New Face in the Mirror

London's tabloid Daily Mirror is Britain's earthiest daily and the world's biggest (circ. 4,500,000). Until last week, its undisputed boss was 67-year-old Harry Guy Bartholomew, who was responsible for its pepperpot tone and all-out backing of Labor. Last week, after 50 years on the Mirror, "Mister Bart" was out. He was retiring, said the board of directors, because of his "advancing years and an earnest desire to promote the advancement of younger men." Actually, at a turbulent meeting of the Mirror board, Mister Bart was voted out of power.

Fleet Street buzzed with explanations. Even though he had doubled the circulation of the Mirror and boosted the circulation of its even gaudier Sunday Pictorial (5,000,000) almost 70% since war's end, many a Fleet Streeter thought he had tried to tackle too much. The Mirror has bought paper mills in Canada, a string of newspapers in Africa and Australia and a chain of Australian radio stations. Mister Bart had also started a labor weekly, Public Opinion, to challenge the left-wing New Statesman and Nation and Bevanite London Tribune. Public Opinion folded, and the Mirror also lost on some of the other ventures: Mister Bart's close friendship with Labor Foreign Minister Herbert

Morrison became embarrassing, especially after Morrison flopped on his job. The Mirror and the Sunday Pictorial had claimed a big share in Labor's 1945 victory and its return to power in 1950, and Fleet Street whispered that the paper had become Morrison's mouthpiece. Finally the Mirror was sued for libel by Winston Churchill, for labeling him a warmonger during the last election.

To succeed Mister Bart, Mirror directors named 51-year-old Cecil Harmsworth King,* a veteran newsman who has been everything on the paper from junior reporter to picture boss and advertising director. Oxford-educated Chairman King is no socialist, but no Tory either. He was one of Mister Bart's chief executives in the mid-30's when the Mirror swung from a right-wing position into the socialist camp. But now a new swing is starting. Said King: "There'll be no change noticeably in either the layout or the politics of the paper. But the Mirror must move with the times or come to a sticky end." Since the times in Britain had moved right, it looked as if the Mirror would edge over a bit too.

*Nephew of the late great Lord Northcliffe (whose name was Harmsworth).

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