Across the pond

There is a delightful irony in the sub-title of Harold Evans’ autobiography, My Paper Chase; True Stories of Vanished Times. The sub-title is meant to suggest that the glorious days of British investigative journalism in which Evans played such an important part, are over. Most of the reviewers seem to agree with thesis. Unsurprisingly, because several of them used to work for Harry at the Sunday Times in the 1960s, and they, like me, still relish those days, when Harry dashed around the newsroom in Gray’s Inn Road, cocking a snoop at the establishment and challenging big companies like Distillers and McDonnell Douglas and challenging the government of the day by publishing the riveting Crossman diaries, which revealed just exactly what ministers said to each other in the cabinet room.

They were great days and they have most definitely not vanished, despite the near-bankrupt state of the newspaper industry. This week Britain’s biggest defence company, BAE Systems, is being brought to account in the courts for paying bribes, thanks in part to the persistent investigative journalism over several years by The Guardian investigative reporters, notably David Leigh. The Daily Telegraph is publishing in book form, the results of its investigation into MP’s expenses. That investigation has had an even bigger impact on our political life than anything the Sunday Times did.

This is not to belittle the achievments of Evans and the other Sunday Times journalists who started the Insight team, which Evans inherited – Sir Denis Hamilton and Clive Irving. The investigative journalist working today (and there are several working for the BBC and elsewhere in radio and television) were inspired by their example. But what needs to be hammered home to all journalists is that Harry’s True Stories, though all true and carefully checked in no way reflect the whole truth of those times.

 Neither does the biography of Queen Elizabeth, The Queen Mother, which has hit the bookshops at the same time as Evans book. William Shawcross, like Harry Evans, writes like a novelist, feeding the reader with direct quotes from the hithertoo unpublished letters of the Queen, and making the reader live through again the events of the last century, including the two world wars, when the Royal Family, in a very real sense shared the experiences of their subjects, most particularly losing like them friends and relatives on war service. (And also, managing with five inches of water in their bath to save fuel!)

But it is the story of their times, not our times. Not because what Shawcross wrote was censored by the Queen, who read the manuscript, but because Shawcross has become a fervant monachist, and his story is about how the monarchy recovered from the blows to their prestige as the love lives of King Edward VIII, Princess Margaret and Prince Charles distracted their, and the public’s attention, from their constitutional role.

Those days now seem like ancient history. The People’s Princess has been superceded by Camilla Parker Bowles. Prince Charles no longer talks to flowers and only the architects are upset by his continuing efforts to preserve the appearance of a bygone age.

The challenge to the establishment in the 1960s, of which the Harry Evans Sunday Times was a part, is now a distant memory. There are a few Republicans left at The Guardian, but even they don’t expect the revolution to come in their lifetime.

As it happens William Shawcross cut his journalistic teeth as part of the Evans team at the Sunday Times. He went on to do some brilliant investigative journalism which challenged Anglo American policies and actions, most notably in Cambodia. In those days he was a Young Turk, more in tune with the New Statesman than the Daily Telegraph. One of his colleagues was Lord Snowdon, but he does not betray any personal confidences in his latest book. Nor does he give the reader any clue about the elements in his own personal biography which led to his lurch to the right.

What he does do is let the Queen Mother, and some of the other Royals, speak for themselves. He lends them a sympathetic ear, just as he did to Rupert Murdoch, in his 1992 biography of that well known critic of the monarchy. And the Queen Mother’s voices comes over clear as a bell as the voice of the Conservative Party at prayer, who asserted women’s rights by going big game hunting with the men and insisting on shooting the antelopes and crocodiles herself.

So my belief is that, despite Shawcross’s intentions, this official biography might fan the embers of Republicanism. Do we really need them and all their castles, houses and servants? The Windsors are brilliant at surviving themselves but do they really help the country survive in the global economy?