Stephen Glover

North Oxford is not one of the most deprived areas of Great Britain. When its generally quite large houses come on to the market — which is not often — they tend to be snapped up by computer millionaires or bankers from London rather than by dons. The ‘Tory turncoat’ Shaun Woodward has just paid squillions for a not particularly beautiful neo-gothic semi-detached just around the corner from me. You might expect that this would be solid Tory territory, but it is not. In fact, being a Tory in North Oxford has not been entirely plain sailing these past few years. At election time Lib Dem and Green and a few Labour boards stretch as far as the eye can see, but you have to go north of Summertown, and root around among the more modest inter-war villas, to find a Tory one.

To read the mind of Rupert Murdoch is difficult and not necessarily pleasant — difficult because he is cleverer than almost any other publisher who has ever lived, and not necessarily pleasant because he is nearly always planning to do someone down. But students of the man generally agree that the only thing that drives him is circulation. It is all that matters. There is no point in having a low-circulation quality newspaper if it can be turned into a higher-circulation title of less quality. That is why he slashed the cover price of the Times in 1993, which more than doubled the sales of the paper and accelerated its dumbing-down. And it is why the Times adopted the tabloid format more than a year ago, a change which has also increased circulation, if much less spectacularly.

Every morning, when I am faced by my pile of newspapers, almost the first thing I do is to turn to the obituary page of the Daily Telegraph. Obits in all the serious papers are good — generally much better than they were 20 years ago — but the Telegraph has a particular specialisation which its rivals hardly try to emulate. Three or four times a week it carries pieces about former servicemen who fought in the second world war. To be included it seems that you need to have won a military medal, or else gone on to achieve high rank after the war. These obituaries record the acts of sacrifice and bravery of young men over 60 years ago. There is nothing like them anywhere else in the British press.

John Lloyd has become a much lauded guru of serious journalism. A former member of a fascinating group called the British Irish Communist party, he is now a loyal Blairite, and edits the on the whole very good Financial Times Saturday magazine. He is also the author of an interesting recent book on the British media which for some reason escaped the notice of this column. One day we may put that right. Mr Lloyd recently used the pages of his magazine to make an ex-cathedra pronouncement. This was that the Guardian is poised to become the new paper of the British establishment. His suggestion, which is certainly correct, is that the Times has voluntarily given up its position as the establishment newspaper.

Last week I suggested that in August David Blunkett leaked news of his affair with Kimberly Quinn to the News of the World. My reason for doing so was not that I wished to champion Kimberly Quinn, who happens to be publisher of this magazine. I simply could see no other explanation. Mrs Quinn’s supporters passionately believed that Mr Blunkett did ‘kiss and tell’, and the strength of their belief was such that it was impossible to think (and remains so) that Mrs Quinn herself was the secret conduit. If she was not, who could it be other than Mr Blunkett, who had been dumped by Mrs Quinn, and had the motive of vengeance? On Friday 13 August Andy Coulson, editor of the News of the World, interviewed Mr Blunkett in Sheffield at 10 o’clock in the morning.

Who is more in the wrong, David Blunkett or Kimberly Quinn? Everyone has a view. Let me tell the story. I have deliberately chosen not to talk to Kimberly Quinn, who is publisher of The Spectator. Nor have I spoken to David Blunkett, or anyone who works for him. Last July Kimberly Quinn (she then called herself Kimberly Fortier) told Mr Blunkett that their three-year affair was over. Mr Blunkett was very unhappy about this. He was in love with Mrs Quinn, and seems not to have acted particularly rationally. He wanted at the very least to establish his paternity of Mrs Quinn’s two-year-old son, as well as the child she is expecting in January.

One of the hazards of writing a column about the press is that sooner or later you are bound to be cornered by an editor or journalist whom you have teased. I shall never forget the time I was harangued in the street by the charming wife of my old friend Peter Stothard. Sometimes one is cut in the lavatories of clubs by people whom one has quite forgotten having written about. A worse experience is waking up to find that an editor whom you have ragged has been appointed to the editorship of the paper for which you write. Such was my fate when Sir Max Hastings was made editor of the London Evening Standard, for which I then worked. Max was not inclined to take a humorous view of the things I had written about him.

When Richard Desmond acquired the Daily Express four years ago there was an outcry. That committed Christian, Tony Blair, immediately had the pornographer turned press baron round for tea, but perhaps that was only to be expected. Almost everyone else was appalled that a man who had made his fortune out of such publications as Spunk Loving Sluts should have acquired a national newspaper. Foremost among Mr Desmond’s critics was the Guardian, which ran a magnificent series of articles about him. It discovered that a company owned by him had registered a website which promised live heterosexual sex, live lesbian sex, as well as other images too disgusting to mention in the first paragraph of a magazine article.

The news that Tony O’Reilly may be willing to sell 30 per cent of the Independent newspaper seems utterly astounding. It has enjoyed a considerable succès d’estime by going tabloid. From being a catch-up sort of newspaper which did not excel in any particular area, it has become a trendsetter. First the Times followed suit and produced its own tabloid version. Then the Guardian announced that once it has acquired new presses it will transform itself into a so-called Berliner — i.e., the same shape as Le Monde. The rejigged management at the Daily Telegraph will have to make up its mind whether or not to produce a tabloid edition. Nor is this tabloid craze confined to Britain.