Abstract
The death of Peter Preston prompts an examination of his career — and questions about the future of the paper to which he gave his working life
I owe my chance of a career on The Guardian to three people, two of whom had walk-on parts. I The third was then-features editor Peter Preston, later the paper's longest-serving editor since CP Scott. A seemingly indestructible survivor of childhood polio, of the IT revolution and the price war, of Jonathan Aitken's scary libel case, his death from cancer at 79 was announced in the new year.
In places where it mattered, PP got a pretty generous send-off, even in the Mail, which would have pleased him though he'd have tried not to show it. Not making a fuss (he might have said a “pother”) was central to who he was. Virtually no shouting, only a sharper edge to his laconic but jaunty conversational tone indicated displeasure, perhaps a slight flush in the cheek if it was serious. I doubt if he swore more during his entire 20-year editorship than some Fleet Street rivals managed to cram into a single sentence.
And, as some obituarists noted, Preston stubbornly refused offers of help to get his coat on. Steadying his good-ish arm with his dud one while serenely single-finger typing was a skill he had mastered long ago, but watching him trying to amend an office rota pinned at shoulder height could be painful. I only ever witnessed one successful intervention. “Give me the pen, you silly bugger,” said John Hall, one of the features subs. Peter really liked John. We all liked Peter and felt personal loyalty to him. He gave us subs a weekly “writing day” on which to pursue novelists or movie stars. If you wrote up yesterday's Rod Steiger interview (as I once did) and took it in for the late 6 o'clock shift for someone else (always) to sub, you could write the headline and cut the piece in on the stone at midnight for an overnight page. Lovely and very Prestonian. He gave you chances.
So beneath the physical frailty and the decidedly unimposing manner of an unclubbable, unpubbable loner, we knew there lurked a fierce determination, a humane and nimble intelligence, above all a passion for newspapers - we will come to online later - which never dimmed. The long months the 10-year-old Master Preston spent at death's door in an iron lung had ended his goalkeeping career, but instilled deep reserves of resilience not given to every ex-editor of Cherwell - or even fellow Millwall fans.
Reporter and foreign correspondent, columnist, diarist, headline and leader writer, production wiz, stand-in film critic, PP could do most of it. And if his prose style could be as Delphic as his conversation, that merely added to his mystique. No one knew how he voted. As a non-joiner, he was not very party political, his default position probably Lib Dem, I suspect, but always moderate and pragmatic. “The pol staff is divided 3–2 as to whether or not today's editorial is endorsing Heseltine for next Tory leader. Please advise,” I recall emailing him from Westminster after a cryptic leader over Thatcher's dispatch in 1990. The word from Olympus came back in the affirmative, despite Hezza's earlier role in the 1984 prosecution of Foreign Office leaker Sarah Tisdall, Team Preston's darkest hour.
What of substance did Peter achieve in the transient ever-changing business that no longer even provides tomorrow's chip wrappers? First, he began modernising the old Manchester Guardian, even before he inherited the editor's chair from Alastair Hetherington in 1975, overhauling deputy editor John Cole in the process. He invented the irreverent Miscellany column, ironic and mischievous. He hired John Kent (Varoomshka) and Posy Simmonds (the Weber strip). He nurtured pioneering women's page journalists such as Jill Tweedie, Liz Forgan and Polly (whatever became of her?) Toynbee.
He cannibalised the news list for well-written feature-ish pieces which he could promote on his own pages and encouraged bigger, better pictures and design, not to mention punning headlines. I got the credit for putting “The Biggest Asp Disaster in the World” over Derek Malcolm's unkind review of Charlton Heston's 1972 Anthony and Cleopatra, but the idea was John Hall's. Puns served their attention-grabbing purpose for a time. As editor, PP banned them. Lighter, brighter, yes, a “qualipop paper” was the old hands’ jibe. But by today's frivolous standards it was very solid and blokeish: pipes, beards and jackets with leather elbow patches were still common. The smell of PP's tobacco meant he was hovering. He was a hoverer, silent with it.
I first met Peter in The Guardian's then-London HQ in Gray's Inn Road when I applied to become the features department's late-night sub in the summer of 1971. Robert Armstrong, a pal from regional NUJ politics, by then a features sub in The Guardian's Manchester office, had tipped me off about the vacancy. At the time I was a general news reporter on Charles Wintour's Evening Standard with its seven editions a day. But Stuart Kuttner, later an innocent bystander in the News of the World phone-hacking affair, had just taken over from the veteran Ronnie Hyde (news editor since 1941) and I decided I would not prosper under his regime.
I am grateful to them both for the push, though Robert, who went on to be The Guardian's rugby correspondent, failed to warn me against trying to shake PP's good hand when a vague wave was more acceptable. Despite which, I got the job and went on to sub the late-night eloquence of Nancy Banks-Smith, Michael (where are they now?) Billington and Philip Hope-Wallace.
A bottle between six
PP was usually forgiving of transgression, even when arts editor Mike McNay and I had a fight after I got back late from the pub to sub in the late notices. My excuse was that Christine Keeler had been a guest at a leaving do in the Blue Lion across the road. The late Alan Watkins loved to joke that Guardian men were “half of bitter, then home to the suburbs” types, that the real Bohemians worked at the Telegraph. True, but we weren't quite that dull and PP's nightly half bottle of red on the backbench signalled a modest cyclical swing away from the paper's ingrained, provincial puritanism. The cycle comes and goes.
On the rare occasions that Hetherington took his political staff out for dinner and asked the waiter for “a bottle of wine” the thirsty hacks were meant to share it. PP shunned over-priced eateries for homely cafes and deplored the Garrick and the cosiness it stood for; a kill-joy, merely frugal with the paper's money (his own too, I suspect). He paid star columnist Peter Jenkins's hefty Garrick bar bills (no one else's) because he knew they represented worldly value for money, but he had no desire to go there.
Jonathan Mirsky, the distinguished China scholar who filed from Hong Kong for The Observer (later for The Times), once made the mistake of giving the visiting Preston a lift in the white Rolls-Royce which the Mandarin Oriental always sent to collect him at Kai Tak airport. “This must be costing The Observer a lot,” PP less than graciously remarked. “I'm sure my hotel in Hong Kong tonight is costing less than yours,” countered the combative Mirsky. Years later when The Guardian bought and saved The Observer in 1993 - another Preston achievement - PP's introductory pep talk on the need for economy included a crack at the kindly Mirsky's Roller.
He had mean-spirited lapses like that, just as loner Preston had a near-permanent reluctance to share important information with close colleagues; “infuriating and sometimes insupportable”, as David McKie, one of his long-suffering deputies, wrote in his magisterial Guardian obituary. When another of them, Alan Rusbridger, once confided that “Peter doesn't tell me things, so I've decided not to tell him things either”, I took it as further evidence that Rusbridger would be the man to take his job.
A smooth succession duly occurred in 1995 after PP had clocked up his 20 years, though the aftermath proved bumpier. Conflicting claims on finite funds by both The Guardian and ailing Observer, very much Preston's baby, cost him both his titles, editor-in-chief and chairman of the board. A compulsive, workaholic writer, he retained columns in both papers for a while and would use his Observer media perch to criticise Rusbridger's growing commitment to “web first” journalism.
The projection of Guardian Online as a global product with no paywall to help recoup costs, especially in heavily-staffed Manhattan, clearly alarmed the frugal Loughborough grammar schoolboy in Preston. Fortunately, a combination of loyalty and that elliptical prose style ensured that not even the Mail noticed this running spat.
All that came much later. In his prime, Preston notched up a string of successes, commercial as well as editorial. Never headstrong, PP the outsider found it easier than many Guardian colleagues to navigate the swirling currents of Thatcherism, Bennery, Labour's breakaway SDP, the divisive miners’ strike. At times during the jingoistic Falklands War (1982) only the micro-left-wing Spartacist League and the Guardian's Peter Jenkins were stalwartly against it. His one smack of zeal was for European integration, though he tolerated dissent.
Personally trading information with Mohamed Al- Fayed, the Harrods storekeeper and thwarted influence pedlar, he also fought costly, uninsured and heroic legal actions over Peter Wright's Spycatcher book, against Neil Hamilton and Jonathan Aitken, battles brought to successful conclusions under Rusbridger. Against Aitken, only reporter Owen Bowcott's lastminute discovery of Mrs Aitken's Amex bill in the basement of a closed Swiss hotel saved the day for George Carman QC. The bill's timing was fateful to the ex-minister's credibility.
Not for the first or last time, victory prompted personal spite against the self-effacing editor. In a red-mist column, Paul Johnson accused Preston of a grudge against Aitken for carrying off his girl at a May Ball (wildly improbable even if they had been Oxford contemporaries), and of “forcing” the MP's dyslexic daughter to lie for daddy in court. Oh dear.
Most conspicuously on the debit side stood the Sarah Tisdall case. The Guardian did not know the Foreign Office leaker of the brown envelope which revealed details of Michael Heseltine's controversial plans to install American cruise missiles at RAF Greenham Common. It hoped he/she was a wily senior official, experienced enough to remove tell-tale details on the document, which the paper had rashly admitted not to have destroyed after printing it.
Battles lost and won
But it lost its court fight. Faced with prison (the easy bit) and rolling fines under Thatcher's trade union laws, legal processes which Guardian editorials had urged unions to respect, the paper gave in. It was an error of judgment for which Preston offered to resign. A 23-year-old clerk was duly jailed and disenchantment among the liberal chattering classes contributed to the 1986 challenge from The Independent.
Preston's Guardian was badly shaken but kept its nerve, imposed a radical redesign (1988) and slowly regained its edge as the new world of information technologies began to reshape Fleet Street in ways that required ever-deeper pockets. Some Preston achievements were commercial as well as editorial. Necessity drove PP and his ad-savvy managing director Gerry Taylor to introduce niche products such as Education Guardian, Media Guardian, Society and Environment Guardian. They attracted both readers and advertisers.
Well-fed on display and mainstream classified, Fleet Street fat cats scoffed at such earnest synergy. It was a different story when they fell on harder times and tried to do the same. Then Media Guardian's dominance became a lefty stitch-up with the lefty BBC, though The Lady magazine also advertised on those lefty pages. The rivals also copied G2's approach to a feature-led second section.
Some diversification into regional papers, magazines, even TV, to broaden The Guardian's supportive base, had proved less than successful. But The Guardian's long partnership with Sir John Madejski, Auto Trader's mastermind, philanthropist and Tory, proved to be its improbable Potosi mine, financial lynchpin of the Guardian Media Group (GMG) for decades. The proceeds of its subsequent sale sustain the paper today. So they must, now that The Guardian's advertising streams from media, the NHS and universities have mostly followed Auto Trader's secondhand cars and gone online.
Who would have guessed that 20 years on, despite many attempts worldwide to monetise online journalism via assorted paywalls or volume-driven free access (Rusbridger's article of online faith), most of the revenue stream would be mopped up by Google, Facebook and the other platform-not-publisher FANGs (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google). Certainly not Rupert Murdoch or Paul Dacre, but they had deeper pockets and stronger incentives to retrench. This is the brutal world which the post-Prestonians - Rusbridger since the bankers’ crash of 2008, Kath Viner since 2015 - have had to navigate.
It can be wonderful to work for a paper with no megalomaniacal proprietor, brilliant and indulgent though some Lord Coppers can be to their grubby hacks. Even Murdoch actually likes newspapers, unlike his kids who will sell them before the funeral. But when the shit hits the Fleet Street fan, well-mannered Hugo Young, Liz Forgan and the Scott Trust's current chairman, TV executive Alex Graham, are no substitute for ruthless Lord Coppers or rapacious shareholders demanding cost-slashing blood now.
Bye bye, under-performing supplements, cheerio News of the World and its jailed contacts. A great deal of harm can be done by a ruthless process (just look at the Telegraph under Dave ‘n’ Fred Barclay), but The Times enters 2018 in better shape than competitors might wish. Like a stately liner, The Guardian turns more slowly. After the recession, distressed colleagues would say: “My paper is laying off staff.” I would reply: “Which is more alarming in a recession? Laying off staff or taking them on?”
So The Guardian kept on expanding under Alan's bold leadership, agenda-setting and high profile, curiously charismatic for someone as soft-spoken, seemingly diffident as his two less public predecessors. As ad revenues disappointed and sales shrank in face of the emerging FANGs’ oligopoly, there was another battle over the fate of The Observer (saved again!) and eventually a voluntary - always voluntary at The Guardian - redundancy exercise among journalists.
After a pause, numbers started creeping up again. Retrenchment in America, where the bombshell scoop of the Edward Snowden revelations (I admired Snowden's measured public utterances as I never did Assange's) failed to generate the expected advertising bonus. It was followed by renewed expansion. I never quite got to the bottom of staff numbers in the US, but they certainly topped three figures, so at least 98 more than when I worked there.
“Invest your way out of trouble” is a good Keynesian precept for progressives. But when revenue projections fall short, things can get hairy, as Gordon Brown could explain to Jeremy Corbyn if Mr Corbyn ever thought to ask. The end of Alan's triumphant editorship in 2015 was battered by cross winds, much as Tony Blair's (both of them cool and persuasive ex-choirboys) had been after 2007. As fresh cuts loomed, Alan was widely perceived to have openly backed Janine Gibson's rival candidacy for editor. That only encouraged more editorial staff to endorse Kath Viner and for her to feel justifiably miffed.
The Prestbridger inheritance
As the FANGs ate Fleet Street's advertising lunch, Rusbridger's dominance of both board and trust was blamed for the cash crunch by some of the very executives who had signed his cheques and were now keen to offload their share of the blame. Rusbridger's defenestration as chairman-designate of the Scott Trust was far more brutal than PP's departure (no columns for Alan) and some briefings were unfair, but not wholly so. Ensconced at an Oxford high table, he is writing his memoirs, a good enough writer with a large enough vision to rise above mere score-settling.
The tortoise and the hare? Not really. Flighty hares do not last 20 years, despite the traps and snares. But as a provincial child of 1938, reared in his painfully bespoke version of post-war austerity, the Sage of Camberwell, the London suburb where his beloved Jean quietly raised her and “Pete's” four children (Ben now executive editor of The Sunday Times), must have viewed some of his successor's turns of speed with dismay, sighs and much chewing of Biro ends, a Preston speciality. Relatively little saw daylight in uncoded form, but the wounds are yet to heal fully.
After his death, Viner wrote of PP's encouraging “more power to your elbow” emails. It is she who must grapple with the complex Prestbridger inheritance and shape Guardian 4.0 for the evolving digital era. It has meant more redundancies and cutbacks, plus daily online appeals for voluntary membership/supporter contributions. Some 800,000 supporters worldwide have not deterred the scorn of online bullies or rivals who prefer to take their subsidies from tax-shy or foreign oligarchs. On January 15, nine days after Preston's death, came the unkindest unwinding of all, the replacement of Rusbridger's much-praised but costly Berliner design (2005) with the tabloid format he spent much time and money to avoid.
Mopping up the blood on the balance sheet and restoring the health of Auto Trader's legacy cash pile (Rusbridger likened it to a media Wellcome Trust) has devoured much of Viner's energy, though the worst seems to be over. It is energy that might otherwise have refreshed the news operation, the heart of any newspaper, but not of her own CV. A former head girl of Ripon Grammar, the daughter of teachers, she delivered a keynote speech in November which committed the Viner Guardian to openness, equality and the restoration of public trust in the age of algorithm-driven fake news and Trump. The paper is more feminised and diverse, but torn in polarised times between its historic moderation and the appeal of Corbynism to both readers and younger staff who do not defer as they might once have done. Tough times lie ahead and Viner would do well to cement the loyalty of her greatest asset, her staff, out there, hands on, on the editorial floor, as Guardian editors do not always do. If she senses a hovering ethereal presence, the smell of tobacco or the sound of Biro chewing, she can take comfort from the knowledge that it is only PP mumbling a barely audible “more power to your elbow”.
Michael White is a former sub-editor, diarist, sketch-writer, Washington correspondent, political editor and columnist of The Guardian (1971–2016)
