The finer points of industrial disputes are of keen interest only to the disputants, so I will keep this brief. Members of the National Union of Journalists at the Telegraph, who were due to strike next Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, have postponed their action for four weeks. In the meantime, there will be discussion over new rotas that management was attempting to impose, which it regards as essential to our survival in the digital world.
One issue is how early Daily Telegraph reporters should start in the morning if they are being expected to serve both web and print. By tradition, ours has been a trade of late working rather than early rising. In 1987, when Max Hastings was still new in the job of editor, and bounding into his office in Fleet Street as he had yomped up hills during the Falklands War, he found it hard to understand why so few of his senior staff turned up at their desks before 10 o’clock.
One morning, he sought enlightenment from someone with rather more experience, not to mention patience. “Where the bloody hell is everybody?” he asked Ettie, his secretary.
“Well, Max,” she answered, “you’ve got to remember you’re running a newspaper here and not a dairy.”