DIARY ALAN RUSBRIDGER
Mr Kelvin MacKenzie, tile editor of the Sun, is, contrary to many expectations, a rather private man who, to my know- ledge, has only given two interviews in the whole of his editorial career. So it was unusual, at the least, for him to invite four journalists to lunch this week and engage in free discussion about his paper. He had seen the error of his ways, he told them over the meal. Sun journalists now double, double, double checked their stories. 'Whereas we might have been happy with two people's word, now we need 22 peo- ple.' The lunch was ostensibly to celebrate the impending 20th anniversary of Rupert Murdoch's buying the paper (who remem- bers the time when its staff included Dennis Potter, Nancy Banks Smith, Posy Simmonds and Frank Johnson? Not, I should say, me) and the impending book in celebration, Sunsation. His lunch guests suspected it might have more to do with his desire to get a mea culpa on the record in the year of the million pound libel settle- ment and various parliamentary attempts to muzzle the MacKenzie style of bonk journalism. The Guardian's media corres- pondent, Georgina Henry, said after the lunch that she had found MacKenzie to be extremely funny and that she had laughed a lot, which she supposed was vaguely reprehensible. I know the feeling. I buy the Sun every day and am constantly catching myself smiling at the contents or reading bits out to my wife over breakfast. That, of course, is part of the paper's brilliance — why something like half the adult popula- tion are Sun readers. Once you laugh, they've got you.
0 ne of Mrs Thatcher's most acute realisations, back in the mid-Seventies, was that the Sun, and not the Times or the Telegraph, was the most important paper in the country. If the Sun must take much of the blame for creating the lager lout, it must also take much of the credit or blame for creating Mrs Thatcher. Theirs is a symbiotic relationship built on simplicity, bluntness, and pretty ruthless Little En- glishness.
My favourite MacKenzie story con- cerns the reporter who approached him with a plan for a trifle unlikely Sun campaign to get rid of Sir Nicholas Goodi- son as Chairman of the Stock Exchange. MacKenzie, ever the doughty guardian of the people, demanded to know on what grounds. The reporter considered the com- plexities of the matter for a while and decided to tell the boss in terms he would immediately comprehend: 'Basically, Kel- vin . . . the man's a c—.' MacKenzie immediately grasped the point. 'Oh well, if he's a c—, let's get 'im.' Sir Nicholas resigned shortly thereafter.
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my heart rather sank as I leafed through the nice clean pages of the first issue of the Sunday Correspondent. If it had been bad, or even mediocre, then I would have had the perfect excuse not to read it in future. Instead of which the paper turned out to be rather impressive and thus another 120 or so pages to stagger through on a Sunday. I know everyone says that, but not everyone's job requires them to read the stuff. The paper's air of self-assurance was all the more surprising since for weeks now all the pubs between the Guardian and Correspondent offices have been filled with Correspondent jour- nalists staring rather morosely into their beer glasses. 'I think I'll go off and become a bond dealer,' one groaned only last week. 'Ten times the money and half the pressure.' Such is the dismal process of dummy production. It is obviously too early to predict whether the paper will survive and what impact it will have on existing titles. But I should have thought it made fairly glum reading for Andreas Whittam Smith, putative editor-in-chief of the Independent on Sunday. He is doubt- less still intent on producing an alternative Sunday newspaper, but it must now be becoming clear even to him that there are only so many refinements of alternative. Alternative to what?
This week's edition of The War Cry, the Salvation Army paper, examines Neil Kin- nock's remark after escaping from a fatal road accident in Ireland that 'Somebody up there likes me.' The writer, Molly Blythe, wonders (a) why Mr Kinnock, a non- believer, should think such a thing and, (b) whether this implies that Somebody up there didn't like his driver, Mr Tom Conlon, who, you may recall, died. These seem reasonable questions. But Miss Blythe concludes: 'But I do believe that God has a place for Neil ICinnock in his plans. . . I am sure that it is God's will that he should be saved.' So where does that leave Mr Conlon?
Ever since falling victim to a somewhat hostile book review by her some time ago, I have taken a mild interest in the career of Miss Julie Burchill. I have watched her progress from mid-market Glenda Slag through mid-market Jackie Collins to — last week — writer of concerned letters to the Independent. The subject of Julie's concern was an article by the paper's esteemed columnist, Peter Jenkins, whom Julie described as 'hopelessly ignorant'. Jenkins has apparently exercised his hope- less ignorance on Enoch Powell and his views about race. It was perfectly clear, said Julie, that Enoch had been right all those years ago when he warned of foam- ing rivers. Most Independent readers will not, I suspect, have known that Julie has long taken a concerned and knowledgeable interest in race. Myself, I treasure an interview she gave to New Musical Express back in May 1986 in which she was asked to defend her description of Arabs as, how should one put it, people who take an unusual carnal interest in camels. Julie said she just didn't like Arabs, that was all there was to it. But would she not disapprove of people who were racist about blacks or Jews? 'People who hate blacks and Jews tend to be very stupid people,' she purred. 'Very intelligent people hate Arabs.'
For a couple of years now I have suffered from reflux oesophagitus — heart- burn to you — which was how I first came to know Zantac. Zantac is a little white pill containing a substance known as ranitidine which is most commonly used for neutralis- ing stomach ulcers. Many of you will already know this. Since starting on Zantac I have discovered that most of my friends and colleagues seem to be secret users. There is a covert trade in them around the Guardian office. But I had little idea, until I saw it in the Financial Times the other day, that Zantac is in fact the world's best-selling medicine, earning Glaxo about £1 billion a year, and about two thirds of the company's annual profits. Indeed, to combat counterfeiting, Glaxo has recently started introducing holograms of the union flag on packets of the drug. I do not begrudge Glaxo its profits. Anyone who can soothe my heartburn is welcome to the money. But I do wonder where all those ulcers come from? When was the ulcer invented? What is it that stirs Western civilisation's peptic juices so? It can't just be reading too many Sunday newspapers.
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