When I was fourteen, two life-changing events happened to me: my family took its first ever summer holiday abroad, and I discovered the Daily Telegraph. The two events were linked. Up until that summer, all our free time had been spent in a caravan on the Isle of Arran, in the Clyde Estuary, playing Gin Rummy while the rain battered off the tin walls. We marked the passing hours with family runs to the campsite's Communal Toilet, clinging to one another in a human chain, in order to release the gallons of tea we'd drunk while waiting for the sky to clear. Once a fortnight the sun would poke through the glowering heavens for an hour or two, encouraging a trip to the beach, on which we would gingerly set down our towels just long enough to be stung by the jellyfish which suicidally flung themselves out the sea at anyone foolish enough to lie down next to it. So. A slight contrast with the Thomson's holiday resort in sun-baked Portugal where we found ourselves that summer of 1984.
At first we went slightly insane, not able to get to grips with the idea that the point of such a holiday was to lie in the sun, chat to the other holiday-makers, and to relax. With our own toilet. But mum and dad soon got the hang of it, making friends with everyone, and I was left to jump in and out of the pool, and to begin my first adult relationship: that with the Daily Telegraph. I bought a day-old copy every morning and read it cover to cover, before using the leading article to begin poolside discussions ("Do you think M0 or M1 is a better money-supply target?"). Because my mum and dad are patient and kind, they didn't smack the paper from my hand and tell me to get a life. Rather, we did start to discuss politics. Fascination with political thinking is a golden thread running through our family life; and in me it was kindled by the Daily Telegraph.
Obviously I didn't understand everything that I was reading in 1984, but a few 'norms' begain to make themselves known to me:
- That there was a serious discussion to be had about politics which utterly transcended the merely tribal;
- that it was important to write well in order to advance any political proposition;
- that humour was also available and could manifest itself through parody and wit. (This was the heyday of Peter Simple and the Way of the World. To this day, I cannot see Harriet Harman's mad, staring eyes without hearing the sound of chairs being hastily scraped backwards and shouts of "WE ARE ALL GUILTY" in my head).
These thoughts came back to me when I logged onto the Telegraph website this morning, to read the story about Whitehall's preparations for the next Conservative government. I noticed banners across the top of the page, with links to Telegraph subsections. As well as "News" and "Politics", the reader is also offered "Celebrities", "Weird", and something called "Lifestyle". What would Peter Simple make of that?
I ignored that and went to the story I was after. Here's the third paragraph:
While, such discussions might be expected immediately before an election, the current high level of contact almost two years before Gordon Brown has to call a national poll is highly unusual.
The punctuation is wrong. Does this matter? I'm glad to say that my favourite public intellectual agrees with me that it does. If what was formerly our leading broadsheet newspaper cannot bother to check the punctuation of one of its main news stories, what hope is there for standards anywhere? And doesn't such sloppiness have an impact on the reader? It generates a subliminal response in me: "If you can't be bothered to construct your sentences correctly, I'm not bothered to understand the point you're trying to make".
I haven't kept a record, but I'm pretty sure that the standards of grammar and punctuation across the press are degenerating quite quickly. Has anyone else noticed? I see spelling mistakes on the captions of news bulletins. I hear Today correspondents - employed, surely, for an ability to transmit information - fumbling over their words to a startling degree (and starting every scripted response with "Absolutely!"). And I see many errors in written English in the online newspapers.
I used to think of the Telegraph as the solid oak at the heart of the Tory forest. Nowadays it is concerned with stories about the "Lifestyle" of (hopefully "Weird") "Celebrities". I don't think it would have kept my fourteen-year-old self's attention for five minutes, let alone over a fortnight.
Maybe none of that matters, and I'm simply getting old. I do find myself fingering caravan magazines with a gentle rapture, it's true.
