Is Anything Happening?

by Lustig, Robin;

  David was every foreign correspondent’s idea of what the perfect foreign correspondent should be like. A gentleman from head to toe, erudite, charming, superbly well-connected and always ready to help a colleague, he became, and still is, a good friend. I used to watch in amusement as successive BBC reporters would fly out from London, looking for ways to steal his job from him. He saw them all off, and is still there, well into his eighties, still reporting for the BBC.

  After a couple of years writing as a summer relief correspondent for The Observer, I wrote to the foreign editor, Bill Millinship, to ask if there was any chance of being taken on as a staff reporter based in London. I had applied to The Observer once before while I was still a student at Sussex, but on that occasion Millinship had written a polite ‘get lost’ letter. This time, I struck gold. ‘Funny you should ask,’ he replied. ‘We were just thinking that perhaps we should hire an extra person.’ And so Lustig’s Golden Rule of Career Advancement was vindicated: never begrudge the cost of a postage stamp. (These days, since the advent of emails, you do not even need to buy a stamp.)

  It was a wrench to leave Rome and, as soon as I resigned from Reuters, they told me that they were about to send me to Zambia. I would have liked that – Africa was still in my blood – but it was too late. I had made my decision: after seven years as an agency man, it was time for a change.

  * Equivalent to about £17,500 today.

  † The Mel Brooks film Blazing Saddles, which also featured a famous wind-breaking sequence, was not released until the following year.

  ‡ Radio carbon tests in the 1980s established that the cloth dates from the medieval era and is therefore definitely not the shroud in which Christ’s body was wrapped.

  CHAPTER 9

  THE OBSERVER

  What the British public wants first, last, and all the time is News.

  SCOOP, EVELYN WAUGH

  JOINING THE OBSERVER IN 1977 was not a risk-free undertaking. True, it was a newspaper with a glorious past, but its future prospects were exceedingly uncertain and at the time when I leapt aboard, the good ship Observer was in a pretty rickety state. I am not by temperament a risk-taker, but with no family to support and no other commitments, I calculated that this was probably the perfect time to take a risk. I had, after all, done the same thing aged eighteen, when I flew off to Uganda, so it was probably right, before I entered my fourth decade, to take one more leap into the unknown.

  It was also a gigantic leap when it came to the kind of journalism that I was expected to produce. At Reuters, the emphasis was always on clarity and speed, whereas on a once-a-week Sunday paper with a reputation for stylish writing, I was clearly going to have to make some dramatic adjustments to the way I went about my business. I welcomed the opportunity, although I was unable to change gear overnight. When I handed in my first story on a Wednesday lunchtime, I was told kindly that it would have been perfectly all right if I had taken another couple of days.

  The Observer likes to boast that it is the oldest Sunday newspaper in the world. It was founded in 1791 by W. S. Bourne, who borrowed £100 in the confident expectation that the paper would make his fortune. It would be, according to its advertisements, a newspaper ‘Unbiased by Prejudice – Uninfluenced by Party … Whose Principal is Independence’. But instead of making Mr Bourne’s fortune, it lost him a fortune, and during the first hundred years of its existence, under a variety of owners, it was at various times (I quote from the official history) ‘a scurrilous gossip sheet, government propaganda rag and provocative thorn-in-the-side of the establishment’.

  By the time of its hundredth birthday in 1891, The Observer was being edited by a remarkable woman called Rachel Beer. She had been born in India and was a member of the Iraqi Jewish Sassoon family, one of the wealthiest dynasties of the nineteenth century. She was also married to The Observer’s then owner, Frederick Beer. Two years after taking over as editor, she bought the Sunday Times, and somehow managed to edit both papers simultaneously, an arrangement that I doubt would be regarded as acceptable today. It was under her editorship that The Observer published the admission by the French army officer Count Ferdinand Esterhazy that he had forged the document that resulted in the conviction for treachery of the Jewish army officer Captain Alfred Dreyfus.

  In his memoirs, Esterhazy made no secret of his rabid anti-Semitism, and described his shock when he was first introduced to Rachel Beer to discover that, like Dreyfus, she was also Jewish. He wrote that she resembled a stick ‘wrapped in an entirely white dress, decorated with evidently very expensive jewels, but in indisputable bad taste, and on top decked out with an enormous pink hat, the most incredible Jewish Judaic figure that one could see’. He was particularly struck by

  the most fantastic Jewish nose that was ever produced by the twelve tribes; a nose with which it is impossible to turn when you enter an ordinary street; a nose which can only be driven in a cab, and even there, it will disturb the coachman; and over this extraordinary monument, a ruffled mane, not curly but woolly – characteristic of this race, and badly dyed with piss-colour henna.29

  By the time I arrived on the scene, The Observer was a good deal less exotic. It had been edited from 1948 until 1975 by David Astor, the second son of Waldorf and Nancy Astor, and therefore in his own way also the scion of one of Britain’s wealthiest dynasties. (The paper had been owned first by his family, and then by a family trust, since 1911.) Under his editorship, it had developed into a powerful voice for liberalism: it supported the independence movements in Britain’s colonies, opposed Britain’s involvement with France and Israel in the Suez military campaign against Egypt in 1956, and played an important role in the establishment of the human rights group Amnesty International.

  In the words of one of the paper’s best-known and longest-serving columnists, Katharine Whitehorn, the paper had a well-established reputation for three things:

  It is well-written, often broke and usually on the side of the underdog. Chimney sweepers’ boys, slaves, Luddites, the Peterloo protesters, young offenders in adult prisons (as long ago as 1817), females underpaid and over-punished; the poor, those without votes or drains, the downtrodden – The Observer has always been the place to read all about them.30

  Astor had hired an extraordinarily disparate and talented team of writers and journalists, including the historian A. J. P. Taylor, George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, and the critic Kenneth Tynan. To the socialite Lady Pamela Berry, the wife of Lord Hartwell, owner and editor-in-chief of the Daily Telegraph, Astor’s Observer was best characterised as ‘a lot of central Europeans writing about a lot of central Africans’. Unfair, not entirely true, but quite astute nonetheless.

  With the paper losing sackloads of money, Astor handed over the editorship in 1975 to his deputy, Donald Trelford, and the following year the paper was sold (for £1, plus the promise of a £3 million investment) to what was then one of the world’s largest oil companies, Atlantic Richfield. It was a bizarre match, but it saved The Observer from the clutches of Rupert Murdoch or Robert Maxwell and, for a time, the new owners were welcomed by the paper’s journalists as the least bad on offer. They were wealthy and they were based in California – too far away, it was thought, to be unduly meddlesome.

  I met Trelford just once before I joined the paper: I had flown to London from Rome for a job interview with the home news editor, Bob Chesshyre, and the foreign editor, Bill Millinship, before being wheeled in for a courtesy chat with the editor. They wanted to take me on board as a general reporter, based in London, which suited me just fine: at the time, the paper had only one other non-specialist reporter, George Brock, who later joined The Times, where he rose to become managing editor and then professor of journalism at City University, London.

  George and I were encouraged to do what reporters most love doing: poke our noses wherever the fancy took us and see what we could find. I had had few opportunities while I was working for Reuters to do much real reporting, by which I mean interviewing peop
le with notepad in hand, following up leads and stitching together a story from a variety of sources. It also made a welcome change to be writing about things that readers were actually interested in, rather than bashing my head against a brick wall of indifference to news from foreign places.

  Although Astor had handed over both the proprietorial and the editorial reins by the time I arrived, his influence was still everywhere. The paper’s values were Astor’s values. As Trelford put it after Astor’s death: ‘If the paper was characterised by humour, idealism, a sense of justice and a wide-ranging curiosity about the world and the vagaries of human nature – which it was – those qualities had their source in David’s own complex and elusive personality.’

  Many of the people he had hired were still writing when I got there, including such figures as the Commonwealth correspondent Colin Legum, whose book Africa: A Handbook31 had been invaluable to me as a student at Sussex. I was hugely in awe of him, as I was of enigmatic foreign correspondents like John de St Jorre and Mark Frankland, both of whom had backgrounds in MI6. The formidable Terry Kilmartin, the literary editor whom Astor had hired after they served together during the war in the Special Operations Executive (Kilmartin had saved his life when he was wounded being air-dropped into occupied France) ruled over the arts pages.

  Perhaps the most formidable figure of them all was a woman who in theory was a mere ‘editorial secretary’. German-born Gritta Weil looked and sounded as if she had walked straight out of the pages of a John le Carré novel; she was heavily built, had a smoker’s voice and a no-nonsense manner and knew everything about everyone. She had arrived in Britain on the Kindertransport as a fourteen-year-old refugee from the Nazis, and later met the economist E. F. (‘Small is Beautiful’) Schumacher, who knew Astor and got her a job on The Observer. She became an indispensable mother figure to the paper’s stable of foreign affairs writers, making all their travel arrangements, looking after their domestic needs and, in the case of one of them, Gavin Young, caring for him devotedly during a long and distressing terminal illness.

  After her retirement, she set up and ran an Observer alumni organisation that she named Friends of The Observer, which held an annual get-together for Observer staffers down the years. Bob Chesshyre, in an obituary for The Independent, said of her:

  At her appointment, as a refugee from the Nazis, she symbolised the eclectic character of the post-war Observer; by the time of her death 65 years later she was the sheet anchor to all those who worked for the paper under the its [sic] post-war editor David Astor and in the years following his retirement.32

  There was a strong family spirit at the FOBS gatherings, but the Astor generation were not invariably on exactly the same wavelength as those of us who followed them. When the art historian Anthony Blunt was sensationally unmasked as a Soviet spy in 1979, I was told that Terry Kilmartin knew him well, so I plucked up the courage to ask if he had any idea where Blunt might be hiding.

  ‘Probably at his place in Italy,’ he replied.

  ‘Might you have a phone number?’

  ‘Possibly, but I certainly wouldn’t let you have it.’

  Not everyone from the Astor era was an ascetic analyst of global affairs or man of letters. The Observer’s legendary chief sports writer Hugh McIlvanney, for example, was made of more traditional Fleet Street stuff, hard-drinking and professional to his fingertips. He was named Sportswriter of the Year seven times and was the only sports writer ever to be named Journalist of the Year. Most Saturday evenings, after the presses had started to roll, he could be found in the sixteenth-century pub next door, the Cockpit, often till closing time. Occasionally, he would return to the office to spend the night there rather than having to find his way home.

  It was not usually a problem but, in May 1980, when a small team of us under the direction of Donald Trelford were commissioned to write an instant book about the dramatic siege at the Iranian embassy in London, we took over the editorial conference room as our base of operations and worked almost round the clock to get the book written within ten days of the end of the siege. That meant we turned up very early on the Sunday morning, not a day when Sunday paper journalists can normally be found in the office, to continue our labours. And there, slumped across the conference table, we found McIlvanney, fast asleep.

  ‘Hugh,’ said Trelford gently. ‘It’s time you went home.’

  McIlvanney opened his eyes, took one look at us and groaned.

  ‘Christ almighty. I knew there was a chance I might get woken by a security man – or even by a cleaner. But not the fucking editor!’ And, with that, he was gone.

  In April 1989, he was at Hillsborough stadium in Sheffield, when a catastrophic policing failure resulted in ninety-six people being crushed to death and more than 700 injured in one of the world’s worst ever football disasters. It was a Saturday afternoon, and Hugh phoned in to the news desk to give us the first horrific account of what had happened. I was the news editor and, as the death toll steadily mounted, I grabbed the phone and asked him one of those questions that only an insufferably idiotic deskman would ever ask.

  ‘Hugh, how can you be sure they are all dead?’

  In the circumstances, his response was admirably restrained.

  ‘They wouldn’t cover their fucking faces if they were alive.’

  On the whole, though, the Observer newsroom was a model of decorum. A tough-as-old-boots managing editor, Ken Obank, who took charge of the news desk on Saturdays, was known to utter an occasional expletive, and on one occasion was said to have hurled a typewriter out of the window because one of his page layouts had been changed. When I delivered my copy to him, he would usually turn straight to the last page, and, without having read a word, put his pencil through the last paragraph. ‘Every reporter always writes at least one paragraph too many,’ he would say.

  At the other extreme was the section editor who read through a piece I had written and then phoned me from the other side of the office: ‘Robin, darling, it’s a simply wonderful piece. But, listen, top of page three, second line, are you terribly attached to the comma?’

  My very first story for The Observer was not exactly prize-winning stuff.

  Britain has had its wettest winter for a century … underground water tables are amply replenished after falling to dangerously low levels during the great drought [of 1976].

  But I soon got into my stride, and three weeks after joining the paper, I was on the front page with the results of an investigation into the way crooked doctors were ripping off the NHS.

  The National Health Service is paying up to three times more than is necessary for certain drugs because some doctors are prescribing products sold at inflated prices…

  An investigation by The Observer has revealed that it is perfectly possible – and legal – for companies to charge whatever price they can get for their goods. And it is the National Health Service which suffers.

  I had got hold of the story by the simple expedient of answering the news desk telephone one lunchtime and listening to a furious pharmacist ranting about how the NHS was getting ripped off. It took a few dozen more phone calls – and an independent chemical analysis of the drugs in question – to confirm that the story was both true and, equally important, legally watertight.

  There are many definitions of news; I quoted the one from Scoop at the beginning of this book. Another one is: ‘News is what someone, somewhere, doesn’t want you to print. Everything else is advertising.’ It has been misattributed to many different people over the years, including George Orwell, but it seems to have its origins in a line from an American newspaper, the Harrisburg Independent, in 1894:

  There are but two classes of people in the world – those who have done something and want their names kept out of the paper, and those who haven’t done anything worth printing and want their names put in.

  In a reporter’s ideal world, we would write only about the former, but the sad reality is that the bulk of the stuff you read ever
y morning is about the latter. During my time in Rome, when my duties included covering every utterance emanating from the Vatican, we developed a rule of thumb: would we have been surprised if they had said the opposite? ‘The Pope believes in God, the Vatican announced.’ Not news. ‘The Pope no longer believes in God, the Vatican announced.’ News. Definitely.

  The way The Observer was produced in the 1970s was not significantly different from the way it had been produced when Rachel Beer was editing it in the 1890s. We reporters bashed away at our typewriters, handed our copy to sub-editors, who passed it to linotype operators, who typed it all out again to create metal lines of type, from which pages were put together, cast onto rotary presses, printed and – eventually – distributed throughout the nation. The giant presses were housed below street level at 8 St Andrews Hill, just a stone’s throw from Fleet Street, and the editorial floor would vibrate alarmingly as they rumbled into action to produce the first edition on a Saturday night. A sigh of relief would ripple through the newsroom: another week gone, another paper produced. Time to go to the pub. By Monday, our words would be lining the cat litter tray but, for a few brief hours, they represented the totality of our professional abilities. I was, and am, a hopeless romantic about newspapers, even if, like everyone else, I now consume my news mainly on the screen of my smartphone. (I am also a hopeless nostalgic, so The Observer is still delivered to my home every Sunday morning, just as it has been, year in, year out, ever since I can remember.)