They could as well have felled Big Ben, drained the Serpentine or butchered the ravens in the Tower. No more daily print edition of the Evening Standard. No headlines to greet us at every tube station. No cockney cries of: “Read all abaht it!” No news of what celebrity was where last night and with whom.
The Evening Standard, which has announced plans to shutter its daily newspaper in favour of a digital service and weekly magazine, was truly a London institution. Its tabloid rivals, the Star and Evening News, merged in 1960 and closed in 1980, but there was always a touch of class to the Standard. For journalists told to start their careers “working local”, it was a golden step to a proper Fleet Street job. Londoners needed to read the Standard.
With its early edition appearing at lunchtime, the Standard held pride of place in the daily news round. Its political editor in the 1960s, Robert Carvel, was granted a morning briefing by the prime minister, Harold Wilson. Its theatre critic, Milton Shulman, could make or (very rarely) break a show. It had its own correspondents in Paris and Washington.
When I first joined the paper (I served as editor from 1977 to 1979), it was edited, printed and dispatched where it had been since its foundation in 1827, in Shoe Lane, just off Fleet Street. We would feel the thrill of the building shake as each new edition thundered into life from the presses beneath our feet. In the attic survived the pigeon lofts once used to collect football results before there were phones.
The Standard was an active participant in London’s public life. It deserved credit for championing the art centre that was added – against the City’s wishes – to the new Barbican. It campaigned for clearing Somerset House of civil servants and opening it to the public. It spearheaded the campaign to save Covent Garden from becoming a second Barbican. It staged such events as finding the fastest way of getting to work across town – the answer being a motorised scooter. Above all, its eight-strong Londoners’ Diary team painted the daily news with colour and a sense of being present at whatever was alive in the capital. Gossip was strictly upmarket. Its cartoonist, Jak, was the best in Fleet Street.
When the Standard came close to closing in 1977, it was sold to a building contractor, Victor Matthews, winning for him what he was really after – a peerage. The closure of Harmsworth’s Evening News three years later ensured the paper a monopoly on London’s streets for three decades. But, by 2009, losses were mounting and the paper became a freesheet, with the publisher being eventually sold for £1 to Russian oligarch Alexander Lebedev and his son Evgeny. The latter’s chief concern was personal publicity, culminating in a close relationship with the then mayor of London, Boris Johnson. In 2020, this enabled him to follow in Matthews’ footsteps and also win a peerage. Membership of parliament has long been a perk of newspaper ownership.
Since then, the Standard has passed through a succession of editors, including the former chancellor, George Osborne. Constant cuts led to a steady decline in quality, until the paper came to seem like little more than an afternoon version of the now ubiquitous tabloid, Metro. Its metropolitan coverage has been overtaken by the lively freesheet, City AM, now with a circulation of 67,000. Nothing better illustrates the fate of London’s press than the sight of a tube carriage crammed with mobile phones, and hardly a Standard in sight.
Since 2009, some 300 local newspapers have closed in Britain. Those that survive are pale shadows of the muscular local institutions of the pre-social media age. The press, like government, has remorselessly centralised. In a report last year from the Commons’ culture, media and sport committee, its then chair, Damian Green, bewailed the collapse in local news outlets. They had always “acted as the eyes and ears of their readers”, and their loss “has ripped a hole in the heart of many communities”. While local radio and an anarchic social media has to an extent filled this hole, the print press was an intimate intermediary between local citizens and their government, a permanent watchdog.
For all this nostalgia, London will survive the loss of the Standard. Some of the activity of the press has shifted to a world of blogs, small, online-only local outlets, podcasts and weekly magazines. This last is supposed to be the format maintained by the Standard’s team, along with the website. But as London’s antiseptic mayoral elections recently showed, there is no substitute for a stable institutional critique of local democracy. The state of London’s streets, its traffic, its housing, its arts and culture are at the mercy of the internet’s cries of pain. They need civic journalism – and they have lost it.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
