THE wife of a Europhobic friend of mine became so exasperated by his continual banging on about the European Union that she asked him why he didn’t do something about it. He accepted the challenge and fought Barnsley for the Referendum Party when Arthur Scargill was another candidate. The moral of this story is simply understood: why believe in a cause if you won’t stand up and be counted? My friend was trounced but had the enduring satisfaction of having fought for his belief.

So credit is due to Stephen Glover, who has regularly used his weekly Media Studies column in The Spectator to bang on about the “dumbing down” of the British broadsheets, for daring to try to launch a British version of France’s Le Monde.

It is easy to deride Glover’s presumption but, as the launch editor of two newspapers, I made a vow many years ago never to knock journalists who try to start a new newspaper. Glover, moreover, has form and is intimately acquainted with the pitfalls involved in a newspaper launch.

With Andreas Whittam Smith and Matthew Symonds, he was one of the founders of The Independent in 1986 and then launched The Independent on Sunday. The Independent was the most successful launch of a new newspaper in the past 50 years, challenged only by the relaunches of the Daily Mail in 1971 and The Mail on Sunday in 1982.

Glover’s Independent on Sunday was a fine newspaper and it was not wholly Glover’s fault that it never quite took off. But after a year he was ousted and Ian Jack took over. So he is also acquainted with the desolation and personal bitterness that follows failure and which puts steel in the soul.

Those who worked with him then described him as “languid and donnish”, with a “sensible and realistic scepticism”, “cool and unhurried” with an ability to make writers feel good and a belief in a “collegiate” atmosphere. Blake Morrison thought that Glover’s fall was less to do with a power struggle with Whittam Smith and Symonds than with his failure to give his paper a strong identity.

Glover’s new plan was leaked prematurely to the Financial Times last week. His aim is an upmarket national daily, pitched above The Times and The Daily Telegraph, published in a compact format and as serious in tone as Le Monde. It may even be called The World. He has been planning the paper for nine months, believes it could break even on a daily sale of 100,000, and is trying to raise £15 million from venture capitalists and individual investors. He sees his paper as a newspaper version of Channel 4.

The reason for the new paper is obvious, he says. Newspapers such as The Times and The Daily Telegraph have tended to dumb down to maintain their large circulations. They may still contain upmarket elements but have become like supermarkets, offering a lot of soap powder alongside the delicatessen counter. That’s fine for most readers but there is room for a paper with a smaller circulation and more uniformly upmarket journalism.

That does not mean his paper would be austere, he says. Newspapers can be excellent and serious without being dull and boring and he is attracting journalists who have succeeded with such qualities all their lives. The journalists whose names have been revealed support that claim.

They include two who worked with Glover in his Independent days, Francis Wheen who has since written for The Guardian and who is a stalwart of Private Eye, and Simon Carr, who writes The Independent’s Commons sketch, as well as Frank Johnson who was once Glover’s editor on The Spectator.

Adam Broadbent, the chairman of Emap, has signed up as chairman and Vicky Unwin, a former managing director of PR Newswire, is to be managing director. Unwin and an advertising director are now working full time on the project at an office in London.

Yet any realistic view of Glover’s project suggests that he has set himself a difficult challenge in trying to start a newspaper in a period when sales of all newspapers are in decline. Over the six months to January, year-on-year sales of the five broadsheets fell by 122,000 (4.5 per cent). In England, Wales and Northern Ireland, sales of the Financial Times, the most austere of the broadsheets and the closest to Glover’s model, fell by 14,000.

That may be because the newspapers are not serious enough but it is unlikely. The delicatessen counters of the four allegedly dumbed-down mainstream broadsheets remain impressive. Among the columnists on offer yesterday were Anatole Kaletsky and Peter Riddell in The Times; Timothy Garton Ash, Jackie Ashley and David Goodhart in The Guardian; Adrian Hamilton and Michael Brown in The Independent; and John Keegan and Boris Johnson in The Daily Telegraph. Definitely Waitrose rather than Safeway, and why shop anywhere else?

The purveyor of realism when Glover, Whittam Smith and Symonds set up The Independent was the media banker Bruce Fireman who helped them to raise £18 million. His advice hasn’t been asked on this occasion, but £15 million may not be enough, he says. How much money is needed partly depends on how long it takes to break even. The longer it takes, the more money is required. To sell 100,000 copies, moreover, up to 200,000, it will have to be expensively printed.

But Fireman would enjoy a daily Spectator alongside the other broadsheets and all journalists would cheer if Glover succeeded.

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