Dirty rotten journalists

25 June 2005

Sadistic, debauched and full of hate: Ruth Dudley Edwards on tabloid newspapers and trash TV

Bazalgette has suggested that — inspired by Big Brother — the media should encourage the young to take an interest in politics by giving less time to policies and more to personalities. Perhaps because he is himself so much a part of the metropolitan elite, he misses the point that contemporary politicians rarely have interesting personalities. Just like the identikit journalists, they’re a tribe largely disconnected from the people they are supposed to understand. The reason John Prescott and Alan Johnson often seem to be the only human beings in the government is that they are not like those massed ranks of colleagues who have been lawyers, academics or career politicians. Prescott has been a chef and a steward; Johnson has been a postman. Both fought their way into politics through the demanding route of trade union politics. And even though Prescott speaks a strange language, he makes people laugh, while Johnson has resolutely refused to adopt New-Labourspeak. But there will be few others coming up that route. The trade unions are effectively dead.

I was no fan of Mao, but when I was a civil servant he inspired me to recommend that all officials and politicians be sent to work in fields or factories every seven years or so. I have become more radical with age. Additionally, I wouldn’t let anyone become an MP without 15 years’ experience in the real world — which would not include either law or academia. And I would close down the schools of journalism and allow no one to work on a London-based paper until they had served ten years in regional offices. Then we might have politicians that people wanted to vote for and journalists who wanted to make people better. Oh, yes, and while I’m at it, I would stop all this nonsense of degrees for nurses and police. We want nurses who just want to look after people and police who just want to protect them.

Only connect.

Ruth Dudley Edwards’s Newspapermen: Hugh Cudlipp, Cecil Harmsworth King and the Glory Days of Fleet Street is published by Pimlico, £12.50.