Stephen Glover On The Press

That The Times has dumbed down is hardly hot news. I believe I may have pointed out the phenomenon from time to time. The Independent partly came into being over 20 years ago because The Times was vacating the higher ground. Looking back, the process was only just beginning.

In recent weeks I have detected another lurch downwards which, I am sure, is not accidental. Where to start? I was amused to see that The Times was handing out free "classic film" posters' last week. Whereas The Guardian and The Independent have been offering self-improving posters about birds, cows, sheep and trees (I wish these would cease; they are littering my house) the more demotic Times chose to give its readers posters of those memorable films Rocky, Gladiator and American Beauty.

Then there is the front page, which grows ever more sensational. One day last week a picture of a shouting British soldier occupied almost the whole of the front, below, referring to an inside story of derring-do from Afghanistan by the paper's brave correspondent, Anthony Loyd. There was an almost identical front page three weeks earlier, with a soldier declaring "this one's a go". Readers may reasonably point out that The Independent has its own line in dramatised front pages, though one imagines, if it carried a large picture of a gung-ho soldier, that the newspaper would also tell you what he had for breakfast, how many lies Tony Blair has told, and why he was not wearing a protective jacket.

The Times's foreign pages contain a huge number of human interest stories, as do the Daily Telegraph's. Picking up at random an issue of The Times last week, and turning to its surprisingly voluminous foreign pages, I found, interspersed with some shorter, more serious articles, enormous coverage of a not very terrible aircraft crash in Indonesia, yet another piece about Elizabeth Hurley's wedding festivities in India, a quite interesting story about Chinese house prices, and a feature about skywalkers in the Grand Canyon.

You may say one could have encountered a similar mix of articles in The Times two or three years ago. Possibly. My point is that that trends which have been observable for some time have become established. One always used to single out the comment pages as escaping the general dumbing down. Now the leaders are shorter and often slighter. With two or three distinguished exceptions, the columnists do not seem notably authoritative. The departure of Simon Jenkins to The Guardian has left a gap that has not been filled.

My argument is not that The Times is a bad newspaper. Far from it. It is lively and often readable. I should mention that the business pages seem very strong.

(In fairness, I should also say that the paper recently urged its readers to learn Chinese, hardly evidence of dumbing down, though the initiative may have owed something to the fact that both the newspaper's proprietor, Rupert Murdoch, and its editor, Robert Thomson, are married to Chinese women.) The point is that the paper is re-positioning itself. It is greedily eying the more elevated bits of the Daily Mail's much larger regular readership.

So, too, is the Daily Telegraph, of course. But my guess is that The Times is more feared, or at least more respected, by executives at the Mail, because it is owned by Rupert Murdoch, and it seems to have a clearer sense of what it is doing. In two or three months the new Scottish edition of The Times will have full-colour on every page, as the paper in the rest of the United Kingdom will from the beginning of 2008. This will give it an extra weapon as it tries to prise away Mail readers.

Nor should we rule out The Times cutting its cover price. At vast cost it worked last time, which is to say the paper roughly doubled its circulation, and in different circumstances it might work again. The re-positioning of The Times should give a little breathing space to The Independent and The Guardian. The Daily Mail, and of course the Daily Telegraph, will be in the cockpit of this battle.

If I were on a desert island, and allowed only two daily newspapers, The Times would probably be one of them. And yet I regret its dumbing down because it was unique. It occupied a different universe to the rest of the press. To look at it now is to see a once unapproachable dowager downing pints with the rest of them in the saloon bar. My old friend Sir Peter Stothard, Mr Thomson's predecessor, was the iconoclastic figure who lit the fuse paper. When I think of the elfin young man I knew 30 years ago at Oxford, wandering the banks of the Cherwell with his nose pressed into his well-thumbed copy of Virgil, his hair flowing poetically over the collar of his kaftan, I marvel at the changes he dared to set in motion that have transformed a pillar of British life.

scmgox@aol.com

Shame on Major for overlooking Stuart Steven

The former prime minister John Major has given a long interview to Julia Langdon in the British Journalism Review in which he inveighs against the excesses of the British Press, and comes close to calling for a privacy law. As Mr Major and his administration were subject to vituperative criticism from Left and Right, one should perhaps not be surprised that he remains browned off with newspapers.

I would, however, have more respect for Mr Major if he had remembered practically the one friend he had in those difficult years. I mean Stewart Steven, the gifted editor of the London Evening Standard throughout much of the Major era. Stewart was forever popping around to Number 10 to pat the unhappy Prime Minister's trembling hand, and to offer constructive advice when practically every other editor had deserted him.

In a just world, Stewart would have received a dukedom when Mr Major was finally kicked out. He did not even get a knighthood. When Mr Major came to write his long, self-justifying autobiography, he did not once mention his old stay and comfort. Nor, when grumbling to Julia Langdon about the Press, did he recall the one newspaper friend who stood by him during those dark times.

The lesson for every editor is not to put your trust in high politicians. They will use you if it suits them, and forget about you when you can no longer be of any help to them, or have been deprived of the power that made you useful to them in the first place.

Still, there are always exceptions. Stewart's successor at the Standard, Max Hastings, got a knighthood out of Tony Blair before, admittedly some time later, turning his journalistic guns on his old patron. I would rather editors or former editors betrayed prime ministers than the other way around.