Shouting in the Street

by Donald Trelford

  Nora had a habit of acting as censor of other people’s copy, especially if Israel was involved. John de St Jorre came into the office from the Middle East with a horrific story about the ill-treatment of Palestinian prisoners by Israeli soldiers. Nora and Lajos Lederer, the unofficial Israeli censors in the office, were opposed to publishing it. But they had to withdraw their objections when St Jorre produced some graphic pictures that proved his point.

  Nora had appeared on the front page of the News of the World in the 1960s in a story claiming that Harold Wilson had called in Special Branch officers to follow her to find out who her contacts were inside his Cabinet, after a series of embarrassing revelations. In the ’70s, she became obsessed with the idea that Trotskyists were infiltrating the Labour Party. Although she was forced to desist after the NUJ chapel had passed a resolution deploring this ‘reds under the beds’ campaign, it emerged some years later that she had been right all along. She had a reputation, as Alan Watkins put it, ‘for grasping the wrong end of any stick that might be in sight’.

  I once heard her talking on the telephone to Reginald Maudling, then Chancellor of the Exchequer. Her comments went something like this: ‘Reggie, you’re a coward. I’m not going to carry that anodyne quote you just gave me. I’m going to say this instead and that’s what you must say in Cabinet’ – then read out a much tougher quote she had just invented and put the words into Maudling’s mouth.

  Ken Obank, the managing editor, who handled production of the news pages on a Saturday, used to get angry with her on two counts almost every week: one was that she would dictate her story to the copytakers on Saturday afternoon because she couldn’t type, at a time when they were at their busiest taking sports reports; the other was that she would wander over to the back bench, peep over Obanks’s shoulder to see what he was putting on the front page, then say casually: ‘I’ve just talked to Jimmy Margach (the Sunday Times political correspondent) and they are leading the paper with my story.’

  When I was on the news desk, KPO would sometimes take me off for a quick drink after first edition. On this occasion we were joined in the Blackfriars by Clifford Makins, the eccentric sports editor, whose shirt tail had usually parted company with his trousers after a hectic day. KPO was swearing loudly about Nora Beloff as he passed the drinks from the bar counter to me. I will never forget the moment when Makins dropped his bombshell. I had drinks in mid-air in both hands when Makins said: ‘She’s pretty nippy round the bed.’ KPO and I froze at the enormity of the image he had conjured up. To everyone’s amazement, they soon got married: the ageing spinster and the unreformed alcoholic.

  • • •

  Soon after I became editor, I brought in Adam Raphael from The Guardian as political reporter and Alan Watkins from the New Statesman as political columnist. The Spectator was also trying to poach Watkins and we noticed that we were being followed to the Blackfriars pub by Geoffrey Wheatcroft, who made an unconvincing job of trailing us and ear-wigging on our conversation from behind a pillar. This comic episode was written up in the Sunday Times.

  When I met Watkins a second time to confirm the arrangement, I had forgotten to bring the piece of paper listing all the points we had discussed. But I remembered them all and recited them to Watkins, who was so amazed at the exactness of my power of recall that he suggested that I would have made a good Chancery judge.

  Having made these other appointments, I offered Nora Beloff the job of European correspondent. She was a strong Europhile and Britain had just joined the Common Market, so it seemed an exciting prospect for her. She replied by sending two letters, one to me and one to Douglass Cater, the American journalist who was the London representative of Arco, the American oil company which had just bought the paper from the Astor Trust.

  She thanked me for the job offer and said she would be delighted to accept it. In her letter to Cater, however, she said the Americans should get rid of me as editor because I wasn’t a patch on David Astor. Unfortunately for her, she put the letters in the wrong envelopes. As a result, her long career at The Observer ended on that very day.

  • • •

  Meanwhile, back in Moscow, the Soviet apparatchik was still muttering his little refrain: ‘Observer, Nora Beloff,’ and shaking his head sadly. Then I had a brainwave. I was the man who, after all, had sacked Nora Beloff: surely that would carry some weight. When I finally got this point through the interpreter’s head and into that of the apparatchik, there was a long silence while the news was slowly absorbed. Then the apparatchik came round his desk and gave me a massive bear hug in which I could hardly breathe. ‘You sacked Nora Beloff,’ he repeated several times in wonderment. I felt like the man who shot Liberty Valance.

  So Mark Frankland got back into Moscow, where he did an excellent job. It was many years later when I began to wonder if I had been wise to appoint as our Moscow correspondent a man who had been in MI6 (do they ever leave?) and was also gay – not that I knew either of these things at the time. The opportunities for blackmail must have made his position hazardous.

  • • •

  I happened to be in Leningrad on one occasion when Kasparov called me and said it was important that I should see him in Moscow the following day. The hotel said all the flights to Moscow were fully booked and suggested that instead I should take the overnight train. This sounded fun, so I duly turned up at Leningrad’s Moscow station just before midnight. On the platform, everyone was watching a fierce row between a man, obviously the worse for wear through drink, and a tall and very attractive woman, wearing thigh-high boots and with long hair down to her waist.

  The whistle went for us to join the train and I thought no more about it. The babushka in charge of my carriage had few words of English. She showed me my compartment, pointed to the bottom half of a bunk bed and said sharply: ‘You sleep here. Now.’ I asked if there were any refreshments. She explained: ‘First I bring tea. Then the light goes half off and you get undressed. Then the lights go off and you sleep.’

  I was lying on my bed reading a Kingsley Amis novel and waiting for the train to set off when the rowing couple from the platform burst in. Seeing me lying there, the drunken man went into overdrive. He could see I was English from my book, so he yelled at me: ‘You arrange this. You arrange to sleep with her. I will kill you.’ I tried to reassure him: ‘You’ve got the wrong end of the stick there, old boy. Never seen her in my life before.’

  The Russian beauty then spoke up: ‘Please don’t worry. This man is a Finn. Therefore he is drunk. I meet him in a bar tonight and he wants to come with me to Moscow. I tell him this is impossible. But he is drunk. He is a Finn.’

  The babushka had evidently been busy on the telephone, for the compartment was then invaded by two burly policemen, who carried off the noisy intruder to whatever gulag is reserved for drunken Finns in Leningrad. The beauty and I were left alone. The tea came, the tea went, the lights went half-off and we undressed with our backs to each other. Then the lights went out completely. She said she was a paediatrician called Olga, working in Moscow.

  When I recounted this episode later in the bar of the Garrick Club, Melvyn Bragg had said: ‘Well, your feet would be all right then.’ Another friend said: ‘You slept with her, didn’t you?’ Clive James then intervened to say: ‘No, Donald wouldn’t be so stupid. She could have been a plant. He’d know the roof of the compartment might slide open silently and film all that was going on. If you went to Moscow so often, they’d be bound to put tabs on you.’

  When they persisted in asking what happened between us, I said: ‘It’s like President Reagan said about the Contras.’ (The Iran–Contra affair, in which the US covertly backed a rebel movement after Congress had banned such operations, was a highly publicised scandal at the time.)

  ‘Well, what did Reagan say about the Contras?’ they asked.

  ‘He said he couldn’t remember.’

  • • •

  Although he lost his world championship in 1993 and retired f
rom competitive chess in 2005, Kasparov is still regarded as the greatest player in the game’s history. From 1986 to 2005 he was world number one in 225 out of 228 months. He still has a remarkable record in the chess games he has played in retirement – and he reappeared for a US tournament in 2017, suggesting that he might play more comeback matches – but his interest moved on to politics more than a decade ago.

  His is the strongest and bravest voice for democracy in Russia and he is Vladimir Putin’s most vocal opponent. So much so that he no longer dares to live in Russia, for fear that Putin would have him killed – a belief shared by a former head of the KGB. Kasparov now has a Croatian passport and lives in New York when he isn’t travelling, giving lectures and writing books.

  I interviewed him for The Observer around the time the Berlin Wall came down. He said democracy would take root again in places like East Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia, which had known democracy in the past. But he feared for Russia, since the country had moved straight from feudalism to Communism and had no concept of democracy.

  His hatred of Putin is visceral. In 2005, he tried to run against him as a presidential candidate, but claims that the authorities put up too many obstacles to prevent him standing. When someone in America praised the Russian leader as ‘strong’, Kasparov replied: ‘Putin is strong in the way arsenic is a strong drink.’

  When Kasparov first told me he was going into politics, I feared for him. Of course, he has a devastating analytical brain and a forceful mode of expression, but he seemed to me to be too emotional and incapable of the compromises that politicians have to make. Also, as half-Armenian and half-Jewish, he was at a major disadvantage in a country riddled with prejudice.

  But I had underestimated his courage and his will power, which are truly remarkable. I still think it is more likely that he will be assassinated rather than become President of Russia, but more probably neither will happen.

  Once his enemy was the Russian authorities who sought to thwart his ambitions at the chess board. Then it was FIDE, the game’s governing body, which appeared to be in cahoots with his enemies. Now it is Putin. He is still essentially the boy from Baku who has lost his father and will bravely take on anyone who threatens his ambitions and who has puzzled out for himself how to be the best in the world. Now that he has matured, he will take on anyone who spoils his dream of a democratic Russia.

  At heart, though, he is the same small boy of remarkable brainpower, with shining moral courage and a saint-like purity, who will never back down in the face of anything he regards as evil. In chess terms, Kasparov plays the white pieces and Putin the black.

  AFTERWORD

  It was a great relief to me that The Observer, when it finally had to be handed over, was entrusted to the care of Peter Preston of The Guardian rather than Andreas Whittam Smith of The Independent. Merging The Observer with the three-year-old Independent on Sunday, with the Indy in charge of the merging operation, would have meant that most Observer journalists would lose their jobs. The Observer would have slowly lost its identity and the print edition of the world’s oldest Sunday paper would have died in 2016, after 224 years, along with that of The Independent itself.

  Preston was a fine editor, working like me through those dead days of the 1970s and early 1980s when the print unions strangled all enterprise, producing badly printed editions with terrible colour reproduction and frequent delays. Despite this, his Guardian was characterised by highly readable features, a strong social conscience and a sharper nose for news than it’d had in the past.

  Peter and I had much in common, both grammar-school boys from the Midlands who had gone to Oxbridge, the same age, who had been elected by our journalists around the same time and had worked our way up through enthusiasm for the hurly-burly rigours of the newsroom and the technical challenges of pre-digital newspaper production. Peter also had a wicked sense of humour, sometimes so oblique that people could miss it.

  I would have appointed Alan Rusbridger, then Preston’s deputy, to succeed me as editor of The Observer (not that it was any longer my business). That way, I thought, he would have got to understand the quirks of running a Sunday paper by the time he took over Preston’s job. He had spent some time on The Observer as TV critic in the 1980s. Instead, they chose Jonathan Fenby, a book-writing expert on France and China, who was essentially a news and comment man when a Sunday paper requires someone with a talent for features.

  Fenby wrote an ill-judged letter to The Times, damning my regime for allegedly allowing Tiny Rowland too much influence over the paper. It seemed to me to be a bad idea for an editor to knock his own paper in public, especially when he didn’t know the facts. My former colleagues told me that Fenby was ‘like a man caught in the headlights’ who had so much to do as editor that he couldn’t decide what to do first.

  The Guardian hierarchy took a long time to decide whether it wanted a Sunday version of its own paper or to let The Observer continue on the maverick way it had travelled over the two previous centuries. It was treated as the junior partner, yet it had always sold more copies than The Guardian.

  I was followed by three editors in five years while Astor and I had racked up forty-five years between us. There were two short-term appointments as editor, Andrew Jaspan and Will Hutton, before Roger Alton, whom I had once tried to recruit as sports editor, brought some fresh energy to the paper before leaving after nine years, apparently over a dispute with The Guardian.

  I was surprised that he threw the paper behind the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and wondered how much that had to do with memories of Saddam Hussein’s brutal execution of Farzad Bazoft thirteen years before. I would have been tempted to do the same, but would have finally rejected it – or been talked out of it – on the grounds that we couldn’t know what sectarian chaos might follow the fall of Saddam Hussein.

  It is perhaps as well that I wasn’t on board for the European referendum. With its long record of internationalism, The Observer had to be a Remainer. I was a strong supporter of Britain’s entry in 1975. By 2016, however, I was in favour of Brexit – much to the consternation of my older children and the annoyance, even anger, of some of my journalist chums.

  Alton’s successor, John Mulholland, has served nine years so far and has imposed a distinctive character on the newspaper that is different from Astor’s Observer or my Observer, but then it is serving a different generation in a different century. I always make this point when people ask what I think of The Observer today – that it isn’t aimed at people like me.

  What I mostly envy, not just about the modern Observer, but about all newspapers today, is the amount of editorial space they have, compared with the meagre rations on which we used to subsist in the old days. Editing was a constant process of cutting – choosing, say, one out of four possible articles for publication when there would be ample room nowadays for all of them, or cutting back a natural 1,200-word piece to 700.

  Newspapers have Rupert Murdoch to thank for this, for destroying the print unions in the mid-’80s and thereby cutting production costs, allowing for more editorial space and more sections. But I doubt if the Dirty Digger gets the thanks he deserves, or if modern journalists remember or even care about it.

  • • •

  The Guardian was not sensitive in the way it handled the takeover, so that a number of staff chose to leave, notably Alan Watkins, who heard a Guardian team led by Hugo Young, the chairman of the Scott Trust, address The Observer’s journalists. ‘They’re like a conquering army,’ he said. ‘I’m off,’ before moving his political column to the Independent on Sunday and writing a rugby column for the daily.

  My friend Hugh McIlvanney was captured by the Sunday Times, where he built a brilliant second career over the next two decades, confirming his unassailable position as the best sports writer of the age. When Andrew Neil approached him after I had gone, he said he knew McIlvanney would never have left The Observer while I was at the helm.

  Soon after I left the paper I
was called by a former colleague who said The Observer’s files and other documents were being thrown into a skip outside the paper’s old building on Chelsea Bridge. I drove round, climbed into the skip and rescued most of them, including letters from famous contributors such as Bertrand Russell, Graham Greene and Vita Sackville West, and accounts books from the 1930s with entries in copper-plate handwriting.

  I arranged for them to be kept at Sheffield University, where I had launched a new Department of Journalism Studies. Eventually The Guardian got its act together and paid £25,000 to buy back the papers it could have had for nothing. They are now preserved in a wonderful new archive created by The Guardian. The paper deserves credit for this and for making much more of Jane Bown’s brilliant and extensive portrait portfolio than we ever did.

  Early in my time on The Observer, Jane went with me to interview Anthony Blunt, then director of the Courtauld Institute, taking the shopping bag in which she carried the day’s vegetable shopping along with her cameras. The story was about a new collection of pictures the Courtauld had acquired.

  All I saw when I interviewed Blunt was a remote patrician figure with a way-back accent and a rather disdainful manner towards a young reporter. Jane’s camera, however, saw something more sinister, in a pose that made his eyes look evasive, even shifty, against a dark background. It was a portrait that was used extensively when he was finally exposed as a one-time Soviet spy.

  • • •