Interview: Pete Mitchell and Geoff Lloyd, Virgin Radio (Evening Standard)

By David Rowan

IT IS always fun at this time of year to hear radio executives' excuses for their lame quarterly audience figures.

When Capital FM lost its crown to Heart last week as London's most listened-to station, the company explained it was simply "strengthening its national presence". Chris Moyles, selfproclaimed "saviour of Radio 1", may have lost 700,000 listeners in the past year, but that, according to the straight-faced BBC press office, is just because "fewer young people" shaped the latest research. As for the 256,000 who abandoned TalkSport over the past quarter, chief executive Kelvin MacKenzie dismisses the figure as proof that the method used to count listeners is "cobblers".

So it has been bizarre this week to watch Virgin Radio - the most reliably desperate in defending its ailing ratings - have some rare good news to spin. After three years of chaos, during which four separate teams have been thrown into the crucial breakfast slot, Virgin suddenly has a hit on its hands. While Chris Tarrant has been losing a quarter of his Capital audience, and Sara Cox has been dropping 130,000 on Radio 1, the Virgin breakfast audience has risen since summer by an extraordinary 22 per cent in London and by 9.2 per cent across Britain. And it's all thanks to Pete and Geoff.

You may not yet have heard of Pete Mitchell and Geoff Lloyd, but their low media profile is not going to last. A quirky, energetic doubleact, their intelligent wit and Northern-bloke banter has been waking up 660,000 Londoners since Virgin took a chance with them last January. Originally given their start at Virgin by Chris Evans, the station now sees them as its best hope since it sacked Evans in June 2001.

Evans, too, has noticed their rise - and does not appear entirely comfortable with it.

"I went out with him for a drink a couple of months back," says Mitchell, the 44-year-old musicbusiness veteran who tends to provide the laughter to accompany Lloyd's semi-scripted routines. "He told me he didn't listen to morning radio much any more - but he was actually saying, 'I don't listen to you.' And that's fine." In their early days at Virgin - they joined in 1999 from Manchester's Key 103 - they would present an evening rock show while Evans got drunk in the background. On one occasion, when they put on a tape so that they could nip out to a Paul McCartney album launch, they returned to find that Evans had asked listeners who should be offered their show.

Still, they consider him a generous employer and, until his last six months at Virgin, "the best thing on radio". But things move on.

Now, as Evans's TV projects falter amid disappointing ratings, Lloyd suggests that he is the victim of his own hype. "If he'd not let it be known he was behind some of the programmes, they'd have done better," he says. "Boys and Girls would have been perfectly fine Saturday night TV, but people were led to see it as the new Don't Forget Your Toothbrush." Evans had always been "a better self-producer than a producer".

BY taking Evans's former show, the pair are reluctantly aware that they are being defined as part of a "laddish" radio culture. The pressure will intensify next year, when they face Chris Moyles on Radio 1 and Johnny Vaughan on Capital in the battle for breakfast ratings.

"Count us out," says Lloyd wearily. "Just because we're two lads, we get lumbered in with them - but we're cerebral, not sexual. I prefer to see us as merchants of whimsy." Lloyd, a 30-year-old from Macclesfield, lives with his girlfriend in Notting Hill. The one with the lank, red hair, he is the wry ideas man, whose offbeat stunts - quizzing listeners about what Martin the security guard is thinking, or taking bets on whether objects will sink in the station toilet - are gently self-parodying and never nasty. A former writer for TFI Friday and Comic Relief, he was introduced to Mitchell by the latter's friend, Craig Cash, who had employed him as a lackey on The Mrs Merton Show, fetching Caroline Aherne's cigarettes. The pairing has proved inspired, winning them two Sony radio awards.

Their current success has, naturally, put them in a position to poke gentle fun at their rivals - and they particularly enjoy baiting Moyles. "It's a good move for us that Radio 1's put him on breakfast," Lloyd says. "He's quite a shy, uncomfortable fat lad, and when he goes on the radio, all the bitterness pours out." He adds, "Of course, I've never heard him on radio, but I hear he's better on TV."

"Put that one down," Mitchell says with a grin. "I don't think he'll be reading that out on air."

They believe they will benefit further when Tarrant is replaced next year by Johnny Vaughan - "He's not radio, is he?" says Mitchell - and dismiss Heart's Jono Coleman as "the housewife's choice".

Moyles's hackles rise when their remarks are later reported to him. "Tell the poor man's Mark and Lard on that little medium-wave station that when they get a third of the listeners I get, they can come and talk to me," he responds. The battle ahead should prove interesting.

Executives on other stations appear impressed by Virgin's gamble on Pete and Geoff starting to pay off, but they point out that the station has spent millions on marketing this summer, and that its growth at breakfast is coming from a low base after the show's weak performance under Daryl Denham and Steve Penk. Virgin is still only the 10th most popular station in London, rival stations point out, with just a 3.4 per cent share of listeners.

STILL, the pair have ambitions to take their ratings to four million. "We've got this five-year breakfast plan in our heads," says Mitchell. "It's going to take that long to be up there with everybody else, and then we'll see if people still like us. You've had the Chris Evans phase, we want history to remember the Pete and Geoff phase." He is starting to sound uncharacteristically serious.

Thankfully, Lloyd does not let the tone linger for long. "I'd like you to portray Pete as brash and me as enigmatic," he says with a chuckle.

And just as Mitchell is requesting that the interview does not refer to the mother of his two teenage children, Lloyd steps in with the sort of spontaneous mischief that makes the double-act work so effectively on live radio.

"Yeah, his ex-wife's been through the mill," he says. "She's had enough trouble with your many affairs, your walking out on those two small children, having to chase you for maintenance, and she doesn't need it rubbing in her face in a London newspaper ..."

"Geoff 's a c***," Mitchell interrupts. And they laugh out loud.

(Evening Standard, October 29 2003)

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The Times: Tech column - Oyster privacy/political websites/Amazon

By David Rowan

IF YOU HAVE used public transport in London recently, you will have seen the new "Oyster" smart cards being promoted as high-tech replacements for the Travelcard. Once you register, you can board trains or buses simply by waving your card near one of 16,000 yellow readers. Just the kind of convenience that modern technology can offer today's beleaguered commuter.

But what if the card were being used to monitor your movements, allowing the police or government snoopers to know where you were at any time? What if the card's radio signal could be automatically identified from a distance, not unlike the controversial radio frequency identification smart tags being introduced to track consumer goods after they have left the shop? You might want to inquire about these cards' intended use beyond ticketing.

By assigning each card a unique number linked to your personal details, Transport for London (TfL), the body responsible, can learn much about you by logging data generated wherever your card is read. The cards, TfL admits, will track individual passengers' movements in intimate detail, providing a personal data trail that will be stored. And though your travel history will ostensibly be used to "improve the journey planning process", it will also be available to law-enforcement agencies.

TfL's disconcertingly large entry in the Data Protection Register suggests just how intimately it may hope to get to know you. The entry, number Z5623601, shows that TfL stores personal data in 28 separate categories, collecting details such as individuals' political opinions, religious beliefs and even "sexual life".

Civil rights groups wonder which other bodies will gain access to all this information, especially now that it can be tied to our physical movements. The Information Commissioner has started asking TfL to explain itself.

The London mayor, Ken Livingstone, is an enthusiast for personal surveillance on the transport system, which may explain why the city's traffic-monitoring cameras become mysteriously unavailable to the public whenever the police have a street march to control. Other government agencies, meanwhile, are talking of expanding the Oyster card into a wider "London Citizen Card", to be used for everything from benefits claims to library loans. If that is starting to sound like a radio-signalling ID card, you might want to consider paying cash the next time you take a London bus.

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SOMETIMES you can wait months for a useful new website to come along. Then three arrive. The official Hansard website (www.parliament.uk/hansard/hansard.cfm) is a fine research tool, but it requires you to pore through endless columns of guff - parliamentary debates - to discover what your MP thinks.

Now some clever volunteers have built a website that does the searching for you. The Public Whip (www.publicwhip.org.uk) automatically analyses every MP's voting record, and presents the results in an easily searchable form. You can discover that Paul Marsden, MP, is the leading rebel and that the Prime Minister has a mere 7.7 per cent attendance record.

If you prefer your politics with a small "p", the BBC's bold new iCan! website (www.bbc.co.uk/dna/ican) may, as it claims, help you to "change the world around you". An interactive database of campaigns and single-issue politics, it tells you how to organise a local anti-litter campaign or what your maternity rights are.

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Amazon.com has launched a Search Inside the Book feature that lets you search the full text of 120,000 books. Unless copyright concerns make the various publishers rethink, this looks like being the ultimate literary archive.

(The Times, October 28 2003)

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The Times: How drugs companies secretly push their wares - An investigation

That famous face revealing all about their illness may be part of a secretive sales ploy. David Rowan exposes how drug companies use celebs to push products at the public, as part of a policy that also covertly influences research and journals

Barry Greenberg needs to find a celebrity with erection problems. He's not too bothered whether it is an actor or a musician -he just wants someone reasonably well known, whose erections happen to be partial, brief or nonexistent. The celebrity will have to go public, of course - the usual round of talk shows, candid interviews and magazine shoots - but the money should make up for the jokes and sniggers: perhaps as much as £100,000 a day, for at least two weeks.

"The amount is partly determined by the embarrassment relationship with the disease," Greenberg explains, very matter-of-factly, at his desk in central Los Angeles. "It's one thing to talk about your sinus problem, quite another to discuss your erectile dysfunction."

As the chairman of Celebrity Connections, a "celebrity co-ordination company" that provides Hollywood stars to front PR and advertising campaigns, Greenberg has been thinking a lot lately about male sexual disorders. "We have just been approached to get another erectile dysfunction pharmaceutical promoted and I'm looking forward to wading further into this market," he says cheerily. "My clients don't care so much about who the celebrity is, as they do about finding someone who legitimately and openly has whatever the cause du jour is."

The client's cause today is the latest challenger to Viagra; tomorrow it could be an arthritis treatment or a weight-loss pill. When pharmaceutical companies have a new drug to promote, they turn to agents such as Greenberg for showbiz names willing to publicise a particular ailment. Through his database of thousands of celebrity contacts -including such stars as Richard Gere, Emily Watson and George Clooney - he knows who among the "talent" has experience of specific medical disorders. The challenge then is to persuade them to talk.

This is not, Greenberg stresses, about up-front advertising but is instead a far more "clever and subtle" way of building market share -particularly in countries where overt drug promotion to consumers is banned. "Where you have restrictions on advertising, as in Britain, someone going on a chat show becomes a much more precious commodity for the pharmaceutical company," he explains. It works, he says, even if the product is not named.

"The message from the celebrity gets out there - 'I have got this terrible problem, go see your doctor to make sure you don't have it'. And if the company's promotional arm is doing its job, there will be samples of this wonderful new product with the doctor."

What consumers will not be told about is the celebrity's lucrative financial incentive for opening his or her heart. When The New York Times exposed this covert trend last summer, the US television networks scrambled to draw up ethical guidelines to safeguard editorial integrity.

They had good reason to be worried. Kathleen Turner had gone on CNN and ABC to talk about her rheumatoid arthritis and had failed to disclose, as she recommended an information website, that both she and the website took funding from Immunex, the maker of the arthritis drug Enbrel. When Lauren Bacall told viewers of NBC's Today programme that a friend had gone blind from a disease called macular degeneration, and mentioned a helpful new drug called Visudyne, she neglected to add that Novartis, its manufacturer, had paid her a fee.

Regulations are stricter in Britain, but here too the media provide effective channels for pharmaceutical firms' celebrity-fronted promotions. When the former Brazilian footballer Pele visited the UK last year and gave interviews encouraging men to discuss their sexual problems with their partners, it was not always made clear that he was speaking for Pfizer, the makers of Viagra.

Nor were readers of the sports pages told that the cricketer Shane Warne had been paid a reported £80,000 by the makers of Nicorette during his well-publicised attempt to stop smoking. No wonder he was furious when a fan photographed him at a one-day match holding a cigarette "I don't think that anyone in Britain should presume that, because a lot of these pharmaceutical companies are in the US, you aren't affected by their global marketing campaigns," says Ray Moynihan, the author of Too Much Medicine? and a critic of the industry's covert promotions.

"We're increasingly going to see celebrities wheeled through our towns and on TV talking about particular diseases. The stakes are enormously high, and the industry has a lot of money to spend." Moynihan's concern is that many such marketing campaigns aim to persuade healthy people that they are unwell.

"You often have very large PR infrastructures, largely hidden, spending a lot of effort behind the scenes subtly to change the way we think about our bodies," he says. "So we think about a runny nose as an illness, about sexual difficulties as a medical condition. It's designed to turn more and more of human experience into a market that can be 'fixed'."

In a British Medical Journal (BMJ) investigation last year, Moynihan traced the origins of a newly prominent disorder: female sexual dysfunction. The condition, according to countless journal articles and magazine features, was reported to affect about 43 per cent of women aged 18 to 59. Yet Moynihan found that 18 of the 19 doctors who had agreed a definition for the condition in 1998 had financial ties with drug firms that stood to gain from this new market. The figure of 43 per cent came from a 1999 paper in The Journal of the American Medical Association, two of whose authors later disclosed close links to Pfizer. The company also sponsored key meetings in which the "disorder" was debated.

"The conflict of interests is absurd," Moynihan says. "Clearly some women have serious legitimate physiological difficulties but this is 'disease-mongering' - using the media to create fears and to draw attention to the latest treatment."

The strategy is well established. Just before Merck's hair-growth drug Propecia gained approval, a flurry of newspaper articles examined the emotional trauma associated with hair loss. Readers were not to know which of the widely quoted trichology experts were provided by Edelman, Merck's PR firm. Current concern about irritable bowel syndrome, too, is in part the result of a PR campaign. A leaked memo from In Vivo Communications, produced for GlaxoSmithKline, explains how, over three years, the "syndrome" could be perceived as a "credible, common and concrete disease". First, a panel of respected gastroenterologists should help to establish it in doctors' minds; then, patients should be persuaded that it was a "common and recognised medical disorder" -which GlaxoSmithKline's drug, Lotronex, could treat. GlaxoSmithKline says that the strategy was never adopted.

When a PR battle-plan is taken up, the results can be remarkable. For the launch of National Eating for Pleasure Week in December 2001, a celebrity chef pledged to teach Britain how to get the most out of good food. A new survey suggested that a third of men risked indigestion by rushing their meals and a behavioural psychologist warned the nation to slow down and enjoy our food.

In fact, the various "Eating for Pleasure" activities -from the website to the charity auction at the Dorchester -were part of a co-ordinated campaign by Jo Spink Public Relations to promote Johnson & Johnson's new indigestion remedy Pepcidtwo. The campaign was featured in 18 magazines, three national newspapers and 13 radio interviews and, according to the trade magazine Pharmaceutical Marketing, reached the equivalent of 140 million consumers. Pepcidtwo's sales were quickly boosted to 18,000 packets a month. As Johnson & Johnson told the magazine: "PR was key to the successful launch of Pepcidtwo, providing third-party endorsement alongside awareness."

Of greater concern to consumer groups is the industry's sponsorship of ostensibly independent UK patient groups and information websites. The Impotence Association, which has called for greater availability of impotence treatments on prescription, claims not to favour any particular treatment; yet its website is funded by "an educational grant" from Pfizer. The Action Asthma website - "a comprehensive online guide for people with asthma" - goes a step further: it is owned by GlaxoSmithKline, which sells asthma treatments.

"The disease-awareness campaigns are really quite clever and can circumvent the legal restrictions on marketing directly to consumers," says Wendy Garlick, of the Consumers' Association. "There is currently a campaign about incontinence. You ring up the number and get a recorded message from Anna Raeburn, who promises to send you information and leads you to an incontinence awareness website backed by Pharmacia. It raises awareness, which is great, but you're not necessarily getting the full picture -it could be guiding you to a product that might not be the most appropriate or cost-effective."

The Consumers' Association believes that there should be an independent body offering patients objective health information. But doctors, too, are becoming increasingly concerned about the objectivity of papers published in the medical journals. Two years ago, 13 journals -including The Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine - published a joint attack on what they called the profit-driven distortion of scientific research. The drugs companies, they said, use their grants, or the threat of their withdrawal, to prevent researchers from reporting freely on the results of drug trials.

Richard Smith, the editor of the BMJ, believes that he and his readers are being unwittingly manipulated by the pharmaceutical giants. "It bothers me more and more," he says. "Unfortunately, we're seen as an extension of the industry's marketing arm." According to Smith, drug firms fund between 30 per cent and 70 per cent of drug trials published in the main journals. "It's cleverness, not wickedness," he says. "Nobody's doing anything illegal here -but it's not good science. It puts the pharmaceutical industry's interests ahead of the community's as a whole."

A solution, he says, would be public funding of drug trials. But they are an expensive business. "We invest £9 million a day on R&D in the UK," Richard Ley, of the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry, (ABPI) says. The ABPI, the main trade lobby for pharmaceutical companies, says that it takes on average about ten to 12 years and £350 million to develop a new medicine, with no guarantee of commercial success.

Perhaps it is inevitable that the industry employs covert promotional techniques, whether in the form of paid celebrity spokespeople or the rigorously controlled release of trial data. After all, it is illegal to market prescription drugs directly to UK consumers -and the industry says patients have a right to know about treatments that could benefit them. The APBI has been pushing for the rules to be relaxed.

"We've been pressing for more direct-toconsumer information but not for advertising," Ley says. "I don't think at this stage advertising directly to the consumer is appropriate for the European culture."

Ley rejects as "complete nonsense" Ray Moynihan's accusations of "disease-mongering". "There's nothing to suggest that the pharmaceutical industry 'invents' diseases it happens to have a solution for on the shelf," he says. "We're simply getting better at understanding disease and it's a question of refining products based on this new knowledge."

Female sexual dysfunction is a genuine complaint, Ley insists. "It's all very well to suggest to people that their problem is imaginary but that's not always the case. Male sexual dysfunction was also greeted with derision at first." As for patient-centred websites and information groups, the industry has strict guidelines to avoid conflicts of interest.

Everything should be open, he says, and donations should not be used to promote a particular product. After all, he adds, The Times manages both to print objective news reports and to accept advertising. "Of course, you can keep the two things separate," he insists. "This is an exaggerated debate led by people who have a vested interest in denying people information about their condition. The information we provide is backed up by data."

How, then, does the ABPI explain a briefing it reportedly gave to the Pharmaceuticals Marketing Society in 2000, in which it pledged a "battle plan" to fight existing marketing restrictions by deploying "ground troops in the form of patient support groups, sympathetic medical opinion and healthcare professionals"?

"We're certainly lobbying for reform, yes, but it's overtly not covertly," Richard Ley says. "What we do is provide information and hope the messages are understood. We firmly believe that talking to patient groups and healthcare professionals is correct. But it's not some secret mission plan with stooges in place."

(The Times, October 25 2003)

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Interview: Michael Crick, BBC journalist (Evening Standard)

By David Rowan

MICHAEL Crick is twitching with nervous excitement. Just back from delivering the Parliamentary Standards watchdog a dossier on the way Iain Duncan Smith runs his office, Newsnight's famously aggressive political reporter is now finding the microphones being thrust into his face. "This story is make or break for me," he says anxiously, between endless mobile phone rings. "If I've got it wrong, I'm destroyed. It's the biggest story I've ever done - except," he says with a grin, "I haven't actually done it, apart from one 500-word story in The Sunday Telegraph."

Crick, whose dogged pursuit helped bring down Jeffrey Archer and exposed John Major's youthful love-life, has again shaped the political agenda this week. After a five-month Newsnight investigation, he alleged that a salary paid to Duncan Smith's wife Betsy breached parliamentary rules. But when Newsnight dropped the film, the claims appeared in The Sunday Telegraph alongside a commentary from Crick, who then took the matter to the standards commissioner.

The BBC's response has been to "suspend" his Newsnight contract - no blame attached - during the investigation.

"I'm nervous," Crick admits. "Worried. I've got to be careful in everything I say. If the standards commissioner comes out and says there's a mass of evidence that Betsy Duncan Smith was working for her husband, then I'll look a bit silly. And Duncan Smith could sue - he's said he would - in which case I could also be very poor. Now, what am I going to do for lunch?"

Crick, 45, has a reputation for getting his facts right. He wiped the floor with Damian Green, the Conservative education spokesman, on Andrew Neil's Daily Politics programme yesterday, demanding that Duncan Smith provide itemised phone bills and annotated diaries as proof of his wife's work. "There is strong evidence that no one from IDS's team has effectively rebutted," he says. "It's possible that he'll come up with a load of material, but the more I read his statement, the more threadbare it gets." After 11 years at Newsnight, where his contract allows him to take half the year off to write books, he is careful not to say anything that will embarrass the BBC.

Although seen by some colleagues as a showman who enjoys being the programme's resident mischiefmaker, Crick is widely respected for his forensic digging, and the "Betsygate" film was seen as a way of boosting morale after the Hutton Inquiry.

THE decision to drop it has caused widespread concern within the BBC newsroom that management is keen to water down its political coverage. "If they won't let Crick run a story," one journalist was heard to complain on Monday, "how will the rest of us be able to?" "The one thing you need to know about me," Crick says, "is that I've got triplet sisters. Living with three younger sisters you have to be much more aggressive to survive - that's why I'm always talking more loudly and eating more quickly than I should."

When in London he lives with his mother in Clapham, where the walls are full of mementos to a career of making trouble, from the "Archer goes to jail" Evening Standard bill to the framed Daily Mail front page condemning a BBC "hatchet job" on John Major.

There is also currently water flowing through the ceiling from a first-floor bathroom. In his enthusiasm to move the story forward, Crick appears to have left the shower on this morning.

An avowed "anorak" and former trainspotter, Crick prefers delving in libraries to being among the media pack. Alex Millar, researcher on his biography of Alex Ferguson, says: "He'll comb through every document, speak to everyone. But he can also get the story through over-politeness. He treats everybody he meets with respect - and some of his best stories come from secretaries." How did he get the Betsygate story? "Luck, to be honest," Crick says. "It came my way because an internal Tory email warned of a 'Crick-style investigation'" - which prompted a mole to initiate one. He also admits to persistence.

"I'm quite an obsessive person - I don't just go to Man United, I go to every United match. I like to talk to everyone. When we were doing the Archer book, my wife and I tracked down everyone who'd served in the GLC during the Sixties, apart from one. Thoroughness is a wonderful thing." Does he have something against Tories? After all, his biography subjects have included Michael Heseltine as well as Archer?"

Absolutely not," he says. "If anybody had come along with similar stuff about Tony Blair, I would have pursued it with the same degree of diligence and perseverance." So what are his politics? "I was described as 'sceptical Labour' in the paper today," he says. "I can't honestly see myself voting for any party at the next election." He did, however, come close to being a Labour Party insider. In 1990, senior Labour figures asked him to stand for the safe seat of Bootle. "I thought, 'God, it's the safest Labour seat in England.' I knew it was the turning point in my life. But did I really want to move to Bootle? I thought, 'Nah,' and I've had a real sense of relief ever since. I can say what I like about anyone in politics."

HIS books now account for around 60 per cent of his income. Since he earned a £1,500 advance in 1983 for his debut, about the Militant Tendency, he has lately concentrated on more commercial subjects. "I earn enough from the books to live on," he says. The money has let him employ a team of researchers - up to six on the Heseltine book. "I'm just fascinated by what motivates high achievers," he says. "Archer and Fergie are men of incredible charm, but can be absolute bastards. How much ruthlessness do you need to be successful?"

After Manchester Grammar, Crick edited Cherwell while at Oxford. There he showed his own Heseltine tendency, launching a publishing business to profit from recruitment advertising - but lost money. In 1980 he became an ITN trainee alongside Edward Stourton and Mark Damazer - now one of the BBC executives responsible for dropping his film. He joined Channel 4 News, alongside Damian Green. "Damian taught me two great rules," he says. "Don't always assume a woman is pregnant until she has told you; and don't ever come up with an idea yourself, but latch on to other people's, so you'll have someone else backing you."

He achieved a childhood ambition when he moved to Panorama - although he hated the " uncollegiate" atmosphere. At Newsnight, though, he found his home - even applying at one stage to be its editor. He admits now that he would have been "terrible".

"I'm a very happy person, really," he says. "I've got the best job you can imagine. But I would like to do something positive." He laughs again. "I do think a lot of what I do isn't very constructive, holding people to account."

(Evening Standard, October 15 2003)

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Interview: Lucy Higginson, Horse & Hound (Evening Standard)

By David Rowan

LUCY Higginson has some news for Tony Blair. He may have pummelled his rebels over Iraq, and strong-armed the unions over health reforms, but he has clearly not reckoned on the challenge ahead from Horse & Hound magazine.

Under the determined new editorship of Higginson, the Tatler of the horse crowd is preparing to scupper a hunting ban any way it can - even if this most conservative of institutions has to condone lawbreaking to make it unworkable.

Higginson, a serious, sensibly dressed 33-year-old, is an unlikely exponent of civil disobedience. The first woman editor in the magazine's 120-year history, she is married to an Eton maths teacher, rides in competitions alongside Zara Phillips, and enthuses like a Jilly Cooper stable girl about being "thrilled to bits" about her "jolly new columnists". But a year into editing this bible of the horsey classes, she has decided that a hunting ban is more than her readers will stand. So she will offer Horse & Hound as the focal point for that disobedience.

"We'll certainly be very understanding when people feel the need to break the law," she says. "I'm very pro-hunting, and we've run articles pointing out to the Government the large number of people who will continue if the worst happens and there's a ban. I really understand that. People just can't respect this law and see it as an infringement of their rights. So if there is civil disobedience, we will report it with an interest in what's going on and let people explain themselves in our letters page."

In her 20th-floor office in IPC's South Bank tower, surrounded by bound copies of the Horse Racing Record, Higginson may not look like the typical nose-ringed activist, but she certainly displays the requisite anger. "It's preposterous the amount of time Westminster has spent on this," she says. "It's simply not the case that hunters enjoy killing, and it's certainly not a very rich man's sport - there are stacks of people doing it because it's all that's going on. I particularly feel angry for a lot of the horses."

Much of Higginson's life revolves around horses. She has a half share in her own, which she rides three times a week, and she hunts regularly, mainly with the Old Berkshire Hunt. "I've had two death threats from someone who uses red ink and calls himself 'Mr D Mented', but it doesn't worry me," she says. "It represents the deranged nature of some of the people you get in the antihunt movement."

As only the magazine's fifth editor, Higginson joined last year from The Field - where else? - with a mission to modernise it without risking its vast social influence. The readers, almost two- thirds women, are wealthy and well-connected, and it is no accident that Hugh Grant's character in Notting Hill pretended to be from Horse & Hound in order to meet Julia Roberts. "Getting your horse's picture in Horse & Hound is the equestrian equivalent of getting photos of your 21st in Harpers & Queen, if that's your bag," she says. "People are ecstatic to be in the magazine, and they beg us to use their pictures. They pore over the tiny type of the results pages, and are mad keen to know who's done well."

She has lifted circulation from 64,000 to around 68,000 in her first year, by bringing in a less fusty design, more features and columns, and even a number of gossip columns. But she is quick to point out that this is not the lust-with-thestablelad sort of gossip. "Our readers look at the horse first, and we're not a great deal interested in personal gossip, anything that's deemed to be prying," she says. She is offended by accusations that the magazine is "plunging downmarket", and insists that there will be "nothing as frothy as horoscopes", as some have speculated.

She has learned that even relatively minor changes - dropping obituaries, for instance - have proved too radical for her readers. After protests, the obituaries have returned. Could the Horse & Hound readership perhaps be a little out of touch with modern Britain? After all, there seem to be only white faces in the photographs. "Well, we have featured riders from the United Arab Emirates," she replies. "But I suppose our readership is Middle England. Yet it's not the stuck-up, exclusive world that people portray. I'm living proof."

Born to "salesman stock", Higginson grew up in suburban Cheshire, discovering horses while at Manchester High School. After her parents refused to pay for ballet lessons, she joined the local pony club with borrowed ponies, and eventually bought two of her own horses through Horse & Hound's classifieds. At 13, she wrote about a gymkhana for the school magazine and instantly decided she wanted to become a sports journalist - ideally the one editing Horse & Hound. Five days after leaving Durham University she joined The Field as a sub-editor; and, after rising to be deputy editor, she finally achieved her goal.

"I always used to read the print off this magazine," she says, "and was the scourge of the pony club quiz night for knowing all the answers."

HIGGINSON has said some harsh things about the Prime Minister: an editorial before the last prohunt march warned "glib, egocentric, image-obsessed Blair" that he will "rue the day" he promised to ban hunting. With the Bill now back in the Lords for its second reading, and a vote expected next month, a ban could be a reality within a year. If the Lords vote against it, the Government will introduce the Bill again in November and use the Parliament Act to force it through.

She will not say if she has signed the Hunting Declaration being forwarded among determined hunters, who promise to risk jail by defying a ban. "I'm going to pass on that one, as I'm hoping I don't need to face that crisis decision yet," she says. But she does see this as an apposite moment to offer the Prime Minister a warning. "It really isn't going to be a walkover to enforce this law," she says. "There's an awful lot of people who care incredibly deeply about this issue. He thinks they'll just go away - but I'm not at all convinced they will."

(Evening Standard, October 1 2003)

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