Devaluation of . . .
DEVALUATION is spreading. First the pound, then the franc, now the Times. The paper's economic pundit, Anatole Kaletsky, always eager to urge devaluation on others, will experience its consequences at first hand. Austerity is supposed to be one of them, and he can write another into his Budget forecast. Northcliffe, when he con- trolled the Times, devalued it from three- pence to one penny. He wanted to wake up an encrusted management at Printing House Square — the black friars, as he called them, greybeards, muddlers, monks, giant tortoises. As a commercial gambit, it worked, but Northcliffe had a better idea earlier. When Arthur Walter, scion of the founding family, asked him what he would do with the Times, his answer was comprehen- sive: 'Make it worth threepence, Mr Walter.'
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