AND ANOTHER THING
Why Outraged, Cheltenham and Concerned, Hampstead must have their say
PAUL JOHNSON
Journalists are following closely the efforts of Mr Richard Addis, the new editor of the Daily Express, to resuscitate that old Frankenstein's monster, which had not given a sign of active life for many a long year. Part of Mr Addis's cure is to shoot huge megawatts of financial electricity into the neck-bolts of the Creature. It has responded by a few eyebrow flickers and enough galvanic twitching to send thrills of fear through the upper echelons of the Daily Mail and even the Daily Telegraph. If the ancient Beaverbrook Monster really gets to its feet again and runs amok, it could cause problems for the market lead- ers at that critical point where the superior tabloid meets the popular quality.
What interests me about the Addis Cure is that he is not merely recruiting star columnists and reporters with huge salaries, but deploying some well-tried jour- nalistic strategies which cost little or noth- ing. And in particular he has boosted the Express's once insignificant 'Letters to the Editor' by plonking them right on the page facing the leaders and the main feature, and by assiduously ringing around and arm- twisting celebrities to write them. Last Fri- day and Saturday, for instance, he printed letters from Mr John Humphrys and Mr Jimmy Hill, Sir Clement Freud and Dr Mary Archer, not to speak of such bounce- and-glitter females as Miss Marcelle D'Argy Smith and Countess Bienvenida Whateverhernameisnow. This not only makes good copy but it answers the charge, certainly valid until Addis took over, that no one who is anyone reads the Express.
I often remind editors that, by failing to give the 'Letters' their direct and constant attention, they are neglecting what is potentially the best-loved feature in the Paper and the one most likely to turn casu- al readers into lifelong fans. No question, for instance, that between 1935 and 1975, `Letters to the Editor' was the most popu- lar and original bit of the New Statesman. We got some amazing people to write them. The week following a tirade by Bertie Russell, I was going through the let- ters in-tray one morning, and found a huge screed in Russian. I could not read it but I could just about make out the signature at the end — Nikita Khrushchev. We quickly got it translated and whizzed it over to Washington in the hope of getting a letter from President Eisenhower in reply. Ike would not play, but his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, duly answered, and the correspondence bowled along merrily. And, like all good letters pages, the States- man's had a special flavour, in its case of do-gooding eccentricity. Its quintessential letters topic, which went on for weeks in the Thirties, was headed: 'Homosexual Offences in the Mandated Territories'. When I was editor, I worked harder on the `Letters' than on any other pages. So did Anthony Howard, who stirred up lively let- ters by provoking rows between well- matched antagonists. Occasionally, he would ring one up to inform him that a notorious enemy was planning an epistle, and advising him to get his blow in first. Like me, he was not above paying a celebri- ty a modest fee for turning in a sharp, pithy contribution. And when big names send in letters, ordinary readers become more competitive and, thus goaded, turn in first- class copy.
Yet today editors who take their letters columns seriously are rare. The Sunday Times, which a generation ago had a distin- guished and learned section, now treats let- ters as mere space-fillers. Even at the Observer, where a new editor from Edin- burgh has made some remarkable changes for the better, particularly in the news cov- erage, the letters, once one of the best things in the paper, are still neglected. At the Sunday Telegraph, by contrast, Sir Pere- grine Worsthorne, when he ran the paper in the late Eighties, made a successful effort to bring back letter-power. They are still good — though they might be better. The Daily Telegraph, on the other hand, has always tamely allowed the Times to monop- olise the role of being the epistolary notice- board of the ruling class. That is absurd; with a much bigger quality readership, and now with a higher price too, the Telegraph ought to get the pick of those itchy Estab- lishment pens. In fact, not so long ago the Telegraph at least went in for quirky letters. I recall an astounding correspondence under the heading, 'Pre-war Knicker Inspections at Cheltenham Ladies' College', which encouraged some elderly dames to emerge from their burrows with illuminating reve- lations. Recently the paper's letters sec- tion, starved of space as well as editorial attention, had no character at all. I got a personal insight into quite how bad it was when I endeavoured to correct a left-wing jibe at me which had appeared in the paper's Peterborough gossip column. My reply was brief and sent by fax as soon as I saw the offending item. But nothing appeared for three days. I protested to one of the paper's potentates and as a result was telephoned by a dim-sounding Scotchman, who told me my correction would appear 'in due course'. Two days later it finally did, with its point neatly excised. I hope that the new layout of the Telegraph's centre pages, which is a huge improvement, produces a similar rethink among those who pick and process the correspondence.
Editors should not grudge space to let- ters, as so many of them do. I am sorry, for instance, to see that Country Life, a paper which in most ways has never been better, has cut its 'Letters' pages — a mine of information about odd topics — from two to one. In America, where this journalistic genre does not normally flourish, the best letters column is run by the magazine Com- mentary, simply because the editor puts a lot of plotting into it and gives it, on occa- sions, many hundreds of column-inches. I notice that the Scotsman, the Aberdeen Press & Journal and the Glasgow Herald attract excellent correspondence, because their editors make it plain that they consid- er letters important and space-worthy. The Guardian runs a lively letters feature for the same reason, and it is not true that you have to hold insane left-wing notions to get into it, though clearly it helps. The Times occupies its premier position in the letters world because, like the Guardian, it puts them bang next to the leaders and prints a lot — about a score every day, according to my calculation, compared to a dozen or so in the Independent and Guardian, and eight or ten in the Telegraph. So the mes- sage is, let the readers into the act and put them centre-stage — they can be a bigger draw than the professionals.
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