nick Webb from Simon & Schuster and Caroline Michel from Random House. The event was organised by the Labour can- didate for Westminster, Kate Green. Her husband, it almost goes without saying, is a keen Labour supporter who used to edit Bookcase and Books Magazine.
On the other side of the Atlantic there is equally frenzied activity to ensure that Tony Blair gets returned in the forthcom- ing general election. Harold Evans, presi- dent of the hugely powerful Random House publishing empire and former editor of the Sunday Times, is actively soliciting contributions among New Yorkers for the Labour Party campaign fund. His wife, Tina Brown, is playing a still more prominent role. (See page 14 — Ed.) There is growing speculation in the more excitable publishing circles that the Evanses will return to Britain after the election and join the court of Prime Minister Blair. Perhaps not too much should be made of this. I met Mr Evans recently on a train returning from Chel- tenham (he and Ms Brown are rumoured to be looking for a country house in Glouces- tershire) and he displayed a stunning igno- rance of British politics.
All this is harmless. If financiers from the City are allowed to back the Tories, there is no reason whatsoever why publishing folk should not do their bit for Labour. But there are growing signs that Britain's great imprints are going very much further than that. In their eagerness to advance Labour's prospects and get in with Tony Blair, the book trade is promoting books that help the cause and neglecting ones that don't.
Take the case of Stephen Pollard, direc- tor of research at the left-leaning Social Market Foundation. Late last year he approached the publisher Andrew Franldin with a proposal. Now Mr Franklin is a senior and vastly respected member of the publishing profession. He is the for managing director of Hamish Hamilton and has recently set up his own indepen' dent imprint. He is a civilised and cultivat- ed man. He received Mr Pollard warinlY, the more especially as he seemed to PO' sess excellent left-wing credentials. Mr Pe!' lard then disclosed the true nature of his proposal: a lacerating attack on the 'moral chaos of a baby-boomer Britain'. MI Franklin's interest suddenly waned. 'TO won't do,' he exclaimed, 'this is Conserva' Live. It is nothing to do with what progres- sives are all about.' MI Franklin disputes this account. He says the book was turned down because it was hogwash, not because of its Conservative message. But Mr Pollard feels that the book's contents Were the problem. On the other hand, current publishers' lists are brimming over with tame books promor' ing New Labour. Consider Fourth Estate and Tony Nan' Fourth Estate is one of Lcrl" don's most brilliant new Pub' lishing companies which has produced a succession of clan): orously acclaimed titles, of which the most recent is Long'" tude by Dava Sobel. Last autumn, in an act of abject homage' Fourth Estate produced a book by the Labour leader. It was given the spirit-sap" pingly predictable title of New Britain Vision of a Young Country, but in reality I was no more than a loosely edited cone' tion of his speeches. No publisher has evedi been found for John Major's speeches, was eventually Conservative Central Office r, forced to publish them itself. AdmittealY, Mr Major's speeches are no better than Tony Blair's, but on the other hand they are no worse. Reading either volume is Idee being in armed combat with a blancmange: The significant thing is that a publisher was found for Tony Blair, but not for JO Major. One Fourth Estate director coniess es privately, 'That Blair book was not really our sort of thing at all. It is a bit of an embarrassment. We only did it as a sop to our chief executive Vicky Barnsley, who wants to get in with the Labour lot.' And there are plenty more where that Blair book came from. Current publishers' lists abound with them, such as Colin Brown's hagiography of Labour's deputy leader John Prescott under the Simon & Schuster imprint. Publishers are crying out for the official biography of Neil Kinnock, and a life of Michael Foot is on its way. The Labour leader himself has been the subject of two broadly uncritical biogra- phies by John Rentoul of the Independent and the BBC's Jon Sopel. In general the market in works on Tony Blair has been Cornered by friends and allies who have been happy to ignore the really difficult and interesting questions — not the least of the public relations triumphs of New Labour's able team of spin doctors. Compare and contrast the Labour eulo- gies with the treatment meted out to the Conservative Party. Anything that might damage the Government is avidly seized on by publishers and promoted with not even the faintest pretence of objectivity. A high- light of the current Gollancz list is Emma Nicholson's Secret Society. According to the publisher's blurb, the Tory defector 'repre- sented the humane side of conservatism which was rapidly being eroded by scandal, sleaze, and a growing conviction that the Tories had been in power too long . . . For Emma Nicholson, enough was eventually enough . . . Another nail had been driven deep into the coffin of a deeply discredited government.' Fourth Estate can offer Sleaze, an account of the Neil Hamilton cash-for- questions row by Ed Vulliamy and David Leigh. The advance publicity brochure enthuses about how the Hamilton story has become 'a parable for a culture of corrup- tion and decay which has dominated British politics for a generation. Whilst the Tory government championed an era of enterprise, morality and family values, its ministers became embroiled with a spate of squalid sex scandals and bloated financial dealing There is no attempt at fair play here. Britain's publishers are out to get the Gov- ernment. They make little or no attempt to disguise their loathing for the Tories. The literary agent Andrew Lownie — a rare Tory supporter in bookish circles and the author of an acclaimed biography of John Buchan — describes how he recently tried to sell a work by Stephen Dorrill, the radi- cal editor of the left-wing magazine Lobster, to a distinguished publisher. He reacted in horror the moment Lownie mentioned the author's name: 'I will not buy a book by that horrible little man.' The Publisher simmered down when it was gen- tly explained to him that the writer in ques- tion was not the Tory Health Minister. Another literary agent, who refused to be named because he is fearful of damag- ing his relations with publishers, is more explicit. He complains that 'a good propos- al for a pro-Tory book is just that much harder to sell'. This comment is endorsed by the Earl of Stockton, chairman of Macmillan. 'Inevitably editors and publish- ers choose books which they are in sympa- thy with and they think their readership will like. Most literature is read and above all reviewed by the chattering classes. I sus- pect that's inevitable.' And even when a work which is helpful to the Government, or bashes Labour, manages to find a publisher, it can meet considerable problems within the book trade itself. This was the fate of Leo McK- instry's Fit to Govern?, a valuable and damning account of Tony Blair's New Labour Party. Neglected on the whole by reviewers, it ran into blanket resistance in the bookshops. Tim Cochrane of Bantam Press, which published McKinstry, claims that 'there was some resistance and lack of enthusiasm for a book knocking the Labour Party. In some cases they didn't take it at all. And if they did take it they didn't make much effort to display it.'
Mr Cochrane contrasts the lot of Mr McKinstry's work with the whole-hearted promotion of fashionable left-wing books like Will Hutton's The State We're In. Mr McKinstry's work is certainly more read- able, and arguably more original, than the much-promoted Hutton one, but it received far less prominence in the shops and the book trade, which makes no secret of its affiliations. Next week, Dillons, doyen of academic booksellers, is to hold a public debate on the general election. It goes without saying that the three speakers billed in advance are Hutton, the Institute of Public Policy Research director, Gerald Holthan, and Geoff Mulgan from the Blairite think-tank Demos —New Labour to a man.
So far we have been looking at the main- stream book trade. If we move on to aca- demic publishing, the picture gets darker still. We enter a mysterious world of troglodytes, creeps and weirdos; a world where one of the most brilliant works of British historiography since the war, John Vincent's Intelligent Man's Guide to History, is turned down by the once revered Oxford University Press on the grounds that it is `sexist'; a world where more than two dozen studies of the British Communist Party — which has produced just four MPs and had a negligible impact on national life — have been published, but only two prop- er histories of the Tory Party which, dis- tasteful though it undoubtedly is to most academics, has after all governed the coun- try for 70 out of the last 100 years. It goes without saying that Andrew Davies, whose excellent history of the Tory Party was pub- lished last year, received a much larger publisher's advance for his earlier history of Labour.
As if another Labour history were need- ed! Every tedious Labour Party split and rift has been exhaustively chronicled by thousands of anorak-wearing graduate stu- dents and university lecturers. Meanwhile, the rich Tory Party archive at the Bodleian gathers dust. Incredibly, the Monday Club awaits its historian, and there has been no proper study of the Tory back-bench 1922 Committee with the single exception of a likable but thin offering by Sir Philip Goodhart. But all this is a subject for a sep- arate article on the irresponsibility, politi- cal bias and sheer silliness of British universities. Not that publishers are exempt from their share of the blame for this. Sir James Cable's path-breaking study of gun- boat diplomacy in the 19th century received 11 rejection slips, mainly because it failed to condemn British imperialism in sufficiently robust terms. It was eventually picked up by Macmillan, where it turned into a considerable commercial success.
It would of course be idle to pretend that there is not solid commercial reasoning behind the many recent books on Labour. Tony Blair now looks all but certain to be the next prime minister: clearly there is a public appetite to discover more about the man himself, the people behind him and the ideas that drive him. But that does not explain the uncritical pap that often passes for serious work about him and his allies, nor does it account for the undisguised malevolence with which the Tories are viewed by the publishing fraternity.
The 'movers and shakers', as they think of themselves, are not simply behind Labour, they are at the heart of the Blairite mission. Some are simply groupies, but at Random House Gail Rebuck is married to Blair's adman Philip Gould. The Verso boss Lady Elton (sister of Sunday Times journalist Zoe Heller) is one of the obliga- tory women on the left-leaning Bauman Commission. The chattering classes from Notting Hill, Bloomsbury, Hampstead and Islington have decided that Blair is best for Britain, and they are determined to thrust him down our throats.
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