Across the pond

This part will focus on how Greenslade came to write it.

Roy Greenslade was a communist as a young man and for most of his working life has been a committed member of the National Union of Journalists. Though he initially succombed to the charms of Robert Maxwell when he was editor of the Daily Mirror he had a better record than most who worked for Captain Bob, in that he fought to limit Maxwell’s bullying and to protect his staff and to protect the journalistic standards of the paper.

He was more fortunate in his next major employer, Tony O’Reilly, the Irish newspaper tycoon, who also owns The Independent. He was a highly valued consultant to O’Reilly for several years.

During his stint as The Guardian media columnmist he became close to a third tycoon, the young Lord Rothermere. It was a relationship based on personal liking and mutual respect. Though Rothermere was the was much the most powerful of the two, he was very ready to take advice from this much older man, who knows more than most about the post-war history of British newspapers, as his book, Press Gang, proves.

Greenslade also became a Rothermere employee when he took on a weekly column for the Evening Standard, as well as his Guardian blog. But it was not the money he was paid for that which changed his views. It was the persuasive management arguments that Rothermere put to him, for saving newspapers by devising ingenious schemes for producing newspapers of the same quality with fewer journalists.

This led him last year to support the management of the Birmingham papers and to denounce the NUJ for resisting their enlightened moves. He went on to publicly resign his membership and attack the NUJ leadership for behaving like the Luddites of the Arthur Scargill era.

But on the morning of 2 February Greenslade did a sudden about turn and denounced his noble Lord and employer even more vehemently than he had attacked the boss of his own union.

Not because he saw the light when he was walking down the Farringdon Road but because he talked to a dozen Evening Standard journalists, who were also his own colleagues, who had quite a different view of the fourth Lord Rothermere. He was not blinded by a new vision but helped by his colleagues to remove from his eyes the rosy-coloured spectacles with which he had been viewing Rothermere. But his talks with his colleagues enabled him to see, what he had not seen before, had other imperatives as well as a commitment to journalism of the kind of jounalism that Greenslade values.

So, when he got back to his keyboard he attacked Rothermere with all the venom, which he felt as editor of the Daily Mirror, when his then ‘hero’, Captain Bob, betrayed his expectations. Then, Greenslade did not rush into print, or leak stories to Private Eye. He did his best to bring out a decent Mirror every day and to get his boss, Captain Bob, to realise that he could not make a success of the Mirror by bullying the staff.

All the suppressed anger he felt about Captain Bob was poured into his attack on the present Lord Rothermere, who is quite different.

For starters he is a member of the ruling family which founded British journalism today, the Harmsworths. The Harmsworth who did that was Alfred, who later became Lord Northcliffe, who died without a son, so that the empire that he founded was inherited by his brother, Harold (later Lord Rothermere), who had a financial flair, which he used to help his brother to achieve his dreams.

But the fourth Lord Rothermere, who I am sure, as the scientists tell us, was much influenced by his genes,  which come from the Harold line, shows a spirit, which is much more like his great grandfather’s brother, Alfred. So it was no suprise to me to hear that in the matter of selling the Evening Standard he listened to the judgment of those who understood finance. Not a Rothermere but his own finance director.

Who was as over-whelmed, as his great granddad would have been, by the fact that ‘decent journalism’ was costing £18 million a year. And the prospect was that, unless something was done, those losses would become even greater.

But for Greenslade the terrible truth was that one of his heroes had betrayed him.

So he attacked Lord R as if he was Captain Bob, who was of quite a different ilk. A Czech who had to lie to escape Naziism and had to lie to get accepted by what we used to call the British establishment. Far more powerful people than Roy Greenslade helped his rise and rise. Merchant bankers like Flemings and Hill Samuel. High Street bankers who look after the people’s bank accounts, who are now being bailed out by the Government, because their judgment is now seen to be ‘seriously misguided’ and ‘crimes’ have brought not only Britain, but the world, to a crisis as bad as the Great Depression.

Greenslade, when he got to his keyboard, vented all his vitriol on Lord R. In which he was gravely mistaken.

But he wrote as an honest man.

And the world needs honest journalists.

So I hope that The Guardian does not fire him. And that the new management of the Evening Standard renews his contract to write for them. Because although the new management has views to the right of Greenslade. And althought the new editor, is more at home with the readership of Tatler, which includes many chaps educated at Eton and Oxbridge, and not many like Greenslade, who did not even get to university til they were in their mature years.

Because the Evening Standard, even though it was started by a very right wing boss, Lord Beaverbrook and is now wholly owned by another right wing boss, Lord Rothermere, has succeeded because it has always welcomed left-wing views as well, so much so that it employed as editor at a crucial time in its history, one Michael Foot, whose political views, then and now, are not only to the left of Gordon Brown and Tony Blair, they are to the left of Harold Wilson and possibly even Tony Benn.

When both Rothermere and Beaverbrook realised that London could no longer support two evening papers, they merged Rothermere’s Evening News with Beaverbrook’s Evening Standard, which had a srmaller circulation, but which had a more wealthy readership, which was more able to attract advertising.

The third Lord Rothermere, who rapidly became the senior partner in this shot-gun marriage, was happy to adopt the Standard name and many of its characteristics. His son was even keener to support it. Because, even after it became wholly owned by Rothermere, it has not totally bowed to the Daily Mail line.

It’s investigative journalism team had one member. One Andrew Gilligan, who devoted his time to ‘exposing’ daily the Daily Mail’s arch villain, Ken Livingstone.

But most of the paper was much more like Beaverbrook’s Evening Standard than Rothermere’s Evening News. It continued an arts coverage tuned to the top slice of the readership. It did not devote all its resources to attacking mothers without partners. It did not even continue to fight for the Empire both Rothermere and Beaverbrook had loved. (Not least because that Empire had sunk before the joint venture started.)

It will take something entirely different to save the Evening Standard. As I understand it there was only one bidder who was prepared to take the risk. What they will do, I know not. But maybe the combined talents of an ex-KGB man and an Old Etonian will find a solution. (in my experience many KGB men were guilty of nothing more than accepting the reality of power in the land they lived and doing their best for their families. And that although most of the Old Etonians I have known betrayed a nasty arrogance, a few of them showed a good deal more understanding of the downside of the class system and the state of the world than most of those of my friends who had been entirely educated in state schools.

That’s me.

But where does Greenslade stand now? Will he re-join the NUJ? I could ring him and ask him, but he may not even have decided yet. He is clearly still in trauma from discovering that Rothemere the Fourth is not quite the man he thought.

And I also believe that it is a good thing for journalists have debates like this in public.

The journalist’s job is to explain what he does and why he does it to the readers. There is no shame in changing your mind and no shame in admitting mistakes.

Unlike many journalists Greenslade does admit his mistakes. As in a recent Guardian blog, Sorry Arthur, he apologised for runniing an article when he was editor of the Daily Mirror, accusing Arthur Scargill of pocketing union funds.