I wish I had written more for the paper myself, especially editorials. On Saturdays, I gave priority to reading news and feature proofs and laying out the front page. Instead of working on leaders drafted by office pundits, I should have written more of them myself.
Another regret I have as I look back on more than half a century since I first climbed the Dickensian staircase to join the Coventry Standard in 1960 is that I was promoted so quickly through the ranks that I never got the chance to be a sports editor or a magazine editor on the way to the top. I would also have enjoyed making more documentaries for television. Still, I can hardly complain about the life I have been immensely lucky to enjoy and which has taken me to so many parts of the world.
After leaving The Observer I spent some time presenting the breakfast show on LBC radio, which meant rising at 3 a.m., reaching the studio at 4 a.m. to prepare the programme and write a daily press review, then go on air from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. It was both exhilarating and exhausting, especially as I then frequently caught a train to Sheffield to supervise the launch of the new Department of Journalism Studies, returning to London the same day to resume this punishing regime. Part of me – the part that needed more sleep – was grateful that the job ended after nine months when the company lost its franchise.
• • •
As for the Rowland period, which I have described in detail earlier, I saw my role as taking any flak myself and keeping him off the writers’ backs, so that they didn’t feel that the owner was looking over their shoulder all the time. I mostly succeeded in this, though it became harder in my final few years in the editorial chair, after the publication of the special edition on the DTI report into the Harrods affair had brought so much public attention and made the staff ultra-sensitive to the slightest sign of interference.
Friends tell me the special edition was a mistake, and they may be right, certainly as far as my reputation and that of The Observer were concerned. But, as I have already explained, I didn’t feel I had any choice in the circumstances. I didn’t actually do it to benefit Lonrho, as people assume, but to get lawyers off The Observer’s back.
• • •
I have visited twenty countries (so far) to lecture on journalism or join panel discussions or conferences, mostly about the threats to a free press. The list (not in any order) includes Spain, Egypt, Germany, Italy, the USA, Canada, India, Turkey, South Africa, Argentina, Kenya, Trinidad, Barbados, Lebanon, Russia, South Korea, Peru, Belgium, Singapore and Ethiopia.
In Ethiopia, I found myself at a welcoming drinks party, given by the British Council, with about two dozen would-be journalists – mostly press officers, in fact, since the country had no independent media to speak of – who were standing around in glum silence. I broke the ice by announcing: ‘Will Manchester United supporters please come to this side of the room and Liverpool supporters go over there?’ The effect was remarkable, causing a buzz of excitement and chatter that lasted all evening.
The follow day I was asked by one of the audience what ‘spin doctor’ meant. I struggled with a cricket analogy, but they wouldn’t have that, pointing out that the phrase was also used in America. Finally I spluttered: ‘Bend it like Beckham!’ – at which they all stood up and cheered. Once again sport had provided the key to global communication.
After I had completed the course, I was asked if I would address the whole Ethiopian Cabinet. I gave them my usual spiel about the need for a free flow of information to make a country efficient and for its people to feel they have a real stake in the society. The grey-looking men in suits looked back at me blankly through their shades. I left with the feeling that I had made no impression whatsoever, and the country has shown absolutely no sign since of opening up. Even so, it was extraordinary that they were even prepared to listen.
When I flew to present the annual West Indian journalism awards, I was met at the airport in Barbados by my hosts, who insisted that I should be whisked off immediately to the studio, since the event was being shown live on television and was already behind schedule. With difficulty, I persuaded them to allow me to stop off at my hotel briefly for a shower and a change of shirt before I could face the cameras.
In Calcutta, I took part in a panel discussion in a football stadium in front of an estimated 14,000 people. As it happened, Private Eye accused me of absenting myself from the office on that particular Saturday to get up to no good. On my return, I was able to tell Richard Ingrams that I could produce 14,000 Bengali witnesses and a newspaper picture to prove that I was in India. He agreed to publish an apology.
The Calcutta event was arranged by my friend M. J. Akbar, one of India’s most distinguished journalists and authors. We had first met at the home of Mark Tully, the veteran BBC correspondent in New Delhi. I remember Tully, wearing a white kaftan like an Old Testament prophet, walking around with a drink in his hand and warning his guests that the West didn’t understand the force of religion in Asia and the Middle East and that one day we would feel the force of it.
• • •
The most serious event I took part in was a conference in South Africa during the final days of apartheid, organised by Harvey Tyson, an energetic South African journalist who attracted fellow editors from all over the world to provide support for the country’s beleaguered press. I was asked to ‘evaluate’ the conference at the end; no easy task, especially as I had to criticise in their presence two speeches by ministers of the apartheid government.
The opening address had been given by Katherine Graham, Watergate heroine and by then chairman of the Washington Post. Some of her comments are still relevant now:
‘Governments are too quick to cry national security when often they only want to make their own job easier, to protect themselves from embarrassment, or carry out a policy or programme that could not win public support.’
And again: ‘When governments or their leaders try to persuade people they are suppressing information in the interests of the people themselves, I tend to believe that’s precisely the information the people most need to know.’
I had first met Mrs Graham in 1975, soon after I was appointed editor of The Observer and a few years after the Watergate scandal had forced the resignation of President Richard Nixon, thereby conferring everlasting global celebrity on the Post and on her and her executive editor Ben Bradlee. It was a dramatic day when I went for lunch with them in Washington, with helicopters on the office roof carrying newspapers to defeat a strike by print workers.
I quoted another conference speech that seemed to me to hit an important note. It was from Bill Kovach, who went on to be Washington bureau chief of the New York Times and one of America’s most respected journalists. Although clearly directed at apartheid South Africa, his comments are just as valid today:
Conflict which cannot be resolved by debate is likely to be resolved by force, for the truth is always there. It pounds like the surf against the shore, relentless and irresistible. Like a rock which stands before the wave, a government which stands against the truth is eaten away, its credibility undermined, and its form will eventually collapse.
I ended my speech with a quotation I have used many times from the same Tom Stoppard play, Night and Day, which I quoted before. A seasoned foreign correspondent says: ‘I’ve been around a lot of places. People do awful things to each other. But it’s worse in places where everybody is kept in the dark. It really is. Information is light. Information, in itself, about anything, is light. That’s all you can say, really.’
And, of course, he’s right: that’s all you can say, really.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I must first thank my wife Claire for encouraging me to write this book and for providing an invaluable sounding board while it was being written – and especially for the forbearance she has shown in taking on additional domestic chores while I was failing to do my fair share of basic parental tasks. There are several friends, too many to mention by name, who should also be thanked for pressing me to write;
one even suggested that I should invent an affair with the Queen Mother to add some spice to the book.
I am eternally grateful to my Observer secretary, Barbara Rieck, now back in her native Australia, for the ultra-loyal support she always gave me and for organising my papers so well that even I, the least organised of men, could usually find what I needed when I needed it. Barbara typed up many of the original diary entries I have relied on to prompt my memory. My thanks are also due to Gina Hallam, who typed up some diary entries I had written in a barely legible scrawl and also input a number of articles and documents produced in a pre-digital age.
I am grateful to Nicholas Morrell for reading and correcting some chapters involving Lonrho. Parts of the chapter on Dr Banda (‘Kamuzu’) were taken from a talk I gave on BBC Radio 4 about my time as an editor in Malawi, which was later reproduced in The Listener. Some stories in the chapter on my late colleague Lajos Lederer are derived from his private papers and from some articles he wrote about himself in The Observer. I am immensely grateful to Randolph Lederer for unrestricted access to his father’s archive. Some of the material in this chapter about Sir Robert Mayer appeared in an article I wrote for The Oldie.
In the chapter on Farzad Bazoft I have made use of some recent material unearthed by The Observer in Iraq, more than twenty-five years after Farzad’s execution. The chapter on Colonel Gaddafi (‘Muammar’) relies partly on a joint article I wrote for The Observer with Colin Smith after we had interviewed him together; the best phrases were undoubtedly his. The chapter on Mohamed Fayed (‘Tootsie’) contains some points from an article I wrote for The Observer when Harrods was sold to its new Qatari owners in 2010. Some parts of the chapter on Len Hutton appeared in an introduction I wrote for a book of tributes after his death.
Finally, I owe a profound debt to the dozens of Observer journalists, living and dead, who wrote and edited the many thousands of articles that appeared in over 900 editions of the newspaper during my editorship. I hope I have done them justice.
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INDEX
21 Club 1
Addenbrooke’s Hospital 1
Adler, Sue 1
Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) 1
Afghanistan Kabul 1
Africa Centre 1
African National Congress (ANC) 1
Aged Mineworkers’ Home 1
Aitken, Max 1
Alexandra, Princess 1
Algeria War of Independence (1954–62) 1
Allason, Rupert 1
Ali, Muhammad 1
Alton, Roger 1
Amis, Kingsley 1, 2
Amis, Martin 1, 2
Anderson, Robert O. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
Andrews, Barbara 1
Andrews, Ted 1
Andropov, Yuri 1
Angola 1, 2
Anne, Princess 1
Apponyi, Count 1
Arab Spring Libyan Civil War (2011) 1
Arco (Atlantic Richfield) 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
Argentina 1
Armstrong, Sir Robert 1 My First Hundred Years 1
Arnold-Foster, Mark 1
Arsenal FC 1
Arts Council 1
Ascherson, Neal 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
Ashes 1
Askar, Kadem 1
Aspen Institute 1
Associated News 1, 2, 3
Astor, Bill 1
Astor, Bridget 1
Astor, David xi, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 0213, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28 A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush 1
Great Grain Race, The 1
Astor, Jackie 1
Astor, Nancy 1
Astor, Waldorf 1
Astor Trust 1
Athenaeum 1
Attenborough, David 1
Attenborough, Lord Richard 1
Attlee, Clement 1, 2
Australia 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Melbourne Olympics (1956) 1
Australian, The 1
Austria 1, 2 Vienna 1
Austro-Hungarian Empire 1
Aw Sian, Sally 1
Ayer, Sir Freddie 1
Azerbaijan Baku 1
Aziz, Tariq 1
Ba’ath Party (Iraq) 1
Bablake School 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Bacon, Francis 1
Bahamas 1
Ball, Alan 1, 2
Balmoral 1
Bambridge, Anthony 1
Banda, Dr Hastings 1, 2, 3, 4 Cabinet Crisis (1964) 1, 2
Barbados 1, 2
Barnes, Julian 1, 2
Barneston, Lord 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Barry, John 1
Barrymaine, Norman 1
Bazoft, Farzad 1, 2
Beaverbrook, Lord 1, 2, 3
Beaverbrook Newspapers 1
Beeston, Richard 1
Behan, Brendan 1
Belgium 1 Brussels 1, 2
Belgrade Theatre 1
Bellingham, Henry 1
Bellini, Giovanni 1
Beloff, Max 1, 2, 3
Beloff, Nora 1, 2, 3, 4
Bellow, Saul 1, 2
Ben-Gurion, David 1
Benn, Tony 1, 2
Berlin, Isaiah 1, 2, 3
Berloff, Nora 1
Bernard Shaw, George 1, 2, 3
Bernst
ein, Carl 1
Berzinski, Monty 1, 2
Bessell, Peter 1
Bevan, Aneurin 1, 2
Bevin, Ernest 1
Biffen, John 1, 2, 3
Biko, Steve 1
Birt, John 1
Bishop, Patrick 1
Bizet, Georges Pearl Fishers, The 1
Black Consciousness Movement 1
Blackpool FC 1, 2
Blair, Tony 1
Blom-Cooper QC, Sir Louis 1
Bloom, Ronnie 1, 2, 3, 4
Blunt, Anthony 1
Boardroom 1
Bock, Dieter 1, 2, 3
Bolton, George 1
Bolton Wanderers 1
Boothby, Lord 1
Bordes, Pamella 1, 2, 3, 4
Bosnia 1
Botswana 1
Botticelli, Sandro 1
Bower, Tom 1, 2
Bowlby, Lady Lettice 1
Bowles, Camilla Parker 1
Bown, Jane 1
Boxer, Mark 1
Bradman, Donald 1
Bradshaw, Thornton 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
Bragg, Melvyn 1
Brasher, Christopher 1, 2
Brazil 1, 2
Brearley, Mike 1, 2
Brezhnev, Leonid 1
British Airports Authority 1
British Airways (BA) 1, 2
British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 Any Questions? 1, 2, 3
Compact 1
Newsnight 1, 2
Radio 1 2
Today 1
World Service 1
British High Commission 1
British Press Awards 1
British Sports Trust 1
Brittan, Sam 1
Brivati, Brian 1
Brooke, Lt Col Humphrey 1
Brown, George 1
Brown, Gordon 1
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