Anthony Howard

Wednesday

Anthony Howard

Mischief and mayhem

From our UK edition

Henry Fairlie was the journalistic idol of my youth. I met him, I think, first in 1955 when he had just started writing his Political Commentary in The Spectator — and it was on the mischievous appeal of those early columns that we had invited him to come and address the Oxford University Labour Club. Certainly at the time he represented a total breath of fresh air in the then somewhat musty world of political journalism. In the Observer the part-time novelist Hugh Massingham may have blazed a new narrative trail, with his ability weekly to follow E.M. Forster’s advice and tell a story; but it was Fairlie, with his buccaneering streak and instinct for irreverence, who completed the revolution in the coverage of British politics.

Saturday

Anthony Howard

A diffident pioneer

From our UK edition

Now Saga’s agony aunt, Katharine Whitehorn, has for more than 50 years been a trail-blazer in British journalism. Starting out as a member of the talented writing team on Picture Post, she went on (stopping off only briefly at Woman’s Own) to found the celebrated ‘Roundabout’ column in The Spectator before being scooped up by David Astor’s Observer. There, under one guise or another, she spent a remarkable 36 years until falling foul of some trendy young fly-by-night installed by the Guardian in 1996. If never perhaps the most renowned female journalist of her day, she was arguably the most distinguished — the pioneer who pushed the frontiers of women’s pages forward and turned newspapers into a unisex trade.

Friday

Anthony Howard

Diary – 30 September 2005

From our UK edition

It was that faintly implausible radical and revolutionary, Clem Attlee, who once likened the Labour party annual conference to ‘a Parliament of the movement’. And so, indeed, it used to be before our current Great Helmsman and his chums on the central committee put an end to all that. The party may still make its autumnal trip to the seaside but all it does when it gets there is to lay on a pageant or present a TV carnival. Worse than that, it is now essentially a commercial undertaking, with even journalists — below the rank of editor or political editor — required to pay for the privilege of being allowed into the hall to listen to the leader’s speech.

Saturday

Anthony Howard

An ersatz Boston Brahmin

From our UK edition

The ‘campaign biography’ has become a familiar enough phenomenon in any American presidential year. So it should be said straight away that this book, with the slightly teasing adjective in its subtitle, is in no way representative of that genre. Far from being a dazzling encomium of the qualities of the Democratic candidate in this autumn’s presidential election, it offers a cool (and at times almost chilling) assessment of the various episodes that have gone into the making of the career of the present junior senator from Massachusetts. The perspective from which it is written is, it has to be said, predominantly a local one.

Saturday

Anthony Howard

Diary – 20 March 2004

By now they must have finished sifting the 79 applications and be drawing up the actual shortlist for the chairmanship of the BBC. Nothing as remotely exciting has ever happened in that strange Trafalgar Square annexe of government, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. It is, of course, an absurd ministry, originally invented, if under the different name of National Heritage, by John Major to oblige his mate David Mellor. (Memo to prime ministers: it is nearly always a bad idea to create ministries to suit the convenience of individuals — Mellor soon proved that and so, if in a different way, did George Brown at the DEA in the 1960s.