Government by columnist: Geoffrey Wheatcroft on how an unelected press got to call the political shots

A LARGE part of the Tory press turns on a Tory government with unprecedented savagery. In the United States, a presidential nominee for defence secretary withdraws after a newspaper columnist criticises him. In Italy, a press magnate enters the political arena.

Are newspapers undermining the political process? There is nothing new in politicians' complaints about the 'power without responsibility' of the press, and no one seriously believes that the Tory-minded tabloids will support Labour at the next election.

But in the background is a development of greater historical significance. In most Western countries there has been a shift in what might be called the 'terms of trade' between politics and journalism. Quite simply, politics has become less important and glamorous relative to journalism. Or, the other way round, journalists have become more influential relative to politicians. This is a profound change in our social, economic and intellectual outlook.

It is a seesaw: as one group has gone up, the other has gone down. Politics used to be lucrative, especially at ministerial level. Before the war, a cabinet minister's salary was pounds 5,000, which is worth about pounds 200,000 in today's money. By contrast, journalism was an ill-paid trade. There were exceptions, of course, and some star writers were rich men. But when Winston Churchill was paid pounds 7,800 a year (about pounds 320,000 now) by the Daily Mail for a weekly article in the 1930s, that was positively aberrant.

As recently as 1974, when W F Deedes - a former cabinet minister - became editor of the Daily Telegraph, his salary was pounds 11,000, substantially less than the prime minister's at the time. Twenty years on, it is a safe bet that no national newspaper editor is paid less than the prime minister's pounds 76,000. Ministers' incomes have declined sharply in real terms, while those of political commentators have risen.

This shift cannot be measured in economic terms only, however. Look back to the political scene in the 1950s. It is a myth that the Tories were then (or at any time this century) an 'aristocratic' party. But they were dominated at the top by a hard core from two or three public schools. For 25 years, from 1940 to 1965, the Tories were led by a Harrovian and then three Etonians.

At the time of Harold Macmillan's resignation in 1963, the party was still controlled (as events showed) by the Etonian 'magic circle'. That has changed completely, for better or worse - and it is hard to imagine anyone who thinks, or at least says, it has been for the worse.

Although their public school upbringing did not endow those Tories with superior abilities, it did give them the notorious self-confidence - or arrogance - of the upper class. And that affected their dealings with the press. It must be hard for younger journalists, or politicians, to imagine the days when Tory politicians made no pretence of regarding journalists as their social equals.

Not that journalists disagreed. Even older journalists may find it hard to recall the deference of those days, when political reporters referred respectfully to ministers in public, and habitually called them 'Sir' in private. We knew our place.

At the same time, Labour wasn't an Etonian party - but it was an Oxonian one. After 1950, the Parliamentary Labour Party had come to be dominated by a group of men and women from Oxford: Hugh Gaitskell, Richard Crossman, Douglas Jay, Barbara Castle, John Strachey, Anthony Crosland, Harold Wilson.

And they were a formidable bunch: you needed to sharpen your wits before taking on Crosland or Crossman in argument. In mental weight, the present-day opposition front bench does not compare.

Thus, a generation ago, just as few journalists were in a position to patronise Tory politicians socially, few were in a position to patronise Labour politicians intellectually. Now journalists can, and do, patronise both. Once the MP crowed and the correspondent cringed; now it is the other way round.

Journalism has acquired a cachet and distinction it did not once have. The change can almost be dated, to a time and place: Cambridge in the decade after the war, which produced a remarkable crop of journalists.

Apart from Neal Ascherson and Alan Watkins, there were Samuel Brittan, Peregrine Worsthorne, Michael Frayn, Colin Welch, Richard West, Clare Tomalin and Karl Miller, and, among those no longer with us, Peter Jenkins, George Gale, Brian Redhead and Nicholas Tomalin.

This is a very impressive list by any standards - and it is more impressive than the corresponding list of their contemporaries who became politicians. For the first time in English history, gifted people were more likely to go into journalism than into politics.

A generation on, this has worked its way through and is reflected in the new confidence of journalism, and a complete lack of deference towards politics and politicians. You see this not only in the leaders and columns but in the news pages. MPs have been complaining about the decline of parliamentary coverage in the newspapers. The decline is drastic, and not just in terms of column inches. When parliamentary speeches were reported in detail, MPs were, in effect, treated on their own terms. Now those long columns of verbatim speeches have been replaced by 'sketches' in which clever journalists send up politicians.

If politicians as a class have been taken down a peg it should gladden many hearts, not only journalists'. But it is hard to welcome a change that has clearly weakened elective, constitutional government. Maybe it's time for the seesaw to swing back a little.