Lord Hollick has a problem at the Express: my dad. I don't suppose he will be losing much sleep about a nonagenarian retired butcher, even if he has been reading the paper since 1921. Nevertheless, the way my dad relates to a newspaper he has thought of as "his" for most of the 20th century might shed some light on the risky transplant operation which has been going on at the Express. Contemplating a venerable and ailing patient, Hollick has stuffed it with vital organs from every corner of what used to be known as Fleet Street. The question is whether the result will be a new lease of life, or a speedy demise.
My dad is a Beaverbrook man. He has always read the Express and the Evening Standard. Occasionally he reads the Mirror, and a raft of Sunday papers. My mother buys the Express every morning. Then my parents have a chat about the bits they have marked in it, for future reference. In my memories of childhood, tables always have old newspapers on them.
The most obvious thing which has been changing at the Express is the politics. Since he bought the paper in the early days of New Labour, Hollick has switched the paper from right to left. The shift has been fundamental, and for people like my dad, traumatic. (Hollick may have a problem with my mum, too, but as long as horrible crimes continue to be covered in detail, he will probably hang on to her.)
It is important to remember that in its heyday the Express did not strike the tremulously sour note which, after years of falling circulation, it acquired before the Hollick takeover. Robustly, it daily claimed to be "The Greatest Paper in the World," and with a circulation close to 4m, high profits and a significant influence, the exaggeration seemed excusable. My dad was not exactly an average reader, but he was not atypical of a tribe that kept the home fires burning in two world wars, and nodded vigorously at references to Old Contemptibles, Dunkirk and the Blitz. He was certainly part of a key group-hereditary small business folk, suspicious of bureaucracy, law-abiding, yet living off their skills and wits-which formed a core element of the wide social sweep the Express addressed. The Express was big enough to accommodate rival points of view. Michael Foot, Tom Driberg and AJP Taylor wrote for the Express. But no one ever doubted that it was a Tory paper; and no one ever doubted, however eccentric some of his views might be, that its proprietor had little truck with Mr Attlee and Mr Gaitskell.
Recently, of course, most newspapers have jumped on the New Labour bandwagon. However, many of the political shifts have been seen as conditional. Nobody imagines that Rupert Murdoch's Sun has undergone a conversion. Setting aside the higher strategies of the Murdoch corporate empire, people assume that the Sun has calculated that its gut-conservative readers, fed up with the Tories, want a different label. What is happening at the Express is very different. It is about trying to save a paper by giving it a new soul.
Now I know Labour is not as left-wing as it used to be, and that the new Labour party is sensibly pragmatic enough to form the basis of a 21st century natural party of government. I also know that the public is not supposed to be interested in politics anymore. I even know that Labour earnestly wishes to have more reliable support from the press in the future than it has received in the past, and that recent and forthcoming changes in the television industry make this increasingly important. I am also well aware that the logic of the situation is a "comfortable Labour" appeal, in the next election as in the last, to a growing constituency of middle-ground, middle-opinion folk who are young and affluent, and that this essence of New Labour is waiting for a suitable paper-for example, the new Express-to scoop it up. And I don't want to be a wet blanket, but I think that there is a problem in all this. It adds up to a jigsaw, not a vision.
Arguably, newspaper politics is as much about voice and tone as about party affiliation. To hold as well as win loyal devotees, newspapers (and television channels for that matter) have to have clear personalities. At present it is hard to make out what the Express's tone is likely to be-or the nature of its new persona.
The problem is best summed up by cartoons. Shared humour, more than anything, defines a community: in the past, Express political cartoons were a world-famous trademark. Who is the new Express reader going to laugh at? Cartoons do not have to agree with the editorial line of a paper, but they do have to speak uncompromisingly to how readers see the world. Cartoons are the iconography of social and political analysis, presenting images which sum up the crisis of the day. Good cartoons need wince-power. Whom is the new Express going to make wince?
When I asked my dad if he bought the Express because of its politics, he got a bit shirty. No, he said. He bought it for the news, even though this had declined in quality a good deal lately, and a lot of it was not proper news anyway. On reflection, this was because he did not see his kind of conservatism as political, but rather as natural, sensible, self-evident and decent. (Not that my father has ever told me how he voted. Indeed, he has always regarded inquiry on this topic as out of order-so much so that as a child I believed that something would happen to you if you found out how other people voted). In my family, politics was a kind of taboo: only twisted, argumentative, left-wingers were seen as political. The general approach was captured by a 1949 Giles cartoon in which the dad-long suffering, put upon, but in the last resort the boss-threatened gran's new parrot. "If you wish to remain a permanent member of this family," he admonished the bird, "no politics and no religion!" Successful newspapers and their readers belong to a freemasonry of shared assumptions. At the moment, I wonder whether the new Express and its readers-many of whom are a hangover from the past-are even in the same room. (The circulation is now about 1.4m and still slipping slowly.)
But it is not simply the politics which are changing at the Express. The paper is also going up-market. Of course the paper has gone down and up in the past-chasing the tabloids and the qualities. Indeed, in the 1970s it went both ways several times over a couple of years. But up-market to whom this time? Usually such manoeuvres involve taking what you have in the way of readers and adding a sliver of younger, richer, newer readers with high advertising potential, which is what seemed to be happening during Richard Addis's tenure as editor (1995-1998). The strategy is usually determined by marketing departments, the real editors of the modern press. It is not that difficult to be either younger or richer than my parents, so the field is wide open.
But are we talking here about "up-market" as in Bridget Jones-reading, rocket-eating, wooden-floor owning, anti-chintz and anti-capital punishment liberals? Hardly. This is where the Rosie Boycott bit of the equation comes in. She was appointed editor earlier this year to provide a watered down liberalism for what are identified as the wannabe chattering classes. Indeed, the Express seems to be aiming at an aspirational, and potentially liberal-minded, respectable, lower middle class, and for women rather than the Express's traditional male readership. Unfortunately for Hollick, this group does not exist. The truth is that the "liberal" class-if there is one-is sparse and disparate, and well provided for by other newspapers.
In addition to all this, the Express has been trying to descend an age cohort or two-something it has been seeking to do for decades. Recently, the broadsheets have been expanding the bits of their papers which tell the nation's middle-class youth how to get into a university. The Express, not to be outdone, has been telling its a-bit-up-market readers about how to enter Higher National Diploma and Higher National Certificate courses. These are worthy programmes, much loved by New Labour. But the strategy-with its implication that Express readers and their young are a cut above the uneducated rabble and a cut below the university attending classes-is surely doomed. Not only do universities, these days, attract teenagers from across the class range. Glamorous and up-market the HND and HNC courses are certainly not, and-if the truth be told-not that useful either.
So the Express is trying to dump my dad and go lefty, young and up-market all in one breathless go. It wants to be "with it," as they used to say when my dad was a good bit younger. That is jolly brave of it. Some newspapers have gone up-market successfully (the Evening Standard, for example). Some have gone down-market (The Times and Sunday Times, for example). It is also true that some papers have successfully massaged their social and age profile. (Although the Daily Mail, which has managed this most clearly, was from the very start pitched at women, and so it developed an existing strength, rather than attempting to switch to a new readership.) But no newspaper has ever tried to do all three at the same time.
My parents could be classified as dinosaurs wandering a changed world -although they are still remarkably interested in it. Their values belong to a different generation. They approve of responsibility, respectability, good English cooking, helping the disabled, small shops as opposed to megastores, hard work, the importance of families. They are privately just, easy-going, and immensely kind, while sometimes remaining-in their wider, public attitudes-socially intolerant (at least in my opinion). Their particular bunch of attitudes is probably not uncommon: they prefer their leaders uxorious, or-when that is impossible-they would prefer not to know. They value education, partly because they never had much, yet remain roundly distrustful of some of its consequences (on me, for instance). They do not think much of soap operas but they think a great deal of anything involving David Attenborough. They will probably go on reading the Express, for the time being; a habit of three quarters of a century is difficult to break-even though my dad did point out with remarkable precision where it had shifted to the left. But I can tell Lord Hollick one thing that my parents really will not put up with. They are not going to take to any of Rosie Boycott's stuff about legalising cannabis. Not one bit.
