Nasty Bruce
From Mr Joe Haines Sir: I buy The Spectator for the quality of its writing. It is a literary oddity that reactionaries make the best writers. However, I gave up reading Bruce Anderson years ago. I despise loutish journalism. But, by chance. I saw he had turned his bile upon me (A tale of two PR girls', 14 April).
The Mirror, I read, had been a serious newspaper until Robert Maxwell and his 'lieutenants' (I, 'twisted, hate-filled . .. who learned his morality from Harold Wilson', and Alastair Campbell, who 'studied truth and honour at the old thief's knee', etc) came along. That one passing sentence was a classic example of Anderson's style. It was abusive, inaccurate, even twisted and hatefilled, and written with the aggressive, pretended authority of a political poseur who feasts on the malicious gossip of the Westminster village and presents it to his readers as fact.
Anderson confuses invective with insight and bombast with knowledge. I was at the Mirror seven years before Robert Maxwell arrived. It was an era when the paper published its shock issues, days when most of its pages were devoted to problems of unemployment, the NHS, the homeless and the like. Anderson cannot possibly know at first hand anything about my relations with Maxwell, nor Campbell's, but I know that Campbell's resistance to Maxwell's attempted bullying put him in a small minority of Mirror employees.
Joe Haines
Tunbridge Wells, Kent
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