which way the balance tipped so far as regards the conduct of the paper whose fine tradition I inherited and which I have had the honour to serve through all my working life. Had it not been so, personally I could not have served it.
It is more or less inconceivable to imagine these words, or anything like them, from the lips of any newspaper owner today.
Since the predominant purpose of the Guardian lay in its influence, reporting, commentary and educative mission, it was obvious (to Scott’s mind) that it had to be an editorially led venture. Scott wanted there to be a ‘unity’ between commercial and editorial – both driven by the same values. But he was absolutely clear that ‘it is a mistake to suppose that the business side of a paper should dominate’. He had seen experiments to that effect tried elsewhere, and ‘they have not met with success’.
Between its two sides there should be a happy marriage, and editor and business manager should march hand in hand, the first, be it well understood, just an inch or two in advance.
The paper under Scott grew in influence far beyond Manchester. It was never afraid to be unpopular. At the end of the nineteenth century it was virtually alone in the UK press in opposing the Boer War and was excoriated for exposing the existence of British concentration camps – a moment when its reporters needed police guards as they turned up for work. In 1956, again, it stood virtually alone in condemning Britain’s foolish adventure in Suez. It exposed labour conditions in apartheid South Africa and, under Peter Preston,5 sleaze in parliament.
In 1961 it had taken an immense commercial risk by taking on an extra 500 staff to make the move from being a Manchester paper to one based in Fleet Street. The move nearly capsized the paper – but, with hindsight, it was a bold and visionary decision.
Some rivals in Fleet Street thought it was also self-regarding, prissy and politically correct. There was doubtless something in that. The early twentieth-century Tory politician Lord Robert Cecil once described the Guardian as ‘righteousness made readable’. There was something in that, too. But the ethos of the paper was formed by its history and ownership. As we’ll see by the end of this book, the correlation between ownership, profit, purpose and the quality of national conversation is a complex one.
The BBC was, in some ways, close in spirit – a publicly funded organisation dedicated to providing serious and trustworthy news. Large swathes of Fleet Street, of course, loathed the BBC and did all in their power to undermine or destroy it. The Murdoch family regarded it as a semi-socialist entity that affronted their view of how the free market was best placed to deliver what they regarded as independent news.
They didn’t much like the Guardian, either.
*
That was the paper Nick and I joined in 1979. The paper still had the feeling of a family newspaper. The generation in their late 50s or early 60s who were in charge had begun their careers in Manchester and seen the newspaper transition to being a London title. The Trust was then chaired by Richard Scott, a former Washington correspondent and grandson of C.P. Scott. Peter Preston, our editor, had been on the paper since 1963 and was four years into a 20-year spell as editor. His predecessor, Alistair Hetherington, had also done 20 years. People tended to spend their entire lives at the paper.
For much of its existence the paper teetered on the borderlines of profit or loss – supported, when it went severely into the red, by the profits of the Manchester Evening News. In terms of circulation it was ninth in the league of national newspapers. Gradually, in the early ’80s, the financial position of the Guardian improved. Preston was restless in modernising the paper and, in conjunction with the business managers, building up the classified advertising. By the late ’80s the paper had fat, extremely profitable print sections on Monday to Wednesday carrying hundreds of jobs in media, education and public service.6
Our day began around 10 a.m., by which time we were expected to have read most of the other papers. The paper’s first edition went to bed around 9 p.m. in the evening, though the flow of copy meant that, if you weren’t writing for the front page, they appreciated copy by about 6 p.m.
On most days you wrote one story, maximum two. So the day had a shape to it. Reporters were encouraged to be out of the office as much as possible. If you were in the newsroom there was time to read yourself in to the subject you’d been assigned, to make calls. A break for lunch. Some more calls. You might be writing a backgrounder – the context and analysis – in which case you’d start writing about 3 p.m. Otherwise you might have five or six hours on a story before you threaded your first sheet of carbon paper into the scuffed old typewriter.
Fleet Street, where most of the UK’s national papers were based, was both a community and a battleground. Before Murdoch’s great confrontation with the doomed print unions at his new plant at Wapping in 1986,7 most of the newspapers – nearly 20 of them, including Sunday editions, which mostly had separate staffs and editors – were gathered along or around Fleet Street, which runs from St Paul’s Cathedral and the Old Bailey in the east to the Royal Courts of Justice in the west.
To walk that half mile from Ludgate Circus to the High Court takes no longer than ten minutes. But – before Wapping – you would pass the glass, stone and marble-front edifices of the Express, the Telegraph, Reuters, Press Association. Down the eighteenth-century Bouverie Street – once home to William Hazlitt and Charles Dickens’ Daily News – lay the cathedral-sized press hall of the News of the World and the Sun, capable of thundering out 4 million copies in a night from presses weighing hundreds of tons, with print lorries and delivery trucks lined up along the narrow street to restock newsprint or race to the night trains.
The outliers on this map in the early ’80s were the Financial Times – a little to the east – and the Times and the Sunday Times, half a mile to the north. The Guardian, which only began to establish a significant London presence in the 1960s, shared printing facilities with the Times but its newsroom was in an unlovely ’70s converted light-engineering building in Farringdon Road, ten minutes’ walk from Fleet Street. It was always the slight outsider.
There was a demarcation between broadsheet, mid-market and red-tops in which supposed quality was in inverse proportion to proven popularity. Arguably the most serious broadsheet – the FT – sold the fewest: around 200,000 copies a day – followed in unpopularity by the Times, the Guardian and the Telegraph, which led the ‘serious papers’ with daily sales of around 1.5 million.
Then came the mid-markets – the Mail and the Express, each selling around 2 million copies – and finally the really popular red-tops, the Sun and the Mirror edging towards 4 million.8
*
My career took a traditional enough path. A few years reporting; four years writing a daily diary column; a stint as a feature writer – home and abroad. In 1986 I left the Guardian to be the Observer’s television critic – then a plum chair that had been occupied by Clive James and Julian Barnes. But I discovered I didn’t have the right temperament to sit at home watching video-tapes all day, and it was a relief when I was approached to be the Washington correspondent of a new paper to be launched by Robert Maxwell.9
The London Daily News was a brief adventure: Maxwell ran out of patience within six months of starting it and closed it even more suddenly than he had opened it. But I was in the US long enough to develop a life-long respect for American journalism’s methods, seriousness and traditions. If Fleet Street sometimes felt like a knowing game, American newspapers were soberly earnest. Back in the UK, I rejoined the Guardian and was diverted towards a route of editing – launching the paper’s Saturday magazine followed
