After the Fall

It was an oldfashioned, ripping Fleet Street row. The issue: press treatment of the abrupt resignation from the Labor Party of Lord George-Brown, 61, the hard-drinking, outspoken former British Foreign Secretary, Deputy Prime Minister and Economic Affairs Minister. A member of the House of Lords since 1970, George-Brown went on TV to announce his decision to quit the party after 40 years. The move, prompted by George-Brown's fear that press freedom would be threatened by a Labor proposal requiring all journalists to join a union, was made only after considerable personal turmoil--and some alcoholic fortification. After a brief, halting speech, delivered while waving a glass of white wine, George-Brown backed away from the cameras, left the studio and fell on his face in the street.

For the London papers, the big story quickly became not George-Brown's resignation but press coverage of his subsequent tumble. After the Guardian, Daily Mirror, Daily Mail and Daily Express all carried front-page photos of the elder statesman's dive, the lordly Times weighed in with a cane-wagging editorial scolding them for lack of "compassion and delicacy" in showing George-Brown "fallen in the gutter." Perhaps, the Times added sarcastically, the other papers "resented his infringing their monopoly" there.

Striking back, the liberal Guardian accused the Times of "knee-jerk elitism that believes public figures should always be shielded in public indignity."

The tabloid Mirror flayed the Times for "prejudiced and intemperate political judgment." Author Auberon Waugh wrote to the Times: "Your decision to suppress those aspects of the news which displease you strike me as differing only in its effectiveness from the Russian model."

Times Editor William Rees-Mogg defended his editorial as a needed blow against what he sees as an "increasing trend in Fleet Street to competitively intrude into people's private lives." Many Britons seemed to agree. The four offending papers were deluged with letters expressing sympathy for George-Brown. The Daily Mail devoted its entire letters page to complaints on the matter--but noted that it did so because "newspapers, like politicians, operate in the public arena."

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