Letters from London (7 page)

Still, even this Josephine trickery serves to mark
The Times
out from other journals, suggesting some cherished ideal of what it might be or perhaps once was. This notion has been under attack now for some time—internally, thanks to an editorial and marketing course of such zigzaggery that you would have thought the paper was trying to shake readers off rather than attract them, and externally by the rise of one particular rival. From the beginning of modern history, there were only three “quality” dailies in Britain. On the left, the
Guardian;
on the right,
The Times;
a bit farther to the right, the
Daily Telegraph
. That was all there was, and that, conventional wisdom claimed, was all there was room for. Change happened only when newspapers died; they didn’t get born anymore. However, this lethargic cartel was broken in 1986 by the arrival of
The Independent
, a fresh-faced, tycoon-free, unaligned, upmarket, new-technology daily. Old Fleet Street hands tended to discount its chances: Anthony Howard, the former editor of both
The New Statesman
and
The Listener
, and deputy at the time to Tiny Trelford at the
Observer
, widely predicted that the paper would fail, and that its editor would be out within six months. Undeterred, the paper has flourished and is steadily beginning to overhaul its established rivals: the last set of audited circulation figures showed the
Guardian
at 433,530,
The Times
at 431,811, and
The Independent at
415,609. Mr. Howard himself, a rueful smile on his face, now writes a weekly column for
The Independent
.

It’s not just circulation, either.
The Independent
has shaken up newspaper design, with much bolder use of photographs (a move the
Guardian
has followed); it put strong foreign correspondents in place at a time when news values were generally becoming more Anglo-centric, and ran the first stirrings in Eastern Europe on its front page before its rivals did; it teasingly produced a color supplement largely in black-and-white, and offered broad, vivacious obituaries, which contrasted sharply with the turgid necrologies of Sir Tufton Bufton and his ilk to be found in
The Times
. While being “independent,” the new paper has swiftly built up its own establishment, which alarmingly overlaps with that of the old
Times
. A small but pertinent distress signal blew when Graham Greene, inveterate writer of letters to
The Times
and genial provocateur, started addressing his envelopes to
The Independent
instead. In one of his earliest statements after taking office, Simon Jenkins, asked to say which of his immediate rivals he was targeting, named them all, but added, “There is only one paper which, five years ago, put its tanks on our lawn and that is
The Independent?
This is indeed the case, though it has to be said that the tanks went in with hardly a shot being fired, while the front fence hadn’t been mended for years.

And when you get inside this famous stately home you find that the walls are peeling, the linen-fold paneling has been ripped out, and most of the (probably genuine) Old Masters have been sold off Visitors are still happy to pay the entrance charge, but many leave shaking their heads at the way the old place has been run down. All of which makes the appointment of Simon Jenkins thoroughly appropriate not just in fact but also in metaphor. He first made his name in the early seventies as a journalist campaigning to save bits of London from the property developers and helped found an organization called Save Britain’s Heritage. Now he has been handed the biggest heritage-saving job of his career.

Jenkins, who is forty-six, is a cultivated and charming man, dapper in appearance, scrupulously polite yet intellectually steely; very English, while also being married to the American actress Gayle Hunnicutt. He is a writing editor, with an excellent track record: as campaigner; as editor, at thirty-three, of the
London Evening Standard
, and then as political editor of
The Economist
for seven years. Until recently he was a columnist on the
Sunday Times
, while also occupying himself with the sort of great-and-good roles (on the board of British Rail) which normally come later in life. He had resigned from the
Sunday Times
and was just about to join
The Independent
when headhunted by
The Times
. Ironically, he now has to go into daily battle with the paper he nearly joined, convincing himself that it isn’t really as good as he thought, scouting for weaknesses, and giving added credence to any whispers of financial instability.

But does
The Times
still have any symbolic value? Is it still “the newspaper of record”? (And does that phrase, in any case, mean
much? Surely all newspapers aspire to be newspapers of record; the phrase is as redundant as “investigative journalist”) Rather to his surprise. Jenkins says, he finds that the
Times
legend retains its force. “There’s something about British newspaper readers,” he says. “They want there to be a
Times
even if they don’t read it. It’s like wanting the Royal Family to be there, or a rural station to be kept open even if they don’t use it.” Much goodwill remains, though of a rigorous kind:
The Times
doesn’t just have readers; it has fingernail monitors. If a journalist puts “Lady Miranda Spofforth” instead of “Miranda, Lady Spofforth” (or vice versa), stern letters flow from rectory and dower house. After Lord Rothschild’s death recently,
The Times
obituary muddled up his succession, and the rebukes came in like thrown fish knives.

When Jenkins is asked to locate his politics, he describes himself as an “enthusiastic Thatcherite,” applauding her “iconoclasm” and finding her economic policies “wholly salutary.” (Asked about the Rowland-Fayed squabble, he murmurs, “A plague on the whole bloody business,” and judges Minister Ridley’s nonintervention “quite right”) In other respects, he has reservations about Mrs. Thatcher—“I feel much more worrying is her appeal to basic instincts on social questions”—and on education Jenkins says he is “quite left-wing.” (This, by the way, is the British
quite
, meaning “fairly,” rather than the American
quite
, meaning “very”) He is also sophisticated or canny enough to know the dangers of a newspaper being seen as a political camp follower. Cautiously declining to criticize his predecessors, he notes that “The
Times
has been too closely identified with the present incumbent of Downing Street”—a polite way of saying that for some years it has wagged its tail off, rolled delightedly on its back, and brought Mrs. Thatcher her slippers in the evening.

Jenkins’s first influence has been to calm down the strident—some would say vulgar—design of the paper: smaller headlines, no stories in bold, no double rules, less boxing of items, and a “light basement” (i.e., a nonpolitical, human-interest story) on the news pages. There is still a long way to go in terms of substance: he needs to win back some of the good writers
The Times
has lost over the years, or, preferably,
to discover their successors; he needs better feature coverage, friskier arts pages, solider news; he needs to reimpose accuracy and authority. He also knows that there is an inevitable time lag between such things being established and their being spotted and relied upon by readers: for some time, dinner parties will continue to feature that impaling moment for Mr. Jenkins when the agreeable neighbor to his right congratulates him on his appointment and adds smilingly, “But of course I read
The Independent?
Before his job is finished, he will need to delete a few bylines, and there can be little security in knowing that so far each of Murdoch’s four editors seems to have been chosen for virtues that exactly contradict those of his immediate predecessor. Hearteningly, though, Jenkins is the first
Times
editor in recent years to be appointed with an evident brief to take the newspaper back upmarket. The office from which he seeks to do this is a small, windowless hutch in London’s docklands—“the submarine captain’s cabin,” he calls it—whose walls are covered with ancestral portraits of previous editors. History breathes down his neck, and there is no contemporary view: skeptics might find these surroundings singularly appropriate for an editor of
The Times
. But for the moment even political and journalistic opponents are wishing Simon Jenkins well. You don’t have to believe in feudalism to want the local castle to be in good repair.

June 1990

3
Mrs. Thatcher Discovers
It’s a Funny Old World

I
n May 1979, when Margaret Thatcher formed her first Cabinet, she and her ministers sat for the traditional school photo. Twenty-four men, plus one central woman, lined up beneath the dewdrop chandelier, Axminster at their feet, Gainsborough behind them. Twenty-four men trying, variously, to exude gravitas, to look youthfully dynamic, to dissemble serious surprise at being there in the first place. Ten of the two dozen are faced with the first real problem of political office: what to do with your hands when sitting in the front row of an official photograph. Folding your arms, like Keith Joseph, looks a defensive, prim, keep-off gesture. Clasping your hands over your capacious stomach, like Lord Hailsham, looks the boast of a gourmandizer. Grasping the left wrist with the right hand, and allowing the left hand to dangle on the thigh, like Lord Carrington, seems indecisive, semiwet. Half-cupping both hands in front of the groin, like James Prior, is frankly inadvisable. Alternatively, as three of the ten newly appointed front-rank ministers do, you can deposit the hands, with fingers spread, firmly upon the thigh just above the knee. This pose looks crisply businesslike: here we are, ready for action,
keen to clear up the mess left by the last government. So that is one problem solved. The second problem is what to do with the face: that intended smile of quiet confidence might translate as unctuous self-satisfaction, while the plan to appear weighty yet full of vigor often misfires into an expression of high anxiety. Perhaps the best solution is to be as straightforward as possible, and just look very cheerful.

One man who has found the correct lines on both face and hands sits two places to Mrs. Thatcher’s left: a bespectacled figure, gray-haired but youthful, beaming but thrustful—in essence, jolly happy. So he should be: he has managed the conversion from liberal Conservatism to Thatcherism without angst, he was a key figure in drafting the election manifesto, and he has just been appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer. His name is Sir Geoffrey Howe, and for the next eleven years he is to remain the most loyal, the least disliked, and the most uncharismatic of leading Tory ministers. He is to spend four years as Chancellor, six as Foreign Secretary, one and a quarter as Deputy Prime Minister. His loyalty and tenacity can be judged by the fact that when he finally resigned, on November 1, 1990, he was the last but one of the original twenty-five Axminster squatters to depart: only Mrs. Thatcher herself remained of that team. Sir Geoffrey’s longevity might not have surprised observers in 1979. What would have surprised them is that within a month of his departure, and as a direct consequence of it, Mrs. Thatcher herself who had in the meantime won two more general elections and still enjoyed a majority of support within the Parliamentary Party, would be hustled into suburban exile, thus bringing to an end the longest premiership since the second Earl of Liverpool’s unappealing stint of power from 1812 to 1827.