Michael White

St Ives, Cornwall Emailing a friend in Boston, I reported that winter had been so benign in southern England this year that it was bound to snow in Cornwall at Easter. Not so. I write just after dawn as a fishing boat chugs across the tranquil bay in bright sunshine. The week’s weather promises to be as near perfect as any since my siblings and I first started our annual family reunion in rented cottages here in 1983. Wonderful. And the Sloop Inn (‘circa 1305’) has now installed a wireless connection for the laptop. *** Not all is calm. This region is steeped in military history, but its media seems almost as indignant as Fleet St about the Iran hostage incident.

When I was a young reporter on the London Evening Standard nearly 40 years ago I spent a lot of time in the press room at Scotland Yard, not learning very much. By some mysterious process of osmosis between detectives and the leading crime correspondents, details of that dramatic armed robbery in Croydon would be all over the front pages while the Yard’s official spokesmen were still confined to talking lamely about ‘an incident on Purley Way which required police attendance’. I do not know how much has changed. In our 24/7 media world everything is sharper and faster. Dawn raids have TV crews primed to film the drama, sometimes to the anger of innocent communities.

Within an hour of returning to the Commons after a sabbatical tour of ex-British South Asia I find myself plunged into the firefighters' strike. The Blairites have long been envious of the glass-jawed opponents who queued up to be walloped by Mrs Thatcher. But during Monday's Downing Street press conference the Prime Minister modestly disavowed the Sun's belligerent claim that he wants to 'do a Maggie' on the FBU. There's no need really; he is as evidently a conciliator as she was a warrior. It suits the milder temper of the times, despite the media's frantic demands for victory by tea-time. Warrior Winston would not have lasted long enough to become the BBC's Top Briton if today's Daily Beast had been on his case in 1940-2.

Despite feeling ghoulish, my wife and I found ourselves drawn to the television set whenever an important development took place during the grim vigil at Soham. By the very nature of the event much of the footage and commentary was banal and, like the press, unavoidably intrusive. Sky was sharper, the BBC's much-mocked News 24 had better tone - a bit like the difference between tabloids and broadsheets, I suppose. Both deployed retired ex-detectives, including John Stalker, in ways I'd not noticed before, knowledgeable, discreet and wise. Yet, rare in the age of 24/7 TV news, there weren't any pictures of what this was really all about: unfathomable evil at large in a sleepy English village. We each had to use our imagination. Much worse.