brexit


What did Brexit ever do for us?


The vote to leave the EU led to the first new national news title for decades, says Denis MacShane


T


here are few good things to emerge from the vote on Brexit two years ago but one was the arrival of a new


national print newspaper on 4 July 2016. The New European was the first new


print newspaper to hit the newsstands in decades. Its driving force is Matt Kelly, who worked for 18 years on the Daily Mirror before becoming editorial director of Archant Press. Kelly is a journalist’s journalist. His


father Vin was a legendary Liverpool Post and Echo journalist who trained future national editors such as Peter Preston of the Guardian and Roger Alton, who edited the Observer and Independent. “I woke up on 24 June 2016 depressed


at the Brexit result and then I realised there was a huge market opportunity with 48 per cent of the population voting against Brexit and they don’t have a paper that speaks for them,” he tells me.


The press has been overwhelmingly


anti EU this century. Even liberal left papers such as the Guardian and New Statesman found plenty of space for diatribes against Europe. Journalist Owen Jones gave his concept of ‘lexit’ or left-wing exit a platform in the Guardian and, even if he later changed his mind, there is a long tradition of anti Europeanism on the left going back to Clement Attlee, Hugh Gaitskell and Tony Benn. Kelly says: “I loved the old Daily Mirror style of shock covers and I am a big fan of Charlie Hebdo covers which are rude, crude and in your face.” His pitch to the Archant board was


that The New European would be an example of pop-up publishing and at


8 | theJournalist


the beginning he expected a shelf life of just four issues. Two years later and the weekly newspaper is selling about 20,000 copies. “We got the first paper out in just nine days. The curious thing is that, although I was a digital editor for the Daily Mirror and I also did two years in Argentina creating a digital version of Clarin [the Buenos Aires daily], it actually takes much longer to create a good online web version of a paper than the traditional print version,” says Kelly. Kelly found a designer and called on former Daily Mirror journalists who had worked under him, including Jonathan Freedland and Alastair Campbell. After the first paper, he was able to call on a network of freelance contributors, often recently retired journalists such as the Guardian’s Michael White or the Mirror’s Paul Connew. Intellectuals such as


“ ”


There was a huge opportunity with 48 per cent of the population not having a paper that speaks for them


AC Grayling, Bonnie Greer and Yasmin Alibhai-Brown came in with major comment and analysis pieces – some even allowed to run at London Review of Books length.


It is not all Brexit. The back half of the paper is devoted to the highways and byways of European culture and history where writers and historians who care about central European soccer in the 1930s or the early history of Hungarian film can get published. There are serious journalist accounts of what is happening in Bosnia or Turkey. “We have not spent a penny on


advertising and we are banned by Asda and Morrisons who say we are too political and don’t want us side by side with the Daily Mail,” says Kelly. The New European’s revenue comes from its cover price – surely a first in modern newspaper history. To be sure, a circulation of The New European’s size is not going to change the direction of Brexit, especially with papers such as the Daily Telegraph and Sun fighting their Brexit war as if they hadn’t won two years ago. But, for those for whom every new


newspaper that goes on sale is a win for journalism and for journalists, maybe even devout pro-Brexit NUJ members can raise a small cheer for Matt Kelly and The New European and wish it well as the Brexit saga looks set to roll on for years.


Denis MacShane is a former Europe minister and author of Brexit, No Exit. Why (in the End) Britain Won’t Leave Europe. He was NUJ president in 1978-79


SHAKEYJON / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO


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