Some years ago, a colleague on the Irish Times took the columnist Nuala O’Faolain to lunch. Nuala was famous, and feared, as a controversialist who specialised in attacking popular pieties, unless it was the pietests who were under attack, in which case she would spring immediately to their defence.
The pair had hardly finished their starters when the colleague, who had been in newspapers long enough to know better, heard himself asking Nuala how she managed to have so many opinions, enough to fill 52 columns yearly, as well as the odd special assignment. Nuala, cutlery suspended in mid-air, looked at him incredulously and said: “What are you talking about? I haven’t any opinions – I’m a journalist.”
Richard Evans, although a former newsman himself, does not seem to have grasped the first commandment in the journalist’s catechism: stop at nothing in pursuit of a story. His subject, George Ward Price, certainly adhered to it. Dubbed by Ernest Hemingway “the Monocled Prince of the Press”, he was one of the most successful and most famous journalists of his time. Born in 1886, the son of a clergyman, he lived for 75 years, and died largely forgotten but extremely rich, leaving more than £125,000 in his will, “at a time when”, Evans writes, “the average annual UK salary was around £1,000”.
When Ward Price was at school, a friend said of him that his ambition was to be either “a bishop, or on the staff of the Daily Mail”. He hearkened to the latter calling, and quickly became the Mail’s star journo, producing scoop after scoop and leaving the competition stumbling in his wake. His greatest triumphs came in the 1930s, when he courted the Nazis zealously, in particular Hitler, who in Linz, on the evening after the German annexation of Austria, “greeted him with a smile. ‘Well, Ward Price,’ he said. ‘Always there!’”
Ward Price’s reporting came in for serious criticism, including from Winston Churchill, who declared on meeting him: “I see that you’ve been over in Germany again, shaking the bloodstained hands of your Nazi friends.” In his autobiography, Extra-Special Correspondent, published in 1957, Ward Price claimed that he “reported his [Hitler’s] statements accurately, leaving British newspaper readers to form their own opinion of their worth”. For other commentators, he was merely the “international mouthpiece for the Duce and for the Führer”.
In any case, early on in his book, Evans produces a piece of evidence that, taken at face value, unequivocally condemns the Mail’s preeminent reporter. Six months after the Anschluss, and following Neville Chamberlain’s peace mission to Germany, Ward Price spent some days at Hitler’s holiday retreat in the Bavarian Alps. Here he had exclusive access to the Nazi leader in all his moods, from the avuncular to the manic. At the end of his stay, as Evans writes, Ward Price “came down from the mountain with the biggest story in the world”.
That story was of Hitler’s determination to take over the Czech Sudetenland, and by implication, his plans for further, wider conquests. However, the piece that appeared in the Mail seems to have been a tempered version of what Ward Price had written. And who did the tempering? Joseph Goebbels, who was at Berchtesgaden at the time, wrote in his diary: “He [Hitler] is still revising the interview by Ward Price, which has turned out very well. It was somewhat too effusive.”
Evans makes surprisingly little of this explosive snippet, yet it is the smoking gun at the heart of his book. If Ward Price did allow Hitler to tone down what he had recorded, it would have been a total betrayal of himself as a journalist. Securing the “biggest story in the world” was possible only through an extraordinary act of malpractice. It is one thing to tell yourself you have no opinions, are merely an accurate chronicler – it is quite another to permit your subject to burnish his own image. When your subject is Hitler, it is wickedness itself.
• Interviewing Hitler: How George Ward Price Became the World’s Most Famous Journalist by Richard Evans is published by The History Press (£22). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
