Put to bed by drunks
From Tan Heald
Sir: I recognise almost everything in Charles M(x)re's memories of the Daily Telegraph 25 years ago (The Spectator's Notes, 16 October), not least the author, then an eager young leader-writer who would come bouncing into the editor's office to present his day's effort in the evening when the smoke was thick and the whisky flowing. He always seemed alarmingly, even disarmingly, sober.
He gets it wrong at the end, though, when he says 'nothing worked'. The paper may have been dull and largely put together by anonymous male inebriates, but against most of the odds it nearly always came out on time and it sold over a million copies a day. The readers seemed to like it and if you're writing a biography of someone who was a national figure in those days, it's a remarkably useful and reliable source. You could almost call it a 'paper of record'.
Tim Heald
Fowey, Cornwall
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