The Match King and the fading of fraud

Frank Partnoy's The Match King - a biography of Ivar Krueger, by some accounts the greatest financial swindler who ever lived - has the appearance of a book born under a lucky star. The author's previous works include Infectious Greed, a warning about the dangers of modern Wall Street complexities. So this feels like his moment. My friend Robert Colvile has said so in print. There was even time, before publication, to put a reference to Bernard Madoff into the introduction.

It isn't that simple, I'm afraid. Despite that mention of Madoff, The Match King is not prepared to give its subject the treatment that the times might now demand. In its conclusion, he is praised for his "financial innovation". He was, we are told, the first man to evade tax and scrutiny using Lichtenstein; the inventor of many brilliant schemes for handing investors apparent ownership stakes in a company without surrendering any control. Many of his ideas are still in corporate use today! I'm sure all this seemed less equivocally good a few months ago. Partnoy reserves judgment on just how much of Krueger's fall was panic and the effects of the depression - he was Time's cover boy for October 28, 1929, and seemed at first to be surviving, but ran out of credit-lines in a now rather familiar way - and how much was an unravelling swindle. Perhaps judgment has to be reserved, although it makes for an unsatisfying book. Let me summarise.

Ivar Krueger was "the Match King" because he built a match monopoly in Sweden, and came to America in the early 1920s asking for investment on the prospectus that he would use it to buy match monopolies in other countries. Tobacco was everywhere; the Bic lighter was 50 years away; matches were a big deal. Krueger paid dividends upwards of 20 per cent over a sustained period, and Partnoy is careful to establish that he didn't just do this out of subsequent investors' money - the match factories and their profits were real, and he did succeed in buying several monopolies.

On the other hand, Partnoy lays out several sets of alarming facts without quite drawing conclusions. Krueger apparently had a habit, whenever a deal was signed, of commissioning a rubber stamp of the other party's signature. We get nothing about any practical use he may have made of these souvenirs. He died - a suicide or a suspicious death - with his empire under great strain, and his reputation was destroyed when his associates tried to rescue the business using a document they found in his office safe. It was a monopoly agreement with Mussolini's Italy; and, as they subsequently discovered, it was a crude forgery. But Krueger doesn't appear to have told anyone about it - he merely hinted that something big was in the offing - or tried to use it himself. What gives? Then there is his preference for entrusting his most essential business to underqualified people he could control completely, rather than to anyone who might challenge him; and the way that the most important details of his empire remained inside his head.

It is the reason given for his vagueness that seems most suspicious to me. The case was that he couldn't give details on what he was doing with investors' money, because the details of his negotiations with foreign governments could bring those governments down. This is a confidence-trickster pitch: you elicit trust by admitting that you are trying to get one over on somebody - somebody else. It also plays to American assumptions about the venality of all other countries. "You sound like a conman" is far from a conclusive case, however, and if Partnoy is right we lack the detail to ever know exactly what Krueger was up to.

JK Galbraith thought Kreuger's story could function as an immunising memory - a reminder that this is a kind of person to be cautious of, fully crooked or otherwise, with sincerity possibly more dangerous than cynicism. That clearly isn't working. His top Google results, which are probably what passes these days for the verdict of history, include several defences and celebrations, and a get-rich-quick site with his name as the brand. Will today's fraudsters slip into a similar soft focus? They are probably better documented - but that may merely mean we have too much, rather than too little, information to be certain.

Obama as Godzilla

Of course, a man capable of standardising type use across a campaign rally is capable of anything. But I had hoped Barack Obama would stop short of destroying Dorset:

(Note that the two stories are from the same feed, so it's possible that the juxtaposition was deliberate.)

Another ruddy booklist

Obviously the problem with that list of books designed to entice reluctant boys into reading is that it doesn't contain enough things that Daily Mail readers were forced to work through when they were little. That is the problem with all lists of books for children. Lists of books for adults are prone to more or less the opposite problem; they are snobbish, hidebound, difficult, highbrow - though to say "elitist" might not, in this context, be politically correct.

Mask off, I think giving school libraries the money and the permission to buy boy-enticing pulp is rather a fine move, although making it a high-profile initiative may serve to reinforce the idea that boys don't read. On the contents of the list I'm not much qualified to comment. I'm happy to see the inclusion of adventuresome books with female lead characters (Northern Lights, A Hat Full of Sky), but then I was a boy who read all my sister's Mallory Towers books, my pre-pubescent misogyny temporarily crushed by Enid Blyton's narrative drive.

Around town

The British Library has just opened Sacred, a large and reverent exhibition of holy manuscripts designed to show the common roots of the Abrahamic faiths. It has also just positioned security men to check your bag as you go into the building. I would so love to live in a world where those two facts seemed unlikely to be connected.

(Disclaimer: I haven't actually been in to Sacred yet, by the way, so I can't guarantee that its reverence is total; was at the BL for other reasons that may result in a further post here.)

Lanchester on copyright

John Lanchester's long article on copyright for this Saturday's Guardian Review was based on a commendably clear and simple principle: that the purpose of the copyright system is to ensure John Lanchester a living. To that end, besides a slinky version of the usual attack on Disney and some personal remarks about the difficulties created by the need for clearance on obscure works, he has two suggestions:

One is that the period of copyright control does not need to be the same as the period during which an artist can earn royalties. I worked for a short while at Penguin in the early 1990s, during which Joyce and Woolf both briefly came out of copyright (on January 1 1992) and sales in their work zoomed upwards, as publishers came out with competing editions - in the case of the one book for which Penguin already had a licence, Ulysses, sales went up (and there were five other editions on the market). As a result of having seen that at first hand, I think that, 50 years after an author's death, anyone should be able to publish a book or record a piece of music or put on a play, as long as they pay a royalty. This would increase general levels of cultural creativity and still allow revenue, but not control, to artists' descendants. We could even have some fun with Mickey Mouse...

The other suggestion is that artists should be guaranteed, by law, a percentage of the revenue from the sale of their work. At the moment, the big retailers squeeze the publishers, who in turn squeeze the talent, so that it is common for as little as 5% of the purchase price of a book, say - though it's not just books - to reach the writer. That's 95% of the money going to someone other than the creator: does that seem right? My experience of asking people about this suggests, very unscientifically, that most people aren't aware that three-for-twos and dramatically reduced prices mean that the writer is earning a smaller royalty per copy.

The suggestions cut against the prevailing legal tendency to make intellectual property behave more like other sorts of property - cutting against that is fine by me - but they also cut against each other. What percentage of the royalties from Family Romance would go, by law, to the author of the anonymous poem that can be quoted only in its English edition?

The risk of reproducing potentially copyright material, as I (poorly) understand it, isn't just that the author's grandchild can decide to have your book pulped; it's that they can present you with a bill of unpredictable and possibly profit-destroying size. To make the first suggestion work in a way that made use of orphan works easier, you'd have to set some kind of standard rate, and then set up an agency to distribute the cash, adjudicate on claims, and - if you believe that the owners of un-orphaned works should be able to demand more than agency rate - decide who's an orphan and who isn't.

Then once someone's successfully claimed the cash for an orphan work, it has presumably ceased to be an orphan. Can they negotiate a higher fee for the next edition? Or stop it coming out at all?

I'd like these kinds of tweaks to work - at the least the first one, if it worked, might have a relatively high chance of happening. But copyright is almost certainly more broken than that.

The old rules

The following is from "Taboo: what newspapermen can never, never say", by Nicholas Tomalin, published in Punch in 1973 and republished in the posthumous Nicholas Tomalin Reporting two years later. It was probably ceasing to be true by the time it was written, but it may be suggestive about how hard it would be to restore a culture of "positive" commentary:

The final taboo that really irks me is the still lamentably general rule that all newspaper writers must be optimistic. 'Upbeat' is the word used. In a strict sense, an upbeat is of course the unimportant hiccup before the musical bar line; it is the down-beat that makes the important statemen. The word has become peculiarly corrupted to mean some tone of voice that makes readers cheerful, and more liable to buy advertisers' products. It means always looking on the bright side. I consider the effect of this taboo is quite disastrous on the national life. Because every second-rate hack knows he must be 'upbeat', and every advertising slogan is upbeating perpetually, anyone with a spark of intelligence comes to feel happiness is a totally unacceptable, vulgar, lying emotion (...) I am quite incapable of saying how utterly wonderful it is to be going onward and upward with ths great country of ours (even when I feel it), because so many idiots are saying so, so very often and so very insistently.

Jamesians

Slate has decided to provide a high-profile home for Clive James's webcam interviews, which is excellent news, and to launch them with an extravagant editor's appreciation:

Whether we know it or not, one of the chief inspirations for our ongoing efforts to provoke thought and mirth at the same time is none other than this polymathic Australian extrovert. The kind of television coverage Troy Patterson writes in Slate grows almost directly out of the column James wrote for the London Observer beginning in the 1970s. The quick-witted cultural writing to which we aspire owes its tone to James' essays, first collected in The Metropolitan Critic.

That seems a bit much. Clive James was better than anyone before or since at turning the TV review into a blast of highbrow comedy, but he wasn't first with the idea. Bernard Levin, of all people, used to do it in the Manchester Guardian of the 1950s, where the ground was prepared for him by a once-famous tradition of needlessly witty and erudite music-hall reviewing. And although I admire James's reviewing, I can't shake the accusation in Jonathan Raban's For Love and Money that he writes a dialect "as recognisable as Mummerset; at once donnish high-falutin' and come-off-it low slang, it is the received standard accent of the smart English book review".

But Jacob Weisberg is right to wonder why the man is not more prominent in America; he is as widely cultured a good talker as Christopher Hitchens, treading much of the same literary territory, and better at reading closely (as if that matters). I suppose it's to do with the primacy of politics over culture, Hitchens being a political writer deriving status from his cultural hinterland and James a cultural critic aiming for a political edge. And then Hitchens's old socialist-among-liberals schtick would be more of more use to American talk-show bookers than the liberal-among-socialists one that drives most of James's more political stuff. That James's jokes are for laughing at, rather than admiring as sallies of wit, and that he puts so much work into looking laid back, probably do their share of damage too.

Ask a fictional journalist

Let minor characters from Victorian and Edwardian novels guide you through the bleeding-edge world of new media. A new series! One that may have more than one part! Interviews are conducted on a Wired speak to Rockefeller basis, not a Zembla speak to Henry James one: that is, I am decontextualising quotes, not attempting to use my imagination. Opinions may be selected for resemblence either to conventional wisdom or actual wisdom, cuts may be concealed without remorse and quality of transcription may, as ever, be crap.

This week's interviewee is Mr. John Rorrison, the sole Fleet Street contact of the hero of J.M. Barrie's When a Man's Single. Rorrison is certainly probably possibly "practically editing a great London newspaper". He explains How to succeed in blogging.

Rorrison, I've got this great new political blog. Will you link to it?

You beginners seem to be able to write nothing but your views on politics, and your reflections on art, and your theories of life, which you sometimes think original. Readers don't want it.

I know what this is about. You only link to your powerful mates, right?

Don't believe what one reads. Men fail to get a footing on the press because -- well, as a rule, because they are stupid.

All right, all right. So there are too many of us trying politics.

Yes, and each thinks himself as original as he is profound, though they only have to meet to discover that they repeat each other. The pity of it is that all of them could get on to some extent if they would send in what is wanted.

And what's wanted?

They should write of the things they have seen... readers have an insatiable appetite for knowing how that part of the world lives with which they are not familiar. They want to know how the Norwegians cook their dinners and build their houses and ask each other in marriage.

But I'm in Aberdeen. I'm hardly ever anywhere exotic.

Neither was Shakespeare. There are thousands of articles in Scotland yet. You must know a good deal about the Scottish weavers -- well, there are articles in them. Describe the daily life of a gillie: 'The Gillie at Home' is a promising title.

But TotallyGillie.com must have done all the big topics by now.

Of course they have, but do them in your own way... new publics are always springing up.

So I'm not to write about politics at all?

Write about politics if you will, but don't merely say what you yourself think; rather tell, for instance, what is the political situation in the country parts known to you. That should be more interesting and valuable than your political views.

And what if I don't want to write all this personal bollocks?

If you have the journalistic faculty, you will always be on the look-out for possible articles. The man on this stair would have had an article out of you before he had talked with you as long as I have done. Once I challenged him to write an article on a straw that was sticking out of a sill of my window, and it was one of the most interesting things he ever did. Then there was the box of odds and ends that he promised to store for me when I changed my rooms. He sold the lot to a hawker for a pair of flower-pots, and wrote an article on the transaction. Subsequently he had another article on the flower-pots; and when I appeared to claim my belongings he had a third out of that.

The Grey Lady's light basement*

The New York Times "home page" feed just gave me this intriguing bit of fluff about politicians using hand-sanitiser after long bouts of handshaking. It has some of the falseness of all trend stories: to be news it has to suggest or imply that this quirk of behaviour has just come into being, or just become more prevalent; in fact, the reporter has just noticed it, and decided we might be interested. He's right, though. It is interesting. So fine.

The most interesting thing is that no politician is quoted as santinising to protect the public from their germs, rather than themselves from the public's. Maybe one of them tried that line and was dismissed as a flatterer; but surely they could have been profitably mocked as a flatterer in the text? So maybe they all are that egotistical.

I'd feel more sympathetic if the pols were French. According to a friend who should know, but may have been winding me up, the French cliche equivalent to "kissing babies" for political glad-handing is "feeling cows' arses". (And the key fact about Jacques Chirac, apparently, overlooked outside France, is that he's the greatest cow's-arse feeler in living memory.) Hand sanitisation after that? More than excusable.

*Apologies if this headline was even less comprehensible than usual. I believe a 'light basement' to be a human-interest story put in at the bottom of a broadsheet page; I'm going by a Julian Barnes piece collected in Letters from London, where Simon Jenkins says he insisted on having them as editor of the (London) Times. And the Grey Lady's the other Times, obviously, which having never fully accepted post-1930 conventions of newspaper layout probably finds the equivalent space half-way up a left-hand column, or on page K1 of a special weekly section called "Fluff". Forget I mentioned it.

Orwell overdose in progress

Reading a book of newspaper columns is like eating a whole bag of boiled sweets. The first one is refreshing. Your taste is whetted. Your juices run. By the tenth or fifteenth your mouth feels stiff with sugar and the flavour is all aftertaste, but some vestige of the original pleasure drives you* on. By the last one you are nauseous, and you get sicker at the very thought of the Fox's polar bear.

Last Wednesday I went to an interesting pub in Fitzrovia, met one of my favourite journalism tutors, and gave him £20. In return he gave me several drinks and the most gigantic bag of barley sugars, concealed under the title Orwell in Tribune. I'm more than halfway through the binge now; so far it's pure "As I Please" - that is, pure George Orwell newspaper miscellany - cut with just one pseudonymous Christmas article. And yet my appetite feels healthier than I could have imagined.

There are some things that start to cloy. The anti-Catholicism gets a bit old - it's not just Spain or even Spain and Beachcomber. The "brain-ticklers" were annoying even in the heavily selected Collected Journalism version. But the accretion of literary personality makes good all irritations. He toys, quietly, with the sort of leftist jargon he is more famous for flaying ("I am objectively anti-Brains Trust, in the sense that I always switch off any radio from which it begins to emerge"). He has an excellent running joke about top hats. And there is a care about epithets, preached and practised, that his admirers at the Daily Telegraph might have to call politically correct. He may enjoy winding up Catholics, but he never calls them Roman Catholics.

From the second "As I Please":

It is an astonishing thing that few journalists, even in the left-wing press, bother to find out which names are and which are not resented by members of other races. The word 'native', which makes any Asiatic boil with rage, and which has been dropped even by British officials in India these ten years past, is flung about all over the place. 'Negro' is habitually penned with a small n, a thing most Negroes resent. One's information about these matters needs to be kept up to date. I have just been carefully going through the proofs of a reprinted book of mine, cutting out the word 'Chinaman' wherever it occurred and subtituting 'Chinese'. The book was published less than a dozen years ago, but in the intervening time 'Chinaman' has become a deadly insult. Even 'Mahomedan' is now beginning to be resented; one should say 'Muslim'.

From the 36th:

Now, it seems to me that you do less harm by dropping bombs on people than by calling them 'Huns'. Obviously one does not want to inflict death and wounds if it can be avoided, but I cannot feel that mere killing is all-important. We shall all be dead in less than a hundred years, and most of us by the sordid horror known as 'natural death'. The truly evil thing is to act in such a way that peaceful life becomes impossible.

'Selective quoting of George Orwell' is not a contest that deserves prizes, but that aspect of him was new to me.

[Orwell in Tribune: 'As I Please' and other writings 1943-7, compiled and edited by Paul Anderson, London, 2006. Oh, just read it. Or just buy it and then read it.]

*I mean me, which is shaming.

National Lampoon conservatism

"Imagine a guillotine, on which a kitten is strapped, connected to a bicycle that must be predalled ever more quickly to keep the blade aloft. Slow down, and the kitten gets it." -- Will Wilkinson of the Cato Institute explains the relationship of happiness to economic growth, in the October issue of British Prospect. If your response is "Free the kitten!", you are presumably some kind of dangerous pinko utopian.

Happy relationships: as rare as mansions by Hampstead Heath

From a man whose book is called Bad Thoughts: A Guide to Clear Thinking, is this not an astonishingly weak piece of argument by analogy?

How to pass a UK citizenship test

If you can't remember Britain's second emergency number, or the details of employment law w/r/t trade-union membership, you might write this in any space provided for additional information:

I don't give a hang for all the sound intellectual reasons for devotion to a country -- pride in its greatness or its blasted 'rough island story', or the pedigree of its kings. I would as soon love it for its imports of jute. As far as I can tell, my own regard for England is almost wholly sensuous, or at any rate broad-based on something sensuous. My England is the Strand and Waterloo Bridge and all the Thames and the Pennine Hills here, and the crowd at a League football match, and Midland farmers talking like Shallow and Silence about the price of beasts, and the look of the common soldier in France at anything new, and the special kind of good-temper and humour and relenting decency that the man of the working classes has here. It's always something visible or audible or tactible, and there's not a scrap of a sound intellectual reason why I should feel any affection for it, any more than there is why most of us should be loved by our wives. In fact it is love and not judgment or wise criticism, which are much inferior affairs.

That's C.E. Montague again, inevitably, in a letter reproduced in the only full-length biography of him. It's here because I declaimed it aloud to a very knowing American of my acquaintance and he seemed to like it.

[C.E Montague: A Memoir, Oliver Elton, London, 1929. An old-fashioned praise-filled life and letters, always looking for an appropriate place to insert another of the subject's unpublished poems. Impressively thorough, though.]

Service note: Many apologies, dear reader, if you were on while something was triple-posted a few minutes ago. Wireless connection on blink + my stupidity = result you saw. And this blog will get back to quoting something other than journalism and books by old journalists soon, I promise.

Lord Russell, tear down that wall

Simon Jenkins, in Landlords to London (1974), on Bedford Square in Bloomsbury:

The Estate's officers, with the experience of the haphazard development of south Bloomsbury behind them, went to inordinate lengths to ensure that nothing would mar the quality of their new neighbourhood. The conditions imposed by [the Bedford estate's agent Robert] Palmer on the builders went into mind-boggling detail. The proportions were all laid down, as were the quality of materials to be used -- 'best Memel or Riga timber' with floors of 'good yellow seasoned deals free from sap'. No trades were permitted nor was any change of use from residential allowed. Even the lesser streets which were built north of the Square -- Chenies Street and Store Street -- were banned to traders. Servants were expected to patronise the shops south of Great Russell Street, and strict limits were placed on through traffic. Gates guarded the entrances to Bedford Square from the south and Gower Street from the north and a shopkeeper was not even allowed to send his boy to make a delivery. He would only be admitted if he came himself, lest the tone of the neighbourhood should in any way be lowered.

He appends a remark about "the fortified suburbs of Los Angeles", but things have moved on. We have our own super-rich to mock these days.

And a bonus liberal London snobbery quote, did you know the cachet of your postcode depends on the price of a ticket there in 1870?

For the most part South London failed to develop the social prestige attached to the new northern suburbs. Certainly, especially on higher ground, pockets of eminent respectability survived into the twentieth century, for instance in Wimbledon, Dulwich and Blackheath. But none of them exerted on their surrounding estates the economic attaction of a Highgate, a Hornsey, a Hampstead or later of a Harrow or a Wembley Park. One thesis is that the railway companies were stronger to the north and had less need to court suburban traffic with cheap tickets, which in turn tended to drag down the economic tone of a neighbourhood. The LNWR, the Midland and the Great Western absolutely refused to introduce any workmen's fares throughout the nineteenth centur, thus neatly preserving a ninety-degree arc of north-west London from working-class colonisation.

He later uses the inverse -- financial troubles at Liverpool Street, and a resulting rush of cheap tickets -- to explain the "tone" of the Essex suburbs.

[Landlords to London, Simon Jenkins, Constable, 1975. The history of a metropolis considered as one long frenzy of property speculation -- an approach that fits London very well. Some repetition and loose editing, but if it was a 'quickie' book (preface says much of it comes from research for the Evening Standard, which he was about to edit) then it's a remarkably coherent one. His declared purpose -- a memorial to private land speculation, now that London is under the total grip of municipal development power -- is another for the hindsight file.]

How the wheel turns

This is the bitterest stroke of satire in 'Owd Yer Tight, Emrys Bryson's 1965 A-Z collage of Nottingham life. It's filed under J, for "Jack - I'm All Right":

"Guardian Journal", June, 1964. - A tumbledown block of five outside lavatories is shared by 18 adults and 19 children in Little John Street. All the nine terraced houses are more than 100 years old and are without bathrooms or even hot water. Every day the occupants have to disinfect the drains in the middle of the yard where children play between the dustbins. They spoke of damp walls, crumbling plaster, pigeons nesting in the attic, falling chimney pots and woodworm. Last year health officials had to be called in to deal with an invasion of cockraoches and ants.

The area is not due for inspection until 1966.

November 19th, 1964. - Mr J.J. Dunnett, Labour MP for Nottingham Central, told the House of Commons that in Central Nottingham alone there were 15,000 houses more than 80 years old which lacked inside sanitation, a fixed bath and a heating system. Six thousand of them not only lacked basic amenties but were so terrible that they had been condemned. Houses were sometimes so terrible that they could not be sold and were being let at rents which were exorbitant - £3 a week instead of 17/2; £4 5s instead of 16/11.

Nottingham has a housing waiting list of 5,340 families.

In 1964 Nottingham Corporation built 508 houses.

In the first six months of 1965 Nottingham Corporation completed 268 houses, and an exactly similar number was provided by private enterprise.

Nottingham is now building at the rate of 750 dwellings a year.

Since April 1945 - over 20 years - the Corporation has built 17,246 houses, a yearly average of 862. There are between 15,000 and 20,000 slum houses in the city.

January, 1965: Nottingham's No. 1 civic car is now a £10,000 Rolls Royce...

Completely justified indignation, of course, although given a sly push in the original by following a series of extracts on Victorian and Edwardian slums. What's sad is knowing that an equivalent work in 1980 would have vented its anger on tower blocks; and that the anger of the sixties would have helped raise them.

['Owd Yer Tight, by Emrys Bryson, staged Nottingham Playhouse 1965, published Nottingham 1967. A pageant-cum-guidebook-cum-scrapbook, almost entirely quotation, that ranges at will over Nottingham's history. Witty and learned and enough to make you nostalgic for the time of its writing, for all the pettinesses and injustices it describes. It's named after "the mating cry of the city's bus conductors" - these have died out, and the tram conductors who eventually came in their place have not taken up the call.]

Worlds lost and found

The reason this blog has been dead again, I would like to pretend, is that I've been reading The History of The Times 1785-1841, and had vague things to say about it that seemed to require finishing it first, even though the system of cross-referencing in the text suggests that no one was ever meant to read it through. And it was heavy, and took up my book-carrying space, and got in the way of anything else. But now I'm free. Ha! And I can put over my crackpot theory about London in the late 18th Century as a model of our future media. Your turn to suffer now.

The first thing to say about The History of The Times 1785-1841 is that it's a monument to The Times in 1935, when it was "written, printed and published at the office of The Times, Printing House Square". It's anonymous and authoritative-sounding, handed down like the most elevated class of leading article. It's tremendously dignified in appearance, displaying the then-really-new Times New Roman to lapidary effect. At the same time, it's a gallery of show-off presswork, stuffed with tipped-in portraits and actual-size fold-out reproductions of documents leaked to the editor. Imagine the world's starchiest pop-up book. And it issues from an office that had come to see itself as eternal: scraps against long-forgotten gossip sheets (the True Sun, anyone? The World?) are covered with warm partisanship for the home side.

The second and bigger thing is that it argues, to this ignoramus convincingly, that all this imperturbable, ultraprofessional smugness, along with most of the other qualities that bloggers now denominate "mainstream media", descend from two men: John Walter II and Thomas Barnes.

Walter inherited from his father (John Walter I, oddly enough) a paper that was first meant to demonstrate a printing gimmick, and continued because it continued. The tax regime on newspapers was then, The Times argues, designed to stop you operating a mass-circulation daily, or any daily at all without accepting bribes. Paper was stamped and taxed. Advertising was stamped and taxed. Payments from political operators, and the "suppression" and "contradiction" fees journalists could extract by public blackmail, were available on relatively advantageous terms. Walter II stepped steadily out of these customary practices, and then bought the first steam-powered presses, which allowed him to produce enough papers quickly and cheaply for the bribeless office to pay.

An obviously bribe-free paper, among obviously bribed ones, is a powerful thing. It became a shockingly powerful one in the control of Thomas Barnes, its first proper editor, a crony of radical poets who became for thirty-odd years a Times-only man. He built up the reporting staff, fighting the Post Office to free his foreign correspondence, cultivating sources all over Britain, and extracting tip-offs from the great. He used all this to present a front of omniscience and infallibility. He took anonymity as far as he could. The first time his name appeared in his paper was a death notice:

On the 7th inst., at his house in Soho-square, Thomas Barnes, Esq., in the 56th year of his age.

And his paper's defensive approach to the apology makes today's Fleet Street look craven. We know the names of his Parliamentary staff because when the Irish leader Daniel O'Connell accused them of misquoting him, they published a signed letter in the paper declaring they would not report another word of his until he had apologised for the slur on their honour.

His opinion-writing was louder and ruder than today's Times would contemplate. One reform-era leader responds to a particularly outrageous suggestion (another slur on the honour of the paper) by a quarter-inch of blank space, and then:

We leave a space vacant, as the author of Tristram Shandy says, "for the reader to swear in, any oath he is accustomed to," only hoping it is an innocent one.

The leaders are composed on a principle of finding out what public opinion is - among the small middle-class then allowed to be the public - and then leading it by advocating a popular position as forcefully as possible. The readers of today's tabloids might recognise the approach, and the ruthless willingness to switch sides.

And that's the most important tradition, right there. Thomas Barnes shafted powerful sources. He would take information and even opinion steers from the likes of Henry Brougham - but when he concluded that Brougham could no longer carry the credit of his readers, he said so plainly. He had the power to get away with it.

What worries me most about the decline of the press, apart from the chance that I will have to find a proper job, is that soon we will have no journalists powerful enough to fuck over the influential; and that control of information is not going out to a more democratic world of volunteers and citizen investigators - great as they often are at mining data already in the public domain - but back to its previous owners, the great and the good and their small vindictive functionaries. Even Jeff Jarvis occasionally has such thoughts, on his way to something more uplifting.

Brougham had a press agent called Le Marchant. He doesn't make the index of The History of The Times. But until the Great Shafting, he is as much cited as a determinant of what appears in The Times as anyone apart from Barnes. His time is returning.

Shouting fire in a crowded theatre

This phrase just occurred twice in half an hour or so on Radio Four; once in Brian Walden's Cooke substitute thing, and once in Any Questions, both times in relation to the Danish cartoons clusterbuggerup.

It's a nice cliche. I've used it myself. But what I failed to understand until a few years ago, and what I suspect may be more widely forgotten, is the full meaning of a shout of fire in a theatre before building regulations.

We're not talking about severe inconvenience or discomfort that's worse because it arises from malice; nor even about Walden's "behaving in a way that deliberately puts other people at personal risk". A man who falsely shouted fire in a Georgian London theatre could expect a stampede that killed half a dozen people. This happened quite a few times. Indeed, it was a technique for blackmailing producers. The restriction proposed may therefore be less severe than the phrase now suggests.

Unfortunately for this argument, the source of my revelation was a display in the basement gents' toilet of Sadlers' Wells theatre in 2003, which I now only dimly remember. Confirmation is beyond my Googling; corrections would be greatly welcomed.

You've got strife

Here's a nice streak of piss and vinegar from Peter Jenkins's The Battle of Downing Street, a venerable quickie book on the "In Place of Strife" controversy. We are operating from the point of view of the Prime Minster, Harold Wilson. It is June 1969, and we are attempting to get the TUC, newly led by Vic Feather, to create rules against unofficial strikes strong enough to save us from a doomed attempt to legislate against them. Lucky us:

One of the most effective weapons in the TUC's armoury is boredom. It has the capacity to deliver boredom by the megaton, the desolation it can inflict on the other side of a negotiation table can be terrible to behold. Many a rapacious capitalist had laid down his arms and put up his money at the rumbling of trade union leaders going nuclear. What a prospect for Prime Minister to awake to on a summer's morning with the birds singing in St. James's Park -- four hours with the General Council! The sight of them shuffling in, settling round the table in strict order of senility -- so many of them! Harold Wilson would struggle with matches and pipe trying to remember some of the dreary fellows' names -- who was that one, Alf, Bert or yet another Bill? Listening to them -- "speaking from long experience" (tendentious reminiscence); "plain words" (cliche); "making it quite clear" (unnecessary reptition); "brief intervention" (long-winded monologue); "point of information" (fatuous question); "expediting the proceedings" (wasting more time); "useful suggestion" (red herring); "summing up" (going over it all gain); "valuable progress" (hours wasted); "another meeting?" (Oh God!). "The TUC doesn't like rush", Feather had said. It was a war of attrition; the TUC's tactics: grind the enemy down, wear him to a standstill, bore him into submission.

The violence of the tone here is uncharacteristic: for the most part an ironic equanimity is maintained. And the portrait of Vic Feather is mostly admiring.

[The Battle of Donwning Street, by Peter Jenkins (Charles Knight & Co, 1970). Not exactly an enduring classic -- it's repititious in places, and prone to misprints even when not retouchtyped quickly by a blogger. On the other hand, refreshingly free of Thatcherite or Labour-movement's-big-missed-chance hindsight, which makes it easier to see how limited the measures in "In Place of Strife" were, and how farcical and contingent on tactics was their collapse. Probably my last trade union book for a while.]

How terribly British

"The Northern Light was one of the most militant strike bulletins, and its distributors were often arrested. A touch of generosity, which would have been unthinkable in most countries, entered into relations between police and strikers here in Durham. When Stephenson [the editor] was fined £2 with the option of fourteen days' imprisonment, he chose to go to prison, but asked the police not to call at his home on the day he was due to go inside. They agreed, and he met them at the railway station. When Stephenson asked how they knew that he would keep his word, the constable was surprised. 'Funny thing, nobody ever thought of that'." -- The General Strike, Julian Symons.

Even more British was the end of the strike: the anway reluctant TUC leaders appear to have taken vague reassurances of goodwill from Baldwin as a promise of no reprisals. They awoke to employers imposing wage cuts and legislation that would broadly have satisfied Thatcher. If Baldwin had implied -- stopping scrupulously short of saying -- that he would meet you at the railway station, you would have needed police around his house at once.

[The General Strike, by Julian Symons (Cresset Press, 1957). Doubtless completely superseded account of great trade-union disaster; lots of great narrative colour, but the overall effect is more GCSE history than Strange Death of Liberal England.]

In the next seat

"On the third day, he had two pieces of luck. First, he met an entirely drunken man who told him about a church in Hammersmith that would give him food, and so he ate. Second, he trekked to the house of a friend in Neasden, north London, who lent him £100, which allowed him, among other things, to buy a one-week bus pass so that he could sleep on the night buses." -- No direction home, Nick Davies, Society Guardian, Wednesday, October 19.

I should have pointed to this days ago. I meant to. On the other hand, the Guardian should have had it on the front page of the main section (what else is that "Column Five" for?) rather than the front page of its local authority jobs section.