A newspaper magnate's commentaries

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 32886, 8 April 1972, Page 10

A newspaper magnate's commentaries

Without Fear or Favour. By Cedi King. Sidgwick and Jackson. 246 pp. Based on the newspaper magnate, Mr Cecil Kings articles, broadcasts, lectures, sermons and speeches, this miscellany of comment offers some stimulating reading. With an impeccable British background, a traditional education, a successful career in the family business of newspaper publishing and an impressive list of public appointments, Cecil King is now over 70 and can look back on a notable career. To many, his name is chiefly linked with the “Daily Mirror”—a publication which he changed from a companion picture paper m 1934 to a popular daily newspaper, now read by half the adult population of Britain. In his book be ranges over many aspects of contemporary living and like the successful mass circulation daily he created, Mr King is always readable, to the point, shrewd and entertaining. The first section, on people, contains some classic cameos: Mr King saw the late President John F. Kennedy as “a man on the verge of greatness;” he comments on Kwame Nkrumah that “political gifts apart he had only the

training and ability of a very ordinary journalist or clerk;’’ he sees King Feisal of Saudi Arabia as “a man of utter integrity” and he comments mat Anthony Eden was “the best International negotiator of his day . . . who can look back on a lifetime of disastrous public service.” A section on places ranges through America, over to Nigeria, around the Arab world and back to Europe and Mr King’s homeland. He considers Britain’s forthcoming entry into the Common Market as the greatest shift in British foreign policy for some centuries and urges that it should be embarked on with enthusiasm and without much regard to the immediate effect on the shopping basket. Looking at various aspects of society gives Mr King the opportunity to reiterate some of his favourite themes—not enough faith in God in the world, a lack of leadership at the top, the inadequacies of modem education and mothers who set their faces against breast feeding and are keen to unload their offspring on to a school while they hold down a job and devote their leisure hours to bingo. Mr King is not surprised that our •

young people feel that they have been bora into a society which is just not good enough. The established ceremonies which give dignity to people at the great moments of their lives—birth, marriage and death —have been downgraded. Sex has been reduced to the level of a scuffle in the bushes; marriage is a rather sordid episode in a registry office or else merely an opportunity for a girl to wear a long’ white dress; the glorious miracle of birth is a hurried period in the labour ward of a hospital; and death now presents little more than a refuse disposal problem. Mr King devotes a section to religion—“if the universe has no Creator nor any destiny, then order will disappear and society will disintegrate”—and one to mass communications—“skill on television, shouid .be universally accepted as an essential qualification for statesmanship.” And finally he deals with his own fascination with phenomena of extrasensory perception. Much of the material has hot been published previously. It is frequently pungent, occasionally caustic, always incisive and rarely dogmatic.