Richard Ingrams’s Week: Brown may have bounced: Miliband dropped the catch

It's hard to keep up with the fall and rise and fall again of Gordon Brown. A year ago they were telling us that he was a walking disaster who would very soon be booted out and replaced by the brilliant young David Miliband.

Then came the banking crisis and overnight Brown was transformed into a wise and experienced statesman, the only man capable of guiding the good ship Great Britain through the choppy waters of recession. Miliband was ridiculed and forgotten.

That lasted for a few months but now the wind has changed once again.

Just as he was last year, Brown is being written off as useless and incompetent. Jeremy Clarkson, no less, has spoken and we have all gone back to square one. How long before Miliband is brought out, dusted down and re-hailed as the brilliant young heir apparent? It is all quite confusing. And the difficulty is in knowing how long the anti-Brown consensus is going to last. Could it be that when the snows have melted and there's a promise of spring in the air, opinion will again change and Brown will be called once more an economic mastermind and potential saviour of the world?

If it has happened before, one can see no good reason why it shouldn't happen again. Unless in the meantime, I suppose, our volatile opinion-formers come round to the view that, useless or not, we're stuck with Gordon Brown because there isn't anybody else – unless that is, Jeremy Clarkson is prepared to volunteer his services.

Why my magazine is booming

Talk among journalists these days is uniformly depressing. Circulations are falling; hacks are being laid off. Where two or three are gathered together fear and uncertainty reign.

But in my own neck of the woods, which is the world of small magazines, it is by no means all doom and gloom. It is true that some mass-market publications such as OK! and Maxim have recorded alarming falls in the latest figures to be published this week. But in other areas the circulations are buoyant, and my own magazine, The Oldie, has even registered a record 10 per cent leap in sales. Elsewhere it is noted that the more uncompromisingly serious magazines such as The Economist are attracting more and more readers.

Newspapers and magazines depend on the quality of their editorial content and it is always a mistake to credit ill-defined factors like fashion or the changes of national mood for the rise and fall of sales.

All the same, there are signs here that the response of many newspapers whose content is more and more dictated by advertisers and marketing men has been generally disastrous. Faced with falling sales, the suits have opted for a general process of dumbing down or sexing up – whichever you prefer. Forget the credit crunch and the rising unemployment figures and fill up the front page with a big picture of Kate Winslet.

It won't work, any more than laying off a lot of journalists will improve the quality of the product. But I suspect that the process has gone too far now to rescue those organs which are on the slide.

Newspapers trod carefully while Fred 'the Shred' risked all

Anyone struggling to understand the banking crisis may be finding it harder and harder as time goes on. It emerges from this week's Nuremberg-style grilling of the disgraced HBOS and RBS bankers that they were not really bankers at all. Questioned by MPs about their credentials for being put in charge of big banks with billions of pounds of assets, they all replied with commendable frankness that none of them had any banking experience. So how did they come to be there in the first place?

Another mystery is why it is only now that we are being informed how generally useless and overpaid they were.

In the case of at least one of them, the RBS's Sir Fred 'The Shred' Goodwin, pictured above, there are a few clues which may help to explain why he has hitherto escaped exposure. Because like many rich, arrogant and powerful businessmen, Goodwin had taken refuge in litigation when criticised in the press. And, as Robert Maxwell and others had discovered before him, there is nothing like issuing a few libel writs to ensure respectful coverage in the media.

Five years ago, The Sunday Times printed a number of diary stories about Sir Fred. One of them told how he had applied to join an exclusive golf club expecting to be allowed to jump the queue in view of his immense fame and importance.

Goodwin denied all the stories although the golf club episode was subsequently confirmed by the club's secretary. He demanded substantial damages from the paper and even allowed the Royal Bank of Scotland to be party to the litigation.

Although the case never came to court, the fact that Goodwin had showed himself to be litigious would in itself have been enough for all the newspapers to tread very carefully in future when writing about his various misdemeanours.