Coming from the wars of words
Alan Watkins
EDITOR: AN INSIDE STORY OF NEWSPAPERS by Max Hastings Pan, £20, pp. 608, ISBN 0333908376 It was 1971, at the Dudley Hotel, Hove, late at night during a Tory conference, and Sir (as he then wasn't) Max Hastings and I were discussing editorship. He was then working for the BBC. Specifically, we were talking about the editorship of the New Statesman. There was discontent there about the tenure of R. H. S. Crossman. It was felt he could not last much longer (he was to depart next year). Max thought Anthony Howard would be an excellent successor, as, indeed, he turned out to be. For himself, he was uninterested in such baubles. `What I really like doing,' he said — I remember his words exactly — is sleeping under an Israeli tank, looking up at the stars.'
This did not seem to me to be the ideal way to spend the night but I refrained from saying so, as it must have been obvious. Max, by contrast, was even then a leading graduate of what I call the Hemingway School of Journalism. Certainly journalism of some kind was in the blood. His father, Macdonald Hastings, was one of those allpurpose writers who prospered modestly in the 1950s and became quite famous, in a small way of business, as an early television reporter. His mother, Anne Scott-James (to whom this book is dedicated), was even more highly regarded in the trade as one of the leading women columnists of the day. She decamped with the recently widowed Osbert Lancaster, leaving Max with his father. His paternal grandfather had been editor of the Bystander.
While Sir Max has never made any attempt to conceal this inky background — on the contrary, he is rightly proud of it — the impression he gives is of a member of the minor gentry, affable but irascible, happier with his dogs and his guns than with politicians and proprietors. True, he belongs to that distinctly metropolitan club. Brooks's, which plays a prominent part in this narrative. He uses that old Tory watering-hole Wilton's as a canteen (Tony Blair, he tells us, did not like the place at all). But his heart, he implies, is somewhere else all the time, either with the pheasants or with his books of military history.
There is a previous memoir, Going to the Wars. This one is about his decade as editor of the Daily Telegraph. It does not include his subsequent spell as editor of the Evening Standard, though that is referred to briefly. This is, I think, a pity. But the Telegraph period has, as he says, a beginning, a middle and an end; and authors must be allowed to write their own books rather than those that other people want them to write.
The story begins with an approach to edit the Telegraph from Andrew Knight, formerly the successful editor of the Economist, by now the emissary of the Canadian financier Conrad Black. Mr Knight, Sir Max tells us, had always possessed in the highest degree the ability to make the mighty feel safe in his hands, comfortable that he was on their side ... I had spent 20 years as a journalist learning to treat the representatives of wealth and power with respect but without deference. Andrew cherished an inherent regard for the possessors of riches, nicely graduated in accordance with scale. Conrad Black featured at about a median point. Now Rupert Murdoch [to whom Mr Knight was subsequently to transfer his allegiance, much to Mr Black's indignation] stood near the top, up there with the Aanellis and the Fords.
The assiduous — and, it must be said, somewhat sinister — Mr Knight had helped Mr Black to acquire control of the Telegraph group previously owned by Lord Hartwell, formerly Michael Berry, and the rest of the Berry family. They were themselves descended from two Welsh businessmen and brothers, Lord Kemsley of the Sunday Times and Lord Camrose of the Telegraph. Lord Hartwell was the possessor of a life peerage bestowed on him by Harold Wilson. Paradoxically — or `ironically', as journalists write these days — Mr Black's opportunity came through Hartwell's attempt to modernise his paper. He got himself into debt, and the City would not stump up the cash to get him out of it. This preliminary story is well and lucidly told by Sir Max, though seekers after further and better particulars should consult Duff Hart-Davis's The House the Berrys Built (1990).
Where Sir Max seems to me to go wrong is in his analysis of the paper which Mr Black acquired and of which he became editor. Of course, it was always a Conservative paper, but it was by no means unquestioning in its support. After all, it was the Telegraph that published Donald McLachlan's article on the smack of firm government which was the beginning of the end for Anthony Eden. Nor was Hartwell himself noticeably on the right of the party to which he gave his general support. If anything, it was the other way about. He had been an early admirer of Harold Macmillan's The Middle Way and had, indeed, himself written a less well known work along the same lines. He saw himself less as an originator of policy than as a superior news editor, arriving early, leaving late, despatching from his eyrie on the fifth floor little notes to the hated managing editor Peter Eastwood (misnamed 'Donald' by Sir Max) in which he would draw attention to stories in other papers that the Telegraph had missed. The editor, for his part, ran the leaders and the leader pages. The old Telegraph was as balanced as the 18th-century constitution.
Sir Max would say that this was precisely the trouble. The paper was just as out of tune with the times. Indeed, it is the theme of his book. It is about how he transformed a rickety old structure into a building fit for the 1980s. Nor was he alone in the enterprise. He is generous to those who assisted in the construction: Trevor Grove, Nigel Wade, Neil Collins and, most of all, the indispensable Don Berry and the terrifying Veronica Wadley. But as an account it is vulnerable. It will not do at all.
For another to whom Sir Max pays tribute is William Deedes, for his loyalty, his commonsense and his knowledge of politics which, as Sir Max admits on several occasions, the new editor conspicuously lacks. And yet this is Sir Max's immediate and long-serving predecessor, the very same person who is supposed to have brought the paper to the condition which he is now in the process of helping to change. The people who typify this former and lamentable condition are T. E. ('Peter') Utley and Michael Wharton (Teter Simple'). Sir Max does not regard them as the great journalists they undoubtedly were but as embarrassments to be got rid of as soon as he decently can. And, in due course, they take themselves off. He seems incapable of distinguishing between Utley's brand of Church-and-State Toryism and the laissez-faire Conservatism in the old leader columns which owed little to Deedes and everything to Colin Welch, who, astonishingly, goes unmentioned in the entire narrative.
There is throughout a confusion between modern and progressive political views such as Sir Max espouses — a friendliness towards Europe, a hostility towards Ulster Unionism — and the creation of an up-todate newspaper. As Sir Max recognises. Mr Black thought he was getting something different: not a doctrinal Conservative, certainly, but one built on lines inclining more to the Right. In this he resembled the Fellows of Peterhouse, Cambridge, who chose Lord Dacre as their Master under the impression he was a Tory but found themselves with an Enlightenment Whig on their hands instead. Likewise, Mr Black found himself with a one-nation Conservative who had little time for those Thatcherite pundits whom he so much admired. Nevertheless, Sir Max tells what is really a funny story with great good humour and has produced an outstanding example, of which he can be proud, of that minor literary form, the Fleet Street memoir.
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