In the October 1984 issue of this journal, Hugo Young began this occasional series on newspapers with a most interesting inside account of the internal politics of the Sunday Times, the struggle for control between owner and editor and its changing policies. All this could be done for the Observer, indeed. But I want to essay something simple but rare and difficult, to read the newspaper as a product, to read it closely and externally as an entire and self- contained text. The proof of the pudding is in the eating—as our mothers taught us before the colour supplements’ cookery inserts: just for once to look at the thing in itself and not how it came to be, or what it should be doing. And to look at it in its entirety. Hugo Young created the impression that the Sunday Times is composed of political matter! Did he ever read the whole astonishing artefact?

My quotation from Orwell is a little self-indulgent and external to the text, but it does serve to bring out two basic structural factors. The first is that for most educated, thoughtful, lively and well- informed people, there is only the choice of the one Sunday or the other—or both.1 No wonder that, hunting for the same market, the two rivals look so like each other, embodying the same kind of ‘improving consensus’ as the two main political parties used to do in pre-Thatcher days—and for much the same reason. ‘Like Tweedledum and Tweedledee’, it was often said, which still lookslargely true, by content, make-up and values, apart from the Sunday Times’ lurch to the Thatcher camp in its few political pages.