The gossip-as-news phenomenon (from which no title is immune) is a symptom of the current uncertainty in the broadsheet papers about whom they are addressing.Until 20 years ago there was little doubt: the Times was aimed at the elite who inhabited the clubs of St James and the corridors of power; the Guardian at schoolteachers and the liberal intelligentsia; the Telegraph at the horsey set from the shires who bemoaned the state of the nation but relished a little discreet filth with their court reporting. Hold the front page.The definition of news has never commanded consensus. A rule of thumb, accepted by most journalists until a few years back, is that to qualify as news something must be true, interesting and have happened fairly recently. The Guardian’s story falls at the first of those hurdles, the Sunday Telegraph’s at the last and the Times’s psychic dogs, arguably all three.Whether something is interesting is a subjective judgement which depends on the view an editor takes of his paper’s audience: and that is the crux of the issue. The gist, then, was that a bunch of fruitcakes were saying things about Lady Thatcher that were probably untrue. Quotation marks inside a headline are a giveaway, telling us we are about to read a story that the paper cannot substantiate and does not quite believe itself.Sure enough, the “news” that Baroness Thatcher was about to quit the Tories in favour of Sir James Goldsmith’s Referendum Party was attributed only to “bizarre rumours circulating among right-wing anti- Europeans” which had been “emphatically denied by Thatcher admirers”.

It was given more space than the Northern Ireland crisis and Labour’s plans for tax cuts.Last week’s Sunday Telegraph also dallied with the paranormal. It revealed at the top of its front page that after the Brighton bombing in 1984, Bernard Ingham, then Margaret Thatcher’s press secretary, asked an astrologer to keep an eye on the portents and to let him know if any other dangers loomed for the Prime Minister.On the previous day, the Guardian, too, had a yarn about the great lady, given pride of place on its front page above the main story about Iraq: “Thatcher ‘ready to cut ties with Conservative Party’”. It is not just the prominence given to stories about pop stars and sporting heroes: that simply reflects the homogenisation of popular culture. What is new is the appearance on broadsheet news pages of stories with such a fragile basis in fact that, only a few years ago, they would properly have been consigned to the gossip column or to breathless features called “Just Fancy That”.
Thursday’s Times devoted 56 column inches on page three to a story and picture claiming that dogs can tell instinctively – perhaps telepathically – when their owners are on their way home from work. There used to be news and there used to be gossip but today, in what we once called the posh papers, it gets ever harder to distinguish between the two. But Parkhill must not be preserved as a monument either to brilliant architects or to councillors who believed they were doing their best for Sheffield Parkhill was built to meet the needs of the people If it no longer achieves that aim, it should be demolished..

I was summoned to London by the housing minister, Henry Brooke – in those days regarded as a right-wing ogre – and told that the government would find the extra money if I could find the contractors to build more houses Those days have gone. And it may not be possible to destroy 1,000 flats and maison-ettes while there are still families waiting for decent houses. A decision to preserve may be wrong because of the way the world has changed since 1960.When Parkhill was built, Britain was far less a middle-class nation than it is today Working men and women certainly demanded a decent home. But the passions of extended prosperity – garage, fence, garden, drive, car – had not consumed the lower-income groups. In those days, adjacent front doors encouraged confidence, not a feeling of social inferiority Living cheek by jowl was not the risk it is today. Aerosol sprays had barely been invented and there was little graffiti on the walls Packs of youths did not stalk the galleries late at night. The occasional drunk urinated in the lifts, but they were not systematically vandalised out of operation.