Portraits and Miniatures(98)

There was therefore a position in which one man, still relatively young, without much training or academic or other achievement behind him at that stage, had undiluted ultimate responsibility for the financial and editorial direction of a newspaper with a long history, but without, at the end of the Garvin era, much drive or high circulation. The scene might so easily have been set for a rich man’s dilettantism, leading soon to boredom for the proprietor and to decline for the paper. On the contrary, it led to thirty years of inspiring editorship as well as proprietorship. It made the Observer for me, and I believe for many others, the paper with which, across the whole spectrum of British journalism, daily, Sunday and weekly, they most identified and were most proud to be associated. I may be prejudiced, for I know how much David Astor’s Observer contributed both to developing me as a writer and to sustaining the causes for which I cared in politics, but I regard his civic service as being the most outstanding amongst the distinguished company which I previously mentioned.

In my autobiography I wrote of Astor as being ‘the greatest non-writing editor/proprietor of the thirty post-war years’. To describe him as ‘non-writing’ is not perhaps entirely fair, although he was even better at inspiring other people’s pens than using his own. But he did rewrite the crucial opening sentences of the 1956 leader on Suez, which both helped to turn the issue into the most divisive national controversy since Irish Home Rule and cost the Observer heavily in circulation and advertising, although not in repute. Probably the most damaging and resented of these sentences was the simple ‘We had not realised that our Government was capable of such folly and such crookedness.’

The commemorative volume for the Observer’s bicentenary was good at bringing out the vicissitudes as well as the achievements in the paper’s history. It was also skilfully selected so as to give a fine ride through the landscape of changing styles as well as providing a lot of information of inherent interest and a lot of writing of inherent quality, as well as very good pictures. What emerged was that the well-turned essay of a thousand words or more has been much more a feature of the post-1945 Observer than it ever was in the nineteenth century or even in Garvin’s day.

The items from the first hundred years of the paper’s life were much more news snippets, often interspersed with good laconic comment. I found the following few lines on the death of George IV coolly penetrating, particularly as they were written at, as it were, the heat of the moment: ‘Although a scholar, a gentleman and a patron of arts, our Sovereign, however worthy of being regretted, was neither a great King, an enlightened statesman, nor a national benefactor.’

I also thought that considerable prescience was shown both by: ‘The wide-spread habit of smoking has not yet had due medical attention paid to its consequences’ (1846); and the demand for an underpass to relieve the weight of traffic at Hyde Park Corner (1877). I was less impressed by the Observer’s championing of the right of every newspaper to be represented at prison executions (1879). Any sensationalist sin here was, however, more than expiated by the paper’s leading role against the death penalty eighty years later, when a series of mind-jerking articles from Arthur Koestler operated with the uncomfortable efficacy of a dentist’s drill.

Looking at the collective evidence I am persuaded that there was something of an Observer house style in the post-1945 quarter century. There were inevitable variations in how it was executed, but it encouraged the normally tight-lipped Lord Attlee to be quite expansive on King George VI, and even the Central Europeans such as Sebastian Haffner, Isaac Deutscher, Lajos Lederer, who were a great post-war feature, were persuaded by it to write remarkably unheavy English. (Koestler needed no such persuasion, for hardly anyone, unless it be Joseph Conrad, has written so well in a language not his own.)

The Observer stylist who stood out, however, was Patrick O’Donovan (1919-81). His piece on Churchill’s funeral was as near to a perfect example of gossamer writing as it is possible to imagine. It was not written to convey any great message. Nor was it written to express deep emotion. As O’Donovan frankly said: ‘We were not sad … And we did not weep - that is not fitting for great old men - but we saw him off and because he was us at our best, we gave him a requiem that rejected death and was almost a rejoicing.’ What it was written for was to fill an 800-word space, and to do so elegantly, grippingly, with occasional fresh insights, and without striking any false notes. And the simultaneous achievement of these objectives is a good part of the art of high-class journalism.