Press
From the Gallery
Bill Grundy
As I slide slowly into the sere and yellow, I notice that daily I am getting dottier. This manifests itself in many ways, but in none more surely than the desire I have to become a parliamentary sketch writer, one of those chaps who sit up in the Press Gallery in the House and write acid things about what is going on below then!: Proof that I am not yet totally dal; is provided by the fact that would only want to do it for 0, year, after which, I know, I woul° be totally daft anyway. The inference is that I rather like the writings of those chaPs who daily do the job for us at the moment. The truth is that I don't. The great days seem to me to have gone. Not all that many years ag° this journal had an uncouth fellovi called Taper whose writings about the chaps in the Chamber brought many of them to the verge of .0 well-deserved apoplexy. Taper was who coined such splendiu nicknames as Sir ShortlY Floorcross which he did – who I see, is soon to become the chairman of the Press Council
may the good Lord preserve us; M'Bulla, the best description ever of the late and great Sir Reginald M.anningham-Buller; Marshal Bigmouth, which was his unlovely Way of referring to our present Beloved Leader; and LieutenantColonel Sir Walter BromleyDavenport (to mention but a few).
But Taper is no more, at least if You subscribe to the view I hold that all in Printing House Square have been dead for some days. So Who is left? A good question, and I glad you asked me that. The short answer is, nobody. No, I tell a lie. There are in fact two Parliamentary sketch writers at yvork today who seem to me to be in the top class. Oddly enough they both have Daily Telegraph associations. One is John 0:Sullivan, the present Telegraph Incumbent, and the other is Andrew Alexander, his predecessor, now with the Daily Mail. Both clearly care about the Palace of West inster (try getting Mr Alexa er away from the place: it Can't b done. I think he lives there c ping out in some cupboard, frytg a few Blue Books for breakfast, and toasting an old Hansard for supper). But besides caring, they also view what goes on with a vcry healthy scepticism and razor-sliarp minds. They are also no resOecters of persons, which seems to me an essential ingredient in the make-up of a good political journalist.
Take Mr O'Sullivan one day last week. He was describing a committee of the whole House discussing amendments to the Finance Bill. The amendments, he said, were "all doomed in advance by the resolute cowardice of the Tory Opposition." The hapless Mr Macmillan, who may be the son of his father but in no other way resembles him, came under Mr O'Sullivan's lash: "Mr Maurice Macmillan, who has the Sisyphean task of helping Mr Robert Carr to understand economics, proposed an amendment to reduce the rate of corporation tax from 52 per cent to 50 per cent. Just in case Ministers might be alarmed at this rash, counter-revolutionary gesture, Mr Macmillan assured the House that he would withdraw it without a vote." Mr O'Sullivan observed that the Labour benches were almost deserted as (because?) Mr Macmillan was speaking: "Only the PaymasterGeneral, Mr Edmund Dell, two backbenchers, and the statutory Whip and PPS were in attendance." Then came the stiletto: "It was the strongest Labour team we have seen for some years."
I don't happen to have a copy of the Daily Mail with me as I write so I can't quote from Andrew Alexander. It doesn't matter. All you have to do is put down four pence on the counter, pick up the paper, and turn to his column. It will be a very bad day indeed if he doesn't make you laugh and think. Whether his victims are provoked into mirth and thought is something I take leave to doubt. I remember that in his Telegraph days Mr Alexander mounted a series of attacks on Mr Michael Stewart so withering that I am convinced Mr Stewart's present air of cringing nervousness is directly attributable to it. And yet it wasn't just savagery for the sake of it. Mr Alexander could spot the flaws in Mr Stewart's position, and thinking that since Mr Stewart was laughingly described as our Foreign Secretary at the time, it could only do good to expose his idiocies, he exposed them, and exposed them in the most amusing way, although I have no doubt that Mr Stewart, like Queen Victoria, was not amused at all.
I am not, of course, saying that only Mr O'Sullivan and Mr Alexander can write amusingly and instructively about Parliament. What I am saying is that too few editors give their men the chance. Which is bad, because nobody reads Hansard every day – not even MPs skimming through it to read their own speeches with modest admiration. Nobody even reads the brief selections of Commons and Lords speeches that appear in the Times, the Telegraph, the Guardian and the FT. In the circumstances, therefore, and assuming you believe that what goes on in the House is actually of any importance at all, the digest provided by a good sketch writer is doing a service to democracy, and to Parliament (which is not at all the same thing). And it therefore follows that if your paper doesn't have a good sketch writer you are not doing that service to democracy. And, more importantly, since a good sketch writer can be-so entertaining, you are not providing your readers with a service they might jump at, if only they were given the chance. And you never know, they might even buy a few more copies, which, in this day and age, would be no bad thing.
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