I’m delighted to see that David Mitchell, one of the stars of the brilliant Peep Show, has agreed to speak at a public meeting later this month to defend the Observer.
As I first reported here, the paper has been threatened with closure by the Guardian Media Group (GMG) as the company attempts to stem losses that stood at nearly £90m this year.
Other options under consideration by the Scott Trust, which owns GMG, are thought to include turning the Observer into a weekly magazine or publishing a vastly slimmed-down version of the paper. An internal review by the trust sometime this autumn is expected to reach a decision on the title’s future.
The meeting, which has been called by Press Gazette and the National Union of Journalists, will also hear from the former Observer editor Donald Trelford.
Mitchell, who currently writes a weekly column for the paper, may have a more direct interest than most in its survival, but he is right to celebrate the title as “the only proper liberal Sunday paper”.
You may notice that I have managed to get this far without once referring to the Observer as the “world’s oldest Sunday newspaper”. There is little reason beyond mere sentimentality for its age to be relevant to the debate.
I also have some sympathy with those on the left who argue that the paper deserves little support after its disastrous decision to support the Iraq war. But a tendency to subordinate wider considerations to this conflict has been one of the more unattractive traits of the left in recent years and doesn’t deserve to apply in this case.
The Observer was one of the first titles, notably through the columns of Henry Porter, to give considerable space to civil liberties campaigns. It has published some of the finest commentary on the economic crisis by Will Hutton and William Keegan. And it remains one of the few papers to include lengthy analysis of foreign affairs beyond Washington.
I’ll be reporting on the public meeting at the Friends Meeting House in King’s Cross for this blog and I urge you all to attend.
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