Review: Supping with The Devils by Hugo Young

Supping with The Devils: Political Journalism from Thatcher to Blair
by Hugo Young
320pp, Atlantic Books, £14.99

Well aware that daily journalism is written for the morning after and no longer, Hugo Young modestly questions whether his writings collected here, mainly from his columns in the Guardian but including profiles and reviews from elsewhere, are worth preserving in book form. He answers, only as "a kind of chronicle or tableau of a period and some of the issues that concerned it". In fact, they are well worth preserving not as "a chronicle", which carries overtones of dullness, but as a series of vivid and revealing "tableaux" that, among other things, remind us how, despite external appearances, most things remain much the same. Throughout the two decades covered by this book - 1986 to 2002 - British governments go on making a mess of things, the world economy continues its downs and ups, the Middle East still festers, and the British press comfortably maintains its position as perhaps the worst in the free world.

Young regards himself not as "a player" but as an alerter and reporter. That was probably true of his relations with Margaret Thatcher. He saw quite a lot of her when she was prime minister, first, he thinks, because she liked an argument and thought he had convictions; and second, he is sure, because she never read a word he wrote. If so, the relationship seems highly creditable to both of them. But elsewhere, as befits Britain's leading political columnist, Young seems to be pretty near the playing field if not quite on it.

Most of Supping With the Devils is devoted to politics and international affairs, but there are also entertaining sections on church and state, the law, and social problems. In all of them Young is nearly always fair. Thus, though "a Roman Catholic born, bred and still roughly believing", who thinks that the frequent journeys of the present Pope have been inspiring and hopes that history's verdict on him will be favourable, Young concedes that John Paul II has been "as far as politics goes, a disaster". "Terrible things," he adds, "have happened to the freedom of Catholic theologians," even as their leader has sent out the most resonant signals in favour of freedom elsewhere. He thinks John Paul II's regime has been far too authoritarian and Rome-centred. Indeed, he deplores the decisions taken by the church during the last century, singling out Rome's "crime against humanity in Africa": its prohibition of the use of contraceptives even when one of the parties has Aids - an exorbitance of purblind dogmatism that even the most fervent Islamic or Judaic fundamentalist might have difficulty in matching.

One important feature of international affairs, not just in appearance but in reality too, has drastically altered: in the United States there has been not merely a change of president but a change of regime. "The Washington that gave birth to the special relationship with the Brits," Young emphasises, has gone, and the American internationalists of the post-war era have been succeeded by "a gang of unilateralists and isolationists", whose objective, of which they make no secret, is to destroy the internationalist consensus. Young penned that as long ago as November 1999. It chimes well with what the distinguished American economist and columnist Paul Krugman wrote about America's home policy the other day: "The people now running America aren't conservatives; they're radicals who want to do away with America's social and economic system."

Young was similarly prescient on Iraq. He was aware last year that the prime minister had promised Bush that Britain would collaborate in an American attack on Iraq. He sees Blair as a moral crusader and a naive intervener. Consequently Blair saw no difficulty in joining a "pre-emptive aggression" against the horrific Saddam Hussein, though now it seems (as many, including Young, thought and said at the time) Iraq had nothing worth pre-empting. Iraq's allegedly dangerous weapons of mass destruction turn out to have been what before the war Michael Moore, the author of Stupid White Men, aptly called "weapons of mass distraction". Even if the United States ultimately manages to produce evidence - genuine or planted - that Iraq possessed some WMD, quite plainly such materials were not an imminent threat to America, Britain or anybody else. So the chief cause of the war was America's desire for war. And, as Young feared, Blair made Britain "the useful idiot for the Pentagon's big project", while at the same time jeopardising our relations with our most important European allies.

Europe, as his magnum opus This Blessed Plot showed, is the issue that above all concerns Young. He has long been appalled by what he calls the "staggering insularity" of the British outlook. Writing just before the Maastricht treaty of 1991, he thought it "crystallised the failure of the British political system". The worst part of that system is of course our press, who, as Young says, "descended to new depths of invention" after Maastricht. And over the recent draft outline of a new European constitution, it has - with all its rubbish about the end of 1,000 years of British history and so on - contrived to descend even further.

In many respects, Young points out, the British care little about nationality. They have been unmoved by large swaths of British industry being bought up by Americans, Germans, French, Dutch and others. They have not even noticed that virtually all the City of London soon sold itself to the highest bidders, who were invariably foreigners. Nor do they even mind a large segment of their newspapers being foreign dominated. So paradoxically, if the British had been more nationalist 30 and 20 years ago, they would not have been subjected to decades of europhobia from the Murdoch and Black papers; and they would be much less insular and nationalist than they are today .

The policy attitudes of the Black and Murdoch press have little to do with British national interests. Rupert Murdoch is an American citizen, and his interests and politics are predominantly American not British, which his papers closely reflect. Conrad Black is different. He is naturalised and lives over here, but most of his interests are North American, and his papers similarly reflect his ultra-far right political views. As for Lord Rothermere, his papers have not sunk as low in as their pro-Mussolini days but, though his Daily Mail was good on the Iraq war, occasionally there seems to be a whiff of what might be called pre-fascism about it.

This deformity of the press suggests an ambiguity in Young's title. It is not just journalists supping with politicians who need a long spoon. Politicians supping with journalists need one too. So it's long spoons all round - except of course for readers who can safely sup with the distinctly non-devilish Young.

· Lord Gilmour is a former editor of the Spectator and Conservative cabinet minister. His book The Making of the Poets: Byron and Shelley in Their Time is published by Pimlico.