The press
Civilisers and primitives
Paul Johnson
T t would be a pity if the appointment of a new editor to the New Statesman were to be overshadowed by a row over political af- filiations. It does not matter whether the person chosen belongs to the Labour Party or the Social Democrats or neither. The New Statesman was founded not to pro- mote the interests of one political party but to preach socialism to all of them. If anything its allegiance was to the Fabian Society, though this ceased to be of impor- tance after the first two decades. It was not a paper committed to any particular ideology. The only didactic element was a weekly feature written by the Webbs, entitled 'What is socialism?' It should be emphasised', wrote the paper's official historian, Edward Hyams, 'that this socialism had nothing whatever to do with political parties, but was put forward as a policy which might be espoused by any party.'
Clifford Sharp, the first and perhaps the best of the NS editors, was not a party type at all. He was a trained engineer, a hard- boiled collectivist of the type which flourished in the Twenties. As Leonard Woolf put it, he created an atmosphere 'of intellectual Jeyes Fluid, moral carbolic soap and spiritual detergents'; but, Woolf add- ed, `temperamentally and fundamentally he was a conservative of the Rule Britannia, Disraelian, 1878 vintage'. In due course the NS absorbed three other liberal journals, which all went to complete its corporate spirit. The Athenaeum was idealistic, but pretty remote from practical, let alone par- ty, socialism. Massingham's Nation, the centre of a brilliant circle of radicals which included Hammond, Nevinson, Hobson and H. M. Tomlinson, was more of a Liberal journal: Massingham did not join the Labour Party until after he was sacked from the editorship, and he spent his life shopping around for a party which would embody his ideals. The Weekend Review was also vaguely Liberal, and its editor, Gerald Barry, later went on to run the Liberal News Chronicle. None of these men was a party type; quite the reverse. In pre- sent circumstances, I suspect, most of them would have been tempted to give the SDP a whirl because, being inchoate, its policies are more open to the influence they were so anxious to exert, than a Labour Party crammed with narrow-minded dogmatists.
Kingsley Martin, editor of the combined paper for thirty years, later wrote: 'In general we supported the Left Wing of Labour'. Oddly enough, however, he back- ed Herbert Morrison against Attlee for the party leadership in 1935. His chairman, Keynes, was a Liberal rather than anything else. Martin was not a party man. He called
himself 'extraordinarily, even embarrass- ingly, independent'. He quoted with ap- proval R. H. S. Crossman's famous defini- tion of the paper's spirit: 'Since its only loyalty is to its readers, the only treason it could commit would be to conform'. And Martin added: 'the treason I myself feared was treason to my nonconformist cons- cience'. He defined his aim as 'to support the civilisers against the primitives, the thinkers who used their minds against the blimps who thought with their bowels'. Where do the 'civilisers' as opposed to the `primitives' hang out now — in the Labour Party or the SDP? It is a very debatable point and illustrates the absurdity of demanding that the NS editor must be a paid-up member of a particular party.
Kingsley Martin, I need hardly add, would not have recognised the present-day NS, which has changed its character com- pletely in the last few years. He was not in- terested in 'exposure' journalism. When writing reportage himself he was thin on facts, and those he produced were notoriously inaccurate. For him, the NS was essentially a 'journal of opinion', traf- ficking in ideas and arguments. It aimed to influence by the originality of its thoughts, the plausibility of its case, the grace of its expression. He thought of the paper, as he once put it to me, as an intelligent argument between civilised people, reaching the right conclusion in the end but by a process of persuasion and leaving room for reasonable disagreement. He loathed sectarian jour- nalism. Nor did he make the mistake of thinking that politics (let alone party politics) were the whole of life, or ought to occupy the whole of the NS. He often used to say that there should never be more than one piece about economics in any issue of the paper. Of course politics were usually kept out of the literary and arts sections of the paper, but even in the front half he found room for non-political treatment of a vast variety of subjects and for articles and essays printed purely on their merits as first- class writing. I have just been looking through the anthology of NS articles, printed between 1913 and 1962, which was published on the occasion of the NS's 50th anniversary. Hardly any of them, including fine pieces by James Joyce, Bernard Shaw, Graham Greene, Arthur Koestler, D. H. Lawrence, J. B. Priestley, Bertrand Russell, H. G. Wells, Virginia Woolf, Arnold Ben' nett, Hilaire Belloc, George Orwell, Cyril Connolly, E. M. Forster, C. P. Snow, V. S. Pritchett, Lewis Namier, Luigi Pirandello and Angus Wilson, could possibly have ap- peared in the NS as it is now conceived. In picking a new editor, it is much more im- portant to choose somebody who can restore the traditional character of the magazine, and recruit and print writers of in-
quisition gifts, than to conduct an on his or her party political views.
My personal hope is that the next N5 editor will be a woman. It seems to me monstrous and unacceptable that men still monopolise all the senior, posts in British political journalism. 'I am not pleading for tokenism, still less for the doctrinaire policies of the Women's Movement. The cause of justice between the sexes is not ad- vanced by such means but by the presence of real women in actual jobs — jobs which are important and for which they are demonstrably qualified. When the N5 editorship was vacant during the 1970s, I tried hard to find some good women can- didates, and got no support at all from 01Y fellow-selectors. It may be that, in those days, no suitable woman was available. That is certainly no longer true. I can think of half a dozen. The NS, with its in- novatory traditions, ought to be a pioneer in this respect, and to hell with party cards.
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