The Daily Novel

At first sight the changes at education should please the workers at the chalk face. Blair famously used all his rhetoric to proclaim his commitment to them; when asked what his priorities were he replied, ‘Education, education, education’. In practice his education secretaries reinforced the introduction of the new managerialism to the university sector started under the Thatcher government. Blair had his own backroom boy as a junior minister who thought he knew better what was good for education than the teachers.

Brown with his clunking fist has given education real clout at the cabinet table. In his reshuffle he has given education two cards in the pack. And Ed Balls who is to be responsible for the schools sector is the joker in the pack. He is one of the new Prime Minister’s oldest friends who is widely known and respected by the Treasury and in the City, and who is intelligent enough to realise that the new managerialism is mostly claptrap. Like twelve others amongst the twenty-two sitting around the cabinet table he is part of the Oxbridge elite. He went on from there to Harvard as a Kennedy scholar, one of the best places to make contacts with the American elite at the same time as getting a first class education. He began his work life on the Financial Times. As did Shirley Williams, one of old Labour’s best education ministers, nearly forty years earlier.

Brown intriguingly also tried to bring Shirley Williams, now a Liberal Democrat, into the government as part of his botched attempt to co-opt Britain’s third political party to the success of his administration. Apparently, the Baroness is still considering taking on a role as an adviser and giving him the benefit of her fine mind, vast experience, and, co-incidentally, her own Harvard connections.

What all this signals is that the Blair era of faith in faith schools is at an end. Though Brown is a son of the Manse and no less ardent in his private religious beliefs than Blair, he is not a closet catholic and is highly unlikely to fill the junior education posts with colleagues of that ilk.

John Denham is quite as much his own man as Ed Balls, though he comes into the cabinet with the delightful Blairite job title as Innovations, Universities and Skills Secretary. (Yes, just think about. You can as a cabinet minister realistically attempt to influence how universities are run. But what can you do about influencing the development of innovations and skills, apart from write articles for the newspapers and rabbit on about it on the television.) Denham is one of tiny minority of the new cabinet who went to a decent old fashioned metropolitan university and entered Parliament as the MP for his university town (Southampton). He was one of the very few junior ministers who actually resigned his job because of his opposition to the Iraq war. Subsequently he has used his role as chairman of the Home Affairs select committee, to challenge and constructively criticise the government.

That’s the good news.

The worrying aspect is that Brown reveals his Blairite tendencies by messing around with the structure of educational administration, which day to day is done by the Civil Service. He is splitting schools from the universities, despite the steadily growing realisation, that what is needed is closer co-operation between the two sectors. The wisest voices at the chalk face have realised this for many years. It took over ten years for the unions from the older universities and the former polytechnics to merge into the new University and College Union. It will probably take more than ten years for UCU to merge with the school teaching unions. Real change just not happen quickly when it involves institutions.

Just how much havoc is created by breaking up the department of education and skills remains to be seen. Much will depend on the how well the two education ministers co-operate with each other and how much attention they pay to the huge potential disruption involved in creating new administrative units of government.

All I can do is recommend some weekend reading. Co-incidentally Frank Heller, who died last week, wrote many things highly relevant to these issues. He worked for many years at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, who were and are one of the world leaders in promoting a multi-disciplinary approach to achieving institutional change. I first met him when I was at London Business School in the mid 1970s working on a project called The Quality of Working Life. He was the director of the Tavistock centre for decision making studies for thirty years until he retired in 1999. This quote from The Guardian obituary sums up what he was about.

Frank’s abiding interest lay in the exercise of power and the consequences of sharing power, mainly in work settings. Concerned about the use of appropriate and ideally longitudinal research methods, where data is collected over time, and recognising that much could be learnt from exploring the exercise of power in different institutional contexts, he engaged in a series of comparative projects that helped to establish his reputation.

Frank did his Ph D at LSE in occupational psychology. This discipline, unlike most of the psychology taught at Oxbridge, concerns itself with how academic theory can be used to effect changes in the workplace. Inevitably that leads to a multi-disciplinary approach because as soon as you begin to study why human beings behave as they do at work, you realise that as well as internal psychological imperatives you have to look at sociological and economic influences.

The Tavistock ethos, which is also influenced by neo-Freudian thinking, is based on getting people to talk to each other at a deeper level and confronting, rather than avoiding, the conflicts that arise when human beings try and work together with other human beings. Maybe if Frank Heller had been at the Granita restaurant table in Islington, when Tony Blair and Gordon Brown allegedly made their pact to resolve the conflict that arose because of their mutual wish to succeed John Smith as leader of the Labour Party, he would have been able to help them resolve their deep-seated antipathies which led to some of the nastiest feuds between Blairites and Brownites when they actually achieved power.

I like to think so. As well as an impressive intellect Frank had a keen sense of humour, which he used to change the course of a conversation. And he retained until well into his eighties a zest for life, continuing with his regular visits to the ski slopes until shortly before he died.

Brown has lost no time since the Queen handed him the reins of power on Wednesday. We now know his full cabinet and a few new policies he is pushing hard for. My preliminary impression is that this lot might do better than the Tony Blair’s accolades have done over the last half of Blair’s decade in Downing Street. But it is far too early to be certain that Brownism is going to be something really different, or whether it is Blairism with a gloss of brown and slightly pinkish paint. At least the new Foreign Secretary has red blood in his veins and studied Marxism on his father’s knee.  As did his brother, Ed Miliband, who has been catapulted into the cabinet after only two years as an MP. He is to be Secretary for the cabinet office and chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster. He will not spend much time in Lancaster but he will not have a department to run. But this delightfully archaic title gives him the opportunity to be a key influence on the new cabinet, as was Willie Whitelaw on the Thatcher government. But he can only do this if he has the ear of the Prime Minister and the ability to sway the views of his colleagues around the cabinet table.

 Brother David has an easier chance to make his mark. He has a Prime Minister, who unlike Blair, so far not betrayed any signs of wanting to help run the world, as if running this small island were not enough to satisfy his longing to get into the history books. Also, he is said to have been one of the few ministers who expressed serious reservations about the decision to go to the war at the command of George Bush, rather than waiting for the backing of the United Nations. He will still have to deal with the realities of American power. Though he may not want to be George Bush’s poodle, but he cannot tell him, or any other American President what to do. But at least But he will be dealing with a Rottweiler who has three lame legs for the next six months. In 2008 there will be a new American President, who seems likely to be Hilary Clinton (a female Labrador?) or Barak Obama (an all black Border Collie?). Either of them are much less likely to send the dogs of war into Iran and more ready to listen to the views, of the Brits, the Europeans, and the people of Iraq and Palestine.

 Alan Johnson sounds like good news for the health service. He is the only member of the cabinet who did not go to university. He tramped the streets delivering the posts and joins the cabinet on a day when his former colleagues have gone on strike. The level of discontent amongst workers in the national health service is even greater than that of he postmen, and that applies to the consultants almost as much as the nurses. Johnson at least will be ready to listen to them. But whether he will be able to turn back the tide on the Blairite commitment to a curiously old-fashioned form of managerialism remains to be seen.

 Same question in education. But that is best dealt with in a separate blog. Meanwhile it must be noted that Brown has recruited to his cabinet even more colleagues who themselves benefited from an elite education. Nine of them went to private schools. No less than  thirteen went to Oxbridge.

It is a grey rainy dawn but I am very happy. Gazing out on our windswept street and feeling many of the feelings that I felt on another dawn, in 18 March, 1976, when I sat down in this room and wrote my first diary in Roderick Road. Then, I felt totally and utterly at home. With the house, with the street and with the huge lime tree, which towered above the house and filled most of the view from the bay window.I am as at home here now as I was then. And quite as happy. Though this blog is in fact a farewell letter to the house. Because although we have not yet exchanged contracts I know in my bones that the deal will go through. On 1 August the parking bay will be suspended to make room for the removal van which the will take whatever we have decided not to throw out of the things we have collected over the years down to the Dorset coast. Which I first saw sixty years ago through the eyes of Thomas Hardy whose novels I devoured.I am happy to be moving because life is a journey and the time has come to move on to the next stage of my life. How it will turn out I am not quite sure. Just now it feels like going on an extended holiday. When I am down there I shall not do much more than write my blog, watch my grandchildren build their sand castles, and walk the coastal path in sunshine and in rain.

It is one of those elusive dreams which you cannot remember. I am trying to set up a meeting with Kelvin McKenzie, because I want to get him to see the error of his ways. McKenzie is the former Sun editor who gave us those front page headlines like GOTCHA, when the British task force sank the Belgrano, and Freddie Starr ate my hamster, on a particularly bad day for real news. Last night I watched his television programme on BBC Four, Birth of a Tabloid, about the launch of the Daily Mail in 1896.I know it is not going to be easy but I have a glimmer of hope. This is not McKenzie the confident tabloid editor of the Thatcher years. This is McKenzie the student, who has pondered a bit on life. He has discovered that there was not quite so much new in his Sun than he had thought. The programme shows him looking through the first edition of the Mail which, though broadsheet in shape, introduced the language and spirit of the tabloid to the British public. ‘You might think tabloids started recently. You would be wrong.’, he told viewers last night.Before 1896 the newspapers were ‘Boring, boring, boring.’ They were written for gentlemen interested just in politics. Not the newly educated classes who wanted news to read on trains and buses.  He paid homage to the man who understood this and gave the readers what they wanted; Alfred Harmsworth, later Lord Northcliffe. And on his programme McKenzie had wheeled in two of today’s Harmsworth to tell us how great their ancestor was, including Lord Rothermere the present boss of the Mail.Northcliffe was portrayed as a genius far ahead of his time. He was praised for his instruction to his reporters to ‘Explain, clarify, simplify.’ For realizing that ‘man bites dog’ is what news is about. For recognizing that readers wanted newspapers that were entertaining, that gave them some fun.Now I have no quarrel with a lot of this. Northcliffe was undoubtedly a most talented newspaperman and one with vision. The Daily Mail today is recognizably the same kind of newspaper as the 1896 edition. It has many imitators, not least the newspapers owned by Rupert Murdoch.  The fault is not so much with Northcliffe it is with the rest of us who accept the Northcliffe model as the benchmark for journalism.As McKenzie said, ‘Alfred Harmsworth did not want revolution. He wanted mass circulation.’  And so do his imitators. Even the BBC, the world’s leading public service broadcaster, is chasing the ratings. Even The Guardian, devotes many column inches to funnies. Much as I enjoy some of their wit and humour, I cannot help but think there is too much of it. I am reminded of a conversation I had in the late 1960s, when I was an enthusiastic member of William Rees Mogg’s team, which was transforming The Times into a less fuddy duddy paper.In the pub at a party political conference I was taken to task by one of The Guardian’s leading political commentators, Francis Boyd. There is nothing wrong with being boring, Francis told me. Serious matters require serious treatment. I can hear his voice now urging me to take the risk of making this blog one of the ‘unpopulars’. And bloggers have an even more awesome job than newspapers and broadcasters in the digital age. There are allegedly four million of us all hoping to get a few readers. And how will we do that if we don’t grab them in the first paragraph, give them a few surprises and some laughs.There must be an easier way of earning a living.

According to an article in MediaGuardian this morning lots of journalists having joined Facebook, a social network which started in teenagers’ bedrooms. The article provides details of ten leading media figures using it, headed by Iain Dale, whose political blog as much talked about in right-of-centre salons.

Of the other ten I know four somewhat. Richard Sambrook, director of BBC global news, because I asked him to talk to my City University journalism students once. Andrew Neil, because I shared an office with him at The Economist in 1975. Cathy Newman, because she won the Laurence Stern Fellowship a few years ago. Jo Whiley, because she was a radio student at City University. Of this lot Jo Whiley is the only one I thought of as having a hot line to the teenage psyche.

I looked up the site and found to my astonished that I had registered a few months ago. I had totally forgotten. Even more astonishing I discovered that I had then set up an automatic feed so that it imports this blog automatically.

This made me warm hugely to Facebook. I can now see it as a kind of W. H. Smith of the digital age. They are distributing my nostalgic ramblings to the world’s teenagers. Today’s youth now has a window into the world of my youth, which I write about often, just like many old people.

I am not at all sure about how it works. There is a mysterious activity called poking, which for my generation has another meaning. Old men get locked up for poking. So I did not dare to try any poking myself this morning, despite the gallery of attractive pictures I found amongst the Facebook members.

But according to MediaGuardian 12,000 BBC employees are members of Facebook. So presumably this kind of poking is fairly respectable.

Like most smokers I am feeling more oppressed as each day goes by and the first of July draws ever closer. Appropriately enough it is a Sunday when I am to be excommunicated by the thought police of the new nanny state. Unless I reform, admit the error of my ways, I am going to be banished from civilised society. Deprived of the company of my fellows blending conversation withe the flow of wine and the chewing over of succulent foods. The ‘No Smoking’ notices are going up all over the place, and they have to be big, otherwise the owner is liable to a fine. I am even to be banned from smoking in the doorways. And if I dare to stub out a cigarette on the pavement, Camden Council will slap a fine on me.

The public service ads are filling the newspapers. (Rupert Murdoch must be rubbing his hands with glee as he counts up his advertising income.) I am being offered free help by the thought police in being brain washed into believing that the State is doing me a good turn by depriving me of the thing I have always liked about smoking.

It was a sharing thing. You passed round your packet of ten amongst your friends. If you were down to your last cigarette on a Saturday night you were totally happy to share it with a friend who had smoked the last one in his packet. It fuelled human discourse. It enriched relationships with the unique double action of nicotine, both a stimulant and a depressive. You paused to take a drag, and while doing so found just the right words for your next sentence.

I write in the past tense, because the new generation is going to be deprived of this most valuable drug. Which also can kill you. Like all the officially sanctioned drugs it has unpleasant side effects. Just like the new epilepsy drug which my youngest daughter is taking, which is making her hair fall out.

Most important depressives and manic depressives are going to be deprived of the drug which helps them to live with their condition, whose benefits have been proven by endless research studies. These are ignored in the zeal for the new orthodoxy. I fear in will get even worse.

I may wake up tomorrow and hear that some policician or police chief has asked for new stop and search powers, so that people can be charged with the possession of cigarettes. In case they offer one to another human being. Or blow the smoke their way on the windy corners where smokers will gather.

The legislation goes far beyond reason. It goes far beyond the need to protect non-smokers from the very small risks of passive smoking, which can only be harmful in very confined and poorly ventilated rooms. It is a nanny policy dictating to citizens how they should live their lives. And it ignores the fact that human beings are infinitely variable.

And this legislation has been brought in by a Labour government, which has already hiked the tax on cigarettes to a draconian level. Though all the evidence shows that most remaining smokers are the oppressed classes, the poor and women for instance. Which Labour is supposed to care about.

Ironically, one of the few places where you will still be able to smoke is prison. Presumably because it helps the governors to keep control of prisions. Cigarettes help the prisoners to deal with the deprivations of prison life and help them to control their anger.

I live in hope that one day I shall be able to wean myself off cigarettes. That if I can find new ways of raising my tranquility level that I shall no longer feel the need to smoke.

Not yet. Everytime I see a new No Smoking sign I have a powerful urge to light up a fag immediately, as my anger rises at the waste of public money (for many are totally unnecessary) and, to say the least, aesthetically unappealing.

In the olden days I could live with anyone who put up one of those ‘Thank you for not smoking’ signs. And I always obeyed such notices. But the whole tone of the No Smoking campaign appeals to the worst in human beings; it appeals to the petty fascist in human beings, the urge to control and dictate the behaviour of other human beings.

So perhaps I better send out a public warning. If any nasty little fascist tells me to  stop smoking my fag on the Dorset coastal path, he, or she, is in serious danger of being thrown over the cliff.

This morning at 10.19 AM someone called Terence posted a comment on a blog I wrote on 24 November 2006, entitled ‘Journeys in the mind….’. The comment was:

Hey This is pretty cool. I think it’s a decent blog.
Thanks a lot and have fun!

At the time I read it I was not feeling like having any fun. My stomach was queszy. I was acutely aware that though I had decided to sell my house in early February, and have long since found a bungalow in Dorset and a small flat in the next street, I was still stuck here in the house I have lived in for the last thirty-one years. Unable to get on with the next phase of my life.

The present prospective buyer is a bloke I like and we had hoped to exchange contracts this week. But it was not to be. And as I learnt last night from a text from him, this was nothing to do with my house. The delay which prolongs the uncertainty arose because his lenders, from whom he expects to get his mortgage, were away for most of the week, on what he described as a corporate jolly. The kind of thing that Rupert Murdoch does. Takes all his key executives off to some exotic island (inviting people like Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Henry Kissinger to address them). In recent years the university sector has imitated this behaviour. It is called ‘Away days’. When the office is shut. All the staff goes off-site. Not to the Bahamas because university budgets cannot afford this. But out of the office.

But although this age in which we live believes that ‘the customer is always right’ the behaviour of the lender was certainly not in the interests of the lender’s client, my prospective buyer, nor me, nor the other people in the chain, the vendor of the Dorset bungalow and the couple whose house she is buying.

So while the lender’s key executives were swanning off on a combined junket/training programme/exercise in staff bonding, the needs of the customers were put on hold. We had to stomach the delay in dealing with some of the many things that need to be settled when you are buying and selling houses in UK. Houses are much more than bricks and mortar. And if you are an owner occupier, selling and buying a house, involves many important changes and risks that go well beyond the financial imperatives.

When I wrote the ‘Journeys in the mind’ blog my thoughts were far away from house buying. I was on a visit to friends in Paris and my mind was occupied with the notion of the journey and the effect it had on me, from the many journeys I have taken in my life. I began it with two lines:

………not so much a stream of consciousness more an exploration of the earth.

In fact this blog (which you can read by following this link) reflected my own inner conflict in writing, between an attempt do a stream of consciousness and my more practical inclinations. It led me to think about the writer’s search for an authentic voice. This applies to the blogger, the journalist and the fiction writer. These are vastly different ways of writing, but serious practioners of all three, want to write in their own authentic voice. To bear witness to what they have seen in life, rather than slavishly follow the dominant fashions of the times.

I have not written a blog like ‘Journeys in the mind…’ since I began my house move project in early February. This project reflects my practical side. The house in which we live is far too big for us. We would like to spend more time in the country, but to keep a pad in town. Since I have retired (at last) from teaching, we can come and go at times of our choosing, so do not have to travel in the rush hour.

But the sale of our house has unleashed an ocean of emotion in my wife and in my children. And as I found on the night that I accepted the highest offer for the house in early March from a woman who was buying and selling houses as an investment, also in me. I have loved this house and would prefer to sell it to someone who also loved it.

Despite its many imperfections. Which I notice every day. And in the last few weeks I have sunk to lower and lower level of incompetence. The doorbell has stopped working, so prospective buyers (and other visitors) have to use the knocker, rather than my favourite chimes. And I have not managed to fix it.

But quite how far away I had got from the original imperative which prompted me to start this blog on 12 August 2006 I did not realise until just now. It was intended to be a dialogue between the demands of reality and the inner imperatives that drive writers and other human beings.

So when I re-read what I wrote on 24 November 2006 I immediately noticed that the date was my eldest daughter’s birthday. Which I was certainly aware of although I did not mention it in my blog.

Furthermore, I can see now, that this birth was also concerned with house moving.

Holly, my eldest daughter, was conceived on the first night we moved into our first house in the Gospel Oak neighbourhood, in Elaine Grove, part of Oak Village which is two hundred yards from where we live now, in March 1968. At that time we were living in my old bachelor flat in Dorset Square near Baker Street. We had decided that we wanted to have a child so we looked for a small house, near enough to Blackfriars, where I was working full-time on The Times, to make for an easy commute.

Because we were eager to support research we agreed when a learned Professor at University College Hospital asked us to participate in an experiment to induce Holly’s birth a little bit early. In fact, the experiment failed, and Holly arrived two weeks after the forecast date.

So we are now leaving Gospel Oak after living here 39 years. We are not totally leaving in that we are keeping a two bedroom flat in the next street.

To which I repaired at tea-time where we sat on the balcony and drank a cup of tea, and enjoyed the tranquillity of this urban neighbourhood. It was totally quiet, apart from the quiet rumble of the trains on the North London line which pass every fifteen minutes. Although hundreds of people live here they were not on their roof terraces and balconies. No-one was there but us. Until two young women on the second floor in the next house but one came out to drink their cup of tea.

And then our new next door neighbour came out with a pole. I could not make out what he was doing. Until he pushed it up against the canopy on his terrace and the accumulated rain water of this afternoon’s storm, cascaded to the ground.

But tranquillity is what I seek in Dorset. For most of the year this is not unrealistic. But by now our projected moving date is back to 1^st August. By which time the school holidays will be in full swing and the Dorset coast around Lyme Regis will be choc a bloc with summer holiday makers and the owners of second homes with all their fifteen children savouring the seaside.

So I am not going to find Nirvana in Dorset.

But I still want to go. To get on with the next stage of my life.

It is going to be something different.

For the first time in my life I will not be living in a large town or capital city. For the first time in my life I will see, and hear the sea, when I wake up in the morning. And that for a boy from Wolverhampton is something. I first saw the sea in September 1939. I did not see it again until 1948. And at the same place, Rhyl, a rather boring and cold and rainy place in North Wales.

I went into the sea, supposedly to enjoy it, shivering. Because I felt the cold then. I still feel it now more than the average.

But at least I know from my geography that Dorset is warm enough for palm trees. So although I might not find Nirvana I might be warm enough to write my blog without wearing gloves.

So I might enjoy it.

But tonight I am plunged in melancholy.

And quite incapable of writing a blog which will move other human beings to write the kind of comments they wrote about ‘Journeys in the mind….’

Tony Blair started his next war today in the closing days of his premiership. He slammed into the assembled media at a Reuters’ meeting in London for the spin it puts on the news, the failure to distinguish between fact and comment, the pursuit of a few very sensational controversial stories, for fostering cynicism about the motives of politicians, many of whom are in politics to serve the people rather than feather their own nest, and above all on the chase for 24 hour news, with journalists constantly being urged to chase the story that has not yet been broken, instead of reporting properly on the story they are already working on. You can read the full story here.

It takes a spinner to spot the spin. And of course, Tony, with his usual still boyish charm, admitted in his disarming way that he had colluded in this culture. Blair surged to power with the help of spin and his high priest, Alastair Campbell, the former political editor of the Daily Mirror (and, as regular readers of this blog will know, my neighbour in Gospel Oak, who plays the bagpipes at the annual street party.)

But his analysis is perceptive and what he is pointing out is what has been worrying journalists, and journalism teachers, for many years. Where he misleads is by timing the deterioration to the timetable of his own rise to power. While history will certainly declare that Blair has outshone any former Labour Party leader by getting the right-wing press to eat out of his hand, it does not mean we have to be mesmerised by his judgment which is, like the judgment of many human beings, overly influenced by his own concerns.

The deterioration in journalism standards which Blair identifies actually began when Lord Northcliffe invented the popular press and published the first issue of the Daily Mail in 1896. Almost everything that Tony Blair complains of was invented by Northcliffe in the UK and Pullitzer and Hertz in the US who were his contemporaries.

Blair, because he is an intelligent and well-read young man, obviously knows some of this, because he mentions in his speech that the press he has known has always been rather bad. He is trying to explain why it is now worse than it was when he came out of nappies and began to read newspapers. And he misleads by focussing on his own period.

The new low of Blairite spin began, not in 1997, but in 1979, when Thatcherism swept the land. Thatcher, like Blair a fervent believer in not being taken in by spin herself, thanks to her daily conversations with the God in her head, was also a pragmatist. So she employed her own high priest of spin, Bernard Ingham, a former liberal minded Guardian journalist, who became rather right wing as he grew older, and used all his journalistic skills to promote Margaret Thatcher and her peculiar brand of born again capitalist fundamentalism.

Ingham basked in the reflected glory. So much so that when my students plied him with a few serious questions, when he talked to them in the Thatcher years, he bullied them. How dare they question him? He was here to teach them about the world as it was.

Blair also distorts his own message by singling out for the full force of his ire, The Independent. As the paper’s editor, Simon Kelner, argues in his reply to Blair, the departing premier’s anger against the The Independent, rests mainly on its trenchant and consistent opposition to the Iraq war.

In fact, what is wrong with The Independent is not its opposition to the Iraq war, it is that it has been desparately trying to survive in a world dominated by commercial interests as a serious newspaper, by trying to re-invent serious journalism.

Instead of clearing the front page for the latest supected paedophile or the young female teacher allegedy having sex with one of her eager male pupils, it clears it for serious issues. But it does not deliver, what The Times, The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph does. Pages of reporting and comment on news around the world. Because it cannot afford to. It began before Wapping when a rather boring financial journalist, Andreas Whittam Smith, had a big idea. Disgusted with the deterioration of The Times, he persuaded City bankers to give him the money to start a serious newspaper, which would give the readers the facts and informed comment. And a newspaper which would by journalists thanks to the new technology.

Despite its initial success the venture failed, because of Wapping, the destruction of the print unions, and the triumph of the true son of Northcliffe, Pullitzer and Hertz, Rupert Murdoch. Who with his financial power crucified The Independent and even made the survival of The Guardian difficult by slashing the price of The Times, which he was well able to do, because he made his money from The Sun and the News of the World.

The Independent would have gone bust, had it not been rescued by Tony O”Reilly, a former international rugby player and owner of many Irish newspapers, who wanted a foothold in serious British journalism. For several years now, the journalists on The Independent have had to try to bring out a serious newspaper on a very limited budget. O’Reilly has ploughed millions into it, but since he is not super rich, his pocket is limited, so the staff may well have to be trimmed even further.

Making the task of producing a good newspaper ever more difficult. Because reporting is very expensive. Particularly if you want to report on serious news around the globe.

I do not like The Independent’s tabloid front page, and it has not brought financial salvation. But what The Independent has been doing at the same time is hugely commendable. They give their reporters licence to write at length and depth about the important issues of the day. And in a way that informs readers.

The more successful newspapers (and this includes The Guardian as well as the right wing majority) limit their stars to a thousand words. Which is not enough if you are dealing with a complex subject. But it the age where everyone is supposed to have the attention span of a child watching CeeBeebies.

Some of these long pieces by Independent reporters have given me an extra insight into issues of the day. And they should be encouraged. And the successful newspapers should rethink their strategies. 800 words is not enough for some subjects. And the drive to be entertaining can drive out serious discourse.

Yes, Tony, I agree that our press and broadcasting has deteriorated and that this is damaging to our society. But I think that the problem rests in the huge power of the big media empires, which you, Tony Blair, have courted in order to get power.

We need to limit their power. And we need to challenge the current convention, that the readers of The Sun, and even The Times, now have an attention span so small they they need a tabloid with lots of pictures, to tell them what is happening in the world today.

And to help them understand it, which is what Kelner’s Independent does very well when it gives its reporters a chance to tell the full story of some particular event.

Newspaper editors, television producers, etc are dominated by the world of Northcliffe and his son Murdoch in which they have been brought up. Yes, human beings are interested in sex. And a lot of the stuff on the internet is plain porn.

But the overwhelming majority of the stuff on the internet is much more like this blog. And millions of people around the world are reading stuff like this.

Despite the continual bombardment from entrepreneurs pedalling their porn and telling every man that he can get it up if only he buys their Viagra.

Samuel Johnson got it wrong, although he produced a very good dictionary. When he said that man was innocently employed when making money. There is nothing innocent about rich men, and those who would like to be rich, pushing porn.

There is nothing innocent about newspaper proprietors, who proclaim that they are providing what the ordinary people want. Sex and over-simplification. As if it is only people with a university education who are interested in things other than sex and sensationalism.

Come to think of it, most of my current friends spend a lot more time thinking about sex than do the working class folk with whom I was brought up.

It is highly unlikely that I would ever have read The Flower Arranger at All Saints had it not been for the fact that this murder mystery was written by Lis Howell, who is a colleague of mine in the journalism department at City University. I prefer my flowers to be left in the garden. And I am not in the least bit interested in those ladies who spend hours cutting them up and creating floral displays to lighten the gloom of Britain’s Gothic churches.

The All Saints church I knew as a boy which stood at the end of All Saints Road, Wolverhampton, was even gloomier than the nineteenth century terraced house in which my grandparents lived and in which my father grew up. I was taken there occasionally by the women folk in the family. Reluctantly because my Gods resided at Molineux. And I worshiped them on Saturdays, when my grandfather and I made regular pilgrimages of a few hundred yards to the terrace behind the goal facing the cow shed end.

Reading the first few chapters reminded me of the feelings of being dragged off to the Church of England services of my youth whose dominant characteristic was boring, boring, boring. Each of the short chapters is headed by a quotation from the Book of Common Prayer, which still stands on my bookshelves, though it has not been opened for at least forty years. As I read them I felt I was being preached at. And by the time I got to Chapter 35 and read:

Be ye sure that the Lord he is God: it is he that hath made us and not we ourselves.

I knew where I stood. My own conviction is that man did indeed invent God.

But by Chapter 35 I was hooked. And reading on with mounting excitement to discover who had murdered the flower arranger. And whether it was to do with the bitter dispute between the new young happy clappy vicar of All Saints and his older parishioners or to do with the hidden passions and betrayals in the love lives of the villagers from Tarnfield in Northumberland, where many of the parishioners were related to each other. Most of them rarely went any further afield than Newcastle.

The book is written from the point of view of Suzy Spencer, who is a television producer (like the author) and who is stranded in Tarnfield with two young children. Because her husband has run off with his younger personal assistant, which happens all the time in the real world of television. Suzy frequently explodes at the boring old farts she finds in the village.

But the story which unfolds is not at all boring. And it is not just a cracking good whodunit, because there are several interwoven themes. The villagers are not at all the stereotyped figures you think when you first meet them. And Suzy Spencer changes during the course of the book. She sees the villagers and church through the spectacles of journalistic scepticism but she is also attracted by the certainties of belief. So the reader is turning the pages ever more rapidly to discover what will happen in her life. Will she turn her back on the boring old farts and move back to town? Or will she find happiness in Tarnfield?

To write more would spoil it for you.

The Flower Arranger at All Saints is published by Constable. Price £18.99.