[‘Nothing good can come out of Printing House Square’: Sir Colin Coote, editor of the Daily Telegraph.] Autograph Manuscript, signed ‘Colin R. Coote’, of review of ‘The Reigning Error’ by William Rees-Mogg, editor of The Times.

See his entry in the Oxford DNB. From the papers of Philip Dosse, who was proprietor of Hansom Books, publisher of a stable of seven arts magazines including Books and Bookmen and Plays and Players. See ‘Death of a Bookman’ by the novelist Sally Emerson (editor of ‘Books and Bookmen’ at the time of Dosse’s suicide), in Standpoint magazine, October 2018. Rees-Mogg’s book was published in 1974, and the present item appeared in ‘Books and Bookmen’ in the same year. A late draft, neatly written out on 5pp, small 4to, with each page on separate leaf. Signed at end ‘Colin R. Coote’. Minor emendations to the first, second and last pages. Begins: ‘This brilliantly sensible essay does something to redress my conviction that nothing good can come out of Printing House Square except by dismissal. The verdict was reached afterr over 20 year’s service with the former Thunderer, when it became a ringleader in the foolish, flimsy, and almost lethal flummery called appeasement. But I now rejoice that God has answered Belloc’s prayer to be with Balliol men by clearly inspiring one of them - Mr Rees-Mogg.’ ‘What is the “Reigning Error”?’ Coote asks. ‘It is failure to realise that an imaginary test is the enemy of a practical good. There are two basic themes in this essay. The first is the behaviour of money; the second is the behaviour of men.’ At one point he writes: ‘The only advantage I have over Mr Rees-Mogg is that I have actually experienced rabid deflation here and rabid inflation in four separate countries.’ He concludes, on the subject of ‘human behaviour’, ‘What is really distressing is not the venom of mindless militancy, but its stupidity. You need only be able to read and to see in order to know that if strikes are substituted for honest sweat the end will be ghastly unemployment; that if Parliamentary Democracy is destroyed, the alternative will be either tyranny or anarchy; that the real danger is not from known indignants, but from “leaders” who say “I am their leader I must follow them”.’