Press
Hugh Jenkins gets it wrong
Bill Grundy
If You've got a moment or two to spare, I'll tell you all I know about Hugh Jenkins. He's sixty-six, he's g°t a grey pointed beard, he's the Labour•MP for Putney, he's Minister for the Arts, and he has a habit of making daft remarks. The daftest for some time came last week. He was speaking at Peterborough Where getting on for three or four People turned out to hear him. Inspired, doubtless, by the size of his .audience, Mr Jenkins began to deliver himself of remarks the like of Which haven't been equalled for denseness since the death of the late lamented Winnie the Pooh. Being the Minister for the Arts, he. naturally concerned himself With the press, that Black Art about Which he knows nearer to nothing than any other human being. Since N'I.r Jenkins is an MP this naturally did not disqualify him from speaking. The national press, he observed With a wag of his beard, "has achieved an extraordinary combination of technical efficiency with total idiocy." Now there are several things wrong with that statement. Firstly, 1?Ut doubtless, in Mr Jenkins's head, east important, is that it is F pletely false. The national press Is not technically efficient. It is, as I nave been boring you to death by Saying so often in this column, very inefficient. It uses machines and Methods that William Caxton ould have laughed at. (Indeed, I nave little doubt that the whitehaired Mr Briginshaw of NATSOPA
and the slightly less venerable Mr Keys of SOGAT also laugh at them, but not in front of the management, or else they might actually one day have to get around to admitting how out of date they are.) Nor is the press totally idiotic. It hurts me to have to say it, but it isn't. Like most human beings and Mr Jenkins, it is not exactly perfect, but it manages to survive. Fairly frequently the press does something rather good. It exposes scandals. What was Mr Jerikins's party doing — what
• is it doing even now — about the sort of corruption within its ranks that Mr Eddie Milne spoke up about? Would the man Poulson be where he is now if the press hadn't started sniffing the air and not liking what it smelt? Would those thalidomide parents be in a position to afford the care their unfortunate kids need if the Sunday Times hadn't done something about it? Where was Mr Jenkins during that lot? Studying the technical efficiency and total idiocy of the press?
Mr Jenkins, having delivered himself of that inefficient example of total idiocy, then went on to expound his own version of the conspiracy theory of history. This, you will remember from the spoutings of thousands of other Labour twits, goes something like: the press is privately owned, therefore it is against Labour politicians by definition, since Labour politicians (at least in public) are against the private ownership of anything. In what was doubtless intended to be an amusing aside — but failed — Mr Jenkins put it in his own inimitable — thank God — words. He said, "To be popular with the press, Labour" people have to reject socialism or die. Aneurin Bevan, now universal
ly praised, was once scorned with a vitriolic intensity today reserved for this year's scapegoat, Tony Berm."
On the assumption that by Tony Berm, Mr Jenkins means Lord Stansgate, I feel able to tell him one or two home truths. Mr Aneurin Bevan, God rest his soul, is not now universally admired. Lord Stansgate is not this year's scapegoat Nor is he a latterday Mr Bevan, who had his pottinesses but was never as plain silly as Mr Benn daily proves himself to be. And if Mr Bevan is less attacked than he used to be, this could have something to do with the fact that he is dead. And if Mr Benn is attacked more than he used to be this could have something to do with the fact that he is living. And in any case the idea of newspaper editors getting together and deciding who is going to be this year's scapegoat is so funny that only a man as out of touch as Mr Jenkins would fail to twig the joke.
However, Mn Jenkins has got to be treated fairly, and one must therefore admit that somewhere in the whirl of his words there was something trying to get out. By reading even more of his turgid rubbish, I've managed to find out what it is. British radio and television have had "a concept of responsibility imposed on them by Act of Parliament." The press hasn't. But it ought to have. The last five words are mine, not Mr Jenkins's, but somehoiethey sound around the empty chambers of my skull in Mr Jenkins's accent.
I personally do not think that politicians know a great deal about concepts of responsibility, at least not enoughrto impose them on the press. And if the Acts of Parliament that radio and television are bur
dened With are anything like what Mr Jenkins thinks the press should be governed by, then you'd all better go out and buy a piggy bank now to put your pennies in, because you soon Won't have any papers to spend them on. The press, moderately free, moderately good, moderately maddening, and always moderately improving, will have 'died. Perhaps that is what Mr Jenkins wants. There was once a war about Jenkins's ear. Perhaps we should start another one about Jenkins's mouth.
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