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How Dear Bill became editor

John O'Sullivan

Wednesday, 22nd August 2007

In 1974 the Daily Telegraph was teetering on the edge of unaccustomed conflict. Maurice Green’s long and successful reign as editor was ending at the very moment when the paper’s editorship was rising in significance. The Tories were to lose two elections that year. A challenge to Ted Heath’s leadership, probably from Keith Joseph, already looked inevitable. How would the Telegraph lean?

Green himself was a premature Thatcherite who as early as 1973 told friends she would be the next Tory leader. But who would succeed Green? His deputy, Colin Welch, the witty intellectual who had recruited many of the paper’s star reporters, columnists and critics and whose hand was not at all invisible in its monetarist editorials? Or the City editor, Kenneth Fleet, whose pages had been friendlier to Heath and Tory interventionism?

Rumours spread that Lord Hartwell, a liberal proprietor who was the author of an admiring book on Keynes, favoured Fleet. If Fleet were to win, Welch would probably resign and the Telegraph would shift politically leftwards.

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A child of our time

From the economic and psychological bedlam of the global downturn has emerged a particularly dangerous false dichotomy: namely, that there is somehow a choice for ministers over the next few years between economic reconstruction and the repair of Britain’s broken society, and that the government (whether Labour or Conservative) must prioritise the former at the expense of the latter.

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Politics

Fraser Nelson

Fraser Nelson reviews the week in politics

The Spectator's Notes

Charles Moore

‘A money-financed tax cut is essentially equivalent to Milton Friedman’s famous “helicopter drop” of money.’ So said Ben Bernanke, now the chairman of the Fed, in a speech about how to ward off the ‘extremely small’ chance of deflation, which he delivered in 2002.