When I took over the Telegraph, I was acutely conscious that I had no experience of running anything except a pheasant shoot. To resurrect the paper, I was dependent upon a group of colleagues whom I came to adore- Veronica Wadley, Nigel Wade, Neil Collins, Trevor Grove, George Jones, Jeremy Deedes and a few others- to enable me to carry off my own masquerade as an editor. The one who taught me more than anyone else was Don Berry, formerly of Harry Evans’s Sunday Times, with whom I worked for 16 years at the Telegraph and Standard. I had met Don when I wrote for the ST myself, just before I was appointed to the Telegraph and he became a Wapping refusenik. I knew that he possessed technical skills which I woefully lacked, in design, lay-out and typography.
But he also possessed gifts which went far beyond these. He became keeper of the conscience, not only of myself, but of the whole paper. Each day, Don asked questions which any decent editor must ask, and asserted principles which any newspaper should respect- yet which some receive press awards for flouting. The first was to demand of every story: ‘is it true ?’. The second was ‘give readers the facts before you comment upon them’. One day when I wrote a leader supporting Margaret Thatcher’s denunciation of the Irish attorney-general’s refusal to extradite an IRA suspect to Britain, Don said: ‘But we haven’t told people why the Irish government has done this’. He insisted that we must fill columns of precious news space with the full text of the Dublin judgement, before running our leader. He urged the importance of publishing a politician’s speech before offering a columnist’s view of it, together with generous extracts from important White Papers. In the interminable debates which we conducted, about how to define the identity of our new Daily Telegraph, Don exercised a decisive influence in persuading me that it must above all be a news paper, rather than a comment paper. I am not here saying that his view deserved to be eternally valid; merely that Don flew the flag for the priority of newspapers as purveyors of information before also recognizing their function as platforms for opinion. Then as now, it seemed to both him and me that Fleet Street possessed far more fixed slot columnists than there were competent practitioners to justify their space.
Many of Don’s precepts became fixed in my own mind. For instance, never pose a question in a headline which is not answered in the copy below. A redesign is not of itself a panacea for a struggling newspaper, as so many marketing managers fool themselves. Design, Don argued, must grow out of content, not dictate it. He taught me that graphics can be no better than the briefing provided by news reporters to the artist; that successive pages must offer changes of pace; that Sundays are different, and demand fresh minds to produce credible and original papers.
You may wonder why Conrad Black did not cut out me as middle man, and simply make Don Telegraph editor. The answer is that he was fatally crippled by the fact that he is an incredibly nice man. He once said to me: ‘I shall never be an editor, because I couldn’t do what you’ve done this morning’. ‘What’s that ?’, I asked. ‘Sacked four sub-editors’. I did my utmost to make our good people feel valued, and the bad, idle, or drunken ones feel sufficiently unloved to go away. William Rees-Mogg criticised me in print for being ‘a sacking editor’. Yet Rees-Mogg was a notably unsuccessful editor because he saw himself as The Times’s chief leader writer, and cared little what went on at the back of the boat, in steerage. Although I never wholly convinced my own staff that I read sports pages properly, I strove to persuade them that I cared mightily about every corner of the paper. If my own editorships were flawed by the fact that I am not a political animal but merely a journalist who happens to have some political views, I suggest that obsessive political animals are generally unsuited to running newspapers. People like Harry Evans, Paul Dacre, David English, Charles Wintour- acknowledged as the great editors of my time- have always pursued journalistic agendas which merely sometimes happens to be political.
I have a much better life today than I did as an editor, because one is free from the awful and unbroken strain. There is only one aspect of the role which I miss- the collegiate one, working each day alongside wonderfully clever colleagues whom I held in deep respect, and even loved. Some editors are one-man bands, presiding from remote summits. But I was always aware that I could not last a day without the team who did the real work, and had most of the ideas. Neil Collins, our City editor, often listened to me moaning for hours over lunch about my job, Conrad, the management, circulation, advertising and so on. At the end of my great whinges, Neil would say: ‘Yeah, I understand all that. But it beats working’. So it does, for a host of people in our trade, lucky enough to spend our office hours doing something which rouses our deepest passions.
Today, amid widespread dismay among journalists about the shortcomings of some proprietors and managements, it is a common mistake to idealise newspapers of the past. I am not persuaded that, collectively, current British owners are madder or nastier than their predecessors. It is absurd to romanticise Northcliffe, Beaverbrook, Maxwell. My mother, a veteran of 1950s Fleet Street, described to me the thrill of working for Beaverbrook’s titles in their heyday, above all because they were so well-resourced. But she concluded: ‘Don’t listen to anybody who talks about Beaverbrook’s charm. He was a horrible man’. It has been said of the Beaver that he never espoused any cause in his titles that was both honourable and successful. The Thomson era, an exceptionally enlightened proprietorship, was relatively brief.
In our own times, I was fortunate enough to work for Conrad Black during his early years as a proprietor, when he was amazingly indulgent to my political wetness. He allowed himself to be persuaded that commercial success was more likely to come from pursuing a journalistic agenda than a political one. Had I stayed at the Telegraph, however, it would have ended in tears. Conrad came to believe that he could make profits, and also pursue a right-wing agenda. The Rothermeres pere et fils are by the most enlightened owners I have ever worked for. They believe in journalism. They invest generously in their titles. They give editors extraordinary latitude. I have never forgotten Jonathan asking me before the 2001 general election: ‘Who will the Evening Standard come out for ?’, without making the slightest attempt to influence the call. That is the sort of proprietor who commands fierce loyalty from editors, as it certainly did from me. The Rothermeres like journalists. Rather than make or break governments, or pursue self-aggrandisement, they simply want to own successful titles. As an industry, we would be in much better shape if there were more like them.