ldentikit tabloid

David English

The reactions to the born-again Daily Express when the new tabloid eventually came off the presses were predictably ritualistic: shouts of hysterical, self-generating wonder and acclaim from the dazed and exhausted denizens of the glasshouse and contemptuous snorts from elsewhere in Fleet Street.

Neither meant anything, in my view.

The only truly interesting reaction came from the Anglo-Contintenal, 65-68 Leadenhalf Street, EC3. There, Sir James Goldsmith is said to have smiled and said he was pleased.

Pleased! There's a word sinister enough to chill both the heart and the mind of Roy Wright and maybe even crack the permafrost grin of J ocelyn Stevens.

What could he have meant: 'Pleased'? The nervous whisperings from the executive suites of Beaverbrook Towers could be heard right across our side of Fleet Street : 'Would he have been pleased the new paper was good ? Well, perhaps, because it might reinforce the value of the five million Beaverbrook A shares he bought recently. But, on the other hand, a man like Goldsmith doesn't buy shares in a thing like the Express just to make a miserable capital gain of a few hundred thou—so would he have been pleased because it wasn't any good which must lead to lower sales, cashflow problems, desperate appeals for more money, and inevitably a takeover, giving the scourge of Private Eye his own paper to play with.'

'What will he be like as an owner ?' the other ranks were asking in the Express pub on the second night of the tabloid. 'Is he going to cut expenses.

Well, that's the kind of thing journalists say in those emotional early hours of the morning when the worse seems infinitely preferable to what they've just been through.

And the Expressmen have been through a lot in the first few weeks of this year. I can quite understand their wild and imaginative forecasts of collapse, rescue and continued warfare under the captaincy of a new leader —which is the current feverish projection of their battle-fatigued minds. For all I know, Sir James was pleased simply because, like many people, he prefers a smaller shaped newspaper. I know he reads the Daily Mail because he phones me from time to time to discuss the Nigel Dempster column—but that's another story. • Going through the build-up to a tabloid relaunch from a broadsheet to base is not an experience I would wish on my best friends, though I must say an awful lot of people. seem to be doing it these days. If I may remind everyone, that's what I said six years ago: 'Everyone is going to follow the Daily Mail. We're just doing it first, that's all.'

The Express at the time sent coded messages to knowing ex-retainers like myself that they would indeed be following by firmly announcing that they would stay broadsheet for ever. 'There Will Be No Warr ; 'The Empire Is Here For Eternity!'; 'Britain Will Never Join The Common Market!' So it was clearly only a matter of time. And, at last, they have nervedthemselves-up-and-done-it.

Everyone in Fleet Street says, 'Well it's terribly unfair to judge the first couple of issues,' and then proceed to make the most devastating and definitive judgments, a policy I myself have no intention of avoiding. I pronounce that they have produced a competent-looking job. And I would have been very surprised, given the people there, if they hadn't.

But this is a judgment on appearance. Roy Wright is a man with a reputation for neat and workmanlike make-up, which is much harder than it sounds. And he has been professional enough not to take off on any ego trips but to copy the brand leader and imitate the Daily Mail page for page.

I don't blame him. There is only one sensible way to construct a middleground tabloid and the Daily Mail found that out by empirical means over its first couple of years.

So, if the Express front page looks like ours, that is how one would expect it to look. We have left them little room for originality. But it is a problem for while there was a time when people would pay more for reproductions than they would for the genuine article public tastes and standards have raised themselves since then.

So the issue between the Daily Mail and the Daily Express comes down to journalistic quality and marketing. And, therein is the conundrum. One I suspect which cannot be answered even by Jocelyn's harsh but nimble tongue.

If the Daily Express is going to compete successfully with the Daily Mail, then it must do more than look like it. It must read like it. It must raise its editing standards and journalistic requirements to award-winning level.

Possibly it can be done, given time and money. 1 reveal no confidences when I say the present Express is short of both. However, supposing some guardian, moneyladen angel comes along, and they proceed to do it over the next three years. Would the tail end of their readership, the hundreds of thousands of what is brutally known in the trade as 'Ds and Es,' stay with an elegantly upmarketed Daily Express? Or would they defect to the Mirror or, more likely the Sun? That would leave the Express with a sale of under two million which on its present manning and economic structure is completely untenable.

So, of course, the Express will try desperately to hang on to its broad spectrum, across-the-market readership which is both ageing and traditional.

That is why the new tabloid is setting out to be all things to all sexes, ages and classes. You can see it in the composition of the thing as they threw it together. A front page like the Daily Mail, a touch of the Standard in its outdated 'permissive chic' (talking about a lady's only good parts being between her thighs and setting it out in italic, such avant-garde boldness!) a concession toward the Sun in its four-page Howard Hughes pull-out, and a slice of the old Daily Mirror with pin-up pictures circa 1961 (breasts will be shown but not revealed). Yes, it's the Indentikit Tabloid all right.

The few writers that the Express have not paid to leave (surely Beaverbrook's voluntary redundancy scheme was one of the best things that have ever happened to the Daily Mail) have clearly been held in reserve for a later stage of the battle. Everything in the first few days seems to have been bought at vast expense off the publishers' bookshelves.

Of course, I am hardly an objective critic and if I've done a bit of Fleet Street rubbishing on my old paper and present rival, it is, you understand, all in the friendly spirit of good old competitive journalism. I've got lots of friends on the Express and I wish them well. But I fear that miracles rarely happen.