Interview: Richard Ingrams, The Observer (Evening Standard)
By David Rowan
Richard Ingrams is leaving The Observer, quite fittingly, in the style his readers would expect - spitting all the tightly worded venom of the professional grumpy old man. His target this time, however, is not the pro-Israel Jewish lobby, nor the homosexuals or slippery Blairites for whom he would normally sharpen his pen. Today, The Observer itself is the subject of his wrath. After 18 years' more or less continuous employment, he has decided not to go quietly.
It is not that Ingrams, 68, has fallen out with the editor, Roger Alton, he explains in a Soho café near his other two journalistic homes, The Oldie and Private Eye. But when Simon Kelner offered him a new perch at the Saturday Independent, he did not take much persuasion to leave a paper he feels he can no longer identify with.
"For some time I've had a semidetached feeling about The Observer," he explains with matter-of-fact coldness. "I got on quite well with Roger, I just feel the paper hasn't had the necessary editorial bite which it used to have. And it's a bit of a thing to write for a paper that you don't read any more."
In Ingrams's view, Britain's oldest surviving Sunday paper is now "kind of lost". Its most important writers have been allowed to leave; news has lost out to features. "It's particularly noticeable on the whole Iraq issue," he says, lamenting what he sees as Alton's uncritical support for the war. "In the Indie, you had a very strong attack on the whole thing from the beginning. But The Observer's got it wrong about Iraq, which goes on and on, and you're clobbered by that unless you get up and say: 'We got it wrong.' And I was thinking last night about a leader supporting Professor Roy Meadow - that's the kind of thing that wouldn't have been in the old Observer. There are certain issues like that where it's quite plain where the truth lies."
Considering Ingrams's own freedom from editorial interference - on a prominent back-page slot - it sounds more than a little ungrateful for him now to turn on his masters. Yes, he agrees, he was given a remarkably free hand to peddle his own brand of dissent. "I've heard Roger say that too," he adds. "But that makes me out to be some kind of lunatic outsider, who's just allowed in to give them a figleaf."
If the paper is no longer the soul of the liberal Left, he says, the "decline" started long before Alton, whom he credits with at least arresting a circulation decline. In Ingrams's view, the trouble began after the Guardian Media Group bought the paper from Lonrho in 1993, when Peter Preston ran The Guardian. Preston and his successor, Alan Rusbridger, installed Jonathan Fenby, Andrew Jaspan and Will Hutton as editors in quick succession. The purchase, Ingrams concludes, was a historical mistake for GMG, which has subsequently absorbed losses said to be above £100 million.
Editorially, he considers the new owners to have progressively "dumbed down" the paper in search of an ill-defined "youth" readership, at the cost of its own distinct liberal, independent-minded identity. "I'm sure they've done all sorts of market research, but the newspaper world gets it wrong by thinking it can find out what people want to read, instead of the editor saying: 'This is what I'm interested in.' Exactly the same thing is happening with The Sunday Telegraph. Trying to appeal to young readers, [editors] give a huge amount of space to pop music, sex and rock 'n' roll, like they are the only things they want to read about."
He cites the Review section as evidence of the Observer's intellectual decline. "It used to be so strong but I don't read it now. All that's been lost. The books pages are substandard, you ask most people." But surely their editor, former publisher Robert McCrum, carries weight in the literary world? "So why was he writing last Sunday about Bob Dylan?" Ingrams shoots back. "What's he got to do with Dylan? From my own experience at The Oldie, it's not difficult to make an interesting books section. But I look at those pages, and I just don't want to read any of the books."
Roger Alton, understandably, does not agree, reeling off the "serious" highlights from last Sunday's edition. He also points out that the Roy Meadow editorial was against the inquisition rather than for Meadow.
But Ingrams, for his part, suspects that Alton "hasn't got his heart in it any more". Relations with Alan Rusbridger, Alton's editor-in-chief, have been acutely strained over recent months, in part over editorial cutbacks The Observer was forced to bear. To add to that, the Scott Trust, which controls the papers, last year took the highly unusual step of questioning some of Alton's editorial lines. "I've spoken to Roger two or three times recently, and I had the impression that he was semi-detached," Ingrams says. "I may be wrong. But if he's got Rubbisher [Private Eye's nickname for Rusbridger] breathing down his neck all the time, he might feel, 'What's the point?'" He was surprised, he says, that after the Standard reported his departure last Friday, Alton telephoned him not to urge him to reconsider, but to express concern about the publicity.
Alton sees things rather differently. "Of course I've been trying to persuade him to stay," he says. "I have the highest regard for him, and think it's a great pity the column's going. It's a joy to read." Having defended Ingrams's more provocative columns against readers' assaults, Alton is bemused by his decision to speak out. "On the whole, when people leave a newspaper-they go out with grace, rather than putting the boot in," he says.
Ingrams, who edited Private Eye for 23 years until 1986, clearly takes delight in speaking out of turn. Targets for his Observer columns have ranged from the Archbishop of Canterbury to TV "bimbos", but most controversial was his announcement two years ago that he would no longer read a reader's letter in support of Israel "if the writer has a Jewish name". He also suggested that Jewish journalists should make their religion known. The Press Complaints Commission rejected the resulting complaints, although Julie Burchill cited Ingrams's "bias" against Israel as one reason for quitting The Guardian. He is, she wrote in her farewell column, "Victor Meldrew without the animal magnetism ... whose trademark has long been a loathing for anyone who appears to get a kick out of life".
"I think Julie Burchill's a frightful monster," Ingrams says now. "I find it a great mystery that people pay to print what she writes."
But what of the more serious accusation - that Ingrams is, if not a parlour anti-Semite, certainly a writer who has given them succour? "They can say what they like," he says without emotion. "There isn't any truth in it. A columnist has to sniff out the things that aren't mentioned for one reason or another, and this is one of those things. Everyone is so hypersensitive about it, so the issue is left out of the discussion."
Now claiming to be busier than ever, Ingrams says he has enough distractions to keep him from looking back to The Observer's golden days. He still writes jokes for the Eye, spends four days a week at The Oldie, and has just finished a biography of Paul Foot. And, of course, there is the new column.
"The good thing about columns is that by and large people don't remember them," he says. Attacks on former employers, however, tend to linger rather longer.
(Evening Standard, September 28 2005)
. . . AND READ MORE MEDIA INTERVIEWS HERE . . .
Richard Ingrams is leaving The Observer, quite fittingly, in the style his readers would expect - spitting all the tightly worded venom of the professional grumpy old man. His target this time, however, is not the pro-Israel Jewish lobby, nor the homosexuals or slippery Blairites for whom he would normally sharpen his pen. Today, The Observer itself is the subject of his wrath. After 18 years' more or less continuous employment, he has decided not to go quietly.
It is not that Ingrams, 68, has fallen out with the editor, Roger Alton, he explains in a Soho café near his other two journalistic homes, The Oldie and Private Eye. But when Simon Kelner offered him a new perch at the Saturday Independent, he did not take much persuasion to leave a paper he feels he can no longer identify with.
"For some time I've had a semidetached feeling about The Observer," he explains with matter-of-fact coldness. "I got on quite well with Roger, I just feel the paper hasn't had the necessary editorial bite which it used to have. And it's a bit of a thing to write for a paper that you don't read any more."
In Ingrams's view, Britain's oldest surviving Sunday paper is now "kind of lost". Its most important writers have been allowed to leave; news has lost out to features. "It's particularly noticeable on the whole Iraq issue," he says, lamenting what he sees as Alton's uncritical support for the war. "In the Indie, you had a very strong attack on the whole thing from the beginning. But The Observer's got it wrong about Iraq, which goes on and on, and you're clobbered by that unless you get up and say: 'We got it wrong.' And I was thinking last night about a leader supporting Professor Roy Meadow - that's the kind of thing that wouldn't have been in the old Observer. There are certain issues like that where it's quite plain where the truth lies."
Considering Ingrams's own freedom from editorial interference - on a prominent back-page slot - it sounds more than a little ungrateful for him now to turn on his masters. Yes, he agrees, he was given a remarkably free hand to peddle his own brand of dissent. "I've heard Roger say that too," he adds. "But that makes me out to be some kind of lunatic outsider, who's just allowed in to give them a figleaf."
If the paper is no longer the soul of the liberal Left, he says, the "decline" started long before Alton, whom he credits with at least arresting a circulation decline. In Ingrams's view, the trouble began after the Guardian Media Group bought the paper from Lonrho in 1993, when Peter Preston ran The Guardian. Preston and his successor, Alan Rusbridger, installed Jonathan Fenby, Andrew Jaspan and Will Hutton as editors in quick succession. The purchase, Ingrams concludes, was a historical mistake for GMG, which has subsequently absorbed losses said to be above £100 million.
Editorially, he considers the new owners to have progressively "dumbed down" the paper in search of an ill-defined "youth" readership, at the cost of its own distinct liberal, independent-minded identity. "I'm sure they've done all sorts of market research, but the newspaper world gets it wrong by thinking it can find out what people want to read, instead of the editor saying: 'This is what I'm interested in.' Exactly the same thing is happening with The Sunday Telegraph. Trying to appeal to young readers, [editors] give a huge amount of space to pop music, sex and rock 'n' roll, like they are the only things they want to read about."
He cites the Review section as evidence of the Observer's intellectual decline. "It used to be so strong but I don't read it now. All that's been lost. The books pages are substandard, you ask most people." But surely their editor, former publisher Robert McCrum, carries weight in the literary world? "So why was he writing last Sunday about Bob Dylan?" Ingrams shoots back. "What's he got to do with Dylan? From my own experience at The Oldie, it's not difficult to make an interesting books section. But I look at those pages, and I just don't want to read any of the books."
Roger Alton, understandably, does not agree, reeling off the "serious" highlights from last Sunday's edition. He also points out that the Roy Meadow editorial was against the inquisition rather than for Meadow.
But Ingrams, for his part, suspects that Alton "hasn't got his heart in it any more". Relations with Alan Rusbridger, Alton's editor-in-chief, have been acutely strained over recent months, in part over editorial cutbacks The Observer was forced to bear. To add to that, the Scott Trust, which controls the papers, last year took the highly unusual step of questioning some of Alton's editorial lines. "I've spoken to Roger two or three times recently, and I had the impression that he was semi-detached," Ingrams says. "I may be wrong. But if he's got Rubbisher [Private Eye's nickname for Rusbridger] breathing down his neck all the time, he might feel, 'What's the point?'" He was surprised, he says, that after the Standard reported his departure last Friday, Alton telephoned him not to urge him to reconsider, but to express concern about the publicity.
Alton sees things rather differently. "Of course I've been trying to persuade him to stay," he says. "I have the highest regard for him, and think it's a great pity the column's going. It's a joy to read." Having defended Ingrams's more provocative columns against readers' assaults, Alton is bemused by his decision to speak out. "On the whole, when people leave a newspaper-they go out with grace, rather than putting the boot in," he says.
Ingrams, who edited Private Eye for 23 years until 1986, clearly takes delight in speaking out of turn. Targets for his Observer columns have ranged from the Archbishop of Canterbury to TV "bimbos", but most controversial was his announcement two years ago that he would no longer read a reader's letter in support of Israel "if the writer has a Jewish name". He also suggested that Jewish journalists should make their religion known. The Press Complaints Commission rejected the resulting complaints, although Julie Burchill cited Ingrams's "bias" against Israel as one reason for quitting The Guardian. He is, she wrote in her farewell column, "Victor Meldrew without the animal magnetism ... whose trademark has long been a loathing for anyone who appears to get a kick out of life".
"I think Julie Burchill's a frightful monster," Ingrams says now. "I find it a great mystery that people pay to print what she writes."
But what of the more serious accusation - that Ingrams is, if not a parlour anti-Semite, certainly a writer who has given them succour? "They can say what they like," he says without emotion. "There isn't any truth in it. A columnist has to sniff out the things that aren't mentioned for one reason or another, and this is one of those things. Everyone is so hypersensitive about it, so the issue is left out of the discussion."
Now claiming to be busier than ever, Ingrams says he has enough distractions to keep him from looking back to The Observer's golden days. He still writes jokes for the Eye, spends four days a week at The Oldie, and has just finished a biography of Paul Foot. And, of course, there is the new column.
"The good thing about columns is that by and large people don't remember them," he says. Attacks on former employers, however, tend to linger rather longer.
(Evening Standard, September 28 2005)
. . . AND READ MORE MEDIA INTERVIEWS HERE . . .
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