The Press: Cassandra of the Mirror

As “Cassandra” of the London Daily Mirror, biggest daily (circ. 4,535,687) in the world, owl-shaped, sharp-tongued William Neil Connor, 45, is the hardest-hitting and most-quoted columnist in Britain. Cassandra combines the terrible temper of a Westbrook Pegler with the calculated irreverence of an H. L. Mencken. “It is a pity,” Sir Winston Churchill once said, “that so able a writer should show himself so dominated by malevolence.” Even his own paper often finds his comments hard to take, but suffers them because of his circulation-building appeal. Says Mirror Editorial Director Hugh Cudlipp: “Cassandra disagrees with almost everything the Mirror stands for. He is armed with intolerance, bigotry, and irascibility. But the Mirror would be a duller place without him.”

Last week, covering the Labor Party conference at Scarborough (see FOREIGN NEWS), Cassandra gave a demonstration of what Editorial Director Cudlipp means. Writing in the Laborite Mirror, Cassandra blasted Labor Party Chief Clement Attlee: “The whole effect [of his report on his trip to Red China] was that we can do business with Peking … It is a sinister theme … It is also a tempting theme … It was the hope of the Foreign Office and also of Neville Chamberlain that both Nazi Germany and Communist Russia would destroy each other by their complementary antagonism . . . Kicking this dream around is like pretending that there are nice burglars and nasty ones.”

“Disastrous” President. Scarcely a fortnight before, Cassandra had jolted his readers with an even more radical column. For years Cassandra has led Britain’s anti-American chorus, hammered the U.S. for its “climate of fear,” compared congressional investigations to “Communist trials,” called President Eisenhower one of the most “disastrous” U.S. Presidents.

Last month Cassandra publicly confessed that he has changed his mind. He made his confession while giving advice to left-wing Laborite M.P. Aneurin Bevan, who, like Attlee, had also just returned from the Far East. Cassandra urged Bevan to make a trip to the U.S. Wrote Cassandra : “When you have made up your mind to dislike people, it is disturbing when you discover that they are very likable persons indeed. And by far the great majority of Americans are friendly and generous to a degree that you do not always find in these islands. Going around disapproving of Americans is very tiring work indeed. Their many and obvious virtues make it very uphill work.” Cassandra now scorns Bevan’s and Nehru’s “neutralism” with the same scorn he once heaped on the U.S. He also advocates the same strong anti-Communist foreign policy that the U.S. has been advancing. Why did Cassandra change? Explains he: “When you lose your distrust and dislikes of a person, you are able to entertain his views with less prejudice. I’ve been to America seven times in the last year or so.”

Sticky End. Irish-born (County Derry) Bill Connor has been Cassandra ever since he started in newspapering on the Mirror in 1935. The son of a civil servant, Cassandra did a variety of odd jobs until Mirror editors, intrigued by his arrogant, self-assured, insulting ways, gave him a job as a columnist. Cassandra (“One of those titles cooked up in a pub”) was an overnight success. He also got the paper into very hot water, which is just where the saucy, sensational Mirror likes to be.

During World War II Cassandra’s attacks on the government were so savage that the Cabinet came close to suppressing the paper. After Dunkirk Cassandra bellowed for an all-out attack on Germany, even though Britain could barely defend itself at the time. He complained that the British army was weak because it was ruled by the “military aristocracy of the Guards, second-class snobocracy in the center, and behind it all the cloying inertia of the civil service.” In the House of Lords, the Lord Chancellor pointed out that the legendary Cassandra had come to “a sticky end.” To avoid such an end (i.e., suppression), Connor enlisted as a private in the tank corps, worked on a British army newspaper, and rose to a major.

Interview with McCarthy. At war’s end he began his first column: “As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted.” Like many another British journalist, Cassandra puts himself in the middle of every story, to the virtual exclusion of anyone he is writing about. Last year, in a series on Senator Joe McCarthy, Cassandra seldom let even him get in a word as he wrote: “I told him I detested everything he stood for. I opposed what he was doing, and that on further acquaintance I felt almost certain that I would hate his guts. Furthermore, what the blazes was his idea in keeping me waiting in this sweaty town. The Senator from Wisconsin remarked thoughtfully that ‘Jeez, this was straight shooting.’ ”

Cassandra’s theory of reporting fits his headlong methods. “It’s easy to be wrong,” says he, “but it’s not easy to plunge ahead as if you were right without giving the other point of view.” No one could ever accuse Cassandra of giving the other point of view on anything from dogs (“Man’s best friend is a fake and a fraud, and the sooner he is taught to lay eggs or produce milk the better”) to doctors (“I don’t like their mumbo jumbo, their smooth, lying inefficiency”).

Cassandra, who writes in longhand, seldom consults a note or reference source, is more interested in getting his prose right than his facts. Meeting Cassandra in person for the first time, says one old friend, is like being “involved in an extremely unpleasant motor crash.” But neither his barbed manner nor the arrogance of his column is any accident. Says Cassandra: “I know how to be hostile, suspicious and skeptical. I can wield these unlovable qualities like a whip.”