T he news that the circulation of the Sun sank below
three million in December, its lowest since the early Seventies, is a landmark. The moment that the Sun’s circulation overtook that of the Mirror, in May 1978, revealed a big shift in the political and social history of this country. No longer were the aspirations of the working class linked umbilically to the Labour movement, as, since 1945, they had appeared to be. In a conversation I once had with Rupert Murdoch, who has owned the Sun since 1969, he explained the trend. The Sun rose, he said, because, with postwar recovery, working people wanted more freedom and more fun. They owned cars, they could buy much more home entertainment and foreign holidays; they wanted the chance to buy their council houses. The Sun offered them emancipation, while the Mirror offered them a culture of resentment and collectivism. There is a lot of truth in this analysis. Politically, Margaret Thatcher was the beneficiary, and, ever since, party leaders have been at pains to have the Sun on side. The paper — though in reality often doing little more than working out who is winning and then backing him — has wished to assert its kingmaking power. Why the change? Not because another paper is overtaking the Sun. The Mirror now has less than half the sale of the Sun, even in its reduced state. The Daily Mail’s circulation is falling too, though less than that of the other tabloids. It is not even because of a drop in editorial quality, although the Sun is certainly much less exciting than it was in the glory days of Kelvin Mackenzie.
Ithink it is more to do with Murdoch’s point about emancipation. The popular papers have not really adjusted to the aspirations of the second generation of mass ownership. The majority of people now wrestle with complicated issues of borrowing, pensions, insurance; many own shares. They may well work for foreign employers, or work, for long periods, abroad. Roughly half of the children now being born will go to university. Most people use the internet, and it accustoms them to a world in which choice can be very precise, and where they can pursue particular interests in depth. For such people, tabloids may still be amusing, but they do not give them their window on the world, nor do they express their hopes and fears, nor do they give them very useful advice. If you look at the Sun today, it seems, as it never did before, old-fashioned. I do rather miss the days when it was the Sun which got there first — I remember first making the acquaintance of Carla Bruni, now President Sarkozy’s friend, as ‘The Botty That Drove Mick [Jagger] Potty’ — but it will be a liberating thing if politicians no longer have to suck up to the paper. Notice that David Cameron does not bother to prostrate himself before it: that is astute of him.
Although Peter Hain looks gloriously indefensible in the row about donations to his campaign for the deputy leadership of the Labour party, I am utterly sick of people saying that everything in politics should be ‘transparent’. How could it be? Huge tracts of government and party life depend on the privacy, and sometimes the secrecy, of many dealings. Suppose, for example, that a Member of Parliament is thinking of defecting from one party to another. He will naturally have to negotiate with the party he proposes to join, and he will seek assurances about how he will be treated, perhaps even the promise of a job. These discussions will not necessarily be immoral, but they could never take place if they had to be transparent. What about deals over parliamentary votes? Where would they be without the ‘usual channels’? What about the appointment of people to pro Bono posts such as the chairmanship of a national museum? How many good people would submit to a process of selection without some private assurance that they were pretty likely to get it? To pretend that public life has no need for opacity is — transparently — dishonest.
This column has been consistently irritable about the compulsory recycling to which all households are now subject. Convenient weekly collection by paid staff has been replaced by an inconvenient, fortnightly process in which the council taxpayer has to do more work for no less cost. There is another small twist to this: most of the binbags now available for holding one’s rubbish are themselves recycled, and therefore burst.
TV Licence (continued). I have now received an Official Warning at my flat in London, where I do not have a television licence because I do not have a television. In its fiercest letter so far of the many that it has sent to me, TV Licensing, the body responsible, tells me that ‘Enforcement officers have been authorised by us to visit your address ... to interview you under caution’. The Official Warning ‘strongly’ advises me to buy a licence ‘to avoid a court appearance’. It makes no allowance for the possibility that I do not have a television. Many readers have written to me about such letters, and they point out that these threats are, in their experience, empty. That does not, they rightly add, make them better. What it shows is that the authorities are perfectly happy to frighten the innocent as well as the guilty, because it involves little cost to themselves. Bureaucracies automatically behave badly if empowered to do so. God knows what it will be like when the equivalent of TV Licensing is empowered to chase up the identity cards of 60 million people.
AConservative peer, who claims to have the deference natural to a boy from a minor public school, tells me that his fellows have adopted the (now defunct) Eton custom of ‘capping’ David Cameron when he walks past. The action, a vestige of the time when boys had caps or hats, involves raising the right finger as if to remove the imaginary headgear to one in authority. It reminds me of a junior bishop who fell on his knees to the late Bishop Mervyn Stockwood when he spotted him in Boulestin’s restaurant and kissed his episcopal ring. ‘That was very respectful,’ said his lunch companion. ‘Oh,’ said the bishop, ‘I only did it to mock him.’ In the latest Sunday Times, Andrew Davies, the man who keeps shoving explicit sex into television versions of Jane Austen, wrote an article praising her because, in her novels, ‘everything works ... all the details are accurate’. As a generalisation, this is true. But Davies goes on to say, ‘If the apple trees are in blossom, she will make sure we are in the right month’. Famously, this is not so. In Emma, the Donwell picnic scene takes place ‘at almost Midsummer’ i.e., late June, and the view discloses the ‘orchard in blossom’. This is impossible in late June.
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