MEDIA STUDIES
This is not a column about Mr Preston, but he was
rude about me, and I was right about the Observer
STEPHEN GLOVER
Last week I wrote that Peter Preston had secured a short-term victory in success- fully arguing against the sale of the Observ- er to Mohamed Al Fayed. Well, it was cer- tainly very short-term. Like three or four days. Mr Preston has been relieved of his title of editor-in-chief of the Observer and the Guardian by his friends on the Scott Trust. Will Hutton has been made editor of the Observer, replacing Andrew Jaspan, who had been Mr Preston's man. As for Mr Preston, he is now a columnist, an activity at which he does not noticeably shine.
I own to feeling a little sorry for him. I shouldn't, but I do. When a man has edited a national newspaper for 20 years, as Mr Preston did the Guardian, I instinctively doff my cap to him. I do so with Mr Preston, even though he was rather rude about me, in this magazine as it happens, after I had elsewhere written some dis- obliging comments about his newly appointed protégé, Mr Jaspan. For years Mr Preston has been held up as Fleet Street's Machiavelli, a man of legendary suppleness who rode every storm, survived every crisis. Now it seems that he was mere- ly human after all. His fall from grace reminds us that in the end nearly all notable journalistic reputations are dashed to the ground.The sadness is that Fleet Street has such a short memory that poster- ity is never invited to raise them up again.
But this is not a column about Mr Preston, nor indeed about his youthful suc- cessor Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian, who was made executive editor of the Observer in last week's coup. In nor- mal Fleet Street parlance, an executive edi- tor is inferior to the editor. The title was chosen in this instance in deference to cer- tain sensitive egos — Mr Preston's for one, Mr Hutton's for another — but a mere choice of words cannot disguise the fact that Mr Rusbridger has in effect become editor-in-chief of the Observer, which I sug- gested four weeks ago was his aim. Several of his senior colleagues have gone across to the paper on either a temporary or perma- nent basis as a sort of boarding party. Mr Rusbridger will be keeping a friendly eye on the Observer, and on Mr Hutton. Already they have sacked two veterans, Mark Frankland and Adrian Hamilton, as well as Sarah Baxter, a recent Jaspan import, and one or two others.
The two of them might work well in har- ness. Mr Rusbridger is more of a technician than an intellectual. He thinks a lot about how best to present articles. You could say that he is the Sir David English of broad- sheet newspapers. Indeed, he much admires the Daily Mail. His greatest terror would be to bore readers. Mr Hutton, by contrast, is not a really a newspaperman at all. A former stockbroker and television reporter, his newspaper experience is restricted to the economic column he has been writing for the Guardian since 1990. But he is an intellectual of sorts, as his best- seller The State Were In attests. My feeling is that on account of its exaggerated polemic against Thatcherism — the insis- tence that there have been no economic achievements since 1979 — it is a rather chumpish work. However, it is much admired on the Left, though not so much by Blairites, who regard Mr Hutton as being a bit too red for them.
For years the Observer has been crying out for inspiration as a centre-left newspa- per. It is tempting to believe that Mr Hut- ton, the first Observer editor since David Astor who would call himself an intellectu- al, is the man to restore a sense of purpose. It is also tempting to believe that Mr Rus- bridger is the man to help him reshape the Observer. Some sections should be thrown away, others redesigned. They will have to recruit new writers and editors, especially ones who understand how different Sunday and daily features are. Some old writers and editors will have to go. The Rus- bridger/Hutton partnership can work, so long as it is recognised that in the end a successful newspaper can only have one editor, who must be Mr Hutton.
When Mr Jaspan was appointed, I wrote in the Evening Standard that 'he is not cast in the Observer's liberal tradition, he doesn't have much of a sense of humour, and he carries about him more than a whiff of provincialism'. I was chided for these remarks, as I was also chided when I wrote last September that someone would have to tear up Mr Jaspan's revamped Observer and start again. I am going to indulge myself once more. Mr Hutton's Observer may be a succes d'estime but starved of investment in a very competitive market it won't put on much circulation. Integration with the Guardian will reduce losses by about £11/2 million a year from some £10 million, which will not be enough for the cash-strapped Scott Trust. Unless a last-minute shotgun marriage can be arranged with the almost equally enfeebled Independent on Sunday, I fear that notwithstanding all Mr Hutton's good ideas the paper will end up in the hands of Mohamed Al Fayed or someone else.
Readers may have missed last week the most vicious of the breast wars so far between the Sun and the Daily Star. As is usual on these occasions, the part of Helen of Troy was played by Pamela Anderson, a woman with breast implants. The Daily Star got off to the better start on Monday with a centre-spread colour poster of Miss Ander- son and a four-page pull-out containing a cartoon account of her film, Barb Wire. Miss Anderson also lay across the whole of the front page. The Sun was surprisingly slow off the mark, offering us only a large picture of 'shy Pammi', admittedly in a leather 'jump suit' which made only a half- hearted attempt to conceal her enormous breasts. By Tuesday the Sun had rallied its forces, and gave us one and a half pages of Miss Anderson with the headline: 'Pam posed naked with beach hunk and then took him to bed'. But the Star was still iiir front with two pages devoted to Barb Wire.
Although the Star seemed to reach its apogee on Wednesday with an eight-page pull-out, there were signs that the extraor- dinary stamina of its subeditors was flag- ging. They even put another woman on the front, a rival of Pammi's gone to seed, while the Sun produced another one and a half pages of Miss Anderson. By Thursday, it was apparent that the Star had shot its bolt. The paper's Pammi file was temporar- ily empty, whereas the Sun boasted the `best ever pics', which meant the most revealing. On Friday, the Star was preoccu- pied with its Gold Awards, handed out to tiny tots by no less a person than the Prime Minister, while the Sun romped home with two more pages of pictures of Pam, in my opinion the clear victor.
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