Across the pond

>mebeli sofiahe Andrew Marr Sunday morning television show. Harry Evans, who according to one award is the greatest British journalist of my lifetime was on the programme to review the Sunday papers with Polly Toynbee, Guardian columnist who has been urging the Labour Party to save itself by sticking to its socialist principles, whereas Harry has been reported as having misgivings about President Obama, because of his dangerously left-wing views.

Nothing either of them had to say about the morning papers is worth reporting here. But I was transfixed by the non-verbals.

At the start Harry’s face seemed to be permanently fixed in a slant to the right, so much so that I feared he had a stroke. Not so, I now know, because I am just back from a do at the Wapping Project in his honour. Harry assured me that his health is fine and that he is still doing his daily exercises which always put me to shame. But he did ramble on in the scheduled debate with Simon Jenkins. But he is three years older than me, and as readers may have noticed, I ramble on from time to time.

As the Marr show went on Harry was putting his arm around Polly with all the tactile abandon that is the norm in New York where he been living for nearly thirty years. This was amusing to watch, because Harry is about the same height as Napoleon, but much thinner,and Polly is taller and pleasantly rotund. While this was happening they were talking about the need to treat women as the equals of men, which Harry has always been in favour of, though nearly all his trusted aides were men.

But Polly who is somewhat younger has lived in an age when men putting their arms around women is an invasion and a patronising putdown.

Polly disguised her discomfort, Without difficulty, becaue she is the grand-daughter of Arnold Toynbee and the daughter of a distingished Obsever journalist. She has been used to men pawing her, since she was below the age of consent.

After writing this I have to correct my comment above. In class terms, Harry the son of the engine driver, was not imitating the Americans, but behaving much like many working class families, who were not as inhibited as the middle classes in demonstrating physical affection.

So the non-verbals indicate the power and continuing effects of the British class system. In his book, My Paper Chase, Harry has a perceptive paragraph about Sir Denis Hamilton, who recruited him to the Sunday Times, when he was editing the Northern Echo. In my words, Denis had learnt to talk the talk. He came over as upper middle class, but actually, as Harry discovered when he got to know him, he was the son of an engineer from the north-east, with a class background much closer to that of Harry than to Polly Toynbee.

There is another major difference between Harry and Polly. Harry has acted, and still does, according to the jounalistic myth, of keeping the journalist’s own political opinions out of the story. Polly, however, belongs to another generation who saw the sense of the journalist disclosing his or her convictions.

So she became, very publicly, a committed journalist, most notably when she became a founder member of the Social Democratic Party.

This is not yet my review of My Paper Chase, which I am currently half-way through, because I have also been reading the auto-biography of Shirley Williams, one of the gang of four who founded the SDP, and also Shirley’s mother’s Testament of Youth.

These books have re-inforced my own life experience of the close relationship between policians and the journalists who report them. Williams’ first job was in journalism. I had always thought her first job was on the Financial Times, mainly because my first job was on another paper in the same group.

In fact, as I discovered when I read her biog, she joined the Daily Mirror for two years, hired not by the editor, but by the boss, Cecil King. She was appalled by the things she was required to do, particularly on bereavment stories. The Financial Times was her second job.

This is directly relevant to what happened tonight in the debate at Wapping. Harry was asked which was best, US journalism or British journalism. Harry replied, not once but twice, that American journalism was more credible.

This is the kind of question that cannot be answered in a late night debate fuelled with champagne.

It requires a lecture.

Harry’s answer is spot on if you compare the New York Times and the Washington Post to Britain’s national newspapers. The distortions of the Sun, the Express, the Mail and Mirror, dwarf in terms of circulations those of  The Times, the Telegraph, the Guardain and the Independent.

His answer might have been quite different if he had been asked to rate the New York Times against the London Times and the Washington Post against the The Guardian.