Jimmy Cameron was one. I must be among the last people who will deliver this lecture who knew him as a colleague, though forty years ago the divide between his status and mine was unimaginably wide. I remember three particular moments. The first was in 1967, when I was an insanely ambitious 21 year-old, working at the Standard for that master of the clipped, nasal put-down, Charles Wintour. As crisis beckoned between Israel and the Arab states, I sent a memo pleading for a role. Charles replied in his inimitable fashion: ‘Dear Max, you are the fifth (and least qualified) reporter today to ask to be sent to the Middle East. James Cameron is already airborne, and I have no intention of sending anyone else until it becomes plain that conflict is breaking out. Exciting assignments do not hang on trees to be plucked by hungry young mouths’.
A fortnight later, Jimmy had covered himself in new glory with his coverage of the Six-Day War, and I was still tapping out paragraphs for Londoner’s Diary. Charles wandered over to my desk and inquired: ‘Are you free at lunchtime ?’. Absolutely, I said, beaming complacently at envious colleagues, though in truth I had a date with a rather pretty colleague. Charles said: ‘Then you can go to Heathrow and meet Jimmy Cameron off the plane from Tel Aviv’. I found myself cast in the humiliating role of the young tyro dispatched by Evelyn Waugh to greet Boot of the Beast, back from Abyssinia, and to carry the Cameron cleft sticks back to the office.
The following year, I found myself in slightly less ignominious proximity to Jimmy, playing second fiddle to his coverage of the riotous and bloody US Democratic Convention in Chicago. I gained an insight into both the wit of Cameron prose, and the prurience of British newspapers of the time. Jimmy wrote for the Standard: ‘The most popular graffiti on the walls of Chicago today is ‘Fuck Mayor Daley’. This would not, I fear, be a popular assignment’. After much agonising, Charles printed Jimmy’s first sentence without asterisks, but deleted the second.
Five years on, I had a small success of my own, reporting the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Jimmy wrote me a wonderfully generous note about my coverage, but also included some reflections. ‘I sometimes think’, he said, ‘that we are inclined to allow ourselves to become too intoxicated by the brilliance of Israel’s military performances, and not think enough about the shortcomings of Israel’s policies and diplomacy. I know that I made this mistake in 1956 and 1967’. He was absolutely right, of course, as we readily perceive today.
I hope you will forgive these wisps of anecdotage. Not unnaturally, the invitation to give this lecture recalled Jimmy to my thoughts. I won’t say he was the model to which I aspired, because my political views were a million miles from his. But he represented supreme journalistic virtues. He was a lyrical descriptive writer. I remember as if it was yesterday his depiction of the Egyptian Army’s boots, littered in thousands across Sinai in 1967 after their owners had run for their lives. More important, however, was his belief- which should be shared by everyone in our trade- that if the first duty of a journalist is to gather news, the second is to make trouble.
One of the most flattering compliments I ever received came from John Major when he was prime minister and I was Telegraph editor. Douglas Hurd told me: ‘John Major doesn’t like you. He feels that he never knows what you are going to do next’. It is surprising how many politicians look to journalists and newspapers for predictability. In every generation, a few indeed indulge ministers with what my old boss Conrad Black called ‘a high comfort level’. I have never been a wilful iconaclast, breaking china merely for the pleasure of hearing the noise. I counted several Tory ministers as friends. But no halfway decent journalist is bothered by the crash of porcelain. We can go further, and say that any of us wholly trusted by the prime minister of the day is not doing their job properly.
When I became an editor and set about interviewing job candidates, I was chiefly interested in discovering whether they possessed that fanatical craving for a career in print which is much more important than brains. Newspapers need a quota of normal, balanced human beings; but a larger number of definitely unbalanced people, who believe that getting the story is the most important thing in the world. At 23, my own prose was pretty dire. I sought to compensate with a manic commitment to producing splashes.
One January day in 1969, I found myself coming out of Biafra at the end of the war with a story about the Nigerian army’s takeover which nobody else had except my close friend John Clare of the Times, who shared with me the inevitable taxi back to Lagos. In the first hours of that long, long ride, I found myself measuring time and distance. If we could not file until we reached the capital, we would hit the Times’s editions, not the Evening Standard’s. I would lose my scoop. The only plausible means of preventing this outcome seemed to be to lure John out of the vehicle, then either drive off without him, or if necessary whack him over the head with the jack handle. Now, as it happened I got a phone line to London from Benin, and thus my little scoop. I escaped discovering how far I was willing to go. I am grateful for that, because I might otherwise have served a longish stretch for grievous bodily harm. I tell this story without pride, merely as an indication of how mad an ambitious young reporter can become, in pursuit of that beautiful, irresistible, infinitely seductive six-column double-decker headline.