Never say 'never again', EVER again . . .

AT LEAST it will never again be THIS bad on the Mirror I thought, on that dismal bloody Sunday in 1992.
It’s either job cuts or the death of Mirror Group, I told myself on Day One of my editorship as I carried out the board’s instruction to immediately end the employment of all casual journalists at the paper.
In the weeks that followed, that once-imperious redtop tabloid’s fight for life was disrupted by almost daily emergency chapel meetings and votes of no confidence in both management and me.
But it has to be this way, I told my senior execs, coaxing from them names of staff who could be ‘let go’. Management was looking for something like a fifty per cent cut in the 400-plus staff; I was fighting to shed ‘only’ a third.
Upstairs, in the ninth-floor stateroom that Robert Maxwell had abandoned before his fatal midnight dip in the Med sat the man who was calling the shots: not David Montgomery, the chief executive who hired me home from Australia that wintry November; and not Charles Wilson, who had picked me up at Heathrow and ushered me triumphantly into the editor’s office at the exact moment Monty was firing my predecessor, the talented but argumentative Richard Stott, over breakfast at Claridge’s.
No. Dwarfed by Maxwell’s enormous desk, sitting in the old cheat’s chair, was a man from the accountancy firm Arthur Andersen, international undertakers to the business world. The Official Receiver was in.
How I survived that winter at war with the men and women I’d worked alongside as a sub in the Seventies I’ll never know: good ol’ Banksy, their laugh-a-minute mate from yesteryear, had come back to his true home at the Mirror. All would end happily ever after.
Only it wouldn’t. It couldn’t. The paper was overstaffed, overpaid, run for six days by casuals while staffers enjoyed long lunches and a four-day week. Driven by Montgomery’s unblinking (but laudable) pledge to replenish the plundered pension fund and return the Group to profit, journalists and management went to war.
Unhappily, I was Field-Marshall Montgomery’s battlefield general in that newspaper’s valley of death. It was a bloody awful job but someone had to do it. And it would be the Mirror’s War to End ALL Wars, wouldn’t it?
Sadly not: eighteen years later we are here again, in exactly the same hole. Only this time it is circulation and advertising revenues that have taken a nosedive, not the proprietor.
Its greatest rival, the Sun, enjoys a 20p price advantage over the 45p Mirror – five pence more even than in my day – and its closest circulation rival, the 20p Daily Star, now breathes down its neck: just 400,00 copies behind the Mirror’s 1.24million, with a threatened price reduction to 10p this month.
The paper’s BAJ chapel is talking strike action: no change there, then. “The company is proposing to rip the heart and soul out of the national titles . . .no alternative but to ballot . . . job will turn into a sweatshop.” Echoes of eighteen years ago.
And the management? Big pay rises for chief executive Sly Bailey and co-directors while Mirror Group continues to make a £60million operating profit. You can see why the boys in the brown stuff get hot under the collar.
What the Mirror DOES have is dedicated, if fearful, employees and in Richard Wallace a talented editor who produces as good a newspaper as is possible with ever-dwindling resources.
Battle lines, however, are firming. Once again a Mirror editor will find himself stranded in No Man’s Land: no friends, no cash, not enough staff and precious little management support.
Editing the Mirror, for the past 35 years, has been a matter of managing its decline; when I first joined the paper in 1973 its best years were long gone and mid-to-late Seventies Fleet Street wiseacres joked that Sun and Mirror were racing in opposite directions to see who could reach three million copies first.
The race is on again. This time it’s the Daily Star coming up on the rails while the Mirror threatens to wobble off the tracks.
And this time the winning post is a leaner-looking ONE million mark.

SHOCKJOCK Nick Ferrari to replace Piers Morgan as the smoothie-chops loose cannon on Britain’s Got Talent?
The rumour doing the rounds in broadcasting circles might just be a wind-up but don’t expect any yeas or nays from the Simon Cowell camp or from network home ITV – they’re just waiting to see if ex-Mirror editor Morgan is wooed the American way by an offer from CNN to replace veteran interviewer Larry King.
If that does happen Morgan’s life will go stateside as he juggles the CNN job with his job as a judge on America’s Got Talent. That will leave an empty space alongside Amanda Holden and Old King Cowell on the BGT team that’s just made for Ferrari, LBC’s growly, jowly Sony Award winner.
Although he laughs off the idea, Ferrari is the perfect replacement: like Piers, an ex-journo who’s in love with talent and telly and, like Piers, a former Sun Bizarre columnist.
If the biggest loudmouth in British broadcasting DOES get the gig, remember where you read it first and stand by for a rebranding: Britain’s Got Tyrant!
First published in Press Gazette, July 2010