Provincial team
On the face of it, the Express team to fight the new war looks most provincial. Out goes the highly political animal Derek Marks. In comes fifty-four-year-old teetotal Scotsman Ian McColl, mildly sympathetic to Scots nationalism and a great expert on keep- ing Scotland free of bishops. His number two, John Macdonald, comes down from Manchester where he's been for donkey's years. The Scottish Daily Express is very successful and very parochial: and nobody would say that the northern. editions were not a lot more provincial than the London- produced ones. It looks as if the Express answer to the new Mail will be more news, home news, regional news, local news.
The Mirror expects little joy from the forthcoming dogfight. It takes the view that anybody who was likely to change over from the Sketch to the Mirror would already have done so. The Sketch is believed, surprisingly, to have retained a considerable number of its original genteel female readership. The effective end of the old Mail and Sketch is bound to help the Express.
Dennis Hackett, recently fired director of !pc newspapers, and former Expressman and Observer art editor, onetime editor of Queen and Nova, will be writing regularly on the press in the SPECTATOR. 1 look for- ward to reading his views on brash and bouncy David English's new tabloid Mail- Sketch (optimistic first print, three million— and a steady decline thereafter?) next week,
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