of one building in Farringdon Road, and another team in a Victorian loft building across the way in Ray Street. We were, at the margins, beginning to pick up some interesting fringe figures who knew something about computers, if not journalism. But none of this was yet pulling together into a coherent picture of what a digital Guardian might look like.
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An 89-page business plan drawn up in October 1996 made it plain where the priorities lay: print.
We wanted to keep growing the Guardian circulation – aiming a modest increase to 415,000 by March 2000 – which would make us the ninth-biggest paper in the UK – with the Observer aiming for 560,000 with the aid of additional sections. A modest investment of £200,000 a year in digital was dwarfed by an additional £6 million cash injection into the Observer, spread over three years.
As for ‘on-line services’ (we were still hyphenating it) we did want ‘a leading-edge presence’ (whatever that meant), but essentially we thought we had to be there because we had to be there. By being there we would learn and innovate and – surely? – there were bound to be commercial opportunities along the road. It wasn’t clear what.
We decided we might usefully take broadcasting, rather than print, as a model – emulating its ‘immediacy, movement searchability and layering’.
If this sounded as if we were a bit at sea, we were. We hadn’t published much digitally to this point. We had taken half a dozen meaty issues – including parliamentary sleaze, and a feature on how we had continued to publish on the night our printing presses had been blown up by the IRA – and turned them into special reports.
It is a tribute to our commercial colleagues that they managed to pull in the thick end of half a million pounds to build these websites. Other companies’ marketing directors were presumably like ours – anxious about the youth market and keen for their brands to feel ‘cool’. In corporate Britain in 1996, there was nothing much cooler than the internet, even if not many people had it, knew where to find it or understood what to do with it.
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I found the sheer power of an editor frightening – but temptingly enjoyable. I hope I had just about enough self-awareness early on for the unease to trump the heady, head-turning possibilities of gripping the megaphone. Prime ministers, generals, spies, archbishops, princesses, ambassadors, bankers, film directors, presidents, rabbis, oligarchs and business leaders would come to lunch at the drop of an invitation. There was often deference in their voices. They wanted to be liked by newspapers.
Over the years I watched many fellow editors at close quarters. Several of them visibly enjoyed the deference. Among the ranks of editors some were reserved, shy, almost scholarly. Some were humane, sane and straightforward. Some were brash, extrovert, larger than life. A very few were fully fledged bullies – self-important, thin-skinned, mean-eyed and aggressive individuals. These characteristics didn’t necessarily bar them from being very capable editors.
There was nothing in the job description of an editor that said they had to be well-rounded, compassionate and lovable. Some of the ‘best’ editors were none of the above. Some pounded through long days (it was rumoured) on a cocktail of alcohol, adrenalin or cocaine. Some had (to me) quite strange ideas about class, race, immigration, gender, politics or sex, which dominated their worldview. Some editors kept these opinions, beliefs or prejudices to themselves. Others let rip with them in their newspapers.
Here’s the paradox: sometimes the most demotic figures produced ‘brilliant’ newspapers of raucous energy and flair. They were regarded as ‘great’ editors, in touch with popular opinion, their finger on the pulse. They could write the killer headline, crop a picture and lay out a page like no one else. They were true ‘professionals’.
There was little to stop them behaving like unfettered autocrats: within their newsrooms they enjoyed absolute power, sometimes verging on the despotic. In some cases, their internal control was mirrored by an apparent craving for external dominance.
James Graham’s 2017 play about the birth of the Murdoch Sun, titled Ink,2 portrays one such (real-life) character in its editor, Larry Lamb3 – so ruthlessly driven that even the ‘Murdoch’ character is visibly alarmed by the monster he has unleashed on the world.
Lamb’s successor, Kelvin MacKenzie,4 was even more over the top, with a gift for sugaring lethal aggression with a quite winning seaside humour.
MacKenzie pushed the sales of the Sun to well over 4 million with a mix of bonk journalism and populist politics. The more odium he attracted from the despised bien pensant Establishment (as he saw them), the more he felt encouraged to be increasingly outrageous in exposing homosexuals, adulterers, hypocrites . . . and anyone else qualifying for the category of general scumbag.
Complaining readers were treated with contempt. According to the authors Peter Chippendale and Chris Horrie in their book about the Sun, ‘He would pick up their letters and say: “What a wank. What a complete fucking wank,” spitting the words out and holding their letter at arm’s length between finger and thumb as though it were made of some particularly repellent substance.’5
But no one put a check on MacKenzie, even when his notoriously offensive front-page ‘The Truth’ headline about the supposed behaviour of fans at the Hillsborough tragedy in 1989 was shown to be a travesty – and led to an entire city, Liverpool, boycotting the paper in perpetuity.
In 2004 – 15 years later – the Sun admitted the treatment of this story had been ‘the most terrible mistake in our history’. That did not stop MacKenzie’s return to the paper as a columnist in 2006; or being hired as an opinion writer by the Daily Mail in 2011; or by the Telegraph in 2013; or returning to the Sun in 2014. He was eventually sacked by the Sun in April 2017 after comparing a mixed-race footballer with a ‘dim-witted’ gorilla. It was all good fun until it wasn’t.
Today, MacKenzie’s 13-year dominance at the paper seems an era of considerable bigotry, cruelty and prejudice rather than wit, brio and much-envied (and imitated) professionalism. There are editors, then and now, whose behaviour would – in any other context – seem borderline unhinged. They appear, to an outsider, worryingly aggressive and obsessive. They seem to derive pleasure from threatening, humiliating, harassing or intimidating their targets.
A newspaper is probably the last institution or organisation in the democratic world where such people would be allowed to operate with quite so little scrutiny or redress. Anyone who tried to run a government, school, public company, hospital, charity or prison in such a monocratic way would not survive in the modern age. And they would be savaged by the press.
I also knew that no newspaper could be edited by committee. In the end someone has to call the shots and take responsibility for the multiple decisions, small and large, involved in daily editing. One editor of the Daily Mail, Mike Randall, once counted 200 decisions he took in a single day. If you got 50 per cent right, he reckoned, you were doing well.6
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The absence of a controlling owner meant we could run the Guardian in a slightly different way from some papers. Each day began with a morning conference open to anyone on the staff. In the old Farringdon Road office, it was held around two long narrow tables in the editor’s office – perhaps 30 or 40 people sitting or standing. When we moved to our new offices at Kings Place, near Kings Cross in North London, we created a room that was, at least theoretically, less hierarchical: a horseshoe of low yellow sofas with a further row of
