Ian Aitken

With that perceptive but strangely innocent eye which has served him so well as a columnist, Sir Peregrine Worsthorne recently expressed shock and astonishment that an editor of the London Evening Standard had turned down the editorship of the Times in favour of succeeding Sir David English at the Daily Mail. As a boy, wrote Sir Perry, he had wanted to be editor of the Times more than anything in the world. So when Mr Paul Dacre picked Rothermere’s Daily Mail in preference to Rupert Murdoch’s Times, Worsthorne’s first reaction was that it was like choosing to be King of Ruritania instead of King of England.

Denis Healey, a politician who long ago established that the hobnailed boot can be wielded with just as much delicacy and skill as the épée, once said of David Owen that the Good Fairy who attended his birth had generously bestowed upon him the three qualities of charm, intelligence and good looks. He is then reported to have added: ‘What a pity that the Bad Fairy made him a shit.’

At the height of one of the many leadership crises in the Labour Party during the Fifties or early Sixties, the Crossbencher column of Lord Beaverbrook’s Sunday Express described the young Harold Wilson lying in his sleeper on the night train from Liverpool and listening to the wheels beating out the rhythm: ‘It could be me, it could be me, it could be me.’ It was a delightful conceit, wholly in tune with Beaverbrook’s injunction to his journalists to tell the story, whatever it might be, through the people involved. It suffered, however, from one defect. As Mr Wilson pointed out next morning, he hadn’t travelled to London by train. He’d made the journey by car.

Practitioners of the black arts of journalism will universally acknowledge that the most accurate as well as the funniest portrayal of their profession is Evelyn Waugh’s novel, Scoop. No one who has ever worked for a paper with a baronial proprietor could fail to recognise Lord Copper and his bevvy of fawning executives. Equally, anyone who has ever been a foreign correspondent will admit that Waugh’s dreadful pack of war reporters is all too realistic. Indeed, the book has given journalists a phrase which they have adopted as their own. ‘Up to a point, Lord Copper,’ we say to each other whenever one of our number is getting the wrong end of the journalistic stick.

My first paid job after leaving Oxford with what we used to call a ‘good’ second (did you ever meet anyone who got a ‘bad’ second?) was as a research assistant at the London School of Economics. My duty was to seek out suitable material for inclusion in a volume of documents illustrating the development of Labour Party policy from 1900 to 1945. A major source of such material was, of course, the speeches delivered by leading Labour politicians in the House of Commons. So one of my tasks was to wade through Hansard for the entire period, looking for significant utterances which could be held either to have changed Labour Party policy or to have influenced its creation. Sitting in the LSE library with the bound volumes, I developed a subliminal ability to spot a possible candidate for the book while my mind wandered to other things. A little bell would go off in my head, and I would be jerked back from daydreams about the girl at the next desk.