THE PRESS
Belly-button rag
DENNIS HACKETT
There was no doubt which was the best story of last week. Peter Harvey had it in the Guardian: 'Commercial Spies tap State Records.' Mr Heath was obviously impres- sed by it, impressed enough to set up an inquiry at once. The Guardian, 150 years old, wise about these things and possibly wanting to appear used to success, didn't make a big song and dance about having an exclusive, but went on with its business. Very befitting for the best newspaper.
Wheeling and swooping over the corpse of the Daily Sketch, which, in its positively last appearance, was allowed to act as a shroud for the Daily Mail, the populars didn't seem too impressed about this erosion of a right one thought their millions of readers valued above all else: privacy.
They all rather quietly mentioned the story in their Parliamentary reports and credited the Guardian, except for the Sun which led on it and churlishly omitted to mention where it had started. I suppose it might have been an inadvertent omission : everyone too excited about the proximity of 'Belly-button week.' Well, in the battle of the tabloids the human anatomy is proving a little limited: bottoms and busts, busts and bottoms . I suppose we've taken our belly-buttons for granted for too long. I wonder if the Mirror will counter with 'The sexual significance of the armpit?'
Perhaps not. The Mirror is not to be relied on entirely in this war of sexual parts.
It from time to time reaches for political significance. And this urge seems to strike over weekends. On Monday. 10 May, it treated what in happier days was its captive audience, to a page, no less, on the Common Market. Mr Heath, it said, should fight for entry even if it meant losing his job. And Mr Wilson—He should fight for it, too, even if it meant losing his. How's that for political nous. Agreed, the Mirror said, Mr Heath would have to get acceptable terms —though the Mirror didn't extend its space to say what those terms should be but pro- mised more the following day about 'Pub- lic Opinion and the Common Market.' I don't know if all the readers managed to survive the suspense of a whole night but I was in there for Day Two and there it was—smaller in type-size, smaller in space, about the same weight in logic.
It managed to attack the Daily Express, tell us that 64 pet' cent of Frenchmen were in favour of Britain joining and yet refrain from quoting what the latest polls in Bri- tain show i.e. that those in favour have shrunk from 29 per cent in November to 20 per cent now (source: Opinion Research Centre for the Sunday Times).
The Mirror put the pressure on poor old Harold. Nobody had such a chance to 'serve his country more nobly and imaginatively and selflessly' than he. Provided, of course, he agreed with the Mirror. Well he doesn't. And a large part of the Mirror's readers don't. It may even be one of the reasons for the Mirror's decline in circulation : a re- sentment of the lecturing, hectoring posture that has replaced the old reader-identifica- tion policy that helped the paper grow.
lf, as the Mirror suggests, the public is ignorant about the Common Market, then it doesn't say much for the influence of the Mirror which has been publicly enamoured of the idea for so long. There is nothing wrong with believing in something un- popular and saying so. There is bravery that way, publish-and-be-smaller and all that. But, with mass audiences in print, you have to persuade not harangue. The truth is that the Mirror, longing like an old lag for a latterday respectability, has got itself into a political No Man's Land, playing the statesman where properly it should be the voice from out of the public bar.
There are signs, too, that it senses its isolation. On the morning of the Labour landslide in the local elections, its Comment over the results congratulated itself on the normal newspaper practice of publishing letters against as well as for. In this context it was the case of thirteen-year-old Martin Woodhams, whose essay we have all had to read. For one incredulous moment I thought that perhaps he had decided to give up the stage to write Mirror leaders, but no. Two of the Mirror's readers disagreed with the Mirror's verdict that the headmaster had been 'foolish.' And the Mirror had printed them, it announced, the previous day. And again—just to stay in style—the Mirror, while not withdrawing its criticism, was 'delighted to print the other side.' Worried, too, I suspect that it had come to a con. / elusion too quickly and was not trying to / have it both ways. Again. Meanwhile what about that Labour land,' slide? Was it to be forward or backward for the people? Well, kiss my trendy b,0111fr button, perhaps they should have pulled it oil nearer a weekend.
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