LONDON BELONGS TO WHOM?
The press: Paul Johnson
surveys the first week of the evening Armageddon
THE debut of the London Daily News must be accounted a successful launch and if, as its management claim, it sold 330,000 of its first issue, it is doing well. Thirty years ago the total London evening sale was 1.5 million, but television has steadily eroded the market and until last week the Evening Standard, as a monopoly paper, was making good money on half a million (it claimed 580,000 on the day of the launch). What I liked about the LDN was that there was plenty to read in it, both news and features. The universal com- plaint about the Standard in recent years, especially since it lost its competition, was that it was a poor read, barely ten•minutes' tube-browsing. The threat of the LDN brought a marked improvement, at any rate in quantity, and last week both papers were providing ample reading matter.
The most imaginative stroke of the new paper was to bring back the short story (once a feature of the old Evening News). That would have evoked the warm approv- al of Charles Dickens, founder-editor of the Daily News in its original incarnation. The short story, whether practised by heavyweights like Kipling or Dickens him- self, society entertainers like Somerset Maugham, or specialists like Conan Doyle and M. R. James, was once one of the glories of English literature and, equally important, the delights of readers. It has declined catastrophically in the last 50 years simply for want of outlets. I am sure there is no lack of talent. If editors will provide the space, and reasonable pay, the stories will be forthcoming, particularly since we are enjoying a commercial revival of the novel. I hope the LDN's gesture will be the beginning of the trend.
Providing more reading-matter, how- ever, will not in itself enable either the LDN or the Standard to emerge strongly from the present battle. Quality is all- important. The first thing both papers need is some heavyweight, inside-track political comment, of the kind Randolph Churchill used to provide for the Standard a genera- tion ago. A London evening, or rather the one which the 'political nation' decides is important, occupies a wonderfully pri- vileged role in the press, at any rate when Parliament is sitting, because virtually everyone who is involved in politics reads it, or will read it if properly catered for. Since Brian Walden left the Standard for the Sunday Times, there has been a politic- al vacuum in the London evening field, made more obvious by the retirement of its first-class political correspondent, Robert Carvel.
It is wishful thinking to imagine that writers who have achieved a name in other areas can be turned overnight into effective columnists writing about public events. All they do is reveal their ignorance and produce saloon-bar judgments. Frankly, I do not want to read Hunter Davies dis- coursing on President Reagan, or Beryl Bainbridge holding forth on anything. The LDN seems to be adopting this soft-centre policy too. In the whole of its first week there was no political feature worth its space. I doubt if many Londoners want to hear more from Ken Livingstone, whose view was wholly predictable and, for many, repellent. Nor, I suspect, will they want to read yet another column from Julian Critchley, who appears everywhere else. What I would really like to see is the LDN creating a new political commentator, pre- ferably someone under 30, who has studied parliamentary politics closely but who can speak for those who have never known anything except the Thatcher era. I look to the new paper's mastermind, Charles Win- tour, who has a splendid record of dis- covering young talent (especially women writers).
The other needful quality in a London paper is sophistication. Its voice must be dernier cri. This can be expressed in all kinds of ways — in comic strips, for example, much more important (especially in an evening paper) than many press pundits suppose. The Standard has a for- midable rack of strips which will be hard to match, but I rather like the LDN's first venture, 'Soho Square', dealing with grotesque advertising folk, which has ex- actly the ultra-metropolitan touch I mean. The books pages, too, have definite bite, with a much-needed regular spike for deflating gaseous reputations (the first victim, John Fowles, was well-chosen). But in the end, an evening's reputation for being hard-edged smart depends on its main talk-column, which ought to receive more attention from the editor than any- thing else except the front page. The Standard 'Londoner's Diary' has been lacklustre since the departure of Geoffrey Wheatcroft, and the LDN's 'Eye' — too far back in the paper anyway — also lacks glitter. It's a reflection on the other two papers that the sharpest column, at pre- sent, is the 'Back Page' carried by the resurrected Evening News, which has been published mainly as a spoiling operation, to wrong-foot the LDN and confuse poten- tial readers.
We are now beginning to take new launches for granted, a healthy reflection on how far and fast expectations have changed in the national newspaper world since Eddy Shah first took on the unions. But readers, as it turns out, are no easier to come by than they ever were — as the decision to slash the LDN's price by half suggests. After a year of re-jigs and col- ossal sums of money, Today is only selling 295,000. The Independent, which had a highly successful launch and has received endless accolades, is down to not much over 250,000. It will soon, I suspect, be looking for more cash and may even be up for grabs — a very tasty property for a really rich man. The war between the Standard and the LDN may well be deter- mined by the supply of small ads. But that in turn demands a victory for readers, especially quality ones. You can't beat news in a newspaper, but after news comes political punch. Today is stagnant because it has none and the Independent is faltering because its punch is uncertain. The Lon- don evenings rightly set great store by `ratings' pages and the like. But I suspect the contest between Bob Maxwell and Lord Rothermere will depend most of all on whose paper develops a strong political character. That would have been the view of Lord Beaverbrook, keenly watching the fight, no doubt, from sulphurous regions.
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