Rod Liddle’s candidacy to edit The Independent ought to be over. The extraordinary row about his inflammatory postings on the Millwall website should be enough to make Alexander Lebedev, the Indy’s wannabe new owner think. For those who missed it, he wrote, as reported in the Mail on Sunday: “Why do blacks need a forum of their own? As a power base and cash cow for ****s and in order to perpetuate the myth of widespread discrimination.”
And although Liddle denies making some other controversial postings under the monkeymfc tag — saying his password was hacked into — this claim is challenged. This morning the Liberal Conspiracy website has contacted the Millwall site’s sysadmin to say they have had no evidence of hacking, or complaints about hacking. We’ll see what Liddle has to say about this in due course.
The decision to approach Liddle — generally thought to have been at the behest of Simon Kelner, the managing director of the title — shows how desparate the small-selling Indy has become. This row could not have been predicted, but Liddle is a professional controversialist (who can turn on a suitably scatological turn of phrase when he wants to make a point). He is certainly well to the right of the Indy’s internationalist-environmentalist niche — which has troubled so many writers at the title, including, colleagues say, popular columnist Johann Hari. But his appointment would allow the Indy to chase Tory-supporting readers (surely a growth area now) all be it in competition with the better resourced Times, Telegraph and Mail.
Fighting those three newspapers seems insane though, but what is not appreciated is how desperate (sadly) the plight of The Indy and its Sunday sister title has become. Full rate paid for UK sales were 95,833 in December, down a frightening 23 per cent on the year. The Sindie sold 75,683, down 25 per cent. Three more years of that, and neither newspaper is left. If you assume there are only 90,000 paying British readers out there, then the title’s UK circulation revenue is down to a lousy £27.5 million — so little that it is frightening.
No wonder, then, Rod Liddle is in the frame. The Indy in its current form faces the biggest crisis of its short history, and needs a game changing plan to survive. Which is why, as well as chasing new Tory readers, it will probably have to follow the example of Lebedev’s Standard and go free — a threat which has put the other broadsheet titles on red alert. Whether Lebedev (who recently declared himself cash-strapped) has the money to bankroll the plan is interesting, but given that all other ‘white-pages broadsheets’ are in deficit he would be far from being alone in supporting a loss-making newspaper.
Yet, even if Liddle doesn’t make it to the Editor’s chair, it is hard to believe that the Indy will be the same in 12 months time. The worry for everybody else is what happens if the new strategy, however it emerges, turns out to be surprisingly successful.
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