diaries


uninvited, often not knowing anyone there, and mingle without seeming out of place, then trying to make important people stop talking to their friends and talk to you, a journalist, instead.” But it’s not all trivia. Diaries can shine a light on political intrigue that public interest demands should be in the spotlight. That might be a politician’s family connections to big business, or an off-colour remark by an actor not sufficient for its own news story, but which people should know about – if only to make up their own minds. In the decade he spent at the City diary,


Waller had a more specific focus in the world of business. “You’re writing about people who are extremely


powerful, whether they’re in the City or chief executives or whatever, surrounded by yes men, and the temptation is to take them down a peg or two. That was the joy of it, to point the finger at someone and say: ‘You’re not that clever, are you? Ha ha!’ ” he recalls. He also found serious stories – and could get


away with writing about them in ways his news reporter colleagues could not. In one instance, he was told a “straightforward lie” by a prominent investment banker pooh-poohing a story he had been briefed by a reliable source. “Now, you couldn’t write that as a news


story. But I wrote a diary story saying: ‘I don’t think they’re telling the truth.’ And you can get away with that. And it turned out, they weren’t telling the truth. The story was correct – they just lied about it to me.” Working on a diary can mean late nights – and, in the case of the Evening Standard, early mornings too. Lo Dico misses the “scene of the parties in London, all the social connections and the sense there was a rolling energy through town, and that I [with] the Londoner’s Diary was one of the scribes and chroniclers of it”. But she adds: “I have a sense that some of that energy has gone from London anyway, due to Covid.” What is certain, however, is that no one is covering the scene in quite the same way.


“It goes with the general economics of newspapers – comment is cheaper than news, paying for a whole bundle of diary stories to fill up a page didn’t look so good as other accounts where you’ve got two news journalists filling up a page with press releases and a couple of phone calls,” Lo Dico says. “The desk editors aren’t getting out of the office, and the winnings from a diary story are so low that freelancers aren’t necessarily going to be running round town for forty quid.” Many newspapers have struggled to make their diary


columns work online where they no longer had a niche among a community of stories, providing much-needed relief after pages of hard news. Lo Dico believes the modern-day equivalent is the


newsletter. “The thing about the newsletter is that you promise an individual relationship between the writer of the column – or the organisation that’s putting it out – and the reader. And that’s where the diary worked – it was giving


“


On a diary, he could get away with writing about serious stories in ways news reporters could not


insider information to a select group of people who had subscribed to the newsletter or read that page in the paper – whereas blaring it on Twitter doesn’t have the same kind of effect.” It’s undoubtedly true that the newsletter writer uses many of the diarist’s skills, not least frequenting boozy receptions and finding humour in serious settings. But is there a danger of being too familiar? Several email newsletters covering SW1, for instance, are written in a tone that suggests those outside the bubble need not subscribe, in contrast to the diary tradition of bridging the gap between reader and insider. Meanwhile, much of political news reporting has begun to resemble a diary – albeit a dry, po-faced one. The ‘train-gate’ story about former Labour leader Jeremy


Corbyn sitting on a carriage floor while seats were allegedly available would once have been automatically consigned to the diary – rather than blowing up into a news saga for days on end. Kemi Badenoch’s statement that “lunch is for wimps”, meanwhile, would likewise have been received in jest – and denied the potency it got from being reported straight. Perhaps the diary is ultimately a victim not only of print media’s decline but of its own success too.


theJournalist | 19


GARY NEILL


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