It seems an age, but is only a few years, since I read or was told - in all honesty I no longer remember which - that it was wrong to suppose the influx of humourless, unnerving characters in key positions at The Daily Telegraph was not truly a conspiracy. For as well as conspiring against and intimidating the staff they had inherited, they were conspiring against one another.
And since I was no longer there, I could not even be sure they were quite as sinister as they were depicted by certain former colleagues.
But let us suppose it was true or close to the truth. And that that Peter Oborne has a point when he complains that the Telegraph has become, in effect, a tawdry shadow of its proud old self on which editorial content is "no longer judged by importance, accuracy or appeal to those who actually bought the paper". He also alleges, even more damagingly, that coverage of the HSBC tax scandal has been deliberately low-key to preserve valuable revenue derived from the bank's advertising.
My first reaction to Oborne's high-profile departure from the paper was to remember that most of what he deplores is probably what you get in any business that is run on the basis of creative fear.
I worked for the Telegraph for 29 years. The paper gave me a great career for which I will always be grateful. I knew I was joining a Conservative newspaper when I made the move from the Press Association in 1977 and its politics are not mine. But that did not seriously matter, because the paper had such a sound reputation for accurate news reporting that even trade unionists and left-wingers in the Labour party, or at least the more reasonable ones, recognised its journalistic integrity.
The agenda was a different matter and, yes, I was asked many times to write stories that might well reflect badly on Labour or the unions. But I was never discouraged from reporting fairly on whatever issues arose.
You researched diligently and wrote it as it was. When the absurd allegation surfaced that a London borough had banned black bin liners, to avoid offending those from ethnic miorities, no one rebuked me for saying the story was simply untrue. When I heard the Labour heavyweight Robin Cook insist, during radio discussion of a contentious issue in a general election campaign, "don't take my word for it, read the Telegraph's story", I instinctively knew I wouldn't be in trouble unless I'd got it hopelessly wrong. Which I hadn't.
In other words, it was possible for a non-Conservative to work as a reporter on the Telegraph without feeling other than pride in his or her work. What happened in leading articles, or in commentary pieces, was of no consequence. That was a different country. In the newsroom, we of the right, left or centre, or disdainful of the lot of them, but we were way above such considerations.
News and comment became a little blurred long before the Barclays bought the paper. But under Max Hastings, Charles Moore and Martin Newland, the feeling persisted that the paper still placed great store on getting its news stories right, whatever view the paper then took.
I had frequent dealings with those editors and with Bill Deedes before them. At the time of my dismissal - it was called redundancy - the acting editor was John Bryant; we had met only once or twice and he did not even bother to phone or send a message when the axe fell. From each of his predecessors, and - in a more curious way - from Bryant's successor, Will Lewis - I received bucketloads of praise (plus, in the case of Hastings, a bollocking or two). No one ever told me to slant a story in a partisan way.
My last working day for the Telegraph was in September 2006. I have not been especially interested in buying it since then. Many, many more people have followed me out of the exit. It has sometimes seemed that proof of excellence or achievement, often reflected in salary levels, is not conducive to employment by the Barclays brothers and their henchmen. The maxim appears to be that if a well-paid journalist can be replaced by someone just starting out, the Telegraph should just go for it and blow the consequences.
This has an impact on style - my online scrutiny of the paper supports Oborne's complaints that management no longer cares too much about such niceties - and, it is argued, on the quality of journalism. The Telegraph remains profitable in troubled times, so this is seen as unimportant.
The policy has undoubtedly done for some seriously good journalists. Why was David Wastell sacked after an even longer period, on The Sunday Telegraph, than I served? To listen to colleagues, his running of the foreign pages was never less than exemplary. But he was pushing 60, earning a good salary and therefore vulnerable. There are so many other examples of terrific people being cynically discarded.
Oborne strikes at two issues, murky collaboration with advertisers and a collapse of editorial standards. The Telegraph denies the first and, by implication, the latter.
In the resulting furore, other ex-Telegraph people are wheeled out to have their say: Joshua Rozenberg, the former legal affairs editor, tells BBC Newsnight newsdesk recruits from the Daily Mail deliberately forced on him an untrue interpretation of an important story, causing him inevitable embarrassment.
Oborne is not the first to lament lapses from style or basic accuracy that would have had previous editors hopping mad. "Solecisms, unthinkable until very recently, are now commonplace," he writes at https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/peter-oborne/why-i-have-resigned-from-telegraph
. "Recently readers were introduced to someone called the Duke of Wessex. Prince Edward is the Earl of Wessex. There was a front page story about deer-hunting. It was actually about deer-stalking, a completely different activity. Obviously the management don’t care about nice distinctions like this. But the readers do, and the Telegraph took great care to get these things right until very recently."
But these lapses have occurred and there is reasonable suspicion that the current band of executives do not greatly care.
It is probably too easy to heap much of the blame, as Oborne does, on Jason Seiken. an American appointed as Head of Content - a ghastly job designation, I know, but one merely reflecting the corporate nonsense of the current publishing age - to replace the editor, Tony Gallagher.
Oborne regarded Gallagher as an "excellent editor, well respected by staff" and it is true that he was credited with running, as deputy editor, the Telegraph's memorable exposure of the abuse of parliamentary expenses.
And it is this harking back to Gallagher as if he truly represented the Telegraph's golden age, before darker forces took over, that puzzles me most in the row over Oborne's well-publicised departure.
On the basis of my online perusal, I tend to agree that the paper retained, perhaps reinforced its news instincts under Gallagher. But he, too, was part of the Barclays revolution of the Telegraph. Some considered him a bully, wholly in keeping with the approach of a new regime out to destroy its supposedly too chummy predecessor. But he got on with his job, did it well and was ultimately cast aside. Not an exceptional career path in recent Telegraph times.
Take a look at my image above. The words may be hard to make out, but someone has scrawled beneath the slogan "The paper you can trust" the following words: "...to let you down".
I expect the mix of achievement and change, cost-cutting and re-invention, hiring (cheaply) and firing (of experience) to continue.
But the Telegraph continues to employ excellent journalists. Their numbers may well shrink, and any replacements may well be kids still wet around the ears with no appreciation of the paper's history or traditions. Yet it will continue, for as long as the world sees a need for newspapers in print form, to do it all at least as well as most of the other lingerers resisting extinction and making similar compromises.
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