Stephen Glover

The Prime Minister has enjoined us to be ‘in complete solidarity with Russia and the Russian people’, and invites us to draw a parallel between the terrorist threat from al-Qa’eda and the threat posed by Chechen lunatics. I am not so sure about that. Is it not possible that if Osama bin Laden had never been born and there had been no attack on the World Trade Center, Russia would still be besieged by appallingly cruel home-grown terrorists? It is easy to feel a sense of solidarity with the people of Beslan, even of Russia, but impossible to identify with President Putin and his government. We do not share the same values. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Putin’s almost totalitarian treatment of the media.

The excesses of Lord Black, former proprietor of the Telegraph Group, which owns this magazine, are mind-boggling. Of course they have not yet been proven in a court of law, and Lord Black continues to deny the allegations in his characteristically orotund language. But the author of the 500-page report condemning Lord Black is Richard Breeden, a former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission in America, and his colleagues are equally well respected and disinterested people. Moreover, they have certainly provided chapter and verse to a level of detail that must — or should — be mortifying to Lord Black and his wife, Barbara Amiel.

Ever since he became editor of The Spectator, which must be about five years ago, Boris Johnson has been urging me to write a column about the Financial Times. It is a subject which seems to drive him towards apoplexy. As Boris sees it, the FT is run by leftist énarques whose hearts are very far from the businessman struggling with cashflow problems in Nuneaton or, as it might be, Henley. It is a newspaper for sharp-suited Eurocrats and fat cats on the early morning shuttle to Brussels or Milan, not the hardworking capitalist stuck in his dingy office with the VAT man menacing outside the door. I am sure he is right. And yet until now I have turned a deaf ear to his diatribes.

Unlike British newspapers, the New York Times enjoys beating its breast. It recently published a lengthy ‘editor’s note’ which acknowledged that its coverage in the months before the invasion of Iraq ‘was not as rigorous as it should have been’. The paper conceded that ‘articles based on dire claims about Iraq tended to get prominent display’ while other articles that called the original ones into question were ‘sometimes buried’. Many people may regard this apology as pompous and rather absurd. But if a newspaper gives the impression that weapons of mass destruction existed in profusion, and posed a deadly threat to the West, should it not apologise when it becomes clear that they did not?

The sacking of Piers Morgan as editor of the Daily Mirror has been greeted with ululation from media commentators, former and existing editors and several newspapers. Piers, we are told by no less an authority than the legendary Harry Evans, was a great tabloid editor. My esteemed colleague Professor Roy Greenslade can barely be consoled. Mr Morgan’s defenders concede that the pictures he published which showed British soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners may have been fakes, but it is claimed that they illustrate a wider truth. The only discordant voice I have heard amid the general wailing and gnashing of teeth is that of Martin Kettle in the Guardian. What does this reaction tell us about the media class?

Last weekend the Observer media page published a photograph of the Daily Telegraph news conference. It looks to me a pretty standard affair. The camera shows the back of the editor, Martin Newland, who is hunched over his desk and appears energetic and keen. There are eight other senior executives in the room, all of them apparently middle-aged, if by that we mean between the ages of 35 and 55. Two of them are women. Everyone looks dutiful and alert. It is a scene such as one might imagine in any newspaper office, though in some you would be lucky to find as many as two female executives.

It is becoming a commonplace that the ‘tabloid wars’ between broadsheet titles are transforming the newspaper market. There is a widespread belief that in producing tabloid editions the Independent and, to a lesser extent, the Times have stolen a brilliant march on their rivals. The Guardian is accused of having fallen asleep on the job, and one excitable commentator has suggested that the paper is doomed. The Daily Telegraph is also thought by many to be fatally missing out on the revolution. As soon as it finds a new buyer, it is suggested, it must unveil the tabloid edition with whose prototype frustrated executives have been tinkering. Such is the general view in what used to be called Fleet Street. In large measure it is what I thought myself until a few weeks ago.

Amid all the chatter about who may buy the Telegraph Group, the names one hears most often are those of the Daily Mail group, the Express group and Richard Desmond, and the Barclay Brothers. Occasionally various venture capitalists are also mentioned. The one company that is hardly taken seriously, though it appears on most lists of possible bidders, is the American publisher Gannett. And yet Gannett, it seems, is in pole position to buy Hollinger International, whose main titles are the Daily Telegraph, the Sunday Telegraph, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Jerusalem Post and last, though not least, The Spectator. It is not obvious why Gannett should have been virtually ignored by media watchers.

So the Barclay brothers’ bid for Conrad Black’s controlling share in Hollinger International has been vetoed by an American judge. We are back to square one. A lot of time has been wasted. Meanwhile the patient itself — i.e., the Daily Telegraph — is ailing. Mercifully its journalists have called off a strike, though they remain sunk in gloom. But the paper is losing sales (though not on a Saturday) as some readers defect to the tabloid Times or the tabloid Independent. The Telegraph’s management has its own tabloid plans, and a budget of £15 million to launch the thing, but dares not push the button until it becomes clear who the new owner will be. The thought that the sale of the newspaper might take several more months is not a happy one.

The editor of this magazine has asked me to write about a new publication I am planning. You may possibly have read about it. Two weeks ago John Gapper of the Financial Times telephoned me to say he had heard that several people, including myself, were proposing to launch a new upmarket national daily newspaper loosely based on Le Monde, and provisionally called the World. I could hardly deny it. I told Mr Gapper that we had not yet raised the £15.4 million we are seeking, and suggested that he would be jumping the gun if he were to set pen to paper now. Would anyone be interested if we were hoping to start a widget factory but had not yet got the money?

One of the most brilliant myths fostered by Alastair Campbell is the idea of our nihilistic media attacking the government morning, noon and night. It is utter bunkum. Until the Iraq war the BBC gave Tony Blair the benefit of the doubt in scandal after scandal. Among newspapers, the Prime Minister could count on the support of the Murdoch press, the Daily Mirror, the Daily Express and, for much of the time, the Guardian and the Independent. The prospect of the war against Iraq, and its aftermath, changed things somewhat. The Independent, Guardian, Daily Mirror and Daily Mail constituted the opposition, but they were outweighed by the Murdoch newspapers and the Daily Express, which were joined by the Daily Telegraph, a traditional Blair foe.

A few weeks ago BBC television news announced that the Barclay brothers were the new owners of the Daily Telegraph. It has since become plain that they may not be. They hope to acquire Conrad Black’s 30 per cent stake in Hollinger International (owner of the Telegraph newspapers, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Jerusalem Post and this magazine) which carries 73 per cent of the voting rights. Hollinger International is applying to one court in Delaware to block this sale. Lord Black has asked another in Ontario to approve it. No party to this dreadfully tangled affair feels comfortable without issuing several writs. On behalf of Hollinger International, Lazard bank has just issued an investment memorandum inviting bids for the Telegraph Group.