There are many ways to conceive the job. An editor may find fulfilment and perform a service as the prudent custodian of a tradition, like the canny Sir Gordon Newton, who made no waves but quietly enhanced the reputation of the Financial Times. Or the satisfaction, and the acclaim, may come for the editor as a radical who recasts a title to his own tastes, as David English did with such flair at the Daily Mail.
We reflect the origins of our national newspapers by the habit of categorising editors as writing editors (C.P. Scott, etc.) or impresarios of news, sport and entertainment in the Northcliffe tradition (Arthur Christiansen, etc). I don’t mean to suggest that all the “writing” editors write their leaders and go off to the club; or that the “news” editors are just showmen. William Haley was all over The Times every day. He sharpened the news and finally he put news on the front page, arousing as much rage as I did 15 years later, when I kicked classified advertising off the back. Peter Preston’s questing spirit invested his whole paper. The Mirror’s Hugh Cudlipp was the Merlin of tabloid display, but he was a pungent writer, too.
Only a few editors have been able to make a mark with sheer moral authority and literary cogency. One thinks of Haley and his leader “It IS a Moral Issue” during the Macmillan Government’s Keeler-Profumo crisis, and again “Why the Pound is Weak”, written furiously on the backs of envelopes on his way to Printing House Square. There were no new facts here; just a cyclone blowing through. It helped Haley that he succeeded in cultivating an Olympian detachment from mortals; he was the only man in London, it was said, with two glass eyes. Haley’s successor, William Rees-Mogg, retailed wit rather than wrath. His brilliant concoctions never failed to amuse and startle, and sometimes they were also convincing. He came memorably to the rescue of Mick Jagger, sentenced to jail for having four amphetamine tablets, with an editorial flouting the sub-judice rules. Headlined “Who Breaks a Butterfly on a Wheel?”, it was a single impudent dart that punctured the rhinoceros hide of British jurisprudence — and helped to get the Jagger sentence quashed. It was as bold in its day as Paul Dacre’s stunning Daily Mail front page re-accusing the Lawrence suspects of racial murder.
Editors have been at their most effective, I think, when opinion takes a ride on such risk-charged reporting — and they don’t give up at the first call from Sue, Grabbit and Runne: Peter Stothard’s courage at The Times in the Ashcroft affair; Alan Rusbridger’s in the questions-for-cash scandal. For sheer guts, it is hard to top The Observer’s David Astor and Alastair Hetherington, new to the Guardian chair in 1956. In the furore of their unpopular dissent over the Suez crisis, they pressed on despite immediate losses of thousands of readers and of advertisers. But the episode raises the question, is it great editorship or reckless indulgence to hazard the viability, if not the very life, of your newspaper?
Astor and Hetherington are both considered to be in the dissenting tradition of C.P. Scott and The Guardian in the Boer War, but Scott had a much more political concept of editorship that many today would find disturbing. For 15 years while editing the paper he sat as a Liberal MP. He and Lloyd George were thick as thieves. Where should journalism end and politics begin? Is it all right for an editor to work for a cause secretly as well as in the public columns of his newspaper? Scott rejoiced in using personal clout as an intermediary, working backstage both for the establishment of a Jewish state and a precarious settlement in Ireland. Yet a line was surely crossed when, for political reasons, he kept news out of the paper, and also refrained from comment, as did Geoffrey Dawson of The Times in attempts to appease the Nazis. This is utterly different, in my view, from an editor’s discretion on the keeping of confidences. Alan Rusbridger, Editor of The Guardian, is currently under attack for keeping the confidences of a Guardian breakfast with Gordon Brown. Andrew Neil has suggested this is suppression. It is nothing of the kind. It is the doubly honourable refusal to break a promise and betray a source.
My own feeling on becoming a national editor was that I should personally keep a distance from government, which was not difficult since neither Tory nor Labour prime ministers proffered an embrace. Independence was facilitated by having reporters who were not merely plumbers dealing in Whitehall leaks — what for so long passed as reporting. The velocity of The Sunday Times was the product first and foremost of reporters zealous for real news and not gossip or kite-flying. They were of iconoclastic temperament. Getting the right chemistry without blowing up the lab is perhaps the single biggest worry for an editor.
As the original staff was refreshed by newcomers, the group was not merely clever, but developed an esprit de corps that was an amalgam of idealism and integrity affecting the whole conduct of the paper, including the editor. I think this spirit, not of hostility to government or business, but independence, was indispensable to success.
It certainly was nourishing to me in various encounters with authority, even when those who knew what was afoot were very few. The cat-and-mouse of publishing the Crossman Diaries is a case in point. For several months the Cabinet Office used every artifice to try to take the meat out of the diaries and we moved under cover of darkness to keep it in, beginning with a dawn attack.
The reporting on Thalidomide, Ireland, Robert Maxwell, the Vesteys, the cover-up of Philby, the avoidable DCl0 air disaster, wars in the Middle East, Vietnam, Nigeria and genocide in East Pakistan, were probably the most thorough we achieved — Insight’s reporting of Belfast’s Bloody Sunday reverberates still — but I concede that there were occasions when we were tempted beyond reporting and editorialising into the shallow end of the political pool.
I doubt whether the Thalidomide campaign would have succeeded without the willingness to form an alliance with the Labour MP Jack Ashley. So I am glad I overcame my scruples about going down to Westminster to do a little lobbying. But both with Ireland and Thalidomide, facts — and fairness — were more important than advocacy.
Am I allowed a retrospective vote in this game? Of all my predecessors, I would be hard put to choose between Thomas Barnes of The Times and W.T. Stead, the 19th-century editor-campaigner of the The Northern Echo.
Stead did not make the preliminary list, but he was both a crusader and one of the most creative talents ever to take up journalism. From Darlington, as a young man he roused the whole of Europe against Turkish atrocities in Bulgaria — the Holocaust of the 19th century, worse than Bosnia in the 20th. In London later, as editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, he exposed the trade in prostitution of minors in England and went to jail on a malicious technicality.
The same man had the virtuosity of a tabloid editor. He invented the big-time interview — and subheadings in the long runs of type. He also contrived to be on the Titanic, reading the Bible, when it went down. An editor with that sense of where news might be found deserves a special place in any pantheon.
Harold Evans was Editor of The Sunday Times 1967-81 and The Times 1981-82. Based on an edited version of an article in the latest British Journalism Review. Copies from 01702 552912, £4.95. Subscription: 020-7374 0645.
