Not a nasty man exactly
Alan Watkins
LISTENING FOR A MIDNIGHT TRAM by John Junor Chapmans, £15.95, pp. 341 Sir John Junor is one of the great journalists of the age. He was and is a better columnist than he was an editor. A few phrases of his have passed into the language, notably 'Pass the sickbag, Alice' and 'I think we should be told': the latter, interestingly enough, much used by young- er journalists who disapprove of most of what he writes. For Sir John is rarely if ever on the side of what Matthew Arnold called sweetness and light. However hard he may try to be nice — crippled war heroes, little old ladies, loyal spouses and poor, innocent children being high on his list of persons to be commended generally — what comes out at the end is almost always nasty. He has a low mind, greatly preoccupied with money: how much peo- ple earn, whether they are, as he puts it, `skint' (a distressing condition afflicting, we are told, Lord Havers and Mr Nigel Lawson, to name only two), above all, how to obtain goods cheaply or at a discount.
It is not that he is a nasty man exactly. He showed courage as a Fleet Air Arm pilot in the war. In his memoirs he is not at all bitter — quite the reverse — about his wife and daughter, both of whom appear to have deserted him. He is capable of acts of personal kindness, as when he found a job on the Sun (a story unrecorded in his book) for one of his feature-cum-leader writers who had been detected falsifying his ex- penses.
At the same time he finds it difficult to deal with anyone on a footing of equality. This characteristic was one of his defects as an editor. He is either a bully or a sycophant — though, to be fair, he briefly sacrificed his job after standing up to Lord Beaverbrook over support for Harold Macmillan in 1963. Macmillan resigned and Sir John returned. His portrait of the Sunday Express under him as one great happy family is correct only on the under- standing that it was run on the most dictatorial Victorian principles. He was also, I now discover, something of a humbug. He tells us that when he was working as a leader-writer for the Daily Express he used to compose during the late morning in the Reform Club. He found the location quieter and more agreeable. Just so. But anyone who behaved similarly on the Sunday Express would have received one of Sir John's vigorous personal denun- ciations, which were capable of reducing grown men (among them the then sports editor) to tears.
He was a stickler for office hours. Work — anyway attendance at the office - started at ten and went on till six, with a generous two hours for lunch from one to three. On Saturdays the day lasted longer, till well after 11 for some of us. Sir John insisted on his staff's being there at ten because he had to be there himself. Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook's son and his representative in Fleet Street, would reg- ularly buzz him at one minute past ten, except on those occasions when he was engaged in yachting or other sporting activities.
Sir John is somewhat misleading about both his own and his colleagues' attitude to Max, who, he tells us, 'not only had great personal charisma, he was genuinely liked, respected and indeed almost worshipped'.
Steady on a bit. Max was respected for his gallantry in war and envied for his gallantry with women. He was admired for his sporting prowess. His chief influence, however, was sartorial. He once rebuked the air correspondent, with whom he was travelling in the lift, for wearing a duffle coat. The consensus was that, though he may have been a glamorous figure in an indefinably seedy way, he was no news- paperman and could be something of a nuisance. His ideas, on those rare occa- sions when he had any, were never much good. Certainly Sir John regarded him as a bit of a booby, and would sometimes indicate as much when he lunched with his leader-writing colleagues on a Saturday in the Cheshire Cheese.
If Sir John's book has a theme, it is lunch. The title could well have been All My Lunches. Some of us fall by the wayside in the Great Fleet Street Lunch- eon Handicap. Old political friends and acquaintances die or retire. We cannot be bothered to make new ones. When we do make the effort, the new men are not as informative — certainly not as lively or entertaining — as the politicians of the Sixties, Richard Crossman or Anthony Crosland or fain Macleod. Restaurants change and charge too much. We retreat to our clubs. Perhaps he who is tired of lunch is tired of life. Not Sir John. He is as enthusiastic for the practice as when he first became Cross-Bencher.
Though he is a loyal soul, he takes up new places. Those old favourites, the Escargot and the Caprice (where 30 years ago the set lunch was seven and six or 37.5 new pence) gradually give way to the White Tower, Boulestin and the Howard Hotel. His guests change as well. Reginald Maudling and R. A. Butler die, Lords Hai[sham and Home grow old, while Lord Carrington is rebuked for no longer wishing to have lunch with him at all. Replacements soon present themselves, however: Mr Edward Heath, Mrs Mar- garet Thatcher herself CI was aware during our enormously relaxed and friendly chat that the Prime Minister was wearing a split skirt and there was just a suspicion or flash of leg') and, from the younger generation, Mr Lawson and Mr Cecil Parkinson CI suspected that we had a lot, including a liking for the ladies, in common').
Nor is it only politicians that Sir John entertains, for one of the wonderful advantages of being editor of a national newspaper is that you can have lunch with almost anyone you like. Including the most beautiful women.
Sir John's particular favourites are Miss Anna Ford (`quite delightful . . . I disco- vered we shared a mutual dislike for the then Bishop of Southwark, Mervyn Stock- wood') and his discovery Miss Selina Scott (gorgeous, delicious . . . a delightful girl, warm, compassionate and unaffected'). But these encounters are mere dalliance. The principal purpose of lunch is the extraction of political information. Sir John was by no means averse to the following of the same practice by members of his political staff. 'Never drink in Fleet Street,' he advised me shortly after joining the Sunday Express in 1959. 'It rots the brain.' He did not mean — or not princi- pally mean — that boozing in El Vino's destroyed the old grey cells. What he meant, he explained, was that conversa- tions with other journalists were largely Profitless, the same inaccurate stories going round and round. By contrast, lunch with a politician was a commendable prac- tice. Sir John proffered some advice: to order decisively (so that the guest would follow one's lead) from the table d'hote rather than the a la carte menu; never to ask for extra vegetables which only added to the bill and, besides, 'potatoes are fattening'; to drink the carafe wine (a false economy, in my subsequent experience), red or white but never rosé. 'Only poofs drink rosé', he added, not, as in the now accepted version, 'white wine'.
Sir John was always generous with the information which he had picked up on these expeditions of his. One of the two genuine scoops of my life was provided directly by him. On the Saturday afternoon in 1963 immediately after Lord Home had agreed to try to form a government, he buzzed me and said that, if I telephoned a certain Conservative peer who was a for- mer Minister, I should _learn something interesting. I did so and was told, what I subsequently confirmed, that Macleod and Mr Enoch Powell were refusing to join Lord Home's new Cabinet. Unhappily there is little new information of a similar kind in these memoirs. They are mostly tittle-tattle, becoming less and less interest-
ing as they approach the present. They do not do Sir John justice. Or perhaps they do him all too much.
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