THE SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
It is remarkable how George Brown, who, when he was Foreign Secretary, was regarded by Hugh Cudlipp and his Daily Mirror boyos as a load of old rubbish, is now treated seriously by the press and particularly by Cudlipp's IPC (it's not yet really Ryder's). The explanation is obvious. Lord George-Brown, in the felicitous headline of Tuesday's Mirror, "puts the knife in." What George has done is to say, again using the Mirror's headline writer's words, "Wilson is wrong, these WERE our terms for Europe."
If George, or for that matter Roy, had said the opposite and had argued that these terms were not those the Labour cabinet would have accepted, then George, and for that matter Roy, would have been relegated to a most obscure part of the national press. This is what happened to Denis Healey — who, whatever else may be said, is certainly nowadays a more important politician than Lord GeorgeBrown and an altogether more serious fellow than Roy Jenkins. At the end of the Commons four-day debate Labour's Shadow Foreign Secretary said that entry "would be disastrous." The Mirror regarded Healey's important declaration as of no importance, dismissing it in a backpage sentence under the headline "George lashes Wilson."
None of this would normally matter. It is, however, a characteristic example of how the British press, in its pro-European campaign, has long since abandoned all pretence of honest or balanced reporting.
Last Saturday's Telegraph, it is true,
carried an article by Andrew Alexander which gave both sides of the coin: but this,
I fear (and know) was regarded in the highest Telegraph circles as a dreadful mistake.
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