Spectator letters: All Things Bright and Beautiful, oligarchs and school fees, and Songs of Praise

Times past

Sir: ‘Imagine,’ says Hugo Rifkind in his excellent piece on the power of Google (29 November), ‘that there was one newspaper that got all the scoops. Literally all of them.’ We don’t have to imagine: such a newspaper existed, a couple of centuries ago, and Hugo works for its descendent.

The Times of the early 19th century had a foreign intelligence service that regularly outperformed Whitehall’s, and a circulation several times that of all its rivals combined. It thundered as confidently on royal scandal as it did on the details of parliamentary reform. Its editor dictated the membership of at least one cabinet.

Regulation just entrenched this state of affairs. Stamp taxes gave the Times cheap distribution in the provinces; and once newspapers were issued with individual stamps, to reveal what the government assumed must be the Times’s fraudulent dominance, they also gave it authoritative figures showing how far ahead it was.