Newspapermen
by Ruth Dudley Edwards
Secker & Warburg £20, pp484
In one sense, this last rollicking, riotous tale of old Fleet Street, of Hugh Cudlipp, editor supreme, and Cecil Harmsworth King, tainted press tycoon, is 15 years too late. Who any longer cares which demented patriots plotted to bring Harold Wilson and British democracy down? The days of a putative 'businessmen's government' run by Lord Mountbatten, Alf Robens and Cecil are (mercifully) long gone. But, in another sense, there's uncanny timing. What will become of our own dear ailing Daily Mirror? Here are the seeds of greatness and the diseased roots of decline.
In 1987, when King finally died, Ruth Dudley Edwards became his second wife's choice as official biographer. Mission impossible. The second Mrs King was Dame Ruth Railton, founder of the National Youth Orchestra, a ranting, manipulative hysteric for whom the word 'poisonous' seems unduly emollient. Ruth 1 bided her time until the dame was dead, too, and then began work on her own terms.
Great editors and publishers often go together, she thought - David English and Vere Harmsworth; Arthur Christiansen and Beaverbrook; Murdoch and Larry Lamb - so tell the joint story of Cudlipp and King, builders of the mighty IPC empire. It's a rich, brilliantly readable venture, with only one problem. Ruth 1 had a soft spot for Cecil King, but direct comparison with Cudlipp makes him merely odious.
Take away the craggy 18 stone of brooding silence and what have you got? A minor planet revolving round Lord Northcliffe's sun. An emotional cripple who loathed his mother and finished letters home: 'I must stop now as I have nothing more to say, if indeed I ever did have have anything to say.' A chill, distant father and cruel, distant husband. A man who admired Oswald Mosley and Ian Paisley. A thinker paddling in the shallow end; an unremitting hater; a supposed supporter of socialist progress who demanded a hereditary earldom; a megalomaniac.
Why, pray, are we required to treat Cecil King remotely seriously? Why can't he be dismissed in much the same way that he dismissed his uncle Harold, as 'a lascivious, gluttonous, Hitler-grovelling, penny-pinching, power-mad, boring old sod'? Because he was a great (hired-hand) press baron, the summoner of Prime Ministers and Presidents. Because he thought he could run Great Britain Ltd better than the political pygmies huddled in the shade of his belly. Because the pygmies, then as now, fawned on him. Yet the closer you look at his record and legacy, the more the reputation turns to wind and water.
For what, exactly, did Cecil King do? What did he achieve? He wheedled a job out of that reviled uncle and was, for a time, advertisement manager of the Sunday Pictorial. (Great! An ad director who despised the people he sold - very little - space to.) He teamed up with Hugh Cudlipp and shafted Harry Guy Bartholomew, the true maker of the Daily Mirror.
He bought rival empires, like Odhams, and hung them like wet raincoats in his outer office. He left behind a business already falling apart under the weight of its own sloppy illogic. He was so puffed with portent, so bent on saving the nation, that he brought his own house tumbling down. Goodbye IPC; hello Trinity Mirror. He chose - and deserved - Ruth Railton.
Through much of the twentieth century, Fleet Street was a managerial desert and elephants' graveyard. (Read Duke Hussey's parallel memoir and lament the feebleness of the old school ties who failed to curb the unions which really ran the Street.) A Northcliffe, aping a Pulitzer or a Hearst, might seek to strut a world stage; a Harold or an Esmond might keep the home fires flickering, with or without any great enthusiasm. Yet otherwise, this was only cheap showbusiness. Another opening, another show.
There were some shrewd, highly professional managers. (King, like Conrad Black after him, was lucky enough to recruit Frank Rogers.) There were some inspirational ones: Bartholomew. But, for the most part, the newspapers able to attract talent were truly blessed - and the rest made do as best they could. The unions ruled because they were united; the proprietors wilted because they were amateur and disunited.
And the thought that Cecil King, fresh from innumerable defeats by the National Graphical Association, was the superman to pull the UK from the postwar mire is not merely ridiculous, but a laugh-out-loud imbecility. King wasn't a solution: he was the impregnable, insufferable heart of the problem. Without Cudlipp, without those Welsh fireworks forever exploding, he'd have been nothing.
Of course Cudlipp, too, belongs to a departed age. You may not, perusing Ruth Dudley Edwards's warm but occasionally unflinching records, much care for his homophobic tendencies, his struttings and threatenings in the inner sanctums of Labour government, his champagne and caviar with Gaitskell.
There was nothing admirable, nothing fair-minded, about the Mirror 's boozy waltzes through the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies. Wilson's scattering of titles was bad enough; the eagerness with which Cudlipp and the rest picked them up was worse. Cudlipp may have been inspirational, but he was not always inspiring, and the old Mirror - cynicism with flair, morality with menaces - was not always the wonder of Piers Morgan's current imaginings. It almost deserved Robert Maxwell.
But Mr King? He filled a hole and played a role, of course. But nothing he did, and nothing he stood for, commands respect; only a modest pity at best.
Ruth 1 gamely thinks him the reverse of the Peter Principle. The higher he rose, the better he performed. Others, alas, will opt for the Cecil Principle: that an ego expands to match the self-delusion available to feed it.
Those were the days, my friends. Thank heavens they've (possibly, arguably, corporately) come to an end. Lovely book; lousy times.
