MEDIA STUDIES
To become famous by being killed, be a rich man in football (not even a player)
STEPHEN GLOVER
No man knows how people will treat his demise, but in the next world Matthew Harding may be a little surprised about the coverage which newspapers have devoted to his death last week in a helicopter crash. In life the vice-chairman of Chelsea was not a very famous man, even though he had made a great deal of money. I happened to have heard of him only because my eight- year-old son is a Chelsea supporter. But I would guess that until last week about 98 per cent of my fellow countrymen were unaware of his existence.
In death the newspapers, broadsheet and tabloid, set out to make a hero of Mr Hard- ing. The Sun devoted its first five pages to him, banishing its page three girl to an infe- rior spot on page seven. The Daily Star made a similar sacrifice. The Daily Mirror cleared six pages, and printed Auden's beautiful poem 'Funeral Blues.' The Daily Mail 'splashed' Mr Harding's death on its front page, and ran a double-page spread inside. The Daily Express made over its first four pages. The broadsheets were scarcely less enthusiastic, regarding this as a story of general interest which must be covered in great detail outside the sports pages. Solemn obituaries were written, back- ground features hastily thrown together.
I don't want to be rude about Mr Hard- ing but it is difficult to understand why his tragic passing should be considered an event of national significance. What had he done? He had made a fortune — up to £170 million according to some estimates — but the newspapers were on the whole uninterested in how he had achieved this. His claim to fame, so far as they were con- cerned, was that he had invested many mil- lions of pounds in Chelsea, a club to which he was fanatically committed. This is some- thing for which Chelsea fans, including my eight-year-old son, are rightly grateful, but it hardly qualifies him for the role of national hero.
I don't deny that his death was a 'good story', and the broadsheets would have been heartless if they had not covered it properly. There was the added interest of Mr Harding having left behind a wife and children in Sussex and an Ecuadorean girl- friend called Vicky Jaramillo plus a 'love- child' in Richmond. This raised the possi- bility, particularly fascinating to the tabloids, of a contested will, which we may not have heard the last of. All the same, Mr Harding's passing scarcely seems to justify more coverage in our newspapers than one can remember anybody's death receiving in recent times.
There are two explanations, and they have to do with class and football. Unfortu- nately Mr Harding was not by birth a man of the people, but the tabloids were deter- mined to show him as one. His father was a Lloyd's underwriter — which is to say he must have had a good deal of capital. The young Matthew was packed off to Abing- don School, a public school which, if not famous, has high academic Standards. Somehow Matthew Harding escaped the net, leaving with only one A level. His career was dull for a while, as one might expect of a public schoolboy so little quali- fied to do very much, until he met Ted Benfield, an insurance broker, who offered him a job.
None of this could be allowed to jeopar- dise Mr Harding's role as working-class hero. According to a Mr Paul Diggins, quoted in the Sun, 'He was Mr Chelsea. He grew up on the terraces as one of the boys.' Mr Harding was represented by newspa- pers as an ordinary bloke who mixed natu- rally with the fans, and shared a drink with them in a pub close to the Chelsea ground. In many ways he did make it easy for the press. When in the company of other Chelsea fans, he did not stand on ceremo- ny. He wanted to be one of the lads. Pho- tographs of him suggest a guileless, open- hearted sort of chap who might very well be an actor in Coronation Street rather than an enormously successful businessman in a cut-throat market.
There must have been a little more to Mr Harding than was on show in the Chelsea stands or caught the attention of most of the newspapers which wrote about his death. As I say, they were not generally very interested in how he made his money, and were intent merely to establish that he was not a loathsome 'fat cat', even though he seems to have collected some £7 million in salary and dividends last year. I would certainly have welcomed some attempt at an explanation about his business, but it seems almost deliberately to have been kept a mystery. Football was the name of this game.
Even now more people go to church every Sunday than attend football matches every week. For all soccer's supposed renaissance, gates remain very much small- er than they were 40 years ago. Nonethe- less our newspapers — and perhaps partic- ularly those owned by Rupert Murdoch, who has a 40 per cent interest in BskyB which is pumping out almost hourly foot- ball coverage — are keen for us to read an awful lot about football. This makes sense on the sports pages, and it may even be a clever move on the part of the Express to produce a new sports section every day. But it is silly to assume that all readers, tabloid or broadsheet, are absolutely consumed with the death of a football hero.
My own personal breaking point came a few days after Mr Harding's death when I read in several papers that the Chelsea manager, Ruud Gullit, was praying for his soul. That wasn't the half of it. Just as Eric Canton a has been absurdly portrayed as some kind of post-existentialist philoso- pher, so Mr Gullit, who is a brilliant foot- baller, is now written up as a spiritual guru. What is happening to us? I fell to wonder- ing how the Times and other broadsheets will cover the death of Isaiah Berlin, when that unhappy day finally arrives. It is a one way bet that they will accord him less space than they gave Matthew Harding.
The self-effacing and publicity-shy Bar- clay brothers have appointed Andrew Neil, former editor of the Sunday Times, as edi- tor-in-chief of their three newspapers, the European, the Scotsman and Scotland on Sunday. They are said to be keen to buy more titles, and Mr Neil appears to have been appointed with this in mind. The Bar- clay brothers and Mr Neil therefore join Mohammed Al Fayed and his journalistic helpmate, Stewart Steven, in being press barons-in-waiting, their eyes roving around for a newspaper in trouble which they might be able to snap up. There are cer- tainly no shortage of these. Not since Robert Maxwell and Rupert Murdoch in the Sixties have there been two budding publishing groups so openly on the prowl.
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