TWO key figures quit Mirror Group Newspapers yesterday.
Award-winning Daily Mirror columnist Paul Foot said he had been left
in an intolerable position after his editor David Banks refused to
retract a ''smear'' which suggested he was mad.
Board member Lord Hollick, 46, the millionaire head of the MAI money
broking and advertising combine, resigned after a behind-the-scenes
power struggle, blaming disagreements over ''governance and policy
matters''.
The departures are the latest in a series of upsets at MGN, which was
thrown into crisis by the collapse of the late Robert Maxwell's media
empire last year.
The new management, led by chief executive David Montgomery, set about
cutting costs and shedding staff, causing a bitter dispute with members
of the National Union of Journalists which has rumbled on for months.
Last night Mr Foot accused the management of a ''systematic campaign
of union-busting, the like of which has never been seen before''.
A column by Mr Foot, 55, criticising management was banned from the
newspaper last week.
Mr Banks said he was ''very sad'' that Mr Foot was leaving, but added
that there would be a ''sense of relief'' among Mirror staff.
The Daily Mirror NUJ chapel (office branch) described Mr Foot's
departure as ''an unmitigated disaster'', adding in a statement: ''We
are deeply saddened that this management has no concept of the values
that this paper once stood for.''
Mr Foot's departure after 13 years at the Mirror comes less than a
month after another columnist Anne Robinson defected to Today, saying
the management had created a ''fearful'' atmosphere on the paper.
A few days earlier, political columnist Alastair Campbell also
resigned, sparking a chorus of outrage from Labour MPs.
Lord Hollick came to the Mirror in partnership with Mr Montgomery
after Robert Maxwell's death plunged the group into crisis.
But the two men fell out over Mr Montgomery's management style.
In a statement last night, MGN chairman Sir Robert Clark said Lord
Hollick's decision was ''not surprising'', as he was the only board
member who had refused to back the management in a resolution last
month.
* Paul Foot has always been an outspoken crusader for the underdog and
a scourge of the Tory establishment.
Over the years he has campaigned doggedly against alleged miscarriages
of justice and his Mirror column, begun in 1979, and previous work on
Socialist Worker, New Statesman and Private Eye, courted controversy.
But his fearless style brought him the title campaigning journalist of
the year at the British Press Awards in 1981, and he was What the Papers
Say journalist of the year in 1990 for his part in the campaign to free
the Guildford Four.
Mr Foot, 55, lists neither parents nor school in Who's Who, but his
background is at once illustrious and solidly Labour -- his father was
Labour peer Lord Caradon, a governor of Cyprus, and his uncle is former
Labour leader Michael Foot.
He was furious when new Mirror editor David Banks disclosed his salary
as #55,000 during the messy row over his spiked column.
''It's actually a couple of thousand less, although many people at the
Mirror think I earn much more,'' he reportedly said.
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