As The Sunday Times is on a Sunday.”From his office on the 12th floor of the Canary Wharf tower, Moore clearly keeps half an eye trained on Wapping. The recent scaling-down of the price war between the two newspapers has seen The Times’s circulation tumble from 703,000 last June to 655,000 last month. It would seem that Moore feels confident enough to abandon the million-copy sale for the foreseeable future because the pressure from The Times has diminished. “I have been editor for seven and a half years, and for the past five or even six, it has been quite clear that The Times could not get anywhere near us,” he says.

“In the early days of my editorship, I still wasn’t quite confident about the long-term effects of a price war, but it has been clear to me that it doesn’t really shift things.”Despite the boasts, the Thunderer is clearly always close to Moore’s thoughts. Readers of The Times, he says, are an odd mix of “old Britain, the establishment that doesn’t really exist any more, bishops and things,” and new arrivals, “all those people who came in when it cost 10p on Mondays”. As a result, the paper is “bland as an airline meal, because they don’t know who they are serving”, unlike the distinct personalities of The Guardian and, naturally, The Daily Telegraph. Moore even has a copy of a Times front page pinned up on his office wall. It is the edition of 31 March 2003, which led on the headline: “Generals dig in for long war Assault on Baghdad put off for weeks”. The Telegraph editor cites it as evidence of a “lack of perspective in some of the war reporting”. His staff responded to the Iraqi campaign “like an army jumping to their stations” Moore says: “Fundamentally, we got it right.

Our overall arguments were right, and our sense of how this war is likely to go was right.”By contrast, the newspapers that opposed the conflict “exaggerated” the dangers of the military campaign and have “not given enough thought to the really difficult bit” of “how to create a successful society in Iraq.” His ABC circulation figures appear to show that readers feel differently: the broadsheet titles showing a month-on-month rise are The Guardian and The Independent. When that is pointed out, Moore says that his impression is that, because of the availability of 24-hour news television, “all the newspapers are somewhat disappointed about sales in the war.”So, perhaps the Telegraph did not have such a great war after all Not that its owner, Conrad Black, thinks so. In a letter taped to the office wall, the Canadian opines: “We have obviously surpassed our competition and even bear favourable comparison with The New York Times, which, of course, has practically unlimited resources.”. The Government and its exams watchdog were responsible for last summer’s A-level fiasco, a damning report by an all-party committee of MPs has concluded. This decision to rush the introduction of the A2 exams ­ the second part of the new-style A-levels ­ was the single biggest factor in last summer’s crisis, when nearly 2,000 students were awarded the wrong grades, the House of Commons Education and Skills Select Committee said in its report yesterday.