If Michael Howard can disown the past, so can we all

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  Stephen Glover

  If Michael Howard can disown the past, so can we all

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Alexander Larman

What happened to the Rishi Sunak I knew at school?

All this is absurd, of course. The paper has not changed very much. The ‘puff box’ beneath the masthead on the front page advertises slightly more downmarket wares. Perhaps the news pages, with their much praised ‘packages’, are a bit sharper. Perhaps the leaders are a bit flatter. The paper was rather feeble-minded not to endorse a replacement of IDS, and was slower than much of Fleet Street in identifying Mr Howard as the new saviour. Incidentally, while on the subject, I seem to remember that in another publication I once described Mr Howard as ‘mincing into Downing Street’. I would like now formally to withdraw that ill-chosen phrase. If he can disown the past, so can we all.

I am sure that Mr Moore, as he toils away on his biography of Margaret Thatcher, will regard his dethronement with amusement. The editor is dead, long live the editor. At the Times, the same people who once treasured Peter Stothard’s jokes chuckle whenever Robert Thomson opens his mouth. How quickly the Daily Mail’s Sir David English has been forgotten. Of course at every paper there is a sprinkling of old believers who secretly burn a candle for the old regime. But the show must go on. It is bigger than the players, even than the stars. Proprietors, too, can come and go. The Tory party may be more obviously brutal, but in its elevation of new champions, and its quick forgetting of old ones, Fleet Street does not have much to learn.

Pundits seem unable to make up their minds as to whether the Independent’s tabloid is a success or a failure. This is perhaps because it is a bit of both.

It is a success in the sense that there has been a net gain in sales in the M25 area. Eighty-five thousand copies of the tabloid are being distributed every day in addition to the broadsheet, and the paper claims to have achieved a net sale increase of 25,000 in the area. On Tuesday the tabloid was introduced in the northwest of England, and next week it will be distributed in the south. Soon it will cover the whole country. If the paper were able to repeat the success which it has enjoyed in the M25 area, it might be able to boost its overall national sale by 75,000 copies a day. The tabloid version is reckoned to be costing about £5 million. No conventional marketing campaign costing that amount would be expected to attract as many as 75,000 extra copies a day.

In that sense the experiment is an undoubted success. My caveat is that the tabloid Indy does not look very attractive. It is simply a ‘mini-me’ version in which all the typographical features of the broadsheet have been transferred to the smaller format. The result is that the tabloid looks dense, and, with a run of page after page after page of news, appears to my eye rather dull and uniform. If you were designing an upmarket tabloid from scratch, you would not produce the tabloid Independent. They have presumably done it in this way to reassure readers that the tabloid is not too radical a departure, and is still very much the Independent. And, of course, the tabloid version has exactly the same content. There is nothing new about it other than its shape.

All in all, I would describe the experiment as a marketing rather than a journalistic success. If the ultimate aim is for the Independent to be solely available as a tabloid, and to drop the broadsheet altogether, there will have to be a good deal more original journalistic thinking.

The Guardian is the weather vane of the politically correct. When its writers adopt a particular usage, the rest of us should realise that this is now the acceptable form of words. So we should single out a story by the newspaper’s New York correspondent, Gary Younge, last Saturday. In writing about 48 murders allegedly committed by one man, Mr Younge several times used the phrase ‘sex workers’. Please note that this term is now to be preferred to the blatantly derogatory and demeaning word ‘prostitute’.