People don’t like you, Hastings was told but he still landed the job of Daily Telegraph editor
Max Hastings was confident that he would secure the job of editor of the Daily Telegraph. After all, he had been informally interviewed by the editor of The Economist, Andrew Knight, over lunch at Brooks’s, a club in St James’s where they were both members.
What he might not have anticipated when he sat down for a more searching examination of his credentials was a full and frank character reading.
Knight liked what he saw: a journalist and author of the right age, 40, and the right politics, a one-nation Tory on the Left of the party, who had gained a reputation for his work as a reporter for the Evening Standard during the Falklands War.
But Knight had one tiny reservation. “You are not well liked in the business,” he told Hastings. “Indeed, a lot of people dislike you very much.
“That could be a problem, especially when you will have to win the support of all sorts of established Telegraph people like Andrew Hutchinson, the managing editor, who’s terrific and whom you will rely on heavily.”
Knight thought it over for a moment and finally said: “On the other hand, they will all need to go on making a living. Gordon Newton was a very successful editor of the Financial Times, even though everybody detested him. It could work.”
In one of those slightly comedic episodes that happened all the time in Fleet Street, Hastings had been commissioned by the Sunday Times to write the background to the Telegraph’s decline and eventual takeover by Canadian business buccaneer Conrad Black at the very moment that he was in the throes of recruitment as its editor.
He first consulted Knight, who laughed and told him to go ahead. The piece was widely recognised as extremely well informed – as well it might be – but Hastings wondered whether it might come back to bite him.
He had described Black as “a controversial Right-winger with a reputation for fast talking.” He had also quoted Black as saying: “I may make mistakes but right now I can’t think of any.”
But Knight complimented him on the Sunday Times article, Hastings says in his memoir Editor (published in 2014 by Macmillan). They arranged to meet at the Ritz to discuss whether he would get the job, subject to Black’s final approval.
The day before their lunch, Hastings sent a letter to Knight setting out his stall. He paid respect to the paper’s unrivalled news coverage as well as its reporting on sport and finance.
He suggested it would be unwise to upset readers and staff by making “dramatic wrenches” in the early days of his editorship. And he challenged the paper’s blinkered and outdated view of the world.
“The most conspicuous sign of the Telegraph’s senility in recent years,” he wrote, “is its mindless attachment to certainties: The rectitude of the Metropolitan Police, the decency of white South Africans, the inevitability of confrontation with the Soviet Union.”
And he noted that “the paper badly needs one or two people who can write. It is striking how seldom any of the Telegraph’s journalists are quoted on the radio, or invited to appear on television.”
The women’s pages, he said, were “awful, entirely untalented and middle-aged in outlook.”
While Hastings never wavered in his desire to land the job as editor of one of the world’s great newspapers, his wife at the time, Tricia, was less certain. She did not relish the change from a quiet rural life to the pressures of a city existence.
They had his close friend Tom Bower, a renowned investigative reporter, to stay with his wife Veronica Wadley, who would join Hastings at the Telegraph and eventually become deputy editor.
The Bowers were baffled by her concerns. Why hesitate for a second?
Tricia told Hastings: “But you must admit yourself that as an editor, you would be making a lot less money than you are now.”
Hastings was earning £160,000 a year from his prolific book writing and his journalism, but he told her: “This is one of those chances that come once in a lifetime.”
He took it, of course, at a salary of £75,000 a year, after an interview with Conrad Black, in February 1986. Knight told him they were also giving Hastings 300,000 share options in the company.
But the Telegraph’s kingmaker had one piece of advice for his new editor. “Remember,” he said, “the banks own even the desk you will be sitting at.”
*****
Donald Trump has achieved – at least in his own mind – the boyhood ambition of Boris Johnson. He thinks he is “world king”.
The nerve of the man, I thought, as I watched him pitch a real estate deal in front of the TV cameras last week.
You take these pesky Palestinians off our hands, he urged Jordan/Egypt/Saudi Arabia, and America will turn the Gaza Strip from a hellhole into “the Riviera of the Middle East”.
Trump told the Press conference: “The US will take over the Gaza Strip and we will do a job with it too.
“We'll own it and be responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous unexploded bombs and other weapons on the site, level the site and get rid of the destroyed buildings… Create an economic development that will supply unlimited numbers of jobs and housing for the people of the area.”
Not Palestinians, you will notice, but “people of the area”.
Trump has a point about the massive task to rebuild Gaza. But why does he think the Strip is his and Israel’s to do with as they wish? To the victor the spoils?
Then we learn that Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and a former White House adviser, has already cast a covetous eye over the Gaza Strip.
A year ago he suggested clearing civilians out of Gaza while it was cleaned up. “Gaza’s waterfront property, it could be very valuable, if people would focus on building up livelihoods,” he said in an interview.
All Trump’s hocus-POTUS amounted to taking out his Monopoly board and rolling the dice – while Israel’s Prime Minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, looked on, smirking.
This was Bibi’s get-out-of-jail-card. Trump made no mention of a two-state solution and simply proposed booting Palestinians out of Gaza, once home to more than two million before Israel razed it in a vain attempt to destroy its enemy Hamas.
Israel’s ultra Right-wing hawks, uneasy political allies of Netanyahu, have been watching him, ready to pounce at any sign of weakness or vulnerability.
Their followers believe the Gaza Strip is theirs, part of Greater Israel, and are ready to seize their opportunity and move in to take over.
Now, with the hawks placated, Bibi could return home safe from the risk of being ousted and facing criminal charges of fraud, accepting bribes and breach of trust.
I am convinced now that Trump is so drunk on power that he has no control over what he is saying and doesn’t care that a lot of it is dangerous gibberish.
“I am world king,” he is thinking, “nothing can stop me now. Bow before me, pay tribute and bend to my will.”
Trump must have been encouraged in that belief by the reaction to his threats of a trade war against his neighbours to the north and south.
It electrified the Americas. Faced with crippling 25 per cent tariffs on their exports to the United States, both Mexico and Canada hurriedly reached a deal with Trump.
Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau agreed to boost border security to clamp down on the flow of migrants and the deadly drug fentanyl into the US.
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum promised to station more troops on the border to hold back migrants and in return won a pledge that the US would limit the flow of guns into Mexico.
It’s a mad, mad world and Trump, a megalomaniac as well as an egomaniac, is the maddest thing in it.
*****
I take the scenic route through The Times of a morning.
I scan Page One before turning to the sports pages. Then I browse the obituaries and finally I read the news pages properly.
It wasn’t until I started from the front last Wednesday that I realised how little advertising the paper was carrying.
I know it is that time of the year when the agencies have used up their spend on Christmas and the sales, but there were no ads at all until Page 8, where the Government had placed one urging businesses to consult its online guide to boosting international trade. That had the feel of a favour being called in.
Then EE took a 10cm x 5 column space on Page 10 to draw in broadband customers. Pages 14 and 15 were sold to Google for their Pixel 9 Pro phone, with Vodafone jumping on the same bandwagon on the following page.
A 25cm ad decorated Page 17, then nothing but promotions for Times Radio. Page after page of wide open prairies.
I hope it picks up. I doubt whether even a cover price of £2.80 is enough to make the paper profitable without advertising.
*****
A judge has ruled that SAS troops who ambushed four Provisional IRA men and shot them dead used lethal force that was not justified.
The Provos had just shot up a police station in Coalisland, Co Tyrone, and escaped in a stolen lorry. Minutes later, the British soldiers shot the fleeing terrorists as they pulled into a church car park, an inquest was told.
Mr Justice Michael Humphreys, Northern Ireland’s presiding coroner as well as a High Court judge, said they should have planned and controlled the operation to minimise the need to use lethal force.
What, like the Provos did, My Lord?
Unjustified? To shoot escaping armed terrorists who have attacked a police station in the United Kingdom? Isn’t that an oxymoron?
God preserve us from lawyers.
*****
“For the past seventeen years I have been experimenting with lager. I am a lager user and one drug leads to another. If you do lager, as night follows day, you'll end up doing Kentucky Fried Chicken.” – Ben Elton
RICHARD DISMORE
11 February 2025
