Editor by Max Hastings

The official history of the battles of Hastings

(Macmillan, £20)

Like a good journalist, Max Hastings puts it all into his title. Not "The Editor", nor "An Editor", or even "Memoirs of an Editor." Just the single word: a vast and magnificent abstract rising to the sky, and trailing behind is the subtitle "an inside story of newspapers".

An inside story it is, although of one newspaper, The Daily Telegraph, not the trade in general. Given that paper, you can forgive Hastings for feeling that when he (an unlikely candidate) was singled out by Andrew Knight to be Conrad Black's first editor on buying the title from an unwilling Lord Hartwell in 1986, he was somehow being anointed.

The editorship is the prize that any ambitious journalist would give his eye-teeth for; or, rather, the eyes and teeth of his colleagues. Inside the office he or she (mostly, still he) has almost unlimited power to hire and fire and, more important, to drop or promote your copy. Outside, the figure, however young and ill-equipped, commands the invitations of queens, prime ministers and visiting presidents.

The trouble is that the actual craft of editing – the building of a team of creative journalists out of a mass of egos and neuroses, the endless concentration on headline and presentation – isn't nearly as exciting to the general public as it might seem inside. Much of the job today is inevitably more concerned with budgets, marketing and keeping the proprietor happy than with journalism as such.

As for meeting public figures, that is easily misunderstood. You are invited for your position and because politicians and businessmen think they can earn your paper's favour by flattery, not because you hold any attraction in yourself. And they are usually right. Journalists are easily deceived into self-regard.

All this Max Hastings recounts at great length with studied fairness and patrician judgement. He picks his team, reproduces his memos, recalls with strained patience the pressure from the proprietor (who once savaged him for a fashion page that declared the end of the miniskirt) and describes the times when Princess Di, Prince Charles and John Major – to name but a few – sought his advice. He gave it freely, resisting the flattery.

That may be because his self-opinion made him immune to flattery. "Max," recalls a former colleague, "always seemed to think that any form of self-doubt smelled faintly of homosexuality." It tells in the writing.

His decade of editing the Tory house journal was interesting enough. At a paper in need of new blood and modern presentation, he supplied both well enough. But he was never an innovator or a campaigner. He improved the paper but never really altered it. Nor, though his years saw the fall of Thatcher, the rise of Major and his failure, did Hastings influence events outside.

Pomposity, even a certain priggishness, are not bars to being a good reporter (one can think of several, starting in the BBC). It's not even a block to writing good books, especially on military history (Hastings' forte). But self-satisfaction is a distinct drawback to the memoirist of so richly neurotic a trade as journalism and – capital crime – soon becomes tedious to the general reader.