Today, the truncated media pages are hidden away at the back of the book among the travel and classified pages Only dedicated media types bother to find them. News editors can no longer depend upon it for last-minute inspiration. It is hard to take seriously a publication that tells its readers to vote Labour yet has an editor who says he will still be voting Tory because Labour is against fox-hunting.Moreover, with the exception of Simon Jenkins, there are few columnists worth reading: most of the men are dull (bar the TV and arts critics, who are amusing); the women, who all seem to have been hired from the drabber school of journalism, are unremittingly dire.The pink City pages always look like something of an afterthought, lacking the resources such a huge and vital industry based in the capital deserve. Even its once-famous diary is now unreadable.I doubt if Max cares much about London's renaissance; indeed, he probably has a visceral dislike for many of the manifestations of an age in which Soho House matters more than Brooks.

But the Standard is also lacking in areas that he does care about.The paper has lost its political authority. But you will get little sense of the excitement that has gripped London these past few years from the pages of its only evening newspaper. But it is neither Max's style nor inclination.You get the impression Max would rather be off killing defenceless animals in his beloved Leicestershire than poring over page proofs or tramping round the London social scene. He has a lofty disdain for the flotsam and jetsam of modern London life which make the capital tick.He would rather be dining with county types in a grand country pile. But, as a result of this, he cannot be said to have his finger on London's pulse, nor to be at the cutting edge Nor does it seem that he would wish to be.

But his paper suffers because he has little appetite for London life: it is rather as if the editor of the Stanley Gibbons catalogue had no taste for stamp collecting.At a time when London is widely regarded again as a "happening" place, among the top two or three international cities and seen, even among young continentals, as the undisputed capital of Europe, these should be the Standard's glory years. He is a formidable journalist who did a superb job in gradually dragging the Daily Telegraph into the latter part of the 20th century without the more reactionary of its readers noticing. When Conrad Black finally decided to dispense with him because he was not sufficiently Thatcherite, many of us were rather puzzled that he then decided to accept Lord Rothermere's shilling to go and work at the Standard.Max, after all, is very conscious of his status. The move from national broadsheet editor to editor of a regional tabloid (even a prestigious one) was perceived, especially by the rather snobbish peer group around him, as a step down He must have felt that himself Nor could those who know him work out why he bothered. Why accept the drudge and hard slog of daily tabloid editing when a more leisurely (if not so remunerative) life of writing books, penning columns and broadcasting beckoned?Unless, of course, he needed the money (some say he took the Standard to finance an expensive divorce) But Max is from the old school of gentlemen journalists. He edited the Telegraph from a magisterial distance, enjoying long lunches with cabinet ministers and captains of industry, while his minions did the mundane editorial work.But editing a daily evening paper is a treadmill.

An editor who wants to make his mark on the Standard has to be in the office before 7am to see off the first edition and still be there at 8pm to sign off the next day's feature pages This was how Dacre and Steven operated. It is no longer a "must read".The blame for this can only lie with its current editor, Max Hastings, though it is not really his fault - he is just the wrong man for the job. It is disengaged from developments that matter; it fails to capture the capital's zeitgeist; and it reports "new" trends after they have become passe. Sadly, nobody is saying the same today.It is not that today's Standard is a bad paper, although it is a shadow of its former self. It still goes through the motions of covering all the news and printing all the features that matter to those of us who live in London Yet it curiously fails to connect with the capital.