Paul Anderson journalist: THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY

Friday, 26 February 1993

THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY

Tribune, 26 February 1993

Paul Anderson looks at the implications of the spectacular crisis at Mirror Group Newspapers

The rumbling crisis at Mirror Group Newspapers came spectacularly to a head last week as the Labour leadership woke up to the danger that the party might lose the support of the Daily Mirror and its Sunday sister titles - support that it has taken for granted for decades.

Labour's top brass kept quiet last autumn when MGN appointed David Montgomery, a former editor of Today and the News of the World and regarded as a union-busting right-winger, as chief executive. Although reported to be "concerned", they issued only mild statements of regret after he fired two editors, the Mirror's freelance journalists and a string of experienced staffers.

MGN's assurances that Montgomery would not change the political stance of the group's newspapers -he was being employed solely to get rid of over-staffing and waste, according to MGN - apparently convinced Labour's leaders that they had nothing to fear.

No doubt this had much to do with the fact that Montgomery had been brought in by Lord Hollick, the Labour peer who rung MAI Group and a key figure in the Labour leadership's inner circle in the run-up to the 1992 election. Hollick, prevented from taking a majority shareholding in MGN because of his stake in broadcasting, is the brains behind the whole current MGN operation.

But last week the Labour mood turned to one of panic. John Smith publicly expressed worries about the direction of MGN and arranged emergency talks with the board, Last Wednesday, on Neil Kinnock's initiative, 170 Labour MPs signed a House of Commons motion on the subject.

The reason was simple. Montgomery had hired David Seymour, another former Today hack, as "associate editor (politics)" - an appointment that was completely unacceptable to Alistair Campbell, the Daily Mirror's political editor. Campbell had protested and by Wednesday was no longer in his job, although whether he was forced to resign is a matter of argument.

Smith and his colleagues were up in arms because Campbell has been the national newspaper journalist most loyal to the Labour leadership for several years. While other pro-Labour journalists often write stories that embarrass the leadership, Campbell has always presented Labour Party news sympathetically (his critics say sycophantically). To make matters worse, Seymour was the author of some virulent attacks on Kinnock in the run-up to the 1992 election and has a reputation for hostility to trade unions.

A simple case of an enemy of Labour taking over from a friend? Not quite. Seymour has his reasons for distrusting Kinnock, who used to be a personal friend. They fell out in 1986 after Kinnock lent his Welsh cottage to Seymour's then wife, Hilary Coffman (chief press officer in the Labour leader's office) and David Hill (then Roy Hattersley's chief adviser but now the party's director of communications), who needed a bolt-hole to pursue an affair. Seymour is still a little sore.

Campbell, by contrast, is still a personal friend of Kinnock. They went to the ballet together on the evening that Campbell had his run-in with Montgomery over the appointment of Seymour. Kinnock last week defended Campbell in an article in the London Evening Standard.

In response, Seymour says that he is as committed to Labour as Campbell is and that the support for Campbell in the Parliamentary Labour Party is a simple product of Kinnock's personal friendship - a point echoed by George Galloway and six other Labour MPs who last week presented a Commons motion supporting Seymour's appointment. Galloway himself has reasons to dislike Campbell, however, because of his coverage of the affairs of War on Want, the charity that Galloway ran before becoming an MP.

With this colourful story of sex and well-ground axes as a backdrop, the Mirror in an editorial promised undying support for Labour. Montgomery has made it clear that he thinks that Campbell’s closeness to the Labour leadership is unhealthy for any journalist.

The banks, which have owned MGN since the collapse of Robert Maxwell's business empire, have expressed worries that the MGN papers will not make money unless they back Labour. And Hollick has been reported to be at daggers drawn with Montgomery over the papers' political stance.

+++

It is unclear what will happen next, although a showdown of some description seems inevitable. Montgomery's position is vulnerable unless he can persuade the board, on which the banks are dominant, not only that he does not want to drop Labour but that his strategy of cost-cutting and sending the MGN titles further downmarket will soon yield results.

On cost-cutting, he is probably safe: the banks applaud the vigour with which Montgomery has axed "surplus" staff. He is also almost certainly capable of finding a form of words that satisfies the board on the commitment to Labour - at least insofar as that commitment has to do with the Mirror calling for a Labour vote at election time. But when it comes to looking at the broad marketing strategy for the newspapers, which of course includes the backing for Labour, he has a more difficult task.

The MGN tabloids have been engaged in a bitter circulation war for more than 20 years with the two mass-circulation papers owned by Rupert Murdoch, the Sun and the News of the World, both of which have been sold on sex, sensationalism and a sometimes-rabid anti-establishment right-wing populism that affects not to take politicians too seriously most of the time.

The Sun has been one of the great newspaper marketing successes of all time, particularly among younger working-class readers: the Mirror has been on the defensive for most of the circulation war, unsure whether to copy the Sun formula or to take the moral high ground. For the most part, this lack of certainty has led the Mirror into the worst of all possible worlds: trying to do what the Sun does, but doing it half-heartedly and failing miserably both editorially and in circulation terms.

Of course, the Mirror has not simply taken over the Sun’s territory. It has remained pro-Labour, its political and social coverage has remained (until recently) infinitely more serious than its rival’s, and perhaps out of regard for the sensibilities of its ageing readership, it has generally been a little less prurient.

But, with the exception of a brief period under the editorship of Roy Greenslade, when the Mirror asserted a clear identity for itself, the Mirror has copied more and more from the Sun since well before Maxwell bought MGN in 1984. Now Montgomery wants to take this process still further.

Even if he will allow the Mirror to call for a Labour vote at election time, he clearly wants to dilute the Mirror's political content, moderate its campaigning and make it even more of an "entertainment" paper. Under David Banks, with whom he replaced Richard Stott as editor last autumn, the Mirror's coverage of political and social stories has been pitiful. Its tone has become increasingly crass and sensationalist.

Montgomery's problem is that this strategy of inexorable cheapening is not only questionable on the grounds that it represents a final abandonment of what was good about the Mirror, even if it is associated with a "vote Labour" line at elections. It is also bad for sales. Just as under previous regimes that have taken the Mirror downmarket, circulation has continued to plummet since he seized the controls.

Meanwhile, rumours abound that Murdoch is planning to turn Today into a Labour paper to cream off the top of the Mirror market. Belatedly, it seems that the MGN board is realising that there could be something in the notion that there might be some model other than the Sun for a successful popular newspaper.

+++

None of this resolves precisely what sort of relationship the Mirror ought to have with Labour, however. It is clear that it would be a disaster for the Mirror if it ceased to back Labour and that further depoliticisation and trivialisation of the paper will seriously damage its credibility and circulation.

But it is not obvious that the paper will benefit if it is seen to be in the pocket of the Labour leadership. The reputation of politicians is low. If they are seen to be controlling a newspaper’s every move, its credibility suffers.

What's more, Labour would benefit if the Mirror took a more critical attitude to the party leadership. During the Kinnock years, the Mirror became far too close to the Labour leader's office, giving every Labour initiative a fair wind. A little more friendly candour might have shaken some of the comfortable assumptions that lost Labour the last election.

The Mirror will die if it is not a Labour paper. But no one will care if it dies if it has no function apart from parroting the Labour leadership line. Montgomery might be disastrously wrong about the Mirror's marketing strategy but he is right when he says that political journalists should not be too close to the politicians on whose affairs they are supposed to report and comment.

I was born in Edinburgh in 1959, grew up in Ipswich and studied Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Balliol College, Oxford (1978-81) and journalism at the London College of Printing (1982-83).

I spent the 1980s and 1990s working for various radical publications, starting with Solidarity and City Limits.

I was deputy editor of European Nuclear Disarmament Journal (1984-87), reviews editor (1986-91) and then editor (1991-93) of Tribune, deputy editor of New Statesman & Society (1993-96), news editor of Red Pepper (1997-99) and deputy editor of New Times (1999-2000).

From 2000 to 2012 I was a journalism lecturer at City University London. I have worked as a sub-editor on the Guardian since 1999. I wrote a column for Tribune from 1998 to 2014. I now teach at the University of Essex and University Campus Suffolk.

I was editor (with Mary Kaldor) of Mad Dogs: The US raid on Libya (Pluto, 1986), co-author (with Nyta Mann) of Safety First: The making of New Labour (Granta, 1997) and editor of Orwell in Tribune: 'As I Please' and other writings (Politico's/Methuen, 2006). In 2013 Aaaargh! Press published Moscow Gold? The Soviet Union and the British left by me and Kevin Davey as an e-book; it came out as a paperback (with index and footnotes) in autumn 2014.

This archive of my published articles is far from complete, but the gaps are being filled when I have the time to scan in material from the pre-digital age.

WHAT'S HERE

I’ve written for various left and radical publications for a long time. This website is here partly to prove that I existed before the internet, partly to provide a comprehensive CV online, partly to show I was always right all along. (If only.)

What’s here is as it was published in print for the most part, though there are a few pieces that appear as they were before subediting (some of them with suggested headlines that were summarily dismissed). The only things I have edited before posting, very inadequately, are spelling and grammar (though I’ll be sorting everything out into Economist house style as soon as I have time) and a few duff headlines and standfirsts.

So far, I’ve posted nearly everything I can find that I’ve had published since the beginning of 1990, apart from news stories and news features that have no resonance today. So it's largely opinion journalism of one kind or another. There are some pieces still to scan and some missing because I don't have them in any form, but I'll be trying to find them. The record before 1990 is much more fragmentary: there are dozens of pieces still to scan and I've not had a chance to think about what's missing from the vast pile of fading clippings.

Pre-1991 is a mix of features, interviews, leaders and book and theatre reviews, mainly from Solidarity, END Journal, Tribune and Sanity. Most of 1991-93 is Tribune leaders, interviews and features; 1993-96 is mainly New Statesman leaders, interviews and features; 1996-2003 is a mix of columns and features for New Times, Red Pepper, Tribune and Chartist. I was teaching full-time from 2003 to 2011, so nearly everything from that period is a Tribune column.

For copyright reasons, there's nothing here from books apart from one excerpt...

WHAT THEY SAID

This revelatory collection shows how the different sides of Orwell’s imagination interacted… The fascination here is reading Orwell as a working journalist on a single paper. He attended editorial conferences with Nye Bevan (someone should write a play about the encounter), commissioned reviews and made a doomed attempt to publish short stories by organising a competition… Week by week, column by column, his inspirations take shape… His swipes against propaganda, the manipulation of crowds, the squalor of wartime and postwar London life, the absurdities of bureaucracy and the growth of the Great Powers formed the raw material of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Sean French, Independent

This collection is remarkable, not because it contains any of Orwell's greater or more famous essays, but because, 60 years on, his articles are still wonderfully readable… Even when Orwell is using the column to settle one of his many scores with some foe now otherwise totally forgotten, Anderson's thorough footnotes will tell you all you need to know to appreciate Orwell's invective.

Martin Rowson, Tribune

Anderson's informative introduction includes a long digression into the left-wing politics of the period, which some may find heavy going but which supplies the wider context. The footnotes constitute a veritable Who Was Who of British politics and literature in the first half of the last century. Who was Barbara Castle's husband and who her lover? Who were Vernon Bartlett, the Duchess of Atholl, Leonard Merrick? Answers sit conveniently at the foot of the page.

Gordon Bowker, Observer

Anderson's compilation usefully picks out (and edits superbly) a particular thread in Orwell's huge output. Unlike his broadcast commentaries to India, “As I Please” was not concerned with day-to-day events but with broader political thinking: half-inside, half-outside the whale. Warning against the political control of discourse, blanket praise for the Soviet Union and anti-German hysteria, Orwell worked out in plain language the great themes of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. If he abandoned his early hopes that the war would effect a socialist revolution, he never doubted that people would act properly if they only understood.

Kate McLoughlin, Times Literary Supplement

Orwell in Tribune: “As I Please”and Other Writings, 1943-47 ... is compiled and edited by Paul Anderson, a former Tribune editor whose special insights into Orwell's genius make this particular volume the very best on the subject.

Michael Foot, Observer

It is a tribute to the publishers and to Tribune itself that Paul Anderson has been able to edit such a superb compendium of Orwell’s writings at a crucial stage in his life.

Geoffrey Goodman, Camden New Journal

The book gathers together all the pieces Orwell wrote for Tribune... Published as a whole, and in sequence, you can see what Anthony Burgess meant when he wrote of him: "Everything Orwell said had such a stamp of honest sincerity..." As Anderson also points out in his introduction, the collection shows off "one of the greatest practitioners ... of the craft of turning out 800-2,000 words a week". He was Tribune's William Hazlitt, and Orwell in Tribune does much more than re-affirm that fact as well as his genius.

Duncan Hamilton, Yorkshire Post

Neatly edited by Paul Anderson, and good on the contemporary left-wing background, this deserves to sit on the same shelf as Peter Davison's monumental George Orwell: The Complete Works.

D J Taylor, Sunday Times

This book is a collection of all the columns [Orwell] produced between 1943 and 1947... It comes with a lucid and thoughtful account of Tribune and Orwell by former Tribune editor Paul Anderson. It … shows Orwell to have been the best sort of newspaper columnist.

Francis Beckett, Guardian

Even if I had read the pieces before, I profited by reading them again in this attractively presented and well edited collection… Paul Anderson’s notes are not only copious but informative, the work of someone who knows the subject and the period…

Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Spectator

To read the Tribune articles in sequence, and see him taking up points from previous columns, arguing with correspondents and expanding on dozens of subjects is to raise him from the dead, as it were, and have him talking in your living room or – as Orwell would prefer – your local. The easy explanation for the success of Paul Anderson's intelligently edited and beautifully presented collection is that Orwell was a great writer… Yet Orwell's talent flourished in a particular setting, that of a small journal with a tight group of readers... Tribune was a magazine of the Labour left that for a few years in the forties broke the arguments that were to dominate British political life.

Nick Cohen, Democratiya

Evidently Orwell was well equipped, in 1943, to take on the literary editorship of Tribune. He could write interestingly about pretty much anything, and had often appeared in its pages already… The relevant history of the journal is sketched with authority by Paul Anderson in his introduction to this book.

Frank Kermode, New York Review of Books

WHAT THEY SAID

‘Safety First does the government the courtesy of examining its origins and ideas seriously. That inevitably involves criticism. But grown-ups’ respect for Blair and Blairism is much more likely to be encouraged by real analysis than by facile praise. Safety First is not the last word on New Labour, but it is the best so far.’

Roy Hattersley, Guardian

‘Paul Anderson is a former editor of Tribune and a former deputy editor of the New Statesman. Nyta Mann is a former NS assistant editor. The tone and the standpoint is Tribune at its best: rude, factual, lively and down-to-earth English, always provocative, always selective, but crammed full of useful information . . . They remind the triumphalists that the Conservatives killed themselves. Labour could almost certainly have won on bolder policies.’

Bernard Crick, New Statesman

‘The best of the many books now out on Labour. The authors have the ideal background to explain the Labour government, its personalities and policies to the reader . . . Safety First is clearly written and cleverly constructed.’

Nick Cohen, Observer

‘Anybody looking for a primer on Blairism would do well to start here . . . The fact that the authors are on the left, but are sceptical of the Blairite project, gives them distinct advantages in comparing old Labour with the new sort. It means that, although they understand what Mr Blair is about, they are immune from the tendency to gush in awe.’

Economist

‘A well-written and incisive portrait of the key players in the Labour Party and British government . . . a worthwhile, witty and engrossing book.’

Fabian Review

‘Anderson and Mann know a formidable amount about the development of Labour’s policies . . . Safety First is very useful as a reference book . . . a good corrective to the notion that Labour began to modernise when Blair became leader.’

John Lloyd, Times Literary Supplement

‘Written from a critical libertarian left perspective, Safety First will not, I suspect, get Paul Anderson and Nyta Mann invited to many Downing Street cocktail parties. Theirs is a voice from outside the conventional Labour spectrum, and in this stimulating and informative account they treat the official version of the party’s recent history with healthy scepticism . . . They show that serious heterodox thinking — the legacy of independently minded radicals such as George Orwell and Raymond Williams — has survived the left's disintegration.’

Tom Phillips, Contemporary Review

‘A rather intelligent tome . . . In its narrative breadth, it is a useful guide to the politics and personalities of the British government.’

Sion Simon, Spectator

'Safety First is a must.’

Mark Seddon, Tribune

‘Anderson and Mann are well-qualified to analyse the politics of the contemporary Labour Party . . . a highly informative guide book.’

Gillian Peele, Times Educational Supplement

‘A valuable study of the making of the Labour government.’

New Times

‘An intelligent guide to the development of key Labour policies and the intellectual trends that back or oppose them.’

Fortnight

‘Highly informative . . . the most detailed and accessible guide to New Labour yet.’

Labour Left Briefing

‘Safety First does not share Socialist Worker’s political analysis, but the authors have done a great job. It is stunningly up to date. Everyone will benefit from reading it.’

Socialist Worker