MEDIA STUDIES
A look in the Mirror shows there's nothing Independent about Monty and his Charlie
STEPHEN GLOVER
Last Sunday morning I whooped with joy. There was a story in the Sunday Times that Mirror Group Newspapers was 'on bid alert' as a consequence of being eyed up by some unidentified predator. Monday came and my hopes were dashed. Sources at Mir- ror Group denied there was any particular alert. Well, perhaps they are not to be believed. But none of the obvious suspects appears about to pounce. Independent Newspapers of Ireland says that it is per- fectly happy with its existing relationship with Mirror Group and has no intention of making a bid. So that seems to be that.
And yet I can't help wondering how long the regime of David Montgomery, chief executive of Mirror Group, will last. Mr Montgomery has been in his present post for three and a half years, having previously edited Today and the News of the World. In some respects the tenure of this strange, dour Ulsterman has been a success. After the disastrous Maxwell years, Mr Mont- gomery and his colleagues have patiently put the company back together again. Prof- its have advanced year by year. Mirror Group has acquired an interest in Scottish Television, launched its own 'tabloid' Live TV and finds itself running the Independent, in which it has a 43 per cent stake. Mr Montgomery is in the process of building a media empire, though he himself has a tiny shareholding in it.
The more you look at Mirror Group, the more it is clear that almost everything which has been achieved is the result of cost-cutting. Tony O'Reilly, chairman of Heinz and, as chairman of Independent Newspapers of Ireland Mirror Group's partner in the Independent, says that he has never met a newspaperman better at ham- mering down costs than Mr Montgomery. This is high praise coming from such a man as Dr O'Reilly, who once saved Heinz $1.5 million a year by eliminating the back label from the tomato ketchup bottle. But there comes a time when you can't bang down costs much more. Mr Montgomery appears to have reached that point with the Mirror titles and the People, and to be fast approaching it at the Independent, which Mirror Group runs on a day-to-day basis as though it were a wholly owned subsidiary.
Where is the evidence of editorial flair? It might be thought that whatever other problems Mr Montgomery might have, the Daily Mirror would at least be thriving as the flagship of the group. It is not so. In October 1992, the month before Mr Mont- gomery was catapulted to his present post, the Daily Mirror sold an average of 2,751,249 copies. By last month, circulation had fallen to 2,514,427, which is close to a post-war low. During the same period the sales of the Sun rose from 3,572,450 to 4,073,601. Mr Montgomery is now on his third Daily Mirror editor, an engaging fel- low by the name of Piers Morgan, who pre- viously edited the News of the World, Mr Montgomery's old alma mater. Before this, Mr Morgan wrote a showbiz column for the Sun.
He has chutzpah. His model seems to be Kelvin MacKenzie, former editor of the Sun, who has oddly fetched up at Mirror Group where he dreams up such daft ideas as talking bunnies and topless darts for Live TV. Mr Morgan, in a gesture worthy of his old master, recently offered Darius Guppy £75,000 to get out of jail early if he would spill the beans for the Mirror, though this reckless bargain was countermanded by Mr Montgomery. He has tried to introduce a sense of fun, though sometimes the tone is childishly maladroit, as was the case when the Mirror recently 'splashed' on its front page a photograph of a naked James Hewitt hanging from the rafters, a rat drawn over his genitals. You could say that the Daily Mirror is growing ever more like the Sun, only a poorer man's copy. Though it toes the Labour Party line, it does so out of a feeling of duty rather than a sense of passion. I don't believe that Mr Morgan, any more than Mr Montgomery, is either New Labour or old.
It is the same at the Independent. As the Daily Mirror has been drained of its old convictions, so this poor, crippled newspa- per has been emptied of almost anything it used to stand for. Once it was famous for its photography, its foreign coverage and avoiding trivial royal stories. Now its pic- 'It's comfortable enough, but it's miles from the nearest bus-stop.' tures are unremarkable, its foreign cover- age no better than average and its obses- sion with royal trivia indistinguishable from everyone else's. Almost every day there is a story on the front page which is designedly anti-Government but carries little authority or conviction. This is evidently how Charlie Wilson, the acting editor who is the servant of any ideological master, believes an inde- pendent newspaper should behave. Mr Wil- son is a mate of Mr Montgomery's and, in his boss's best style, has just sacked over 40 journalists. The Independent, which even before these cuts was the lowest-cost broadsheet, no longer has the editorial resources to take on its rivals.
I have often wondered why Mr Mont- gomery ever wanted to control the Indepen- dent. It wasn't his sort of paper. Did he want to become respectable? Or did he in some way wish to change something which he didn't like? By no conceivable journalis- tic measure has he been successful. The paper has lost sales and reputation. It has also cost Mirror Group an enormous amount of money. I have been given a copy of the Independent's accounts for the period 27 September 1993 to 1 January 1995. The paper and its Sunday sister lost £50,781,000 in this period, during most of which Mirror Group was a 30 per cent shareholder. Even after the last round of cuts, the two Inde- pendent titles are still losing at least £10 million a year. The point is that Mr Mont- gomery knows no other game than cost- cutting, which in these circumstances is liable to weaken these papers to the point of extinction.
As I write, Mirror Group is about to reveal its results for 1995, which may be less good than the £84.7 million profit achieved in 1994. If I were one of Mirror Group's large investors — Phillips and Drew Fund Management or Mercury Asset Management or Lazard Investors or Fideli- ty — I would ask how much more money the Independent is going to lose and when, if ever, the fatuous Live TV will become profitable. I would question whether the company has made any inspired strategic decisions since Mr Montgomery took over. I would also want to know about the long- term circulation trends of the Daily Mirror. Since, happily, I am not an investor, I shall restrict myself to mourning the decline of the Mirror and, more particularly, the Inde- pendent, and to hoping that a real newspa- perman may still rescue them.
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