And there’s no doubt that Simon going to The Guardian will raise the

And there’s no doubt that Simon going to The Guardian will raise the average IQ there.”These are good barbs, but they don’t address the position of The Times. Is it still the paper of the establishment? “The Prime Minister reads The Times, the director-general of the BBC writes for The Times, everybody in Westminster uses The Times as the bible,” he says. “To be the paper of the establishment means not just to reflect the views of the establishment, but to be a resource for many people in society, including, obviously, the ruling elite. There’s no doubt Simon has made a great contribution to The Times at various moments in its history. He made clear how deep his relationship with The Times has been. We have 18 or 19, depending on how you count, and The Guardian doesn’t have anything like that.” He shifts gear.

“To be fair,” he continues, “I think The Guardian is a paper of record, but for a narrower arc of the population – stretching from Hoxton Square to Primrose Hill, with Islington in between.”What does he think of Jenkins’s forthcoming move, prompted, it has been suggested, by the columnist’s dissatisfaction with the intellectual level of the compact Times? “It was interpreted that way,” says Thomson evenly, “but you saw Simon’s statement, and he’s not a prevaricator. Is The Times still the paper of record?”Oh, most certainly,” he says. “I’ve heard other papers refer to themselves as coming papers of record.” The Guardian? “Yes. But for a start, most weekdays we sell twice as many papers as they do. And a paper of record will have a large number of foreign correspondents.

“But,” he adds, in one of the phrases that lends credence to the description of this former Far East correspondent as “inscrutable”, “a newspaper revolution is not a tea party.”
He is aware that there are challenges to the 217-year-old paper of which he is the first non-British editor Charges of “dumbing down” have been laid at its door. He sees good fortune in every direction that he gazes from his slightly cluttered office in Wapping. He’s delighted that The Times has overtaken The Daily Telegraph at full-price sales; dismisses The Guardian as preaching to a north London ghetto, and the Telegraph as a “shopping catalogue”; and declares he has “the best job in world journalism”. All I can promise is that I will strive to write whatever I believe without fear or favour.

And if the Daily Mail annoys me, I shall say so.Diary damages conventionPiers Morgan’s diaries have attracted much notice. They provide an unappealing, if somewhat predictable, portrait of the Court of Tony Blair: an overbearing and deceitful Alastair Campbell; an over-sensitive and acquisitive Cherie Blair; and a slippery Prime Minister in thrall to Rupert Murdoch, and happy to pay obeisance to red-top editors such as Morgan. Those, like myself, who are no great admirers of Mr Blair may have been cheered by Morgan’s account. But happy though part of me is to see all this in the public domain, another part of me registers an objection. Morgan’s many meetings with Blair over the years were private.