Waugh’s Beast is back, still satirising those who make England so febrile | Ian Jack | Opinion

Waugh’s Beast is back, still satirising those who make England so febrile | Ian Jack | Opinion

‘Up to a point, Lord Copper.” Fifty years ago, I never tired of hearing the phrase â€" made famous in Evelyn Waugh’s novel, Scoop â€" in the conversations that went back and forth across the subeditors’ desk on the Scottish Daily Express. “Is it DuMbarton for the county and DuNbarton for the town?” “Up to a point, Lord Copper.”

It was our deputy editor who used it most: that way of saying no, without saying no. He had a tin leg and wore beautiful heather-mixture suits of the kind favoured by George Bernard Shaw. He was exuberant and he smoked a pipe: there was never an end to his jokes. “Evelyn Waugh â€" pretty but little-known sister of General Archibald Waugh,” he might say. Then the inevitable: “Up to a point, Lord Copper!”

Scoop is one of the funniest books in the English language and it naturally finds a special place in the heart of anyone who’s ever worked for a newspaper â€" not just because it’s about newspapers, but because it evokes newspaper life with what Christopher Hitchens called “pitiless realism”.

For the never-corrected Lord Copper, read Lord Beaverbrook. For the Daily Beast, read the Daily Express. For Megalopolitan House, substitute the Express’s black-glass headquarters in Fleet Street, a version of which housed Beaverbrook’s newspapers in Glasgow. When I worked there, the great lord himself was only a few years dead. The editor kept an archive of Beaverbrook’s blue-paper memos demanding action: “I hear that the provost of Kirkintilloch is an atheist … why are we not attacking this man?” The Express’s Scottish edition sold more than 600,000 copies a day, and it was said that if a trawler went missing in the Minch the Express would have more planes in the air than the RAF. We felt part of something big and faintly ludicrous.

A forthcoming novel, The Beast, has reminded me of those times. As the title suggests, the book makes no bones about its literary heritage and unashamedly tips its hat to the work of Michael Frayn as well as Waugh. Its comedy is darker than either, but arguably (Scoop, after all, was published in 1938) that bleakness reflects our darker age. Certainly, its subject more urgently demands our attention.

The story begins when a subeditor on the Beast fears that two burqa-clad figures he sees standing outside the paper’s Kensington headquarters may be plotting a terror attack. In fact, the burqa wearers are two young women from Abu Dhabi trying to find the branch of Whole Foods that shares the same building as the newspaper (“this last confident stronghold of the press”), so that they could buy “a shaved pomegranate salad that Leila wanted to try”. But the Beast never discovers this harmless truth and soon England stands on the brink of civil war.

The author, Alexander Starritt, has worked on a popular tabloid that the book’s publicity blurb doesn’t identify â€" though no journalist would mistake the Daily Beast for anything other than the Daily Mail, which long ago replaced the Express as middle England’s favourite newspaper. For Copper, now read Rothermere.

What Starritt gets vividly right, in a way I think no other fiction has managed, is the editing process that is so central to the success of any popular paper â€" and which through techniques of presentation has far more influence on the paper’s emotional, social and political register than all its writing staff put together. “The very belly of the Beast”, is how he describes the production department.

“From this cluster of grey desks were reporters sent out to sleep in hedges and pick through bins … To here was copy returned, to have its grammar disentangled, its ignorance corrected and significance identified; it was here that raw, mud-caked nuggets of information were cut and polished to have revealed in them the shine and sparkle of the news.”

Subeditors are the technicians who do this work, and they have always been a more powerful group on popular papers than on their so-called quality cousins. On the subs desk of the Scottish Daily Express in the 1960s, young men barely out of school hacked at copy written by reporters sometimes old enough to have covered VE day or Rudolf Hess’s surprise arrival by parachute on the moorland south of Glasgow. Not that age was a guarantee of quality. “That prosy hooer we have in Motherwell has written 800 words from the sheriff court again,” the chief sub might say when he’d summoned us to his side. “Just get the accused jailed in a paragraph.”

And we would take the bundle of copy and return to our seats, and get to work with our pencils, our scissors and our glue, skewering redundant pages on our sharp metal spikes with a venomous disregard for the poor chap who’d spent a nervous half an hour in a telephone box composing them.

We were a kind of brotherhood. What did we have in common? That we were all men, that none of us had a university degree, that we worked night shifts, that most of us smoked, that we hated excessive length in reporters’ copy, that we understood that to “decimate” meant to kill one in 10, and that we should never use the term “boffin”.

We summoned 15-year-old messengers by shouting, “Boy!” and sent them to the library for cuttings or to the canteen for tea, in the meantime marking up each sheet of copy for the printer with instructions that might have been written by Caxton or Gutenberg. A piece would begin in “LP” (for Long Primer) and descend in type size through “Brev” (for Brevier) to “Min” (for Minion).

Headlines were the pinnacle of the craft. A typeface such as 72-point Century Bold Expanded allows very few letters across two columns and it could be a struggle to find words that would fit â€" it was writing headlines that turned me into a smoker. “FIRST FLUSH OF VICTORY,” I wrote proudly one night, over a planning row about new public toilets in Inverness. “We’ll have no puns about piss and shit in this newspaper,” said the chief sub sternly, and told me to try again.

Together with the tobacco pouch, the gentleman’s armband and the typewriter, most of this world has gone. At Starritt’s Beast, men and women type into screens, everyone went to university, and any smoking is done outside. What persists is the adrenaline produced by the approaching deadline and the pleasure â€" the pride, even â€" that subeditors get from their craft.

At the spin-off news site, the Beast Online, the hard-pressed staff can be overheard weeping in the toilets after a day producing headlines such as “Yew were always on my mind â€" the tree that looks like Elvis”. Or “Rejected migrants given luxury mosque â€" and YOU’RE paying for it”. But on the paper, Starritt writes, “the base note was deep earnestness” under an editor who tells his staff they must save the country from Muslim extremists as well as from subjugation to Brussels, to the secret courts of Britain’s own government, and to “a metropolitan elite that holds the rest of the country in disdain”.

All very well, but a new recruit to the paper sees the Beast differently, its pages “the product of a mind morbidly drawn to decay and corruption … Tragic Schoolgirls, Tragic Babies, Tragic Soldiers, Tragic Anything.” Money is what keeps people working there.

The question then arises: was it money that kept me working at the Express? Probably not, though £22 a week was a handsome sum in 1967. There were other, less quantifiable, rewards â€" colleagues to befriend, a craft to learn, a career to advance, a history to feel part of.

Did the paper do any good? In my time its causes ranged from rescuing the Church of Scotland from an Episcopalian plot (“No bishops in the Kirk!”) to preventing the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders amalgamating with another regiment (“Save the Argylls!”). The first was successful, the second eventually not.

The Express’s tone seemed shrill at the time. Now, post-Murdoch, it looks mild. As Starritt’s satire suggests, the real achievement of the popular press is to have played a part in making Britain, particularly England, the strange, febrile country we now know. And never has it played a fuller part than in these, its dying days.

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