Britain shows talent for literary feuding

BRITAIN in a slump can still export literary feuds, as a cast including John le Carre, Harold Evans, Tina Brown and Rupert Murdoch was demonstrating to baffled Americans yesterday.

Mr le Carre accused Ms Brown, the new British editor of the New Yorker, of using the pages of her magazine to fight the battles of her husband - Harold Evans, the former editor of the British Sunday Times.

She had, he said, produced 'one of the ugliest pieces of partisan journalism that I have ever witnessed in a long life of writing' by printing a 'shameful' attack on an allegedly favourable biography of Mr Murdoch, without mentioning that the media tycoon had sacked her husband - Mr Evans.

Ms Brown replied that Mr le Carre was being 'extraordinarily sexist' in assuming that she either needed or wanted to use her magazine to defend her family. She asked him, as she asks all correspondents, to cut his letter to one paragraph.

Mr le Carre refused and details of the dispute were passed to the Boston Globe and New York Times, which ran the story yesterday morning as a red-blooded alternative to the anaemic presidential debates.

Last night the row showed no sign of fizzling out. Mr le Carre returned to the fray, saying it was 'very depressing' that New York publishing was having its high standards of accuracy debased by 'slightly passe English journalists with arts degrees'.

As in all good literary spats everyone involved knew everyone else and addressed each other by his or her first name as they stuck the boot in.

Earlier this year, William Shawcross, the British journalist and author, published a biography of Mr Murdoch. To some it was an admirable attempt to present an objective account of the career of a press baron whom few authors have been able to view dispassionately. To Francis Wheen, the Private Eye journalist, it was a craven piece of sycophancy from a hard-nosed reporter who had gone soft.

Mr Wheen said so in a short, gossipy article in the New Yorker of 12 October. How, he asked, could 'Willie' Shawcross, who made his name by showing how Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon had bombed Cambodia into the Stone Age, write such a sympathetic study?

The answer appeared to be that, like his father, Sir Hartley Shawcross in the 1950s, William was veering to the right in his middle age.

But Mr le Carre, who declared he had been a friend of Mr Shawcross for years, said the merits of the biography were beside the point. 'American standards of accuracy are so much higher than in the British press,' he said. 'Magazines like the New Yorker do not need to import the sloppiness and vindictiveness of English journalism.'

Ms Brown said that it would always be a pleasure to publish Mr le Carre but that the idea that she wanted to denigrate Mr Murdoch because of what happened to Mr Evans years ago was ludicrous. 'Rupert and I are on very good terms,' she said.

Mr Wheen said that he had written worse things about Mr Murdoch for editors like Auberon Waugh, who had never set up home with Mr Evans. 'I do wonder why Willie has to get his famous friends to fight his battles. But in truth this whole business seems to be a fuss about nothing,' he said.

Mr Shawcross was not available for comment.

(Photograph omitted)