In an interview on Editing Newspapers

Let’s talk about Trollope’s The Warden.

The plot of The Warden has been a familiar one this year. It’s about middle-ranking, mostly decent people who have had financial privileges, which to them – in terms of their own internal logic and their own rules – are absolutely OK. Then there’s a protest and a leak. The Times gets hold of the story and suddenly everything is upside down...

There are no bad people in The Warden. The comparison with our own MPs is quite telling. The top churchmen always had most of the money once bequeathed to support the local pensioners. They justify that to themselves on the grounds that the church should make its own rules, and that society was better if it did. And only when it was given a harsh write-up in the press did it become clear that the internal, moral logic that they thought was perfectly fine actually wasn’t. And the warden loses his job, even though the whistleblower takes pity on him, goes to the man at The Times and says, look, can we call this whole thing off? And, of course, he can’t, because the thing by that stage had its own media momentum.

It’s always good to learn from critics of newspapers. Sometimes newspaper people feel that everyone is getting at them. In fact, newspaper editors do have a great deal of power, and it is sometimes possible to put abstract principles above the ordinary good. It’s always possible to forget the effect of what you are writing on the people you are writing about. However much newspaper editors try to stay close to their readers and to ordinary life, the prospect of becoming a distant figure is always there. The fictional editor of The Jupiter wasn’t called Tom Towers for nothing. He may not have been exactly in an ivory tower, but he was not easy to meet. And the notion that he could send off “the thunderbolt” from so far away was what upset Trollope so much, the power to fire and forget at no risk to yourself.

Now, I’m not saying that Trollope was correct, or that what Tom Towers does in The Warden wasn’t exactly the right thing to do – I’m sure it was – but, what Trollope explains is the effect the newspaper has not just on “bad people”, the people cleaning their moats at public expense, but the people doing things they thought were ordinary. There’s a clear link with what happened over the MPs’ expenses scandal last autumn: good people are dragged down with the bad. It is a nuanced book, which draws attention to that, and a good one for any editor to read.