Peter Stothard with Man Booker 2012 winner Hilary Mantel Flickr

“I edit a paper which is one of the few places left which still has a strong, consistent diet of argued criticism”.

Like many in the industry, Sir Peter Stothard, current Editor of the Times Literary Supplement, Editor of the Times for ten years and 2012 Chair of the Man Booker Prize, is worried that newspapers are going downhill.

“The ‘five stars I like it and I’ll give it to my sister’ school [of cultural criticism] is running very strongly,” Stothard insists, while “argued criticism is being overwhelmed”. Driven, in part, by the ­“pressures of the internet”, speaking to the editor of one of Britain’s foremost literary publications does not immediately inspire confidence in the industry to which he has dedicated his life.

“Every opinion on a book is not the same,” he persists. “We don’t think that every opinion on if you’ve got cancer is the same, or every opinion on whether your plumbing needs repairing is the same.”

Parts of the literary community “have somehow got the idea that people want as much equality as possible”. They “pretend that every opinion on a book, or a piece of music, or a film is as valuable as anybody else’s”. According to Stothard, however, “it palpably isn’t”.

This steadfast insistence on the primacy of traditional criticism over newer forms such as the book blog, which he has previously lambasted as being to “the detriment of literature”, has unsurprisingly stirred emotions. The Guardian writer John Self hit back at Stothard, defending the place for long-form criticism in blogs, whilst Amy Riley, a book blogger herself, claimed blogs “might be scary to people like Mr. Stothard who is used to being a controlling party in the conversation”.

An hour long chat with Stothard about literature, however, and he comes across as more easily confident than scared. This confidence in the objective value of criticism is reassuring, especially from the man responsible for propelling Hilary Mantel to the hall of ‘modern classics’ fame, having led the panel of judges that awarded her a second Man Booker Prize in 2012. But even with careful criticism in place, can Stothard really be sure that Bring Up the Bodies was the best piece of literature to come out of 2012?

“It’s quite fashionable to knock prizes,” he admits – and the controversy surrounding the Booker and its Chair the year prior to his involvement is quickly brought up. Stella Rimmington, who chaired the prize in 2011, “got into quite a lot of trouble, not all of it fairly, [for] saying it was all just a matter of opinion”.

If the crusade against Rimmington’s proposed focus on readability was not “fair”, however, I have little doubt that, at least in principle, Stothard thinks it was right. If it’s “all a matter of opinion,” he tells me: “Why bother?”

“My experience of the Booker”, he continues, “was that if you really worked at it”, even if it was “hard to compare one book against the other because they were very different, you could compare the strength of the argument for each book”. For Stothard, “that was an important lesson, which I think extends beyond prizes to the way in which we look at books in the media in general”.

Stothard looks to ‘traditional’ journalism in more ways than one. I ask about a tradition particularly prominent in the press of late – political endorsement – and Stothard is candid in his disdain. “I never liked it,” he mulls. “A lot of newspaper editors[…] think it’s the worse thing they have to do. I mean, if you spend all the year trying to be even handed, and in the end, you have to say you want ‘x’ rather than ‘y’[...] I’ve heard a lot of newspaper editors say that that was a tradition they wish didn’t exist,” he smiles.

“But newspapers are living creatures, they have traditions and they have parents and they have children”. To keep these living creatures lively, “it’s dangerous to abandon the whole of the heritage”.

Heritage, perhaps; but there is no doubt Stothard is finely tuned to the changing landscape to which this heritage must adapt. Recalling his student days on the Cherwell – based then in “a terrible sort of leaky shed at the back of the Oxford Union” – Stothard believes student journalism “became a bit less self-indulgent in terms of ‘print my poem’.”

The big change, though, was not confined to students. The invention of software that allowed journalists to directly input and design their content was a “massive, massive change”, Stothard stresses, “as big, if not bigger than the current change of moving onto digital”.

Indeed, Stothard believes “there have been two big newspaper revolutions in my lifetime”, and there is no doubt in my mind that he spent both on the front line.
But what of the most recent, legal revolutions facing the press? “You can presumably do a PhD at Cambridge very soon on Leveson and its implications,” he half jests. Weighing up the public interest and the means through which it can be served, Stothard admits that “people like me[…] were editors in a different age”. An age with “a simpler sort of proportionality test”.

“Young people going into journalism and papers now enter a climate that is much more regulated, much more planned” and “some would say a little bit less spontaneous,” he tells me.

But does journalism need spontaneity? “My only hope”, Stothard muses darkly, “is that in this new era, decent, honest, important journalism is not chilled” – that “you’re not discouraged from doing the things that keep journalism alive”.

It’s not only that “crimes will not be investigated” – “a common objection to what could come from the current arrangements – “but that journalism will become very boring”.
“And that, in the longer term, could be even more dangerous.”

Literary or investigative, for Sir Peter Stothard, journalism must be thoughtful, critical and above all, lively. As he quips, “It’s easy to produce a dull newspaper”. And in a world where newspapers are “living creatures”, Stothard provides a stark reminder that dullness could very well mean death.