A story in the Torygraph yesterday reports that senior figures at the Guardian "are seriously discussing a move to an entirely online operation". It's well known that the Graun has been losing money hand over fist for years, and that the paper is only propped up by revenue from Auto Trader, but it was news to me that a situation which clearly couldn't go on indefinitely might be coming to an end sometime soon.
I am of course too grown up to believe everything I read in the Torygraph, and their story, which seems to have originated in a blog called More About Advertising, was swiftly rubbished by Graun media writer / stooge Roy Greenslade on the paper's website. "The truth is", he wrote, " that the Guardian isn't about to do any such thing".
When you pick at this a little, it starts to come apart. The Torygraph story said senior figures were "seriously discussing" closing the print edition, whereas Greenslade denied something rather different - he denied that the print edition was going to be closed. He didn't deny they were discussing closing it.
A lawyer's point, you may say; but one of the things a law degree taught me is to read carefully what people write. Moreover, as someone on the website commented, "the steps are like this: it is impossible for us to do this; it is possible, but we are not going to consider doing it; we have considered doing it, but that doesn't mean we will do it; we always said we were going to do this". It seems to me that at the moment the Graun is probably at the third stage.
I have been reading the Guardian for about thirty years. The era during which I saw myself as a Guardian-reader in the technical sense probably began to fade at about the time of the invasion of Iraq in 2003. It seemed obvious to me that the choice facing the Blair government then was not between one thing which was self-evidently bad (war) and another self-evidently good (no war), but between two things self-evidently bad - war on the one hand, and more Saddam Hussein on the other. Not only was the real nature of this dilemma not reflected in the paper's comment (which was virulently against the invasion), but the self-righteous and self-congratulatory tone of its staff and readership as reflected in the paper seemed to me to show a total lack of awareness of its agonising nature. That George W Bush was the architect of the scheme seemed to them enough, whereas to me this was an object lesson in the principle that just because you don't like the person making an argument that doesn't mean they are necessarily wrong.
This opened up a chink between the Graun and me which widened over the rest of the decade as it began to occur, about 2004-5, that Gordon Brown's economic miracle was a chimera. Our prosperity was based on unsustainable debt, I thought, Brown's public spending was unaffordable, and when the era of easy credit was over, we would have to start paying it back. Blind to the mortal blow this struck at the heart of Social Democracy, the Graun was hailing Brown's skill and arguing that public spending should be higher still.
It didn't help that at this time the only columnists for whom reality seemed to have dawned were the great Frank Field and the paper's economics correspondent, Larry Elliott. However the paper kept Elliott well away from the leader page, where economic matters were dealt with by Martin Kettle and Adity Chakrabortty, the latter a thorough clown whom I have spent some time rubbishing on this blog. Elsewhere Polly Toynbee railed against privilege, despite being levered into Oxbridge with one A Level by virtue of her father's contacts, and despite being very nicely off with a holiday home in Tuscany.
The paper endorsed the Lib Dems at the last election, outraging much of its readership and staff, and then threw its hands up in horror when the party, which any fool knows has quite a significant right-of-centre element, promptly joined forces with the Tories.
The Guardian shows very few signs of joining the real world five years on from the Credit Crunch. Despite the economic virus sweeping through Europe in the form of the single currency, the double dip recession is all George Osborne's fault; whereas just a little more stimulus, borrowed from the evil money markets or taxed from the greedy fat cats, would set us back on the road to prosperity again. Tax avoiders are wicked, except when it is Guardian Media Group itself which wants to use Channel Island tax provisions to acquire Emap. Freedom of speech is an unalloyed good, just as long as you don't say anything the moderators on the paper's website don't like.
Nowhere in the Guardian's Weltanschauung is there the slightest flicker of acknowledgement that the spending supporting British living standards has to be earned, and if that spending is to continue, we have to compete on world markets. That this notion carries overtones of a grocer's daughter from Grantham causes me as much distress as it does anyone else, but once again the fact that I didn't like Maggie Thatcher (and I didn't) does not (pace George W Bush) mean that she was wrong.
Funnily enough, we still get the Guardian delivered, and still read it at a mind-crushingly early hour of the morning with a cup of tea. I could get another newspaper instead, but the Times is desperately boring, and if I suggested the Torygraph my wife would crush me like an insect. So in the broader sense I am still a Guardian reader after all. And while I can't suppress a touch of schadenfreude at the prospect of the loss of the liberal left's house magazine, part of me would die with it. And the bell would not just be tolling for the Graun, but for the print media generally. Anyone who loves newspapers, as I do, should be very wary of premature celebration.
