LETTERS

Epistle to Paul

Sir: Strange to relate, from the first re- corded moment, Christmas 1986, that Paul Johnson started worrying — at the dinner table and then in your pages — about the Daily Telegraph, the paper's circulation began to recover following five years dur-

ing which it had fallen by the best part of 400,000,

How, then, to explain Mr Johnson's attacks on the Telegraph ('no sense of

editorial direction', 'vapid features', 'lead- ers poor and often ill-inforined')?

Is it that Mr Johnson is just an obsessive in the gloom of his convert's cell? Perhaps. Or that he writes primarily himself for the competing Daily Mail, whose reporting objectivity is so rarely subjected to his critical scrutiny in your pages? Or that, after sundry other savagings by Mr John- son, Max Hastings dispensed with his services this summer? Who can tell?

This time Mr Johnson attributes a. rather modest fall (from an artificial peak a year ago) to sinful Max who was born a blue when Johnson was still flaming red — and then fruitlessly cites Conrad Black and me against him. In the process he manages to

forget such little matters as a 20 per cent price rise in February, or that our circula- tion has done well since the Independent

was launched while others have done badly.

Mr Johnson once edited a small left-wing weekly one of whose strengths was to appeal to people like me who disagreed with it. He has never edited a large- circulation, right-of-centre, daily newspap- er. He may not understand that one object is to expose more people to conservatism by being catholic enough in promotion of discussion — though not in one's own values — to catch the attention of non- believers. No set of tenets — even so remarkable as Mrs Thatcher's — will gain force from a newspaper which, in support- ing it as we do, does so as slavishly as Mr Johnson seems to want Max to do.

Still, Mr Johnson concedes that Xan Smiley in Moscow is 'the outstanding' man there (I agree), that our 'news coverage

has never been better' (I agree), that 'the Telegraph usually emerges the best value

of the qualities' (I agree); and that 'the arts coverage is the best of any national paper' (I agree): And that Bill Deedes stayed on (more prolifically than ever, God be praised).

Max must be doing something right after all.

Andrew Knight

The Daily Telegraph,

181 Marsh Wall, London E14