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Of all the irrelevancies, the most ridiculous, to my mind, was the eager exploitation of Mr. Hogg's hasty aside to a heckler about adultery. By some miracle of journalistic levitation, the people who run the Daily Mirror decided (or pretended) that a few words spoken to a provoca- tive interrupter provided the main political news for four days. Mr. Cecil King, the chairman of the newspaper, who boasts of being more closely in touch with public opinion than other news- paper proprietors, mtist feel a certain contempt for the people whose minds he professes to understand. It is hard to believe that he per- sonally attached any cosmic significance to Mr. Hogg's rash retort, yet day after day his paper swept all else aside to inflate the trifling matter to sensational dimensions. Of course, what Mr. Hogg said was silly, but I am baffled at the thought of self-respecting journalists regarding it as fit material for page after page of a national newspaper's most prominent space at the height bf a general election. When the country is trying to make up its mind about the political course to be followed in the next five years, this is about as helpful as the activities of the political Mods and Rockers who were drowning the parties' speakers. Perhaps Mr. George Brown (who believes himself to be unfairly marked down as a target by the Tory press) would agree 0 with me.
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