[RUNNING a Fleet Street paper must in some…]

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RUNNING a Fleet Street paper must in some ways be like running one of those fringe religions which sweep across the world from time to time (usually starting from the US).

The main thing is the profit, dependent on how much they can screw out of the faithful. However the ideology comes a close second.

Each religion (or each paper) is in savage competition with its rivals. Yet each has a common interest in fostering a general sense of the almighty.

With religion the almighty is some kind of benevolent genocidal maniac hovering just out of range of the latest space probe.

Shadowy

With the press the almighty is a similar - if more shadowy figure, handing out hard lessons to prove the inevitability of greed and exploitation and the superiority of capitalism in organising these qualities.

Ronald Reagan is rapidly coming to fit both descriptions.

Like any self respecting fundamental revivalist. the press has started to construct élaborate temples in his honour.

If Mrs Thatcher is St. John the Baptist (and Britain presumably is the wilderness she has chosen to wander in)

then Reagan is the one who comes after. whose feet she is not worthy to kiss.

Ether

There are messages in the skies, rumours of famous victories in the wind: good news in the ether. Imperialism is in its heaven and all's well with the world.

Reagan's policy ot nuclear extinction has received fulsome praise.

Lord 'no doubt I shall be accused of being alarmist' George Brown wrote one of his spectacularly arrogant pieces in the Sunday Express sentiments by NATO:

sentence construction by Distillers.

Even the pro-NATO SDP is too soft for the former deputy leader of the Labour Party (Dennis Healey: your destiny calls you). Brown complains that they have backed a pacifist at Croydon.

But it is the air traffic controllers dispute which has really caused the candles to be lit and the human sacrifices to be ordered.

The Daily Telegraph ran an editorial 'Reagan shows the way' which dispensed