Knocking the Times
From Dr John A. H. Wylie
Sir: So great is my regard for The Spectator that I grieve when I feel compelled to take up my pen to adminster a rebuke.
It really does not become a uniquely venerable and distinguished periodical, to which you, sir, have in recent years brought yet brighter lustre and broader profundity, to castigate the only daily newspaper in the same class. Please, I beg you, desist from your repeated, and I'm afraid sometimes spiteful, abuse of the Times. Only this week (September 2) you describe Mr ReesMogg meaninglessly but presumably pejoratively as ' episcopal ' when, his brilliance as a journalist aside, it is abundantly clear that he is gentle, unassuming, courteous and sincere. Anyway, many of my best friends are bishops! For well over a century no newspaper in the English language has approached, let alone surpassed, the Times in sustained excellence and integrity; certainly not the quasi-literate and editorially bigoted Guardian, to whose correspondents the egregious Mr William Hardcastle invariably turns when he seeks support for his hackneyed views. It would be tedious and spatially wasteful to list the Times newspaper's merits to all its lesser contemporaries quaquaversally but it is perhaps germane to recall that twice week its pages are provocatively illusioned by your own erstwhile but still bravely incandescent ' Taper.'
It would be absurd to maintain that the Times is always on the side of the angels. As Mrs Pamela Vandyke Price's recent display of bad manners in your own columns proved, all great institutions have their lapses, which are usually silly, but may sometimes be dangerous. In retrospect the editorial aegritude of Geoffrey Dawson seems incomprehensible but since the Munich Agreement and the policy, that nurtured it enjoyed the wholehearted support of the vast majority of the British people, that malady did not prove fatal. The life-saving volte-face occurred in the nick of time. That the myopic and uncritical support currently rendered by the Times to the whole odious gallimaufry of the Common Market will prove similarly evanescent, I do not for one moment doubt. Not even the exhibition of all its authority and persuasiveness has enabled the latter-day ' Thunderer ' to convince its intelligent, as opposed of course to its rich, readership of the merits of the EEC. Moreover, this time conspicuously absent is any enthusiasm whatever amongst a better informed and more discriminating British public. A collective Samson, which, if tied blindfold and unwilling to a sustentaculum of the Community, will swiftly and surely encompass the destruction of that shoddy artefact of greed and incompetence.
John A. H. Wylie 9a Portland Place, Kemp Town, Brighton
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