Current affairs

The sensational - if probably predictable story that David Beckham had been playing away with a woman not his wife (allegedly, as the lawyers always insist at this stage) unsurprisingly broke in last Sunday’s News of the World, where such stories tend to break.

On the other hand, the quality press has a responsibility to inform its readers about what is happening in the world, even the trivial, and the sex scandal surrounding Posh and Becks is most certainly the happening of the moment for most Brits.

So a balance has to be struck: such stories need to be covered by the qualities but with decorum and a sense of proportion. Those who believe the broadsheets have been dumbing down in recent years will be surprised to learn that is exactly how the qualities have covered the latest dramatic twist in the Posh and Becks saga.

While the tabloids went to town, the broadsheets and their compact sisters remained restrained. Monday’s Times carried a low-key account of the story on page seven, properly devoting its front page to a scoop about a new survey on teenage promiscuity. The Independent was even more low key, running only a news-in-brief, while the Guardian couldn’t resist a page three picture story.

By yesterday the story had legs, with the emergence of what looked like staged pictures of Posh and Becks frolicking in the snow and copious details of the Spanish temptress. The tabloids lapped it up, but the qualities refused to pay the £20,000-a-pop photographer Jason Fraser was supposedly demanding for his happy family PR pictures.

Tuesday’s Guardian demoted the story to a couple of hundred words at the bottom of page eight, while the Times cleverly involved the annual conference of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (what do you tell the kids about a fallen hero?).

Among the serious newspapers the Daily Telegraph has devoted the most space to the story. On Monday it trailed it on page one and carried it on page three. Yesterday it carried a large P&B puff under its masthead and ran a news story, a feature and an (unfunny) editorial. But the Telegraph has a long tradition of delving into the middle market when required, which explains why it has always been Britain’s biggest-selling broadsheet.

As usual, the Daily Mail showed how the real middle market can have its cake and eat it: it splashed on the story Monday, then moved on yesterday to the rise in NHS bureaucrats - but wrapped P&B words and pictures around it, signposting readers inside to its mega-coverage.

Only the Financial Times has failed, so far, to publish a word about the story - and quite right too (there must be at least one Becks-free reading zone). But, overall, the qualities have confronted their dumbing-down critics with aplomb. They have kept their readers informed of the gossip but with taste and restraint while concentrating on far more important news. Precisely what quality papers in the modern world need to do.

THE Queen is enjoying a far better press in France than the British in general and Tony Blair in particular. True, not many turned out to see her in Paris for her visit to commemorate the centenary of the Entente Cordiale. But they will flock to see her outside the capital: Her Majesty is popular in provincial France.

She is also popular in the public prints, which have commended her for everything from her dress sense (no mean achievement in France) to her unpretentious demeanour to her ability to converse with the natives in their own language.

Some are surprised that republican France takes so well to British royalty. But they do in republican America too. And in France, if you’re used to heads of state as vainglorious as President Chirac (and before him Mitterrand and - above all - De Gaulle), then it’s quite refreshing to come across one who is royal yet so reassuringly ordinary.

SUPPORT for Anglo-American intervention in Iraq is waning fast in the British press as events there deteriorate. Only the Telegraph and the Murdoch press can now be counted on as true believers in the coalition’s mission. The Guardian, Independent and Mirror were against the adventure from the start and their coverage, not surprisingly, has an I-told-you-so tone.

The Financial Times and Daily Mail (unlikely soul mates, to be sure) were pretty sniffy about the Bush-Blair invasion of Iraq from the start but have grown more decidedly hostile.

The Express can still be counted on to give its broad support; but I sense nobody much cares what it thinks these days. Which leaves the Murdoch press, which is a one-party state when it comes to loyal support for a Republican president, and the Telegraph, which is no longer under Conrad Black’s pro-Bush influence but has continued to toe a line of which he would approve.

At least the Telegraph editorials read as if their editor believes in his paper’s policy, unlike the Times, whose milk-and-water support is unlikely to sway anybody. But I doubt if a major plank of British foreign policy or the deployment of British troops in a hostile environment has ever enjoyed such little support in the public prints as the Blair involvement in Iraq (even Suez was supported by most of the press).

The critics are hampered by the lack of alternatives now Britain and America are bogged down in Iraq; even opponents of the war admit we can hardly cut and run. But hawks and doves alike in the media now share a lack of enthusiasm for rebuilding Iraq.

The doves never wanted to do it in the first place; the hawks admit privately that their position has been undermined by the failure to find weapons of mass destruction and the Bush administration’s unforgivable lack of a reconstruction plan for Iraq. So even Blair’s supporters in the British press feel somewhat betrayed by him and his pal in the White House. It leaves the Prime Minister dangerously exposed as he tries to rally public opinion behind his policy.

THE Palace affects to be angry because the Sun had the temerity to take pictures of Prince William on the ski slopes with a young lady generally depicted as his "first serious girlfriend". The Sun’s royal snapper has even been banned from future royal photo-shoots. As Palace penalties go I suspect the Sun can live with that one - and doubt it will last for long anyway.

But what has the Sun done that was reprehensible? As Rector of St Andrews University I was intimately involved in drawing up and getting agreement for the guidelines that would govern the media’s behaviour during Wills’s four years at Scotland’s oldest university. Their main purpose was to protect the prince’s privacy while he was studying in the town so that he could live as normal a student life as is possible for the heir-to-the-throne-but-one.

They have worked better than I had ever hoped; the press has largely stayed away. But I never envisaged they were designed to stop pictures of him being taken if he decided to parade his main squeeze on the slopes of Klosters. He’s almost 22 and there is bound to be public interest in whatever female companion he goes on holiday with. The pictures were taken in a very public place, they did not interfere with his studies and they were hardly intrusive. I’m not sure the Sun did anything wrong.

THIS week’s BBC2 documentary on Conrad Black was pretty devastating for the former newspaper press baron. As well as showing that Black has what Scotland Yard would call previous when it comes to dodgy business practices, it gave a taste of the bitter litigation which could dog him for the rest of his life.

How high would you place him on the scale of corporate misgovernance, the BBC’s formidable business editor, Jeff Randall, asked a lawyer representing the Louisiana teachers pension fund, which owns shares in Black’s Hollinger International and is suing him for securities fraud.

He is off the scale of corporate misgovernance, replied the lawyer. Black is the Mount Rushmore of corporate misgovernance - he treated shareholders like terrorists.

Incidentally, someone needs to have a word with the Telegraph’s TV listings editor. Yesterday its TV page described the programme as a profile of embattled Telegraph proprietor Conrad Black. In fact, Black was not the proprietor in the sense that he owned the papers lock, stock and barrel. They’re owned by Hollinger, a publicly quoted company. And even if he had once been their proprietor, he certainly isn’t now. It was thinking and acting as if he owned the papers outright which got him into trouble in the first place. Time the Telegraph listings got with the story.