Matthew Parris
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Pornography is not respectable — Mr Glover and I can agree on that — but I sense that he was making a more serious objection to Mr Desmond: that he is a force for bad. Well, maybe. I could argue that support for the policies of the state of Israel, urged by the present proprietor of the Telegraph (and of this magazine), is doing more real harm in the world than anything attempted by Mr Desmond. Lord Black of Crossharbour could argue that it is my own beliefs on the Middle East which are pernicious. He might also (if reports we hear of his personal opinions are to be believed) privately think me a man of dubious moral judgment because I am openly homosexual and encourage others to be open too. And I might consider such opinions crazy. And where would it end? In lively, even angry, debate, one would hope — and no more.
Which is why I was taken aback to encounter the conclusion of Stephen Glover’s column about Richard Desmond: ‘Well, I would not write for him, and I am sure many others would not. I should far rather become a busker at Leicester Square Underground station. My cry to politicians and journalists of Right and Left, to those who love the Daily Telegraph and to all decent Britons, is: stop desmond.’
Golly. One’s immediate reaction is to mutter that for Stephen busking is not an option. Nobody is inviting him to be a busker. He wouldn’t be any good at it. He would be moved on. His poor upturned hat would remain empty of pennies. He is a superlative columnist, however, and will never be short of invitations to write. We must all place our upturned hats in the locations best calculated to attract the pennies, and mine is at the feet of Mr Rupert Murdoch and, less often, at those of Lord Black.
The pennies are unfailing. Neither of these two men has ever done me any harm. Neither has ever told me what to write or what not to write. Neither has so much as hinted at a preferred subject, or argument, or opinion. Both have appointed editors who have published without alteration what I have written, and scrupulously avoided interfering.
It has never been suggested that I should give a moment’s thought to the judgment of Mr Murdoch or Lord Black when I choose what to write, and I almost never do. I write what I like. They publish it. They pay me. Really I wonder whether it is modest for a writer to ask more of a patron than that.
But Stephen does ask more, and for reasons that are unquestionably principled and brave. If I understand him, then these amount to a refusal to associate his good name with (or help to promote the commercial interests of) a man he thinks bad. And as well as being a conscientious objector, Stephen seems to advocate a positive campaign: he wants journalists to unite in collective action to drive an unacceptable proprietor out of the newspaper industry — or at any rate out of Stephen’s and my part of the industry.
He is wrong, and his argument is dangerous. It cannot be founded on any basis but the assumption that by writing for a proprietor a journalist somehow associates himself with what, as a businessman or as an individual, the proprietor seems to stand for. This could become true simply by being taken to be true. If journalists resign whenever their periodicals are bought by someone offensive to them, the assumption will arise that any journalist who does not resign is content to be associated with his proprietor’s life or opinions. The very act of writing for a paper (rather than the contents of what one writes) will become a personal statement. Far from re-moralising the public print, this would deaden, it tending to produce stables of writers of like mind with their proprietors.
And it must work both ways. If Stephen is to take that approach to proprietors, why shouldn’t proprietors take the same approach to him? Yet were any proprietor to start dismissing columnists on the grounds that their opinions or morals were unacceptable to him, would we not protest that writers do not pretend to speak for their editors or proprietors, our lives and opinions being our own? Well then, Mr Desmond’s life and opinions are his own, too. We should be prepared to extend to proprietors a liberty we expect them to extend to us.
And on the whole they do. There is one exception. You do not attack your proprietor personally, or his family, or his interests, in his own newspaper. That is so widely understood that none of us, I think, is compromised by respecting it.
There is nobody — not Satan himself —for whom I would in principle not write, and no publication — no, not even a Nazi broadsheet — for which I would in principle not write, so long as I had the assurance I could write what I liked. It is my relationship with readers that matters; they must know it is not mediated by the proprietor. To respect that is all we should ask of him.
Matthew Parris is a political columnist of the Times.
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