Read Online Letters from London by Julian Barnes - Free Book Online

by a Tory central government over the last decade, Camden at one point succumbed to a bit of creative accounting. In a striking (or perhaps batty) financial coup, it sold all the parking meters in the borough to a French bank and then leased them back. The council benefited by a capital sum, though quite what was in it for the French bank was a mystery to us locals. It also became a strange experience to park your car and reflect that the meter you were feeding belonged to the French. You felt as if you ought to insert a five-franc piece instead of fifty pence. And it has to be said that Gallic ownership has made no difference to the efficiency of these stubbornly temperamental machines.
    I T’S NOT JUST the parking meters, the creamed rice, and Harrods. These days, we don’t even own
The Times
. First, it was bought by a Canadian, Roy Thomson; and now it belongs to Rupert Murdoch, an Australian who couldn’t even be relied upon to stay Australian but turned into an American, no doubt for the best of business reasons. At least the editor has remained traditionally British, and the new one, appointed in mid-March, couldn’t be more so. Simon Jenkins is Murdoch’s fourth editor in a decade, a period during which the newspaper’s finances have remained healthy but its personality has endured a running state of trauma.
The Times
, of course, has always attracted labels and expectations like no other newspaper: from “the Thunderer” of Victorian days to “the newspaper of record,” “the noticeboard of the Establishment,” “the Top People’s Paper,” and so on. There is, naturally, a rival view as well:
The Times
is the paper that sought to appease Hitler in the late thirties, and a decade later kissed its hand to Stalin. “The Sycophants’ Gazette,” it was called recently by the columnist Edward Pearce. “In truth,” wrote Pearce, “the old
Times was
a rotten paper, incapable of being judged objectively since it was not sustained by objective merits but [by] levitating two feet off the ground by divine will, like St Joseph of Copertino.”
    Still, even this Josephine trickery serves to mark
The Times
out from other journals, suggesting some cherished ideal of what it might be or perhaps once was. This notion has been under attack now for some time—internally, thanks to an editorial and marketing course of such zigzaggery that you would have thought the paper was trying to shake readers off rather than attract them, and externally by the rise of one particular rival. From the beginning of modern history, there were only three “quality” dailies in Britain. On the left, the
Guardian;
on the right,
The Times;
a bit farther to the right, the
Daily Telegraph
. That was all there was, and that, conventional wisdom claimed, was all there was room for. Change happened only when newspapers died; they didn’t get born anymore. However, this lethargic cartel was broken in 1986 by the arrival of
The Independent
, a fresh-faced, tycoon-free, unaligned, upmarket, new-technology daily. Old Fleet Street hands tended to discount its chances: Anthony Howard, the former editor of both
The New Statesman
and
The Listener
, and deputy at the time to Tiny Trelford at the
Observer
, widely predicted that the paper would fail, and that its editor would be out within six months. Undeterred, the paper has flourished and is steadily beginning to overhaul its established rivals: the last set of audited circulation figures showed the
Guardian
at 433,530,
The Times
at 431,811, and
The Independent at
415,609. Mr. Howard himself, a rueful smile on his face, now writes a weekly column for
The Independent
.
    It’s not just circulation, either.
The Independent
has shaken up newspaper design, with much bolder use of photographs (a move the
Guardian
has followed); it put strong foreign correspondents in place at a time when news values were generally becoming more Anglo-centric, and ran the first stirrings in Eastern Europe on its front