The Marie Celeste of Canary Wharf

I've often wondered what the Marie Celeste must have felt like, and today I came as close as I'm ever likely to ... in the Canary Wharf offices of the Daily Telegraph which almost all the staff have now vacated for Victoria.
I go there every couple of weeks to write new obituaries of policitians or to update the existing stock, and have been doing since 1995. (My connection with the Telegraph actually goes back to 1967, but more of that later). Usually when I have taken up my terminal at the obituaries desk on the 12th floor, there have been up to 200 people working in the open-plan layout on the same level; only first thing in the morning has it ever been quiet.
But today it had the feeling of a campaign headquarters two days after the election. There were at most eight people at work on the 12th floor: three on obituaries, three in the cuttings library, a picture librarian and a sub-editor. One well-known business journalist did come in, only to find his office locked despite assurances that it wouldn't be. He left in a cloud of expletives. Everyone else has already decamped to Victoria.
It was a strange atmosphere to work in. Bookcases stood empty. Papers for future use were packed away in orange crates. The editor's and other executives' offices stood empty. Photocopiers had disappeared. Scraps of paper, old photos and the odd file of cuttings littered row after row of empty desks, most still with their computer terminals. The odd phone rang, never to be answered. In the canteen, piles of food awaited staff who would now never come.
It all seemed much more final and poignant, strangely, than on the two previous occasions the Telegraph has moved its headquarters during my time with the paper. Back in 1987 when we forsook the Fleet Street offices which now house a merchant bank to be among the first occupants of South Quay on the Isle of Dogs, I was working for the Telegraph at the House of Commons and really only went to Fleet Street at the weekend and for the occasional editorial conference ... a practice, astonishingly, that had only been initiated by Max Hastings the previous year after decades in which the paper just "happened". To me, the Fleet Street offices had always seemed rather squalid. After 20 years' sporadic service with the paper, I was happy to let it go.
By the time the paper moved on from South Quay to Canary Wharf in the early 1990s, I was working for a rival chain. I was affected less by the move than the subsequent IRA bomb which did immense damage to the entire South Quay complex, and would have killed far more than two people had the Telegraph still been there. My lasting memory of that building, ironically, is of looking across to Canary Wharf and wondering how I, as an acute sufferer from vertigo, would ever be able to work there.
Now the Telegraph is on the move again, and the near-desolation of Canary Wharf today is something I shall long remember, whatever impression Victoria makes on me. It will be a peculiar sensation seeimg it for the first time as a newspaper office, as I used to visit the Victoria building wearing my reporter's hat when it was the headquarters of Eurotunnel some 15 years ago. Eurotunnel, ironically, moved down to Canary Wharf before deciding they didn't need a corporate HQ.
On reflection, something else has struck me. Until the 1980s, newspaper offices always contained the presses on which the paper was printed, and the roar of the presses was their lifeblood. When the Telegraph left Fleet Street, the two functions were separated, though initially only by 400 yards. Ever since, newspaper offices have struggled to retain the atmosphere that kept them apart from all other hives of clerical activity. I find it hard to imagine that the digital age will bring that atmosphere back.

Fifty Years On

Half a century ago this autumn, the West stood helplessly by as Soviet troops put down the uprising in Hungary which had given that country hope of independence and democracy. Prime Minister Imre Nagy was lured out of the embassy where he had taken refuge and executed, and a new hard-line regime installed as thousands fled to the West. It was 33 years before Hungarians freely elected their government, and its first action was to give Nagy a state funeral.
How had the Kremlin managed to get away with such a grotesque infraction of a nation's right to determine its own future?
The answer, as a frustrated President Eisenhower well understood, was that the West's moral authority had been destroyed by the Anglo-French operation to recover the Suez Canal which had been nationalised by Egypt's President Nasser ... an operation based on those countries' connivance with Israel in starting a Middle East war which could then be claimed to be threatening the Canal. Eisenhower's anger was all the greater as he had been systematically lied to about Britain's intentions by Prime Minister Anthony Eden, who saw Nasser as a reincarnation of Hitler. Only later did it emerge that Eden's poor health may have impaired his judgment.
In 1956, the Suez adventure denied America the traction it needed in the UN Security Council to bring maximum pressure on Moscow. Half a century later, that situation is being painfully repeated.
This time it is the US/British operation in Iraq, which I have to admit I supported at the outset, which has deprived the West of that same moral authority at a crucial moment. The continuing anarchy in Iraq as the options for an exit reduce has greatly increased the difficulty of securing strong and concerted action through the UN against Iran and North Korea for their nuclear programmes, culminating in the Pyonygyang regime's staging of an underground nuclear test. In such matters the co-operation of Russia and China as premanent members of the Security Council is important. It is never easy to secure, as has become evident over Darfur; in current circumstances it is far, far harder.
With Russia the parallel to 1956 is even closer. Then it was Hungary; now it is Georgia, which President Putin is trying to steamroller into acceptance of Moscow's hegemony, and oil companies like Shell, wooed by Russia when times were tough to find and pump hydrocarbons, and now cast aside from lucrative fields as the price of oil has soared.
The days when Bush and Putin seemed to share the same world-view are long since gone. But it is the poison injected into the international system by the post-intervention shambles in Iraq - created by the pig-headeness of the Pentagon - that has given Putin the chance to tighten his grip without the need to take seriously the views of the west.
Nikita S. Khruschev, supposedly a liberal after his posthumous denunciation of Stalin but nevertheless the Soviet leader who sent the Warsaw Pact forces into Hungary, must be smiling from his grave. Fifty years on, the West appears as dumb as ever, and the Kremlin reaps the benefit.