A sad day for Tory England
STEPHEN GLOVER
Charles Moore is an old friend of mine, and I cannot claim to write about his eight-year editorship of the Daily Telegraph with a great degree of objectivity. The task, however, must be attempted, since his departure is significant not only for his newspaper but also for what we might call Tory England.
Mr Moore was not the first choice as editor of the Daily Telegraph at the end of 1995. Perhaps there was a fear that in some way he harked back to the pre-Conrad Black Telegraph which he had joined as a young man in 1979. Sir Max Hastings had edited the paper from the time that Mr Black (as he then was) acquired it at the beginning of 1986. As he makes clear in his recently published memoirs, Sir Max saw it as his task both to modernise the Telegraph and make it less Tory. One of his particular bugbears was the Tory sage T.E. Utley, who had been Mr Moore's friend and mentor. Sir Max produced a newspaper which, while being more modern, jettisoned some of the Telegraph's long-cherished views. It was broadly pro-European. It did not regard the continuing Britishness of Northern Ireland as an almost sacred article of faith. It did not revere Margaret Thatcher, for whom T.E. Utley had sometimes written speeches.
In a political sense Mr Moore returned the paper to its old roots. While Sir Max was really only a Tory in a narrow social way, Mr Moore was intellectually and culturally a Tory to his fingertips, in some aspects a rather old-fashioned one. As time went on, the paper he edited took on board the robust pro-Israeli and pro-American views of its proprietor, views which one does not particularly associate with the old Daily Telegraph.
Mr Moore's paper was also in some respects considerably more highbrow than the paper he had joined. Readers who have noticed the dumbing down of parts of the Telegraph over recent years may find this difficult to credit, but it is so. For the first time in its history the paper had a classic leader and op-ed page, replete with a clutch of new columnists hired by Mr Moore, and offering better written and more thoughtful leaders than it had ever had. This was Mr Moore's most considerable achievement. Traditionally the Telegraph had intellectually been a peg or two below the Times. Mr Moore wanted to put the thinking part of his paper on the same level, to lift up its readers, and to a large extent he succeeded.
Its feature pages and parts of its news pages did dumb down, though. Telegraph readers were introduced to a string of pop stars and celebrities and models of whose existence many of them had previously been only dimly aware. In part this reflected the changing priorities of all broadsheet newspapers, and no doubt of society. The Telegraph Mr Moore joined as a young man had eschewed showbiz gossip, and offered a diet of lurid court cases, comprehensive news about the aimed services, and an extensive foreign coverage which was often composed of surprisingly brief items. It would not have been feasible, or desirable, to go back to that, yet one cannot help wondering whether the headlong plunge into the world of film stars and celebrities was not sometimes overdone. Mr Moore had a particular problem in relation to the Times. When that paper cut its cover price in September 1993, it had permanently to change aspects of itself— to dumb down — in order to retain the new readers attracted by a cheaper paper. As the Times began to cast its net more widely, the Telegraph, which saw itself threatened, tended to follow suit.
So Mr Moore hands on a paper that is as Tory as the one he joined, and both more serious and more frivolous. What will become of it? It is not easy to say. Little is known about the new editor, Martin Newland, though he was for a time the Telegraph's news editor before going to work for the National Post in Canada. He is, like Mr Moore, a Roman Catholic, but otherwise the two men would seem to have little in common. Mr Moore is an intellectual and a Toni; Mr Newland is a practical, news-orientated journalist with little knowledge of Conservatism. He may turn out to be a newspaper genius, but his appointment is undoubtedly startling.
My guess is that under his editorship the paper may be less a fount of Tory ideas and thought than it has been, which in present circumstances would be a blow to a Conservative party that has lost its way. Mr Newland is likely to be drawn towards what he understands best, which is news. Mr Moore's general view was that the news department could largely be left to its own devices. I doubt that Mr Newland will share this outlook. It may be that he will favour a more polemical style of news which reflects the values of the paper and its proprietor. With a few exceptions, Mr Moore did maintain the Telegraph's old distinction between news and comment. During the Hutton inquiry, for example, the editorials have railed against the BBC's Andrew Gilligan while the news pages have, for the most part, been even-handed. Will Mr Newland treasure this distinction?
Change is always disturbing, and I admit that the future is a little uncertain. But in spite of its difficulty in attracting sufficient new young readers, the Daily Telegraph remains an immensely strong paper. It will survive and thrive under whatever editor or proprietor. Yet this is the end of an era. Charles Moore was in the very best sense an old-fashioned editor. Despite the myriad front-page pictures of Elizabeth Hurley and David Beckham, he was true to the Daily Telegraph he joined as a young man. With his departure, Tory England has lost its most eloquent voice.
T ast week I wrote about the death of the
Guardian columnist Hugo Young. I did not mention that the BBC, and the Today programme in particular, treated this event rather as Soviet television might have reported the death of a much-loved member of the Politburo who had stood alongside Lenin during the October Revolution. All that was missing was the martial music.
You may say that it is only right and proper to mark the passing of a distinguished journalist such as Hugo Young, and that must be correct. But I do not think the BBC would have been quite so reverential if Mr Young had been of the Right rather than of the Left, Indeed, I do not recall it even mentioning the death of the Daily Telegraph's T.E. Utley, surely a journalist of at least equal distinction to Mr Young, and of no less influence, when he died in 1988. Mr Young once wrote a column which argued that while a left-leaning columnist such as Andrew Marr could be trusted as an objective BBC reporter, no right-wing columnist could possibly be imagined in such a role. Truth, in other words, resides on the Left. Similar standards seem to apply to the way in which the BBC celebrates the dead.
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