I HAZILY remember the days of real journalism, into which I was inducted on The Spectator in 1983. Proceedings started with a three- or four-hour lunch, after which we walked down to the printers, perhaps a quarter of a mile away, there to gaze in bilious stupefaction at the small, slow-moving print of the proofs of that week’s issue.

I, at least, was stupefied, fresh out of the backwoods of southern Sweden. The others had the quite astonishing tolerance for alcohol required of professional journalists in those days, and could function even after lunch. It was some lunches later that Alexander Chancellor, the Old Etonian editor and a lovely man, produced from his jacket, with an air of puzzled delight, a crumpled piece of paper, which must have been there for nearly a decade.

It was the first contract that he had agreed as editor of the magazine, and it stipulated that he should be paid £16,000 a year, of which half was to be paid as expenses. Translated out of 1975 pounds into today’s money, this meant a tax-free expense account of £52,000 a year, along with a taxed salary of another £50,000. The contract, of course, had been agreed over a lunch grander and possibly even drunker than the one that we were enjoying. As an editor, I’d say he was worth a great deal more.

The story came back to me when I read in The Free Press a review of a memoir of life on New York magazines during the ’90s. Graydon Carter, then the editor of Vanity Fair, “tells the story of a Time magazine writer assigned to cover the pope’s visit to the U.S. In an effort to duck the assignment, the writer said he was scheduled to take a vacation in Maine with his family. His editor responded by telling him that, if he took the assignment, he could send his family to Maine and expense the vacation. So the writer, who had never intended to take his family to Maine, had stationery made up of a fictitious vacation spot, in order to create fictitious receipts, for which he was reimbursed. He even expensed the cost of the stationery. That was paid too.”

The story also lets slip that Dominick Dunne was paid $500,000 a year (plus expenses) to cover the O. J. Simpson trial. Half a million dollars a year! This is even more than a columnist on the Church Times gets paid.

HOW times have changed. This week’s American magazine scoop comes from The Atlantic, whose editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, found himself joined to a chat group in which the Secretary of Defence, the Vice-President, the National Security Adviser, and President Trump’s chief of staff, were all planning to bomb the Houthis in Yemen. At first, he took this for a prank, and only when the bombs exploded was he certain that it was real.

It is absolutely worth reading the whole thing, but, beyond the obvious shocks — chiefly the contempt and resentment with which they speak of Europe, something that makes me believe that the Trump administration will attempt to seize Greenland by force — there are some still more worrying implications.

The most obvious is the sheer brazen lying that has followed these revelations. The press of the ’90s may have been financially corrupt, but it cared about facts, and so did its readership. All that is gone now, along with the expense accounts. The New York Times calculated that President Trump lied on average 21 times a day last time around (and that was just in public). And, after his claims about the 2020 election, nothing that Republicans are prepared to say should shock us.

Nor can one expect any of them to resign, or even to be sacked, for using a private messaging system to discuss state secrets.

The second is the choice of that messaging system — Signal — on which to discuss state secrets. This is worrying not just because Signal is private rather than secure. No one can intercept your messages in transit, but anyone with full access to your phone can read them. And state-employed hackers can break into any phone now. Phone-messaging systems such as Signal and WhatsApp can be set to delete messages automatically, which is why they are so popular with politicians who wish to conceal their dealings from the press. But to use them is to say that you fear your own voters’ finding you out more than you fear the secret services of enemy governments.