Rupert Murdoch, who has retired after 69 years at the head of News Corporation, is indisputably the foremost and boldest media proprietor in history. Lord Northcliffe and William Randolph Hearst would have been contenders for that title in earlier times, but Northcliffe died before the radio, film, and television industries were seriously established, and while Hearst was to some extent a multi-media owner, he was a pioneer only in some aspects of the newspaper business. Both men confined themselves to their native countries. Hearst is better remembered as a fantastic, almost Oriental art collector, builder of the most magnificent residence in the new world, and fabled star of public curiosity, especially as the inspiration for Citizen Kane. Northcliffe, to the extent he is still remembered, (he died nearly a century ago), is chiefly recalled for the madness of his last years; a few months before he died, he phoned the editor of The Times, which he owned, shouted “Are you a shrimp or a brewer?” and hung up without waiting for an answer. Such eccentricities have never been ascribed to Rupert Murdoch.

His father, Sir Keith Murdoch, was a journalist and publisher most famous for his claims that Gallipoli was a bungled British operation in which Australians were sacrificed as cannon-fodder. He died in 1952, and Rupert, then a recent graduate of Oxford, where he was a strenuous supporter of the Labour Party, took over his father’s modest provincial Australian newspaper, The Adelaide News. He raised its profitability, made a number of acquisitions, and followed the path trodden by other Commonwealth figures, particularly Lord Beaverbrook and Lord Thomson, to Fleet Street. Not without controversy, he gained control of the mass circulation Sunday tabloid News of the World and then The Sun, which he converted to a tabloid, in 1969. He quickly demonstrated the flair he had developed in Australia for presenting witty, provocative, and sensational news for a popular readership.

The Sun, a derelict broadsheet, had been offered for sale for a nominal amount by the Mirror Group to spare itself the cost of redundancy payments in shutting it down. This decision by Mirror CEO Hugh Cudlipp was one of the most catastrophic misjudgments in the history of the British newspaper industry. On seeing the first copy of The Sun under new ownership, Cudlipp confidently stated that The Mirror had nothing to fear. Murdoch produced a much more flamboyant tabloid morning national newspaper with a populist, low tax and somewhat libertarian flavour that resonated more strongly than the socialistic class antagonism of The Mirror.

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The Sun eclipsed The Mirror in circulation in nine years, reaching and for a long time remaining at about five million daily — the Western world’s largest daily newspaper circulation. It was a renowned source of humorous headlines and stories; page 3 featured a sexy naked or scantily clad young woman. In advising against voting for the Labour Party in 1992, The Sun warned that, if it were elected, for the next four years “the page 3 girl will look like this”: an under-dressed woman of approximately 300 pounds on a bicycle. When a summer strike in the French ports for the cross-Channel ferries effectively stopped traffic to France other than by air, The Sun headline was: “BLOODY FROGS SCUTTLE OUR HOLS.” During the Falklands War, Private Eye spoofed that The Sun was offering a mini-metro automobile to any British soldier who “killed an Argie”. It did not seem implausible.

Murdoch became the tabloid king of the English-speaking world after buying the New York Post in 1975, America’s oldest daily newspaper, which he has gradually built up to be the leading and liveliest American tabloid newspaper. He bought the money-losing Times and the profitable Sunday Times from Thomson in 1981, after The Times had taken and lost a prolonged strike. One of his greatest and boldest initiatives was building a state-of-the-art printing facility at Wapping. It remained unoccupied for months as he tried to negotiate demanning arrangements with the printing and pre-press unions. The unions took no notice of the less tolerant regime for illegal work stoppages that the Thatcher government imposed, and when the unionised workforce struck, illegally, but as had been their custom, Murdoch fired them and replaced them at once with a smaller, carefully assembled workforce.

Despite prolonged and violent demonstrations, these workers were successfully brought in and out of the new plant in armoured buses and under heavy police protection until a severance settlement was reached. This was a glorious victory over the notoriously capricious Fleet Street shop stewards who for decades had delighted in taking newspapers down for frivolous reasons, insisting on hugely inflated numbers of employees and cash payments to phantom workers. He revolutionised the London newspaper industry and all of the other publishers followed him to new printing facilities and higher profits, (though I was the only one who publicly recognised our debt to him — I had bought control of the Telegraph Group in 1986).

His next pioneering initiative was buying up independent television stations in the United States, putting them together as a network, and buying the Twentieth Century Fox film studio and engaging in systematic integration by doing much of his own programming. At approximately the same time, he set up a relatively unregulated satellite telecaster in Britain and, after a good deal of skirmishing, merged with his chief competitor and became the controlling shareholder of British Sky Broadcasting, which after heavy start-up costs, became another enormous profit centre. Here again he was a pioneer and was one of the world’s greatest satellite television operators.

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He outlined to television veteran Roger Ailes his idea of a conservative American cable news network, to compete with the relentlessly leftist CNN and MSNBC, both owned by huge media conglomerates. In one of the most famous exchanges of modern media industry history, Ailes said that this could work; Murdoch asked how much it would cost and when the response came, “$800 million”, Murdoch replied: “What are you waiting for?”

Fox News was an overwhelming success from the start and has vastly outperformed its chief rivals. He has also persisted in the newspaper business and has been instrumental in developing digital subscriptions as a formula for rebuilding newspaper circulation. In 2007, he bought Dow Jones, publisher of the Wall Street Journal, and has transformed it into a general interest newspaper that has severely challenged and somewhat displaced The New York Times as the country’s most influential newspaper.

Not everything has been a success. In unleashing cover price wars in the British national newspaper market in the Nineties, he damaged the economics of that industry without significantly improving his position in the quality newspaper market. Turning the Times into a tabloid is hard to justify. He lost over $500 million on the Internet site Myspace, and was probably taken for more than $2 billion on TV Guide by the venerable Walter Annenberg. He built his company on debt and had a severe financial crisis in the late Eighties. He has since sold most of his assets except for the newspapers and Fox News and the book publisher Harper Collins and now has a fairly conservative balance sheet, despite the recent loss of an astounding $787 million defamation action over the 2020 US election.

For a long time, most of his editors and close collaborators seemed to leave his employ involuntarily and often, as with Harry Evans (Times) and Andrew Neil (Sunday Times and Sky), acrimoniously. In the end, after receiving many favours from her, he deserted Margaret Thatcher, and except for Ronald Reagan, most other political leaders in all the countries where he has been active.

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Having known him intermittently for over 40 years, and competed with him in Britain and Australia, I’ve never had the impression that he is much interested in politics, other than in how they affect him, or culture, or hobbies, except perhaps motor-sailing. His company is his passion, occupation, and pastime. Although he has known an enormous number of prominent people, he is not socially ambitious, declined a seat in the House of Lords, and though well-educated, knowledgeable and always astute and perceptive, he never tries to impress anyone and is not prepossessing. He has a laconic sense of humour.

I have always thought him a cynic, and while he was not directly implicated in the hacking scandal over a decade ago in England, he is responsible for the News Corp culture of entitlement to do almost anything in pursuit of the corporate interest. A culture of total war and take no prisoners. But when I told him that I thought the animated Fox Television series, The Simpsons in which the family is a caricature of proletarian philistinism and the politician in the series is corrupt, was representative of his views, he strenuously denied it.

He is affable and courteous but not gregarious, and never pretentious or verbose; one of the few thoroughly ruthless and unsentimental people I have known. But he is a straight-forward businessman whose word is reliable. All four of his marriages have ended in divorce, but without serious indiscretions and no one knows what goes on in another person’s marriage and family. He is in excellent health and continues as the controlling shareholder of his companies. This is no time for anything remotely like an obituary.

Shovelling information and entertainment was Northcliffe’s business model. His conjuror’s trick was simple: give as many people as possible what they want, and attention and dumb human curiosity can be transformed into merchandise. Nationalism, revolution, Enlightenment — all the forces of modernity sprung up under the transformative systems of print communication and capitalism. Northcliffe was the first to spot the potential of simply merging the two. And where’s the problem with that? Only that, as Pound felt, we don’t seem to like it when the dignity of human communication depends upon the whims of mercurial businessmen.

Northcliffe became the first in the line of suspicious personalities who have owned and administered our media: an evolutionary chart from frock-coated newspaperman to geeky social networker. And it is the megalomaniac perception of Northcliffe that Andrew Roberts seeks to rebut in a new and sympathetic biography. As ever, Roberts has been drawn to a well-fed “great man” of appetite and ambition (his previous subjects include Churchill, Napoleon, and George III). His approach to biography is traditionalist, using the lives of his characters to narrate a broader social and political period. The bulk of this book is therefore concerned with Northcliffe’s role in the political manoeuvres of the Edwardian era.

Throughout, Roberts serves as Northcliffe’s minder as much as his biographer, fending off the slights which have accumulated in the century since his death. (Briefly: Roberts concedes Northcliffe’s paranoid anti-Semitism and occasional brutality, while slapping down accusations of dictatorialism with convincing if over-defensive force.) Northcliffe’s attackers are snobs, he concludes. This man was a self-made genius who spoke for the people. If you don’t like him, comes the implication, perhaps it’s his readers you really don’t like.

Amid all the reputation-management, though, Northcliffe’s most interesting legacy from a 21^st-century vantage is neglected. He was the first global tech-media mogul and, like Rupert Murdoch and Mark Zuckerberg, his genius lay in his instinctive understanding of how humanity wished to communicate with itself. As Roberts suggests, more than a “great journalist”, Northcliffe was a “great psychologist”. Press barons of the hands-on variety, now evolved into multiplatform world-emperors, have to be more than men. They are cultural hegemons, portraits of their age, “the way we live now”. Much as digital media now moulds our psychologies, in the time of Northcliffe, as he put it, “Our tons of ink make millions think”.

The British media was, until the 1890s, a staid affair, dominated at a national level by boring newspapers reporting court circulars and parliamentary speeches. It was revolutionised by a demand for something more exciting from a newly-literate office class, and the arrival of men like Northcliffe willing to supply it. Born in 1865 to a respectable family of genteel, Micawberish size and poverty, the young Northcliffe had access to the Establishment, but was outsider enough to scale its walls with the hunger of a parvenu. From his middle-class context, he spotted what every media entrepreneur has since exploited: that people would rather consume something banal than anything important.

His first great hit came in 1888 with Answers, a magazine to which readers could write with questions, which his journalists would answer. This formula launched a thousand inanities (“Can Monkeys Smoke?”; “How Madmen Write”; “What the Queen Eats”) published alongside now very recognisable tabloid featurettes: “Mysteries of a Hashish House”; “Horseflesh as Food”; “Narrow Escapes from Burial Alive”. Answers’s contemporary, doom-scrolling analogues are all too obvious. But the model was only preparation for the launch of Northcliffe’s real triumph in 1896, the Daily Mail, which served up a full Edwardian breakfast of aspirational snobbery, sex scandals and imperial jingoism. The Daily Mail rapidly cornered the market, selling a million copies a day by 1900 and becoming the world’s biggest daily paper.

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Nothing dates an era more than its cutting edge, and Northcliffe’s use of electrophone, linotype, rotary presses, ticker-tape and motor vehicles sounds inherently antiquated. But they were the motherboards and algorithms of his day, revolutionising the speed at which his papers could be printed and dispersed. Northcliffe’s technological enthusiasm was also personal. A motorsport enthusiast, in 1909, he was pictured pulling the Wright brothers’ new aeroplane into position, the super-wealthy plaything of its day, much as commercial space travel is ours.

Other innovations were more purely journalistic. A.J.P. Taylor called Northcliffe’s use of the short, punchy paragraph, “the greatest advance in communication since the abandonment of Latin for English” — a judgement which seems excessive, until you recall how the civilisational importance of 280-character communiques has been chewed-over for the past 10 years. And Northcliffe did have an eerie apprehension of the accelerationism that modern media would create. In a 1901 article titled “The Simultaneous Newspapers of the Future”, he laid out a vision for a duopoly of two global papers, providing synchronous news thanks to the telegraph and telephone. It was a remarkable foresight for such a Gutenberg-brained individual.

The Mail became the first colony in an empire. Several of our most famous titles were launched or at some point owned by Northcliffe: the Daily Mirror, the Observer and, in Northcliffe’s greatest coup over the Establishment, The Times. By 1914 Northcliffe controlled just under half of daily newspaper circulation and with popular appeal came political power. Northcliffe was raised to the House of Lords in 1905 but kept his political interventions backstage. His headlines helped destroy governments, but even more breath-taking was his reach. When Northcliffe published an editorial on his vision for peace after the Great War, he was read across the Empire, the United States, Europe and Japan. His dream of a global newspaper seemed almost a reality.

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After Northcliffe’s death in 1922 he was succeeded in the role of press baron and political Machiavel by Lord Beaverbrook (Daily Express, Evening Standard) and Northcliffe’s little brother Lord Rothermere, who had to sell The Times to cover the death duties on Northcliffe’s vast estate, but retained much of the rest, including the Mail. (It would be considerably harder to write such a defensive biography of Rothermere, who was on personal terms with Hitler and praised his “great and superhuman” work.) But Northcliffe’s spiritual successor in ambition and ingenuity was, of course, Rupert Murdoch. As Roberts covers (with a respectful nod to Rupert in his acknowledgements), Northcliffe had even been a personal mentor to Rupert’s father Keith, who some nicknamed Lord Southcliffe.

It was Murdoch fils who seemed to inherit Northcliffe’s feline charm and instinctive media nous. He took Northcliffe’s principles and dialled them up (for instance: bypassing Edwardian sexual priggery with Page 3 models). And unlike Northcliffe, Murdoch had the historical luck to apply two-dimensional tabloid energy to the three-dimensions of multimedia and broadcasting. With satellites and cable television as its printing presses, the Northcliffe formula survived the multimedia shift intact.

But the digital media innovation of the past 25 years has been, simply put, to de-editorialise. To merge private and public communications so they all occur in the same place. Northcliffe and Murdoch were lumbered with the assumption that they at least had to produce material for people to enjoy. But a new generation saw that by building and owning the means of communication they could remove this middleman. Murdoch isn’t at home in the 21^st century — the foul-mouthed, burly Logan Roy outgamed by his gawky, slimy Silicon Valley replacements. Simply create the right host platform, and there’s no need to churn out those stories about rapist boxers, bulimic royals and online paedos.

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People would generate their own tabloid press, pouring their personal lives onto the new media platforms, soon to be joined by the legacy media outlets who can’t afford not to be there. To put it in terms Northcliffe would understand: the Royal Mail and Post Office, The Times and the Mail, intimate diaries and international news reports, all jostling in the same terrifying ecosystem. As Richard Seymour has described it, now “we are all scripturient”, all responsible for turning in the copy we then go onto consume.

Does it do humanity any good to talk to itself so much, to know itself so well? Mark Zuckerberg thinks so, believing that it will foster understanding and empathy. All while building a business that has stoked the lowest human instincts, titillating and piquing our anger, tribalism, lechery and self-loathing, and indulging these atavisms simply because they keep us scrolling and watching and reading. Understanding Lord Northcliffe lets us see the longevity of this dynamic, a modern and very human struggle between what is important, and what is footling and ephemeral, but captivating.

Matthew Arnold, the great Victorian technophobe, set the tone for the snooty attitude of some towards the twittering machine when he saw the telegraph as “that great rope, with a Philistine at each end of it talking inutilities!” But much as we might condemn those who preside over our deracinated media landscape — or even wish them in Hell — the savage irony is the same one Northcliffe spotted over a century ago: they’re only giving us what we want.

Living in the Gilded Age, there were plenty of poor people for journalists to sympathise with — the streets were teeming with working-class Americans who had been cast out of the comforts enjoyed by the obscenely wealthy industrialists. You might think modern-day America — a new Gilded Age in which the gap between the rich and the poor is wider than it has been in living memory — would provide another such opportunity for American journalists to sympathise with the lower classes. You would be wrong.

Back in 2016, journalists, Democratic politicians and Never Trumpers struggling to comprehend how they lost the election came up with two competing explanations. One camp argued that it was a protest vote stemming from the economic anxiety and despair birthed by globalisation, stagnant working-class wages, and downward mobility for the shrinking middle class. The other camp argued that Trump’s supporters were simply racists.

Hillary Clinton was the rare figure to hold both views, immortalised in her infamous comment that “you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables”. One might have expected that after Clinton lost the election, liberals would question the efficacy, if not the morality, of calling a quarter of the country racist.

Instead, they doubled down: it wasn’t just a quarter; it was half the nation. Everyone who voted for Trump was racist. By 2017, the very term “economic anxiety” had been branded a dog whistle for racism by some of the highest profile journalists in the country. So definitive was the racism explanation that during the 2020 election, the New York Times appears not to have run a single op-ed from a Trump supporter explaining their vote; how could the paper of record publish people who everyone knew were avowed racists?

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How did this happen? How did the journalists, thinkers, influencers and professional Tweeters who too often set the agenda for the nation — people who consider themselves on the liberal and progressive Left — manage to police out of existence the devastating effects of globalisation on the middle and working classes of all races? How did we allow the definition of racism to melt until it covered people — of all races — who found their lots slightly improved over the three years prior to the pandemic, a time when wages for the bottom 25% rose for the first time in a decade?

You have to be pretty far removed from the pinch of economic anxiety to confuse it with bigotry. And indeed, America’s media has undergone a status revolution over the past century.

Writing in the Nineties, Christopher Lasch observed that the Left had begun to portray the nation, the neighbourhood and even the commitment to a common standard as racist, as part of a larger attack on populism and abandonment of the working class. But in truth that shift was a long time coming; throughout the 20^th century, American journalism went from being a working-class trade to a highly educated caste.

As I chronicle in my new book, American journalism was born in the 19^th century of a populist revolution in the form of the penny press, which was explicitly produced by and for the labouring class. At the time, the newspapers in circulation existed solely for the political and business elites: they were prohibitively expensive, and contained shipping schedules, wholesale prices, speeches from Congress and other things that interested few except those whose livings were made in business or politics.

The cheap penny papers filled that gap in the market, and were soon impossible to ignore thanks to the hundreds of thousands of Americans who purchased them every day (catering to the lower classes has the benefit of there being so many of them, after all). From that moment, through the middle of the last century, journalism became a blue-collar job, one in which a journalist was as likely to not have a college degree as to have one.

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This is no longer the case. If a 1937 study found that fewer than half of journalists were college-educated and many hadn’t even finished high school, by 2015, 92% of American journalists had a college degree, a number that’s certainly even higher today. And college itself is no longer enough; to become a journalist today in a rapidly constricting industry, you have to go to the best colleges and take multiple unpaid internships in the most expensive American cities — where the vast majority of journalists remain.

But journalists today are not just more educated and progressive than the country at large; like other highly educated liberals, they have become increasingly affluent. As the local newspaper industry collapsed in the face of the internet, it squeezed those who made it to the top 10%, while dropping everyone else out. The fact that the starting salary of a digital media job is so low is not proof of the industry’s egalitarianism but of its exclusivity; who but the scions of the wealthy can afford to live in New York City or Washington, D.C. on $35,000 a year?

With a few exceptions, journalists along with the rest of America’s highly educated liberals now, by and large, belong to what the French economist Thomas Picketty calls a Brahmin Left. And as journalists became more highly educated and more affluent, they stopped writing for or about the working class. In its place, a moral panic around race and an obsession with causes once confined to academia — open borders, intersectionality, anti-racism, anti-Zionism — provided a convenient alibi for an elite that still sees itself as on the side of the little guy.

It’s not all on individual journalists, though. Journalists have for decades been more liberal than their fellow countrymen. But in the past, this liberalism was checked by their publishers, who were often the owners of large corporations, or Republicans, or both. They wanted their newspapers and their news stations to appeal to the vast American middle, which meant that journalists were not at liberty to indulge their own political preferences.

Then came the internet and with it the collapse of the local newspaper industry and the birth of a business model that was diametrically opposed to the goal of getting the widest circulation. Success is now rated in terms of engagement rather than circulation or ad revenue. And the best way to achieve this is to build a niche audience — more often than not, a highly educated, highly affluent, highly liberal niche audience who use the politics of identity to mask their success.

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In other words, the media’s moral panic around race in America and the abandonment of the working class go hand in hand, like a photo of Angela Davis on the cover of the New York Times’s T Magazine and a Cartier ad on the back; like affluent liberals in New York’s most expensive neighbourhoods demanding we defund the police amid a historic rise in murder taking place in neighbourhoods just ten blocks away; like American Express hosting diversity, equity and inclusion training sessions in which the facilitator tells employees that capitalism is racist.

This perfect alignment of journalistic and corporate interests is one of the great ironies of the progressive culture war. It makes individual journalists feel like heroes while making their bosses and shareholders (and themselves) even richer.

Of course, the racism of state actors remains a problem in need of urgent repair; police brutality, for example, remains a scourge on communities of colour. But the racial moral panic obscures — and therefore perpetuates — the real divide separating America into two groups: an economic and cultural one, a giant and ever-growing chasm separating the college educated from those they disdain.

And therein lies the real tragedy: the liberal news media has abandoned the working class, allowing conservative outlets to swoop in and cater to them. The conservative media may not do much to help the economic fortunes of the downwardly mobile, but at least it doesn’t sneer at the working class while abandoning them economically.

That, ultimately, is the story of today’s national media landscape in a nutshell: with few exceptions, it is waging a moral panic around race to disguise the abandonment of the working class — and it’s getting rich off of it.

Under Preston’s fair pen Maxwell is a clever, vulgar, frightened polyglot. In his heyday he was perceived as cartoonish — so inhuman that a guest at one of his parties at Headington Hall went through his cupboards looking for insights into his character. She told Preston she wouldn’t normally do this but it was Maxwell so who cares? (She found rows of salad cream.) His story is irresistible because it is barely believable. One reviewer called it “entertaining”.

Is it though? It is true Maxwell’s life was novelistic. He was a man of infinite possibility because he did not know who he was, and he could not bear to ask. He was a plutocrat who lived in a rented house. He was a sexual exploiter cuckolded by an employee. He was a father who appeared to hate his children. He styled himself, preposterously, as an English country squire and endured typical British snobbery for his trouble. (The Observer compared to him a Petticoat Lane market trader. The Sun called him a peasant.) He invented modern British scientific publishing but had fake book spines in his study. He was the first British passenger to fly one million miles, but he could not go home.

I do not find this story irresistible, or even very strange, but then I am a Jew. To me, Maxwell’s story is a fairly ordinary tale of Holocaust trauma, if not to Preston (but who wants to believe their subject is a type?). It is the story of a man who hated himself so much for survival he could not, for 40 years, admit to his Jewishness, or to his childhood name. It is possible he even forgot he was once called Ludvik Hoch. One of Maxwell’s sisters, Sylvia, was saved by the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who rescued her from a Budapest station as she was about to be sent to Auschwitz. He gave her, along with other Jewish children, Swedish citizenship, and she later came to England. Towards the end of Maxwell’s life Sylvia asked him why he called himself Jan Hoch. Maxwell replied it was his name. No, said Sylvia, he was named Ludvik. According to Preston’s account Maxwell looked “astonished” and asked: “Was I?”

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He was born in what is now Ukraine, in 1923. “I remember how cold I was,” he said, “how hungry I was and how much I loved my mother.” His mother was adoring and his father abusive: Stalin’s family dynamic, precisely, one designed to cultivate suspicion in a child. He said he was once so hungry he ate a dog but that may not be true. He was not a reliable narrator. He was ever shifting. Perhaps that was why he became so fat. I wonder if he subconsciously sought to anchor himself to something, to anything, to this earth.

He was 16 when he left his family. He ended up fighting for the British against the Nazis. By the time the war was over his parents and all by two of his siblings were dead, some in Auschwitz, others en route. He had had nine brothers and sisters — he was the eldest son — and, with his non-Jewish wife Betty, he would have nine sons and daughters, as if to recover the lost family. Betty says he sank to his knees by a pool when they visited Auschwitz, pulled out some sodden splintered bones, and wept.

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As Preston calmly relates, Maxwell’s criminality went far beyond the Man Who Saved the Mirror robbing its pension fund and treating his employees like serfs. (He particularly enjoyed tormenting the well-connected because they knew their place in the world.) That is the least of it. He was a killer. As a British soldier, he shot German civilians — he shot a mayor in the head in the town square — and German soldiers trying to surrender. (He could not understand why other British soldiers objected.) He robbed their corpses. His wife Betty, in her anguished memoir, said that even in the ecstatic early days of their marriage his own lips “depicted death and carnage”. He carried it with him to England, to the House of Commons — he was a much-mocked and talkative Labour MP — and to a publishing empire.

He gathered a robe of success around him, but it did not fit him. He learnt to stop changing his name after his bank manager told him he would close the account if he did not stop. (He had four different names before the age of 23.) He found it impossible to be intimate and walked around his parties with a PA system, so his voice would boom from nowhere. He had no friends, only employees. His most treasured possession was his passport, which was normal for Jews of his generation: the right passport could save your life. When he appeared on Desert Island Discs, he asked his family to choose the music. Who doesn’t have music? A man who either cannot hear it or feels he does not deserve it.

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He returned to Judaism and Betty thought that this, and his growing belief that he betrayed his family by marrying a non-Jew, destroyed their marriage. She said everything changed when they visited Slatinské Doly, the town of his birth, to a hero’s welcome, though the inhabitants could, or would, not save his family. He didn’t divorce her, but he verbally abused her, ignored her and lived in a ludicrous London penthouse alone. In reply, Betty became a skilled historian of the Holocaust. It was an attempt to understand him. It didn’t work. He would say: “I know what loneliness is like.”

He deserved to be lonely, but when I read the exhausting lies, I wonder if Maxwell was a thief because he believed he had nothing. In the most revealing passage Preston writes: “He took the logo of Mirror Group Newspapers — a roaring lion — from the Hollywood studio MGM; the names of the headquarters, Maxwell House, from a brand of instant coffee; and the name of his parent company, MCC, from the Marylebone Cricket”. Once, he pretended to have been in a military hospital with Ronald Reagan, a memory he stole from the Reagan film The Hasty Heart. Another time, preposterously, he pretended to be Scottish. All this is material to those who found him ridiculous, but it is, again, a normal reaction, if to be yourself meant death.

He was not, then, a mysterious person, but another rational product of Nazism. Even so, the mystery endures. Myths fly around his death. Did he commit suicide as his financial crimes came close to exposure? (Did he lock his bedroom door behind him, so the absence would not be discovered?) Was he murdered by the Israelis, who sent a Mossad assassin to a yacht in the ocean, only to give him a state funeral days later? (Anti-Jewish conspiracy theories bookend his life. They give it structure.) Did he fake his own death; does a fake Robert Maxwell lie in a Jerusalem grave? It doesn’t matter. You can argue that Maxwell was dead in every meaningful sense by 1945. That is not the story of every Holocaust survivor, but it is his. The rest, through scornful laughter or not, is detritus.

But I’m going to let you into secret. Part of the thrill is annoying people. Let me put it this way: if you don’t enjoy the idea of people reading your paper and spluttering with indignation, you’re in the wrong job. A newspaper that doesn’t challenge its readers — that simply reflects their views — is not only going to be soporific. It’s also betraying the very idea of a free press.

In which context, let me introduce you to Alistair Smith, the editor of The Stage.

On Friday and Monday, Mr Smith published two pieces from freelance writers on either side of a debate about the Old Vic theatre’s loos. Within minutes of the pieces appearing on The Stage’s site, they were removed. When you find out why, you learn much about the state of public debate and modern issues of free speech.

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As it happens, a year or so ago I was sitting in the stalls of the Old Vic with my wife. Sitting next to her was Sir Tom Stoppard. After the interval, my wife made it back to her seat with just seconds to spare. Sir Tom turned to her, looked at her knowingly, and said words to the effect of: “Aren’t the women’s toilets here a disgrace?” So I was aware before this week’s controversy that there was an issue.

Last week, the theatre announced that it had dealt with the problem. Its solution, however, was to remove the male and female signs and replace them with gender-neutral cubicles and separate urinals. It will now be up to individuals which they use. After a crowd-funded refurbishment, there are now 44 lavatories; previously there were 22. Of the 44, 26 are sit-down loos and 18 urinals.

The Old Vic doubtless considers it has taken a thoughtful step in the battle against discrimination against trans and non-binary people. In reality, it has made things worse for women. Biological women cannot — do I really need to point this out? — use a urinal. But biological men can use a cubicle. So there are only 26 toilets for biological women — and they need to mingle alongside the men (let me be delicate here) preparing to use the urinals.

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Why don't trans activists practise what they preach?

By Meghan Murphy

But the issue I bring to your attention isn’t the rights and wrongs of the Old Vic’s new toilet policy. It is how The Stage has chosen to cover it.

The Stage commissioned one piece arguing in favour of the Old Vic’s move and another, by the writer Sarah Ditum, opposing it. Her article was headlined: “A theatre with inadequate women’s toilets is a theatre that doesn’t care about women.”

You can read the piece on her website, because it is no longer on The Stage’s. Mr Smith removed both articles, according to a statement by the newspaper, because it had received “strong responses” from readers that in posting two pieces putting different views the paper had “only polarised the debate further”. But Ditum’s is a mild and rational piece, with not a word of criticism, stated or implied, of trans and non-binary toilet users. It is about the needs of biological women.

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By Douglas Murray

It is difficult to overstate the spinelessness of Mr Smith’s decision. This was not a debate about the rights and wrongs of, for example, incest or compulsory euthanasia at the age of 60, where one side of the argument is, one might say, controversial. It was a piece about lavatories for women.

In reality, the issue is not even about those facilities. It is about the visceral hatred and abuse that pours forth from some of the more vocal trans activists when anyone dares to question whether there is a difference between sex and gender, the former being biological and the latter, perhaps, a social and cultural construct. And how those in positions of influence — such as editors — react to that noise.

When Ms Ditum’s piece appeared on The Stage, it was met with the usual abuse that any discussion of these always receives (this piece will, too). She was attacked as “anti-trans” and “transphobic”.

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By Julie Bindel

According to the paper: “We have received strong responses from our readers against both articles. We recognise this was an error on our part and would like to apologise. As a result, we have decided to remove both articles from the website.”

Dear God. What is the point of a newspaper if not to prompt strong responses? An editor afraid to publish an article that some people disagree with is an editor who, surely, should be questioning what he or she is doing in the job.
But cowardice is the least of the problems. Because if editors, who decide what does and does not go into a publication, make that decision on the basis of who shouts the loudest, we really are in trouble.

And as Ms Ditum has said of what happened to her piece: “The Stage pulled it (and the companion piece) in response to complaints about me, without forewarning me, thereby giving credence to false accusations against me — but more importantly, denying coverage to a fundamental matter of women’s access to public space. The editor has told me he had no issue with any part of my piece and apologised, but this in no way compensates for the gross editorial cowardice on display.”

The Stage and its editor have now, entirely as a result of their own behaviour, become a symbol of the wider problem of how modern mores dictate that certain arguments may not be made, certain groups may not be offended, and certain issues not raised. And we all worse off for it.

It’s time for some time travel. You’re walking down a London thoroughfare in about 1700. From a building nearby you can hear laughter, both derisive and uproarious, mixed with shouting, hacking coughs, swearing and occasional weeping. You push open the heavy oak door and enter. It’s crowded, people squashed together on long wooden benches set out on jagged floorboards. Everyone is talking, everyone is drinking — but there is no alcohol. The air is heavy with the scents of tobacco smoke, sweat and coffee grounds.

Only, wait a moment. Has there been a glitch in the space-time continuum? Because under that periwig over there, eyes wide, gesturing wildly with her pipe, isn’t that Carole Cadwalladr? What about those two raggamuffins who just burst in breathlessly, greeted by a massed cry of “What news have you?” and shouting the latest on Walpole and the Act of Settlement, then rushing out again; they may be a little besmirched and ragged, but aren’t they Beth Rigby and Laura Kuenssberg?

Ranting in opposite corners, jabbing their fingers accusingly across the room at each other, that must be Kevin Maguire and Rod Liddle. And the urchin with his nose pressed up against the window, stamping his foot and raving that everything and everybody inside is awful and simultaneously demanding to be let in: yes, it’s little Owen Jones.

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By Gareth Roberts

It strikes me that the era of the London coffee house and our own times are linked — both were/are milieus formed out of unique cultural and technological circumstances. Both are characterised by novelties in the means of communication and consumption that reorganised the public sphere with disconcerting rapidity and sent everything and indeed everybody up in the air, leading to howls of outrage, denunciation, and calls for regulation. Both are very, very shouty.

The London coffee houses were the result of a blend of innovations. As trade boomed, coffee and a taste for it were imported. The first house opened in 1652, serving up what was described as a “bitter Mohammedan gruel” — 15 years later there were almost a hundred, by the close of the century an estimated six times that number. At the same time, cheap mass printing became possible, with the first examples of what we would recognise to be newspapers being produced, and sold, much more cheaply.

In 1711 The Spectator launched, with a stated aim to include women among its readers and bring ‘philosophy out of closets and libraries, schools, and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and coffee–houses’  — hence the name of the Spectator’s modern-day gossipy blog. All the newspapers fed into and fed from the opinions of the coffee house in a perfect symbiotic relationship.

Education became more widespread as the middle class expanded and got more prosperous. And suddenly, everybody had an opinion and somewhere to read it, speak it or counterblast someone else’s. The low price of admission — a one-off, one-penny entrance fee — meant almost anyone could enter and discuss politics freely. In 1726, the visiting Swiss nobleman César de Saussure wrote, in a tone of scandalised amusement, that “workmen habitually begin the day by going to coffee-rooms to read the latest news”.

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Unsurprisingly, these changes sparked an opposing uproar, with concerns about seditious behaviour and inflammatory language (you can see where this is going). King Charles II attempted to close down the coffee houses by royal proclamation in 1675, and at about the same time came the notorious ‘Women’s Petition’ against the “excessive use of that newfangled, abominable, heathenish liquor called coffee“. Both were unsuccessful.

After a rocky couple of decades, the coffee houses lost their shock value and became an established part of London life — no longer actively contentious, though never entirely respectable. What did for them in the end was another shift in technology and consumption: the arrival of tea, which unlike coffee you could prepare yourself and drink at home, as well as more substantial and reliable newspapers.

I think that right now in 2019 we’re at a comparable stage to those times, possibly more akin to the earlier, outraged petitioning and royally-proclaiming phase of the coffee house era.

It’s astonishing to think that widespread internet access in the Western world only occurred 20 years ago. The apparent ubiquitousness of Twitter in our public discourse (apparent, as only 24% of the UK population use it at all, a figure worth remembering) is even more recent. We are newbies to all this, taken very much by surprise.

I can’t think of a scenario from 20th-century science fiction — and frankly I’ve watched and read rather a lot of that — that came anywhere close to an accurate prediction of Twitter or social media in general. It’s rather sweet to see again episodes of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine from the Nineties on Netflix, made just a few years before this explosion, in which the characters share information by walking to each other’s workplaces and handing each other iPads. They live in a permanently fraught state of contentious politicking but — incredibly to our eyes — they never worry, or have to worry, about gossip, rumours and fake news, despite being surrounded by computers. The social media revolution, like the coffee houses, caught everybody napping.

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By Graeme Archer

The world has never been more peaceful, prosperous and tolerant, and yet we obsess about race, gender and inequality like never before. Everything is related in exactly the same tone of urgency and importance, which makes it impossible to substantiate what is actually urgent or important. In an impossibly crowded and loud public sphere everything, of necessity, has to be loud or sentimental to claim attention.

The attention paid by sinking legacy media outlets to mini-controversies on Twitter is fascinating — the so-called ‘Black Ariel’ effect, whereby a handful of tweets, or even a single tweet, is drummed up in an online headline as a major outrage, causing more clicks, more heat, more emotion. Much ado about literally nothing at all.

You don’t have to squint very hard to see the perukes on everybody’s heads, and there’s a distinct whiff of ground arabica beans.

But the coffee houses became a normal part of the scene and faded away. At the moment, in the heat of the Twitter uproar, we can’t imagine the same thing will happen — or how — to the current mode of our public sphere, but it almost undoubtedly will. Censorship is one possibility. Even today Chinese politicians don’t have to worry about people tweeting mean things about them on Twitter, as the Party went boldly on past the point where Charles II retreated, and blocked the whole damn thing in 2009.

My hope is that, just as with the coffee houses, we’ll find a way to acclimatise and muddle through. The current calls for more civility in discourse from public figures, often made hilariously by the very worst offenders on this count, are to my thinking on a hiding to nothing. All that has changed really is that people can now say to your virtual face the kind of thing they were shouting at your face on their television screen in 2006.

Perhaps a younger generation of politicians and public figures who have never known different, who can’t remember a time when people didn’t have an outlet to be rude or horrible to them directly, will just shrug and ignore that. When you get past a certain level of renown maybe turning off your notifications from people you don’t know is the best idea.

Meanwhile there’s some joy to be taken from the madness, maybe. Maybe there’s some amusement to be had from the great pompous asses of the day, the Bercows, Linekers and Graylings. We look at Hogarth’s coffee house scenes, and we don’t see the sturm und drang that surrounded that period. Perhaps people in the 24th century will look at depictions of 2019 and feel affection and a certain nostalgia for a lost age of rollicking, spluttering and pretended outrage.

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On Twitter, I too become an arse

By Giles Fraser

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Last Saturday night, in a town just outside London, fifty or so pensioners got together to share a few drinks, nibble on buffet food and enjoy some good company. They played bingo, held a pub quiz and talked of times gone by.

Having travelled from across the UK, they spoke in a variety of accents – from lilting Welsh to chirpy East London cockney, from singsong Brummie to Scottish burr. Once skilled and semi-skilled manual workers, many of those who came had spent decades working in steel mills, manufacturing, printing and other traditional industries.

These were ordinary folk, then. Their shared experience, though, and the story behind their close affinity and fellowship, was anything but ordinary. The hall in which they gathered was festooned with large demonstration banners and large posters, along with photographs of them, in various forms of fancy dress, parading outside Parliament, HM Treasury and other government buildings.

For those who met at the Leverstock Green Cricket Club in Hemel Hempstead last Saturday night were key members of the Pensions Action Group (PAG). And between them, they masterminded one of the most focused, audacious – and highly effective – single-issue grass roots campaigns in modern British political history.

I was delighted to join them and privileged, earlier in my journalistic career, to have played a small role in their astonishing success. This was an evening that reminded me of the importance of democracy, the efficacy of collective action and the ability of individuals and the media, if they try really hard, to hold politicians to account. An otherwise enjoyable evening, though, also raised concerns in my mind, giving me considerable pause for thought.

During the early 2000s, numerous UK company-based ‘occupational’ pension schemes started to get into serious final difficulties. The reasons were many and varied – including rising life expectancies, volatile stock markets and a tax rise in the late-1990s, introduced by then Chancellor Gordon Brown. By placing additional levies on reinvested dividends, Brown’s disastrous ‘pensions stealth tax’ cost company pension schemes many billions of pounds annually, losses which were magnified when compounded over many years.

Once the first few ‘final salary’ occupational schemes began to close – a phenomenon I reported in detail on both Channel Four News and in The Telegraph – dozens more followed. These failures were an enormous shock. Final salary schemes were seen by UK workers as the ‘gold standard’ of pension provision, linked as they were both to wages on retirement and length of service. For decades, employees had assumed such pensions were safe – seeing as they were backed by years of employee and employer contributions. Successive governments, moreover, wanting to encourage workers to save for their retirement, regularly published leaflets stating that, whatever happened to any particular firm, final salary pensions were “guaranteed”.

As these schemes began to fold, thousands of workers, having been advised they would receive a lump sum on retirement, then a healthy monthly pension for life over and above the basic state pension, faced the prospect of getting nothing. This was obviously devastating. As I reported on such occupational pension closures on television and in print, I received hundreds of letters and emails from distraught scheme members.

Under the law as it stood, as individual members of final salary schemes retired, their entitlement would be calculated and an annuity purchased, guaranteeing that income for the rest of their life. But when sponsoring companies started to go bankrupt, pension scheme members who had yet to retire – even if they had given 20, 30 or 40 years of service, making monthly contributions throughout – could end up with nothing.

Previously, as companies had collapsed or been sold, final salary schemes had generally been healthy enough to meet ongoing and future obligations from accumulated assets. Alternatively, new company owners would take on the pension scheme. But as life expectancies got longer, and the world became more competitive as a new millennium ushered in an age of globalisation, the finances of many UK pension schemes became hopelessly stretched. At the same time, lawyers used loopholes to help investors taking over flagging firms to renege on pension liabilities owed to those yet to retire – even if they were just a few years, or even months or weeks away from doing so and had made decades of contributions.

The PAG emerged from the ashes of this tragedy and injustice. This was a collection of traumatised employees, working for companies across the country, who had suddenly lost their entire future occupational pension, which they’d paid for from years of foregone wages. Rather than accepting what seemed inevitable, these individuals – none of whom had the remotest experience of politics or the media – formed a devastatingly effective campaigning unit.

At the heart of the group was Pete Humphreys, who had worked for shelf manufacturer Dexion for decades and was very close to retirement when its pension scheme went bust. It was Pete’s utter determination and commitment to restoring the pension of himself and his fellow workers, combined with the irrepressible sense of humour of his wife Jacquie, that set the tone.

As such, PAG’s relentless campaigning combined humour with a steely resolve and lashings of media savvy. The group used a long ‘Stripped of our Pensions’ banner, held by up to a dozen naked campaigners, their modesty covered only by the banner itself. It was an image that secured acres of newspaper coverage – so much so that PAG repeated the stunt at every Conservative and Labour party conference for years. Other demonstrations saw the ‘pensions theft’ victims dress up as gangsters, St George slaying his dragon, or Laurel and Hardy. The cause was desperate – not least as PAG members were using their diminishing savings to finance their demonstrating antics, which took them to many parts of the country. Some of those affected died without receiving any pension. A few became so distraught they committed suicide. But the media image was one of stoical determination, backed by remorseless logic and tempered with an eye-catching sense of black comedy.

While building a media presence, the PAG also sought and secured expert help – largely from volunteers. Chief among those was Ros Altmann, an experienced investment manager and pensions professional who was shocked by their plight. Altmann used her contacts and skill to help secure PAG legal opinions and a galaxy of helpful consultancy reports. When combined with the group’s growing media clout, such evidence meant the Humphreys and the growing ranks of the PAG couldn’t be dismissed by officialdom.

As a direct result of the PAG’s campaigning, the government set up the Pension Protection Fund in 2005. Funded by industry levies, it was designed to pay 90% of workers’ pensions if their occupational schemes went bust. Today, hundreds of thousands of present and future retirees are benefiting from, or stand to benefit, from the PPF.

Crucially, though, those who lost pension rights before the PPF was established – around 125,000, including much of the PAG – remained uncovered. There was much further protesting and legal and political grappling, including ever more ingenious protests, which eventually led to the government establishing the Financial Assistance Scheme (FAS) specifically for such retirees, initially setting aside £2bn of public money.

Before the FAS started working properly, though, paying out pension due, there were more battles to come. As entitled but still pension-less retirees died, there was much disgraceful foot-dragging by ministers and officials. A Parliamentary Ombudsman’s report found the ‘gross injustice’ highlighted by the PAG had resulted from ‘government maladministration’ and repeated instances of bad regulation.

PAG took its case to the European Court of Justice, which said ministers had acted in a manner that was ‘unlawful and inadequate’. And when a High Court Judge upheld the Parliamentary Ombudsman’s verdict, against which the government has astonishingly appealed, Chancellor Gordon Brown, in a surreal twist, ‘rejected’ that verdict too. At that point, PAG’s demonstrations, and their broader plight, became a major national news story, ultimately forcing the government to submit.

Last week’s PAG gathering in Hemel Hempstead was the tenth anniversary of the weekend when the Humphreys were telephoned by then Pensions Minister Mike O’Brien, who told them the government had finally agreed to fund and administer the FAS properly. PAG members talk warmly of O’Brien. He is one of few government figures who comes out of this sorry saga with any credit.

It was an uplifting gathering, as I said – attended also by Altmann, whose stellar work eventually saw her brought into government, and also Jeff Prestridge, the doyenne Mail on Sunday personal finance journalist, who also took up the PAG’s cause. There was much talk of self-help, determination, making your own luck and ‘beating the system’. I also reflected that this whole episode highlighted the overwhelming necessity, when capitalism throws up manifestly unfair outcomes, of appropriate government intervention.

Delighted to have met up with the PAG gang, though, reliving journalistic adventures past, I have nagging concerns on two fronts. The first is the fast diminishing will and ability of the contemporary media to commit the resources needed, both financial and intellectual, to sustain campaigns that tackle serious injustices – particularly when it comes to financial fraud.

Covering a story like ‘pension theft’ in depth, helping to ‘shift the dial’, was a legal and political minefield. It’s the kind of journalism that requires resilience, an eye on the long-term and the capacity within an organisation to get beyond the demands of daily news. Tackling complex yet hugely important stories relies on financial and editorial backing for the long-haul ­– which I was lucky (some of the time) to have, but which now seems painfully thin on the ground.

The second issue that troubles me is the more specific lack of pension provision. Three in ten Britons aged 55-64 have no pension savings, or savings that are entirely inadequate, according to a 2016 report for Scottish Widows. That rises to almost half of 30-40 year-olds. The UK has made great progress in tackling pensioner poverty over recent decades. But vast swathes of those currently in their 40s and 50s are heading towards retirement with no pension savings. Laboring under enormous mortgage debts due to bloated house prices, or unable to get on the property ladder and paying high rents, they find it almost impossible to put adequate money. As such, we could soon see a return in the UK to widespread pensioner poverty – which ever more people relying only on a basic state pension which, by international standards, remains rather low.

The workers who combined so heroically to form the PAG were able to fight for their pensions because, having made substantial contributions over many years, they had something to fight for. Increasingly few of their successors can claim the same.

“We will also engage with and publish voices from the right. In an age of tumultuous change, nobody has a monopoly on good ideas.” Indeed, and what do Left and Right even mean today?

“We will get out of the big cities and the big institutions.” Because the economics, cultures and politics of medium-sized towns really aren’t the same as in international urban capitals.

And we will “stay with stories for the long-term.” Because what persists is more important than anything that hits the headlines today but is often, justifiably, forgotten within days.

Those four quotes don’t come from UnHerd’s launch day and our critique of a media class that is ideologically too uniform, remote from the values of ‘flyover country’ and biased towards what’s happening now, rather than what’s heading at us from upstream – but they could have done.

They actually come from Kath Viner, Editor of The Guardian. They were part of a ‘long read’, that she wrote in the middle of last month; “A mission for journalism in an age of crisis” and which, two days ago, was published as a podcast. Although the woman who had previously been her paper’s US editor did tell her morning editorial conference that she thought Trump would win, it’s good to see a newspaper recognising that newspaper cultures aren’t currently as connected to all communities as they should be.

Recollecting how her two-centuries-old publication has consistently seen opportunity for progressive reform in challenging moments in history (notably for the betterment of working class conditions in the aftermath of the Peterloo massacre) she argues that The Guardian can use the current crisis to challenge the economic order ushered in by Margaret Thatcher. And she certainly does think our times demand serious change. She talks of the internet having been taken over by bullies, racists and mysogynists; of sky-rocketing inequality; of ballooning depression and mental illness; an “epidemic” of loneliness; and of the disappearance of public amenities like libraries and parks. She sounds like one of the 67% of people who think the world is getting worse (a finding analysed by Douglas Murray last Friday).

Her commitment to reorientate her journalism will be helped by the improvement in The Guardian’s finances. A series of Osborne-ian austerity measures (it practises what it doesn’t preach) have cut the paper’s losses in half and are on course to be eliminated in the next 12 months. And with an inherited billion pounds in the bank The Guardian is well-placed to continue to compete with the New York Times to be the global Left’s newspaper of choice.

With ad revenues collapsing because of the way Facebook and Google are able to offer superior targeting to advertisers, Kath Viner is pleased that the paper’s pursuit of voluntary gifts has been successful enough to avoid a compulsory paywall. In her essay she acknowledges periods in The Guardian’s history when advertisers have influenced editorial. Let’s not believe, however, that it’s as simple as devilish commercial advertisers versus angelic paying readers.

Will The Guardian embrace positions that it concludes are necessary to heal broken Britain if they risk upsetting their supporters? The danger in this era of dwindling sales with newspapers becoming more sectional than truly national is that they come to depend upon unrepresentative groups. When titles are fighting for their survival and cannot afford to lose readers at a faster rate than demography is already causing, it becomes tricky for The Times, for example, to do anything other than back Remain when that was the view of about three-quarters of your readers. When Guardian readers and supporters are enthusiastic about Jeremy Corbyn it’s commercially dangerous to suggest his Left-wingery could be a bit too Left-wing.

In my own dealings with Kath Viner I’ve found her to be interested in ideas from outside the ‘progressive wing’. We’ve spoken on a number of occasions, for example, about what a compassionate conservatism might look like. If her new approach to journalism leads her to believe that the welfare state was reckless to shun William Beveridge’s warnings about doing nothing to damage the relational institutions at the heart of community, will she be willing to argue that progressivism needs to be more Methodist than Marxist?

Time will tell but it was disappointing to learn at the weekend that Giles Fraser would no longer be gracing the newspaper’s pages when it’s relaunched as a tabloid in the middle of next month. It would be unfair to read too much into one change in personnel but I’m just a little bit suspicious that the religious Brexiteerism of the “Loose Cannon” was, perhaps, a little too religious and Brexity for a secular, Remainy subscription base.