Back to the glory days of Cudlipp

I think Hugh Cudlipp would have approved of last night's award. For those who do not remember black-and-white newspapers, Cudlipp was the man who dominated the style and content of the Daily Mirror from the early Fifties until the mid-Seventies.

He was never the editor, but he set the agenda, hired and fired the senior staff and it was he who applied the carrot or the big stick to the editorial team, depending on the previous day's performance.

His rage could be awesome ("I would like a small box printed on page one tomorrow, saying: 'I had f*** all to do with yesterday's Daily Mirror'"). But when we had done well, champagne, macadamia nuts and Havana cigars would be generously distributed from the trolley produced by Mr Lucas, the office butler.

Cudlipp knew well the history of The Mirror. From its early failure, when Northcliffe launched it as a newspaper for gentlewomen, through its first success as Britain's original picture paper to its almost terminal decline as a genteel Tory tabloid in the Twenties.

Hugh came to the paper in the Thirties, as deputy features editor, when Harry Guy Bartholomew relaunched it as a "Left-wing, noisy, troublemaking rag" in the run-up to the Second World War.

Cudlipp joined in enthusiastically and made a significant contribution, but it wasn't until the Fifties he actually gained absolute control. For the next 15 golden years he could do no wrong. The circulation soared to more than five million. The only tabloid opposition was the Daily Sketch, which could never quite hold the one million mark.

Then he sold the ailing broadsheet The Sun for a song to Rupert Murdoch and nothing was quite the same again. The truth was, the readers of tabloid newspapers had undergone a sea change - and Murdoch knew it. The post-war solidarity the working class had forged with the Labour Party fragmented, television had become an incredibly powerful force, and now a great mass of ordinary people just wanted entertainment from their paper - not a clarion call for social justice.

But in his time, Cudlipp understood the hopes, aspirations and desires of the vast Mirror audience. He was that magical figure that all proprietors yearn to find: The Editor Who Knows What The Readers Want.

Newspapers may achieve many forms of excellence as journalistic products, but there is no substitute for an editor who shares a mystic harmony with his readers.

Arthur Christiansen had it with the Daily Express; David English with the Daily Mail; Harry Evans with The Sunday Times and Larry Lamb and Kelvin MacKenzie with The Sun.

Now, I think Piers Morgan has found it with today's Mirror and I can see why his masters at Trinity have resisted the baying to cast him overboard in the aftermath of his share-tipping scandal.

Morgan seems to have realised that The Mirror has always had a solid base of readers and potential customers who want more than an unremitting diet of pop trivia. Suddenly the red-top values of the Nineties Sun seem tired and stale. For some years there has been a vacancy for a Left-of-centre, young-at-heart, middle-market tabloid in Britain. The Mirror appears to be evolving in that direction. Going upmarket doesn't necessarily mean trading a sense of fun for the gloomy mantle of a pompous preacher. Morgan seems to appreciate that as well. I noticed that in yesterday's Mirror they had, as well as a broad base of news, a review of Marlowe's Faustus, at the Young Vic, a generous sprinkling of showbiz gossip, a powerful vice exposure, several pictures of pretty girls, a trenchant leader questioning Britain's role in Afghanistan and a stylish woman's section. The presentation was assured, the prose sharp and tight, they even had a picture of a dog swimming with dolphins!

I think Cudlipp would have liked it.

Stars of the show