Whatever the buzz, the Times is stuck in a groove

My colleague Stuart Reid has been urging me to write about the Times for weeks. ‘There’s a buzz on the streets,’ he says. ‘Oh, yeah?’ ‘Yes, people are saying that the Times is improving under its new editor.’ ‘Really?’ ‘Yes, that is the word. The Times is getting better. Not much, but a little. It’s getting more serious. That is what they say.’

Are they right? Unlike Stuart, I haven’t met many of these people. I haven’t heard the buzz. But it is time we considered the question. For there is no doubt that Robert Thomson, who has been editor of the Times for nearly eight months, wants to take it upmarket. He has even told a couple of friends of mine that Rupert Murdoch, the paper’s proprietor, shares his dream. Perhaps in the twilight of his days Mr Murdoch hopes to be remembered not for all the dumbing down he has achieved, but for a little belated dumbing up. Mr Thomson has been allowed to open a couple of new foreign bureaux.

There are, of course, many upmarket aspects to the Times. There is Simon Jenkins and William Rees-Mogg and Michael Gove and Anatole Kaletsky and Matthew Parris and the rest of the gang. There are the leading articles and the letters. The foreign pages are not bad. The business pages are scarcely downmarket. But all this was the case under the editorship of Peter Stothard, who has now moved on to edit the TLS. (That is another story, which I am following carefully.) My old friend created a hybrid paper which played both sides of the wicket. The old Times readers were supposed to be kept happy by the more elevated features I have mentioned, while the new readers, who flocked to the paper after it slashed its price in 1993, were offered more downmarket fare.