At least the government can still rely on the dumbed-down Times for support

When Robert Thomson was made editor of the Times some 18 months ago he let it be known that he intended to take his paper up-market. There was also good reason to believe that he would not let it be so slavish towards New Labour as it had sometimes been during the long tenure of his predecessor, my old friend Peter Stothard. How has he fared?

The paper’s news pages did briefly become more elevated. A couple of new foreign correspondents were hired. No one could have pretended that the transformation was a great one, but something seemed to be going on. Yet in recent months Mr Thomson has gone into reverse gear. Last week the Times thought fit to publish on its front page, above the fold, large pictures of Lady Archer before and after her face-lift. Would even my old friend have done that? During Wimbledon it gave us photographs of Tim Henman practically every day on its front page, not omitting his pretty wife. There are countless examples of dumbing down. Tuesday’s Populus poll informed us that ‘more than half of voters would not trust Tony Blair further than they could throw him’. What precisely does that mean? Perhaps next month’s poll will reveal that 40 per cent of voters would not go tiger shooting with Iain Duncan Smith.

Of course, the leaders and columns remain ring-fenced, as they were under Mr Stothard, but there can be no argument about the news pages. As for features, don’t get me started. It seems that Mr Thomson may have panicked. He has seen the sales of his paper dip fractionally in recent months. Hatchet-faced executives have doubtless blamed this decline on Mr Thomson’s flirtation with more serious journalism. The sad thing is that he has little choice. The consequence of the Times’s reduction of its cover price in 1993 was to attract readers with more down-market tastes.