Abstract
Some years ago I made the mistake of telling a woman editor about how I had reassured a cabinet minister when he apologised for eating slowly over lunch. As he had been busy talking, relating the sort of inside information for which lunch is a currency between political journalists and politicians, I didn't mind in the slightest that he had been toying with the coq au vin. But he did blush slightly – he was quite an old school Tory type – when I said: “Oh please don't worry. I read somewhere recently that men who eat slowly make better lovers.”
The editor, whose blushes I will spare, did not realise that, while entirely true, this was a) a joke and b) that this was why I was relating the anecdote. “Julia,” she said, and she was completely serious, “I want you to take every member of the cabinet out to lunch and time how long it takes each of them to eat it.” I gazed at this woman, for whom at the time I was working, in horror as I contemplated the wreck of my career which would surely follow any article that appeared based upon the above premise and in conjunction with my by-line. I think I said something like “Mm-hmh,” a sort of affirmative gosh-yes-I'll-get-on-with-that-then noise, and prayed that the subject was never raised again. I think she did ask me once, but then, happily, more trivial matters intervened to occupy her.
This is what Suzanne Franks means, I think, when she describes what she calls “a feminised news agenda”: it is the agenda of those women who have become national newspaper editors, who are journalists who have arrived at their desks from what we call the lifestyle and magazine school of journalism and whose interests (in pursuit, of course, of those of their proprietors) are primarily to maximise their readership by reducing even the most impenetrable subject, like, say, politics, to the lowest common denominator. And we all know who they think that is, do we not? Women.
There are a huge number of issues here, all of them raised by Franks in this excellent, informative and thought-provoking study. First, a word of warning: this is an academic exercise, not a work of literature, but happily it still manages to be clear, concise and coherent. It is packed with useful information about the state of the game for women journalists and will be very valuable material for people who study things like why women are more successful as newspaper editors on provincial newspapers, why only one woman in modern times has edited a broadsheet newspaper (Rosie Boycott, Independent, January – April 1998, a whole three months!), why more women than men are trained as journalists but then disappear from the workface, and how so many people find themselves confined to the pink ghettoes of soft stuff.
She does not, however, arrive at a correct assessment of women in political journalism. I have worked at Westminster since 1971 and do not recognise much of what she writes about the subject. You whinge or you make it work for you, but she has handed it over to those who complain about the men's club. My proudest moment of journalistic recognition was when the late, great Alan Watkins greeted me in a subterranean corridor of the House of Commons with the unforgettable words: “Julia, dear boy, how are you?” Did I feel patronised or insulted? Of course not. He didn't mean it like that. But I did realise that even though I wasn't a chap I'd been accepted as a member of the journalists' club in the lobby. That mattered.
And there is a great deal of positive, forward-looking material: the successful women in financial journalism, the fight back on behalf of older women on the telly (I loved the title of one American anchor's memoir, “Too Old, Too Ugly and Not Deferential to Men”) or the fearless women in foreign reporting whose names resonate with courage and achievement. As it happened I shared a computer nerd with Marie Colvin, who I didn't know personally, but I blanch in awe at the differences between my life knocking around the lobbies and her finding a way under the wire into Syria and paying with her life, while lovely Greg sorts/sorted out our comms.
There is some important material here about the way ahead, about how women have used new media to bridge the gap that occurs for so many who want to go on working while not missing their children's childhoods. That is something that resonates with me. I missed my first child's first birthday (Moscow: Gorbachev/Reagan summit); first word (Poland: Margaret Thatcher visits Gdansk); first step: (Africa somewhere) but caught up with the second. He was three months old and I had just returned to work when I was fired as political editor of the Sunday Telegraph for taking a Saturday off to spend New Year in Venice.
What the editor didn't know was that I had gone to stay with the Conservative Party treasurer who had just hosted the Thatchers over Christmas. I was fired for “not being serious about my job”. That editor didn't have much judgment either, but at least he had the excuse that he was a man. And being a freelance meant I could be a proper mother, too.