God Exists Only for Leader Writers

Suddenly there is Graham Greene everywhere. It is his centenary. And the media likes a centenary. If he had survived to be hundred, he might have been a bit of an embarrassment.The media does not like centenarians so much. None of the newspapers could have traced his sexual interests in the detail they have deployed in the past few weeks. Or, at least, not very politely. But a dead hundred-year-old, unprotected by libel law and with a back catalogue of late-night movies? Perfect.

Greene, himself, would not have been surprised by this. The man who wrote that ‘God exists only for leader-writers’ was a consummate observer of journalists and well known for having enjoyed his own early days in our trade. He wrote in his autobiography that being a Times sub-editor was helpful to any young writer. It taught compression and the art of culling clichés, particularly one’s own.It was night work, which left the sub-editor’s freshest hours for work which mattered more. Nor was it as monotonous as it might seem.World events were like Scrabble letters. At four’ o clock in the afternoon you might have a rough idea of how the board might look at the end of the game. But the final arrangement was never fixed till the last tray of leaden type left the stone. The only real certainties that he saw were the falling of hot coals in the office grate, the opening time of the Chief Sub Editor’s favourite bar and something else,which amused Greene rather more, the regular risible vanity of his elders and betters. As we, later Times men, came to know to our cost, when Graham Greene became one of the elders and betters himself, there were few more prickly or more vain. But we are talking now of eighty years ago. Newspaper sub-editors in the years following the First World War boasted of their noble calling. They put themselves a cut above the pontificators, those who had inflated ideas about themselves, the confident predictors of the future. In his autobiography Greene does not first aim directly at leader-writers. He goes for a more trivial example of the all-knowing man, the playwright J.M Barrie who was the only person in the country, apart from the Prime Minister, whose speeches were published in The Times verbatim and in the first person. Barrie did not just send his not-yet-delivered speech texts, in full and in advance, to the sub-editors’ room. He sent also his impromptu responses to the predicted reactions of his audience, supposedly spontaneous responses to events which had not yet happened, such as “I see the Archbishop of Canterbury smiling skeptically in my direction and wickedly shaking his head”. When David Meara asked me to give this Olsen lecture, he explained that I too could have this text printed in advance. I decided against it. I didn’t want to write that “I see my former fellow leader-writers smiling skeptically in my direction…” It was not just my reluctance to tempt fate. By the time I had spent forty minutes predicting the leader-writers’ demise, I worried that my old friends might react with something stronger than a mere sceptical smile. The subject of this lecture is only a bit about God, even here in the beauty of St Brides. It is only a bit too about Graham Greene. It is most of all about leader-writers, for a century or more the most knowing of writers, once most privileged both to know and to predict, to prophesy and to judge. It is about an endangered species of which for more than twenty years I was a member, without quite seeing just how endangered we were. Whenever a journalist anywhere comes to retire, there is often a drink, or a dinner - and the Editor has to make a speech. Most of you here know the sort of thing I mean. There can’t be a newspaper man or woman here who hasn’t been to one, who hasn’t heard all those partially checked, half-remembered anecdotes, almost justified character assessments, all wrapped in a light soufflé of rhetorical conventions. Such speeches are not easy. How much, for example, does an Editor really know about his foreign correspondents, who think that even to visit the office might bring bad luck or, worse, bring them home? Or about the night sub-editors, like Greene himself, whose professional ambitions include ‘not being known’? Sometimes, as an extra help for the speech, the leaver’s friends offer their own anecdotes for the editor’s text, adding a further layer of unreliability to the confection. Sometimes friends are instructed to recall anecdotes, adding to the possible errors of memory the almost certain errors of the forced confession. There are also, however, the personal files. If the departing journalist had arrived only in the last twenty years, these held often little more than expenses disputes. Only if the retiree’s career stretched back further, would there be a bulging file, a paper trail from a very different journalistic age, carbon copied memos of meetings with ministers and police chiefs, military leaders, presidents, papal legates, confidantes of foreign kings and queens, carefully written assessments of war progress and peace prospects, and vivid descriptions. Most of this was what we would now know as Copy. Take the files from the early fifties, from south east Asia, in the long run-up to theVietnam War. We can read in the archives the description of eastern ministerial offices, the personal habits of Thai potentates, the view that Ho Chi Minh and his friends, once faced with the humdrum task of ruling half a real country, would soon feel a cooling of their revolutionary ardour. But it was not Copy which, in the modern sense, ever appeared in the paper. Looking through these frail carbons, I could imagine the features department of today saying, “great, let’s get a profile of that Siamese crook with the strange tastes from the whorehouse menu” or “terrific, what about a series on the war room gadgets of south east Asia”. But, at that time and for a good while after that these notes went primarily - and in many cases only - to the Editor and his leader writers who sat together daily, then and now, trying to agree about the world and what was going to happen in it. Some items of this unused copy were never intended for publication.They were Confidential Memoranda for the eyes of the people on the paper who made the judgements and predictions, the assessments of character and behaviour, in those days pretty much the only people who made such judgements. Some of these curling items were intended for publication but never made it into print. Censorship? Rarely, if ever. Squeezed out for lack of space? Every night. Papers in those days were tiny by the standards of today. The practical effect of low publication rates was not just a discontented correspondent, or indeed a contented one since not all our colleagues love work above all else - whatever the editor’s retirement speech may say.The real practical result was an extraordinarily well informed set of leader-writers, working for an editor who had what amounted to a personal intelligence service.

All British correspondents - and especially those from The Times - could regularly meet the movers and shakers of the age. And the results of these meetings with world leaders and their minions, written often with panache and always at length, were given to the editor so that he and his leader-writers might make their own assessments of future actions, motive and character. These carbon copied accounts even sometimes refer - not always with great respect - to the printed stories written by the same correspondent who is writing the confidential memo. It was the memo which seemed to matter, which allowed the Times leader writers back in London to be more knowing, more seeing than anyone else, which made editors able to meet the foreign secretary on near equal terms. Your man in Singapore says this about the Viet Minh. Mine says that. And so on. The words from Graham Greene which give this lecture its title come from his Vietnam novel, The Quiet American.Greene did not cover Vietnam for The Times. He went there only after his success as a novelist. He did, however, meet one of the most famous Times correspondents, Louis Heren, one of those from whose confidential memoranda I have been drawing. Greene’s hero, Fowler, is a self-consciously, fact-driven reporter for an English paper in the years before the Vietnam War had properly begun. The French had not yet fled. The Americans were merely observing - some more quietly than others. The title character is an American agent, Pyle, who knows, or thinks he knows, how the Vietnamese can be motivated away from communism, how they can be changed and who can change them. He and the reporter are rivals over a girl and over how much we can know of others. The reporter wakes one morning with the girl beside him and his rival dead and with a typical Greene-world question: had man invented an understanding God because man was so incapable of understanding himself? There is a strong smell of opium in the air. It hangs there rather as the question hangs. Then Fowler remembers who he is: ‘Perhaps if I wanted to be understood or to understand, I would bamboozle myself into belief. But I am a reporter’, he says. ‘God exists only for leader-writers’. Leader-writers do not get too many mentions in fiction - or even in press history. So I have given this line some thought. Is Greene merely mocking leader-writers as verpaid, under worked, pompous teacher’s pets? He would not be the first Times sub-editor to take that stance. For £250 a year in 1926 Greene had vied with his fellows to see how much they could remove from writers’ copy without losing the sense. Thirty per cent was an average score. But he couldn’t touch the leaders.Those were sacrosanct - in a well nigh literal sense. Leader-writers could attack each others’ clichés, and often did, carping about so-and-so’s use of ‘more must be done’, ‘must try harder’ and ‘crying out for action’. But ordinary spotters of pompous cliché, even the most senior ones, could intervene only for contempt or libel. There was once a time, even much later, when Louis Heren was Deputy Editor to William Rees Mogg and anxious in the early evening about a highly offensive leader about the PM which the Editor had written before leaving the office. Heren could not contact Rees Mogg. He felt he could not change any words. He just removed one or two, guiltily, sparingly, even though he was in charge of the paper at the time. Which is why we still have the line ‘Better George Brown drunk than Harold Wilson sober’, arguably one of the finest lines in twentieth century Times leaders. But let us go back to Greene at The Times in 1926, watching the coals, checking the names of marrow-growing clergymen in Crockford’s Directory and winning, he tells us, a silver matchbox for his work during the General Strike. When later he wrote The Quiet American, thinking back to The Times as he said he often did, was he, not so much mocking leader-writers’ pretensions, as simply, saying that it was no great job to be a leader-writer? A few pages later in the novel, the reporter receives a telegram promoting him to be Foreign Editor, the job whose responsibilities included charge of foreign leader writing. He is horrified.’I was to be a reporter no longer. I was to have opinions, and, in return for that, empty privilege. I was deprived of my last hope’ . This is a familiar cry to any Editor’s ear. I don’t recall anyone ever coming up to me when I was Editor and begging a job as a leader-writer. Golf correspondent? That was different. Greene was, most of all, attacking those with fixed views for improving distant parts of the world. His quiet American, Pyle, a name designedly like a haemorrhoid, is a caricature of a leader-writer himself, a man whose knowledge comes mostly from the books around his desk, a caricature based in part upon Greene’s highly opinionated and high-paying anti-communist American editor in the fifties, Henry Luce of Time Life. Greene knew that Times leader-writers had a somewhat godlike view. Greene knew his Times, both the very special status claimed for its opinions and the special efforts made to ensure that they were maintained. Records of that go back to the Crimea. William Howard Russell’s first published report from Gallipoli, on April 24, 1854, describes how the French had got to the beaches first and commandeered all the best accommodation, every last sunbed, conveniently far away from where anyone would have to fight. This might be seen as good straight reporting about the current continental rival in the best British tradition. The reporter then gives the editor his private account of the failings of British management - the information which helps Delane become one of the most farsighted editors in newspaper history. By Greene’s time as a sub-editor, according to the Times archivist, Eamon Dyas, the system was somewhat faded. The paper had become bigger and the lines of communication between the Editor, beset by commercial problems, and the men in the field, increasingly managed by a Foreign Department, had become too long. Then came the Thirties, Appeasement, and the realisation that the Editor had paid too little heed to the fears about Hitler felt by his Berlin correspondent.What happened at that time has been much disputed. The post-war result, however, was plain enough. Appeasement brought lessons to The Times as well as to the country. And one of them was a more formal system of Confidential Memoranda from correspondents to the Editor and his leader-writers.

The Cold War - which Greene and Heren were observing at first hand in the early fifties - also had an impact. Editors needed to know about places which, before, they did not need to know. The poet journalist Basil Bunting sent vivid confidential memorand - as well as unused copy - from the shakey court in Tehran. He told the leader-writers of the Empress’s ‘itchy’ fingers on the triggers of politics - and what the communists were up to. And he was much appreciated. Intelligence was valued much more than copy. Incidentally, Bunting never forgave those leader-writers their hypocrisy when, having thundered loudly against his expulsion from Persia, they then, on his return home, let him ‘starve’, as he put it, as a sub editor on the Newcastle Daily Journal. The war between leader-writers and sub-editors has had many battlefields. The Editor and his team, watching the Cold War from home, had queries about the whole world.Where precisely were the Vietnamese borders? Who were the Vietnamese? No one much had needed to know until the need was suddenly rather great. Times leader-writers commissioned lengthy papers from themselves and from correspondents who sent vivid confidential memoranda back to base. Louis Heren was then The Times man in the Far East, a man as self-consciously, down-to-earth and in his own mind purely fact-driven, as Greene’s own reporter hero. Greene had visited Heren and his wife in Singapore before his first Vietnam trip though, as the reporter recalled, had shown more interested in Scotch than journalism. Heren’s memos home - the jibes at crooked ministers and generals, the jovial treatment of national characteristics - contained just the sort of information that could not then be published in columns or profiles but which gave an editor the opportunity to take up a suitably all-knowing pose, the pose that the Cold War seemed to demand.

In his new Editor, Sir William Haley, Heren had just the man who appreciated that. Haley had joined The Times from the bureaucratic BBC. He was not an editor to mull matters over in informal chats - even those dignified with the name of conferences. He liked seeing arguments on paper, o a degree which journalists today would find quite amazing. He had also inherited a group of leader-writers who liked to read a lot, had time to read a lot, and who were keen to increase their power. Many things had changed since 1926. When Greene, fallen on hard days after the war, tried to rejoin The Times, he had been told that: Since your day, the tents have been folded and moved on’. But much had NOT changed. Greene likened the ‘tents have been folded’ line to Longfellow’s Hiawatha, and it was not much more true than that Red Indian romance. As the proprietor, Lord Northcliffe, had once put it, the staff well represented the paper’s origins on the site of a Monastery. Even thirty years later still, when I joined The Times, older journalists were called Black Friars. The leader-writers, distinguished intellectuals, Oxbridge fellows, were known collectively, always thought of collectively, as the College of Cardinals. It was a smaller college in 1980 than in the fifties and sixties. Some of those writing leaders had by then agreed even to do additional other duties. This had been in their interests for some time. Sir William Haley, like all editors, had to face the need for change. William Rees Mogg had accelerated what Haley had begun. By-lines were allowed on the news pages. Opinions could be held - by someone other than the Editor and a privileged few. Fame was possible for journalists, even gradually, but only very gradually, favoured. Heren himself was still there in 1980 - a man of great bulk but ghostly now. He had rejoiced when by-lines were introduced - when his published work no longer had to be headed ‘From Our Own Correspondent’. He was not short of opinions. But he was not a leader writer. God still existed for leader-writers. They were different. Heren accepted that fact, even if he would snort in his scotch about their pretensions. Heren had been much more suited to that earlier age when he could tell others, in a long and spritely memo of April 22, 1953, that ‘the Siamese are not so stupid as is sometimes believed’ and ‘for an independent nation, have remarkably little concern for the sanctity of their borders’; that ‘General Phao, the Siamese police chief, is a crook’ and that the connection between the Vietminh and the Free Thai Movement may be too smart to be true but the Minister believes it: ‘so that’s why I wrote that piece last Friday’. Eamon Dyas found me that published piece last week. It begins with a highy subbable intro: ‘There can be little doubt that the latest drive of Viet Minh forces westwards towards the associated state of Laos is part of a long planned campaign… etc etc’. It continues dull, dreary. Greene could have cut it by a good deal more than a third. The memo, by contrast, is like overhearing bar chat at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club. The editor got both. He could tell friends about the crooked Phao as authoritatively as though he had just come from Bangkok. He could take other soundings and judge Mr Phao as freely as any novelist. The published story reads like an official memo. The memo reads like a story. Leaders were at the centre of the paper in every sense. The other day I found a leaving card of my own - given to me by colleagues at the Sunday Times Business News when I left them for The Times in 1981. It showed me on a magic carpet and it read: ‘Here comes FLOATING CENTRE MAN’, a reference to the then bitter row about allowing the double page spread of Times leaders and letters to ‘float’, to lose its guaranteed spot in the centre of the paper. Floating the centre was heresy in 1981. The Cardinals did not like it at all. Their confidential memoranda may have become less frequent. Some of what had once been exclusive to leader-writers was now being shared directly, unmediated, with readers. That was bad. But moving the pulpit was a reformation too far. From the Cardinals’ point of view, it was one of many unwanted changes. There was also the content of the leaders. In Charles Douglas-Home, Editor from 1982-85, the leaders writers found a master with his own powerful beliefs, which included his own powerful and unorthodox Christian belief, set out in 1983 in then notorious leaders headed ‘Church and State’ and ‘The Way of the Cross’, attacking the church’s emphasis on adapting to science and sociology, placing rationality, it was claimed, as no more than another ritual, even mere fashion. I witnessed no greater leader rows than whether the Editor could commit the whole paper to his highly personal, direct, anti-rational association with God. Distressed Cardinals accused Douglas Home of setting Times dogma, abandoning the comforting High C of E of William Rees Mogg, of setting out in public what would, in their view, have better suited a ‘private hermitage’. Memos flew. Draft position papers were demanded, anything ‘to bind us all together’. The Editor argued that irrationality was everywhere in every paper but retreated to the extent of saying that his dogmas were not binding on the rest of the college, opening himself to the charge that they should not have been leaders at all but articles under the Editor’s own name. It was quite a battle. C D-H recognised that lofty leader writing required an intelligence service. But he introduced his own, a rival college. We had a schism. The Cardinal virtues were moderation in all things. Cardinal enthusiasms did not include Thatcher or Reagan. C D-H pronounced fully the virtues of this pair and added some hard-line heroes of his own. One of my own hardest jobs in newspapers - probably ever, I think - was as coordinator of Charlie’s own views, the views of these auxiliaries, with the views of the sitting College, and keep the leader line consistent. In those days ‘nonsense’ was a mild reproach from one side to another. ‘Primitive tribalists’: those were the Editor’s words attacking trade protectionists in ex cathedra print one day. Then came the silky reply from a Cardinal next morning. ‘I don’t think the argument is improved by expressions like ‘tribalism’ for our opponents’ position and ‘analytical rigour and refinement’ for our own. Many of The Time’s own church fathers were Catholics. There were occasional angry memos from the Protestant tendency complaining that Basil Hume was hogging our attention and that ‘Cantuar’, as the successor to J M Barrie’s Archbishop was known in leader conference, was being neglected. The Cardinals believed in editorial authority. But they had lost control of their Pope. Even more so, they had lost control of the rest of the paper. Suddenly, as it seemed to them, there were everywhere ‘magazine pieces’ (It is hard to recreate the dismissal in that phrase), half pages about ‘gynaecologists’ (of little interest to Cardinals). There were profiles of actors - based on ‘the worst Freudian fallacies’, as a senior leader-writer once complained to me.There were character sketches of politicians, full of stories little more reliable than in an editor’s leaving speech. Personal irrelevancies - what we now know as colour - were placed alongside political decisions. Columnists and feature writers were even sometimes giving religious interpretations of action mostly ill founded interpretations. Last year, I vividly recalled these rows during the reports of Bush and Blair ‘praying together’ before the Iraq War.What would the Cardinals have made of all that? How much better life had been when God really had existed only for leader writers. Graham Greene himself might have concurred with these protests - even though, in my time at the paper, his communications with The Times were mostly to protest about our inexplicable reluctance to publish ex cathedra comments that he himself, now the JM Barrie of his age,wanted to make in print. Portrayal of character - and comprehending the limits of characterisation - was a high novelists’ art. Even leader-writers should be wary. Now, it seemed, everyone was at it. For a Cardinal at The Times in the early eighties life was in many ways frustrating. Like top Catholics in the early Elizabethan age, not only did they see Protestant individualism breaking out all over in uncontrolled and pluralist forms, on the sports pages, on women’s pages. But even the strong man at the top did not want to put the revolts down. as long, it seemed, as he could promote his own personal and idiosyncratic faith. Charles Douglas Home appeared to them was like some mercurial extremist Pius IV, too bold in his leaders, not bold enough in dimming different approaches elsewhere. Suddenly - and not much has changed in that regard since the eighties - nothing existed only for leader writers. Speed was increasingly against the Cardinals. We were beginning to move - hurtle as the Cardinals would have put it - to the position we have now, where we tell our readers what we know as soon as we know it, where we publish much more of what we know - because we can; where a secret is a story that someone else will publish if we do not, where an original insight is an insight that someone else will soon make unless we make it fast, where a leading article is just one of many places in a paper where judgements are given; where many of the arguments which once took place before publication - or before any publication that included assessment or judgement - now take place afterwards; and what an editor and his leader-writers know is much more akin to what the readers and other newspaper writers know. Thus did the fear of the Cardinals come true. Colleges of leader writers are now everywhere much smaller and in many places barely existent at all. C D-H himself concentrated most of all on distinctive leaders that he wrote - wholly himself - often from home on a Sunday. In a rare breach of Times protocol, under which all leaders have been anonymous, these ‘specials’ were collected and published after his death, under the title ‘Leading Articles from The Times under Charles Douglas Home’. He would have been happier, in many cases, as would have been his leader writers, if many of these had been published under his own name in the first place. Leaders are a collective activity. Douglas Home’s greatest fear, in this as in so much else, was the submerging of the individual by the collective. For him, and for me, the modern newspaper was - and is -a healthier place. Today, most leader-writers write also under their own names. So do Editors. Leader-writers have columns of their own, feature and profile-writing opportunities of their own - all much more rewarding and cost-effective than writing all those discussion documents. Once, if there were any humour in a paper, it was in its bottom leader. That remains. But there is humour and light writing in many other pages too. The monolith has broken - even its decorations. Leader-writers - at The Times and elsewhere - still have some of the old leisure to keep themselves informed beyond the demands of daily writing. They do maintain the discipline of arguing a line, having their assumptions tested. Some of my most enjoyable hours at The Times were in leader conferences. But we did not have private intelligence agencies of our own - either internal or external. I sometimes wondered, during my ten years editing The Times, whether leader-writers - as Greene knew them - might not cease to exist altogether. The system of confidential memoranda is not wholly dead. Sometimes we would circulate notes of a prime ministerial lunch meeting. But competition - within papers as well as between them - made even that practice less common. Perhaps other news organisations do circulate discussion papers from their bureaux afar, though not, I think, with the volume desired by Haley.

Newspapers will always want from time to time to nail their colours to a mast. But a signed piece by the Editor can do that now just as well. In this year, 2004, enthusiasts for Graham Greene are enthusiastically celebrating the centenary. Lovers of The Quiet American have rarely had so many editions to choose from. J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan is also, as it happens, a hundred years old, with its own new releases to match. Perhaps Green’s problem with the pompous playwright was a peculiar sibling rivalry.War reporters have rarely been more regarded - and rightly, for continuing acts of courage, celebrated and all too often mourned in St Brides. In White House and Downing Street the existence of God, however much the media and many churchmen may protest, is celebrated with greater fervency than at any time for a century. Here maybe, in the great church of Fleet Street, we need to worry more about the existence of leader-writers.