MEDIA STUDIES
Why a tiny group of press barons are not behind the newspaper attacks on the Prime Minister
STEPHEN GLOVER
Apart from being bald, enormously rich and a lover of women, Sir James Goldsmith has a few other things in common with the first Lord Beaverbrook. He has founded the Referendum Party, as Beaverbrook found- ed the United Empire Party, in the cause of British nationalism. He is a European pro- tectionist, as Beaverbrook was an imperial one. He feels as much contempt for John Major as Beaverbrook did for Stanley Bald- win. 'No MP espousing the cause of Empire Free Trade will be opposed by a United Empire candidate,' declared the Daily Express on behalf of its proprietor, Lord Beaverbrook, in 1931. If you substitute Euroscepticism' and 'Referendum Party' at the appropriate places, this is close to the threat Sir James has recently issued to Tory MPs.
There is an important difference between the two men. Beaverbrook owned newspa- pers and Sir James does not. He started and folded Now! magazine, and got close to buy- ing the Express titles and at least flirted with buying the Observer. Somehow it never worked for him. When Beaverbrook launched his Party and the cause of imperial protectionism, he controlled the Daily Express (selling some 1,600,000), the Sunday Express and the Evening Standard. He made common cause with Lord Rothermere, who controlled five national newspapers, the foremost being the Daily Mail, which then, as now, sold around two million copies a day.
If there was ever a conspiracy of press barons to impose their will on elected politicians, this was it. Editors, columnists, leader writers and reporters were cogs in a propaganda machine operated by Beaver- brook with Rothermere at his side. Around this time Rothermere described himself, his dead brother Northcliffe and Beaverbrook as being 'great journalist proprietors in quite a different category to any mere jour- nalist, however distinguished'. This was no more than an accurate description of the way things were. Throughout the campaign, journalists danced to the two proprietors' tunes. Bad news was suppressed and the modest successes of the United Empire Party and Empire Free Trade were absurd- ly played up. 'Canada Joins The Empire Crusade' screamed one headline on the front page of the Daily Express a few days before one crucial by-election. In fact an obscure organ called the Alberta Farmer had endorsed the campaign.
After winning a by-election in South Paddington, and splitting the right-wing vote in East Islington so that the Labour candidate won, the United Empire Party crashed to the earth in St George's, West- minster. Duff Cooper, the Baldwin candi- date, beat Beaverbrook's man, Sir Ernest Petter, by 17,242 votes to 11,532. That marked the end of Imperial Preference, and of Beaverbrook's attempts to under- mine Baldwin. One critical blow was Bald- win's famous remark three days before the by-election that 'what the proprietorship of these papers is aiming at is power, but power without responsibility — the prerog- ative of the harlot throughout the ages'. It also seems likely that the new medium of the wireless gave people a much more objective account of events than they received from the Beaverbrook and Rothermere press, and perhaps led them to the conclusion that Baldwin was more to be trusted than were the proprietors.
If Sir James owned newspapers he would no doubt try to manipulate them just as Beaverbrook did. Alas for him, he does not. He depends on the support of titles owned by other men. So far only the Sun has rooted for him, and that newspaper might easily forget its endorsement the week after next. My guess is that no other title will come out wholeheartedly for Sir James to the point of telling readers to vote for him. In the end he will be judged too un-English, too extreme or even too mud- dled in his European thinking. He can, however, hope for the general goodwill of the Tory Press. Now that the Dail), Express has joined the fight, there isn't a single Conservative national morning newspaper which is not robustly Eurosceptic.
Some people imagine that modern pro- prietors are in essence just like Beaver- brook and Rothermere, feeding an anti- European line to their pliant editors, columnists and leader writers. It is not like that at all. Rupert Murdoch and Lord Rothermere and Conrad Black (proprietor of this magazine) are not eaten up with Europe in the way that Sir James Gold- smith is, or Beaverbrook was over Empire Free Trade. They may feel that closer inte- gration with Europe would involve them as businessmen in high social costs, and there- fore the idea should be resisted. Does it go much further? The ferocious anti-Euro- pean line of the Daily Mail is not dictated by Lord Rothermere from his Paris flat. It is largely the voice of Paul Dacre, the news- paper's outspoken editor. Of course, if Lord Rothermere believed that Mr Dacre's effusions were harming his paper he would act, but so long as they seem to accord with readers' prejudices he leaves well alone. For him it is not a matter of conviction, and one of his newspapers, the Evening Stan- dard, was and remains Euro-friendly. Simi- larly, until recently Mr Black employed as editor of the Daily Telegraph my old friend Max Hastings, who is rather pro-Europe.
When the Daily Express went Eurosceptic it was not because the proprietor of that paper decreed it but because the new edi- tor, Richard Addis, thought it would be a good idea. Perhaps he felt the ghost of Beaverbrook at his shoulder, and remem- bered that the crusader who still survives by the paper's masthead was first put there during the Empire Free Trade campaign. Ours is an age in which proprietors have become more commercial, with their eyes more on the bottom line than on the politi- cal horizon, while editors are left to do most of the ideological running. Perhaps we shall see — this will make newspapers more, not less, formidable in the European battle. Sir James Goldsmith arrives on the scene looking like an old-fashioned news- paper proprietor — his only trouble being that he doesn't own any newspapers.
Last Thursday on the front page of the Times — in the 'puff boxes' beneath the masthead — there was a picture of an attractive blonde woman with the headline Tammy In Deep Water'. Readers were invited to turn to page 31 to discover 'how Baywatch star plunges into a film night- mare'. On Wednesday of this week, the front page advertised: 'Ripping Pam Off . I don't know how many people did this; for me the whole point of reading a paper like the Times is to get away from Pammy. On page 35 there was a learned review of two books about ancient Greece. The author was my very old friend Peter Stothard, edi- tor of the Times, the first person to occupy this position since William Rees-Mogg who could have written such a piece. And yet he puts Pammy below the masthead, and two days later the newspaper's front-page head- line refers in tabloid-speak to 'Tug-of-love Zulu Boy'. Perhaps the Times will soon have a 'Battling Granny' headline. Two newspapers co-exist incongruously within the Times. Am I the only irritated reader?
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