The joy of funny papers

With new owners, the Telegraph could recover its sense of humour a n wilson

It was no surprise to read that BUK, a Bermuda-based holding company, had been passed into receivership.

The receiving company is called AlixPartners, and they are now selling the holding, which, notoriously, includes the Daily Telegraph, the Sunday Telegraph and the Spectator.

The Bermuda-based company was owned by the Barclay brothers, the mysterious twins who bought the titles in 2004 after the collapse of Conrad Black.

Conrad Black has his faults. He is a pompous windbag. He was convicted of fraud by a US District Court in Chicago in 2007 and, although two of those charges were overturned, he had to serve his time in two Federal Correctional Institutions in Florida.

His protestations of innocence made him seem even more ridiculous than he had done when standing at London parties and opining in orotund tones about Cardinal Newman. On the other hand, he behaved with grit and dignity when imprisoned. His wife, Barbara Amiel, herself a good journalist, stuck by him, contrary to what everyone predicted. Their time as the proprietors of the Telegraph now seems, in retrospect, to have been a glory age.

I worked for three of the titles up for grabs. I was literary editor at the Spectator when it was owned by Algy Cluff, who writes elsewhere in this issue.

I was chief book-reviewer on the Sunday Telegraph when it was still owned by the Berry family; then, after it had been bought by Conrad Black, TV critic. While Charles Moore was editor of the Daily Telegraph, I had a column called The World of Books. He let me write what I liked, and paid generously.

I remember those who worked on these papers, many of whom I came to know. From the old days, on the Telegraph, figures such as Malcolm Muggeridge (deputy editor), Colin Welch – probably the cleverest journalist I ever knew; the best-read, the funniest – Michael Wharton and Peregrine Worsthorne.

Among those with whom I worked, on any of the three publications, Charles Moore, John Preston, Gavin Stamp, Richard Ingrams (TV critic on the Spectator when I was there), Ferdinand Mount (political editor, ditto), Auberon Waugh and Max Hastings (editor before Charles Moore) all stand out in my memory as writers of quite outstanding and varied ability.

Some of the best criticism of the arts was found in the Telegraph – one thinks of Rupert Christiansen’s opera critiques, or Richard Dorment’s writings on art.

I could have filled this entire column with the names of good journalists, many of whom used to work for the papers under the Berry family or under Conrad Black, but who did not fit into the Telegraphs under the Barclay brothers.

The Daily Telegraph under their proprietorship became pathetically thin, and the Spectator became samey and dull – perhaps because the editor stayed on too long; perhaps because of the executive role there of the leaden –though clever – old bruiser Andrew Neil.

Those who hate newspapers – and in particular those who hate the proprietors of those newspapers they never read (Lord Rothermere; Rupert Murdoch) – probably think there is something appropriate when a proprietor is found to be not merely a bit dodgy but actually criminal. I do not share this mindset myself, because I actually think that there is no such thing as clean money.

What we look for in a proprietor of a newspaper or magazine is someone who understands the media; someone who likes, or at least ‘gets’ journalists. From a professional point of view, by far the best editor I ever worked for was Paul Dacre at the Daily Mail (another hate figure among liberals).

There was not a single aspect that he did not understand of the business of how to make a newspaper for the next morning. Often, he was still there at ten o’clock at night, altering picture captions on the sports page, rewriting the leaders, agonising about the headlines on the front page, scratching his shoulders until blood appeared through his white shirt, and shouting at the subs on the back bench. The result, time after time, was a role-model paper.

You might hate the Mail. You must recognise that, under Dacre, it was a flawless work of its own kind.

The only drawback to Dacre and the Mail generally is not that they are humourless – they aren’t, exactly – but that there is something about their titles that slightly deadens humour. Keith Waterhouse had a good comic column in the Mail for years and Craig Brown has the same today, but the columns they write, often funny, somehow get buried by the Mail atmosphere.

In the old Telegraph, by contrast, Peter Simple – invented by Claudie Worsthorne (Perry’s first wife), Perry himself and Colin Welch, and carried forward by the immortal Michael Wharton – always felt like the core of the paper. Its facetiously invented cast of characters – Dr Spacely-Trellis, the go-ahead Bishop of Bevindon, Mrs Dutt-Pauker, the hugely rich Hampstead leftie who lived in a mansion called Marxmount, et al – all seemed more real than figures in the news pages.

Nearly all the journalists I named earlier in a sycophantic paragraph have advanced senses of humour.

One would guess the Barclays have none. Charles Moore and Max Hastings, very different editors, had advanced senses of humour. If the Mail do buy the Telegraph, their first task, if they wish to recapture the glory days, should be to resurrect Peter Simple.