Abstract
Hard to think of anyone else who has fallen under the spell of both Rupert Murdoch and Leon Trotsky. Not to mention that of Colonel Gaddafi and Gerry Healy, the malign genius of the Socialist Labour League and the master Marxist of Britain in the turbulent 1970s. These conflicting emotional involvements occurred at different times in Alex Mitchell's life, but they are deftly linked in this exuberant memoir.
Mitchell was one of the adventurous Australian journalists who infiltrated Fleet Street in the expansive mid-century years, the largest concentration of them at Harry Evans's Sunday Times. He was groomed by the ineffable Murray Sayle (from whom Nicholas Tomalin blandly pinched that job specification of ‘ratlike cunning’).
Like most of his compatriots he had begun a traditional ‘cadetship’ on his hometown paper — in his case the Townsville Daily Bulletin in Queensland. In those days, Australia's Deep North was a jungle of dirty politics, corrupt policing and bellicose unions. Visits to the Seamen's Union while covering the waterfront introduced him to revolutionary doctrine. He also developed a weakness for hero-worship, idolising Frederick Engels and Karl Marx.
Another subversive, Rupert Murdoch, aged 30, bought the tabloid Sydney Daily Mirror, effectively a declaration of war on complacent rival proprietors. An associated title, the Mount Isa Mail, lay a mere 900 miles inland from Townsville. A job there would be a toehold in the growing empire. Whatever happened, Mitchell assured himself in going for it, that he “would be working for Rupert. And he knows what hard-edged journalism is all about.”
‘The Isa’ was a company town on the edge of civilisation, forty nationalities among its 17,000 population. The only industry, hugely profitable, was mining copper and associated mineral treasures. Young Alex recognised the permanent confrontation between mineowners and miners' union as dialectical materialism in action but the journalism of participation for which he had begun to yearn still lay ahead. For the moment, the dominant ideology was getting the story and telling it straight. When a union committee refused to allow meetings to be reported, he hid in the ceiling space of their room and eavesdropped.
Murdoch came to town “tremendously impressive, charming, enthusiastic, full of ideas and down to earth…rolled up his sleeves and went to the pub for a beer with a bar full of dirt-stained miners”. It was Alex's chance to bid for a job in Sydney. The Mirror was locked in a circulation battle with The Sun, bare-knuckled tactics reminiscent of Ben Hecht's Chicago. Each paper produced four main editions and endless replates in between to get new headlines on the street. Murdoch's staff was “the toughest, meanest and most experienced … of the city's rambunctious press corps”. Some sneered at ‘the boy publisher’ but Mitchell was inspired by a proprietor who was also “a technically adept subeditor who could cut and rewrite a story with élan”.
Once in London, at the ST, Mitchell got a share of all the big stories — Burgess-Philby-McLean, Biafra, Scientology — before deciding to move to Granada's World in Action. Margaret Thatcher sneered that the programme's producers were “a lot of Trotskyites”, which was certainly true in his case. Together with a lot of other media folk—not all of whom may be pleased to find themselves mentioned—he found a new hero, an “unprepossessing figure with a round, almost hairless head, no neck and tiny legs barely reaching the carpet…”. His odd looks and manner notwithstanding, many thoughtful people found Gerry Healy a stimulating guide in the turbulent times of Vietnam, 1968 Paris, the Northern Ireland insurgency and the meltdown of Stalinism. To Mitchell, he personified the ‘pure’ internationalist Marxist doctrine that Trotsky tried to protect from Leninist distortion.
Soon Granada, too, was in the past. As with the ST, Mitchell's departure may have come as a relief to colleagues who, no matter how much they liked him personally, found it trying to find every story subjected to doctrinaire analysis. A partly successful effort to turn the Socialist Labour League's Workers Press into a professional newspaper was followed by several years of roaming the world, spreading the word and begging for money — hence inspirational encounters with such revolutionary figures as Gaddafi and Yasser Arafat, often in the company of Vanessa Redgrave, the glamorous—and generous—party figurehead.
The SLL (renamed the Workers Revoloutionary Pary in 1973) fell apart in 1985, wrecked by a combination of financial misdealing and some senile sexual mischief by Healy.
Disillusioned, denounced by Healy with characteristic paranoia as an MI5 mole, Mitchell returned to Australia and moved seamlessly back into mainstream newspapering. With him went Judith White, the most enduring of his fellow travellers, who deserves high praise for digging out the pictures and clippings that supplement Mitchell's remarkable recall. Full marks also to the University of New South Wales Press for recognising this as the chronicle of a singular career, well worth a place in the annals.