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How many of the umpteen Express I worked for had a vision for the paper? Er, pass

NICE BUT A FAILURE: Daily Express editor Arthur Firth in his 

Fleet Street office, September 1983


The first edition had gone and we were having one of those conversations in the pub. A new Daily Express editor was in the chair – I don’t remember who, but the umpteenth – and we were mulling over whether this was the man to turn the ship around.


Could he arrest the decline, recapture the glory days? Opinion was divided but that great Express sub Roy Povey chipped in with his usual clarity and insight.


“It all depends,” he said, “on the editor’s vision.”


Well, yes, now you mention it. But which of the many editors to accept the poisoned chalice actually had a vision? Not so many in my time.


I was a member of the 1974 intake. Someone had ordered a clearout of the sock drawer and the heavily laden wheelbarrows were leaving by one door as we young Turks entered by another.


Ian McColl was my first editor on the Daily Express. He had been Scottish editor until 1971 and had put on sales, so the management asked him to repeat the trick in London. Perhaps he had brought with him the vision that served him so well in Glasgow. But it didn’t work down south.


Alastair Burnet had impeccable credentials for the job of editor. Andrew Neil called him “one of the greatest journalists of his generation”. He had edited The Economist and been Political Editor, respected newsreader and one of the driving forces at ITN.


He seemed like a good fit for the Express: A man who rose from modest beginnings, who was a royalist like most of the readers and who had boosted sales of The Economist by 60 per cent.


But vision or no vision, he lasted only 18 months at the Express.


Next cab off the rank was Roy Wright, brought in from the Evening Standard where he was deputy editor. The paper went tabloid on his watch and was as dull as a Sunday afternoon in Cleethorpes.


There was only blurred vision and Wright lasted 17 months.


New proprietor Lord Matthews replaced him in 1977 with Mirror man Derek Jameson. Hackney-born Jameson, son of an Irish mother and a father he never knew but believed to be a kosher butcher, was an instinctive journalist with a finger on the public pulse.


His first task on arriving was to pore over the readers’ letters. He then pronounced: “They’re just like Mirror readers, only they vote Tory.”


That was all the vision he needed and the paper began to resemble the Daily Mirror with white-on-black headlines pointing into the story, asymmetrical layout, short page leads and bold use of pictures.


By the time Jameson left the group in 1980 after a fallout with Matthews, the Daily Express had put on sales of 500,000, an increase of 25 per cent.


His deputy Arthur Firth, a former northern editor of the Express, came next on the Buggins’ turn principle. He was a nice man, a fine night editor and was responsible for hiring me in Manchester. But he failed to maintain Jameson’s momentum and was gone 16 months later.


Then there was a strange period when Christopher Ward edited. He was just 38 and another Mirror man who wrote a brilliant column for them. He seemed to prefer features to news and when he went home after first edition, unless there was a national emergency, he expected the paper to remain largely as he had left it.


Those of us whose job was to see the paper safely through its remaining editions honed our poker skills and enjoyed unseemly amounts of time in the pub. Ward also stayed in post for about 18 months without adding to circulation and was replaced by the man who made the Sun shine for Rupert Murdoch, Sir Larry Lamb.


Now here was someone with vision. He positioned the Sun downmarket of the Mirror, allowed pictures of topless women on Page 3 and favoured quirky human interest stories over the big ticket stories of the day.


But he was a shell of that man when he arrived at the Express in 1983. We saw flashes of the old Larry – daring layouts and shrewd story selection – but he was a burnt-out case and left in 1986 after a serious heart attack.


He gave way to Nick Lloyd, who had already edited the Sunday People and the News of the World. Lloyd, later Sir Nicholas, really did have a vision for the Express. He disliked our readers and once said he wished they were Times readers.


Along with advertising director Stan Myerson, Lloyd wanted a slice of the advertising generated by luxury brands during the Eighties that boosted the coffers of The Times. He oversaw the introduction of new technology to the paper and the move from Fleet Street to Blackfriars.


But success requires more than a vision. An editor also needs timing and luck. And Lloyd had neither. He was arguably a man ahead of his time – the Express under his stewardship was remarkably like the paper The Times is now in tone and layout.


And he had the bad luck to have the brilliant Paul Dacre as a rival. Dacre’s Daily Mail overtook the Daily Express in circulation on Lloyd’s watch and it never recovered.


Lloyd lasted for almost 10 years but was the last throw of the dice for a newspaper trapped in a vortex of doom.


*****


Every autumn, as a boy growing up in Northamptonshire, my father used to take me and my brother to Kirby Hall, a magnificent Elizabethan stately pile just a decent bike ride from our home in Corby.


We didn’t go for the history or the architecture, though the place was rich in both. We went for the wonderful avenue of horse chestnut trees that lay just outside the wall surrounding the grounds.


Get the date right and you could collect sackfuls of the shiny nuts. But Dad’s rule was: You have to carry your plunder home on the bike. So we took enough to make sure we were allowed into the conker games on the school playground and a few for swaps.


We would scour the grass verges for the biggest, darkest, shiniest conkers and let out a whoop when we found a cheesecutter, the holy grail of conkers with a flat surface on one side. These were thought to be impervious to blows from a mere round one.


Once home, we set about improving Nature’s bounty. Some of the conkers went into Mum’s oven. You couldn’t leave them in  there for too long. If they were overcooked they could become brittle – the opposite of what you were trying to achieve.


But they could also explode. As would Mum when she came in to find you raking conker fragments out of her once-pristine oven.


The other ruse was to put the conkers into a bowl of vinegar to pickle them to the tensile strength of the girders produced at the Stewarts and Lloyds steelworks down the road.


Perhaps that is what this year’s men’s winner of the World Conker Championships, held last week at the village pub in Southwick, near Oundle, had in mind.


David Jakins, 82, who has been entering the championships since 1977, finally triumphed, smashing his opponent’s conker with a single blow in the quarter-finals, the semis and the final.


“My conker disintegrated in one hit and that just doesn’t happen,” complained the losing finalist, prompting an investigation by the organisers. So Jakins was ordered to empty his pockets … and what should turn up but a steel conker, painted brown.


Jakins, a retired engineer, who helped to prepare the conkers before the contest, was cleared of cheating. He insisted: “I only carry it around for humour value and I did not use it during the event.”


When I was a junior reporter for the Northamptonshire Evening Telegraph, I covered the world championships twice at their previous venue in nearby Ashton. It is an oddball event, full of eccentrics wearing silly costumes. It always produced a good story.


But steel conkers? That’s bonkers.


*****


One of the crosses an editor must bear is interference from the proprietor. Beaverbrook was one of the worst offenders and later boorish Mirror boss Robert Maxwell and Richard Desmond of the Express.


Their editors had to be well briefed on their political leanings, sometimes on particular policies, their cultural preferences, their social circles and their close friends, all of which could change like the weather.


Desmond, for instance was said to have a “s**t list” on which his pal Lord (Alan) Sugar would sometimes feature. And sometimes not. When The Apprentice came around on TV it was advisable to know Sugar’s current status.


But there were pockets of editorial independence in Fleet Street. When Denis Hamilton asked Harold Evans to join the Sunday Times he was flattered but wary. Evans, then 36, was the ambitious editor of the Northern Echo in Darlington.


Hamilton was offering him a vague, unspecified role in which he would be groomed to become the paper’s managing editor. Evans saw it as a stepping stone to high office but wanted to continue the investigative campaigning journalism he practised in Darlington.


Would his new boss Hamilton and the proprietor, Lord Thomson of Fleet, allow that? Evans did not know, so like every good journalist, he did his homework.


What he found was reassuring. Hamilton ended the Second World War as the British Army’s youngest brigadier and decorated with a DSO. He was friends with Field Marshall Montgomery and Harold Macmillan.


He was photographed with members of the Royal Family, the Shah of Iran and President Kennedy. He spoke quietly with a refined accent and wore suits from Savile Row. But he had been brought up in a terrace house in Middlesbrough.


“Hamilton assumed an upper middle class disguise like a second skin,” Evans wrote in his memoir My Paper Chase.


Roy Thomson, the son of a barber, was a self-made tycoon who laid the foundation for his fortune with radio stations and small newspapers in Canada. He was famously thrifty and gave gossip columnists a field day when he was spotted queuing at Burberry’s for a cashmere coat reduced from £70 to £40.


But he was also a risk taker and threw millions into the Sunday Times to produce the first colour magazine in British newspapers. And he once said that “part of the social mission of every great newspaper is to provide a home for a large number of salaried eccentrics”.


When he took over the Sunday Times he tried to explain his commitment to editorial freedom. It was no “sales gimmick”, he said.


In fact, wrote Evans, Thomson carried a card in his pocket that spelt out his philosophy and would flourish it in front of those who complained, sought favours or tried to exert pressure. It read:-


“I can state with the utmost emphasis that no person or group can buy or influence editorial support from any newspaper in the Thomson group. Each paper may perceive this interest in its own way, and will do this without advice, counsel or guidance from the Thomson Organisation. I do not believe that a newspaper can be run properly unless its editorial columns are run freely and independently by a highly skilled and dedicated professional journalist. This is and will continue to be my policy.”


So, not so much a business card as a “mind your own business” card. It convinced Harry Evans, anyway.


“The word of Thomson and Hamilton was good enough for me,” wrote Evans, and in June, 1965 he took the job as Hamilton’s chief assistant.


*****


“I’m every bourgeois nightmare – a Cockney with intelligence and a million dollars.” — Michael Caine


RICHARD DISMORE



22 October 2024