The I of the storm

Memoirs by distinguished newspaper editors raise a problem. Are their authors watchers of the game or stars on the field? They are stars, of course, otherwise we wouldn’t be reading them. Still, it is usually good form to make a passing shot at self-effacement. The renowned Ben Bradlee of Watergate fame opened A Good Life (1995) by confessing it “a bit cheeky” for a newsman to pen a memoir when “trained to stay off the stage and keep himself…out of the story”.

Feigned modesty is not Lionel Barber’s thing. He is centre-stage on every page of The Powerful and the Damned, his vivid chronicle of 14 years as editor of a revived Financial Times. Whether directing colleagues, dealing with owners or mingling with premiers and bank chiefs, Barber’s pronouns are “I” and “me”.

The name-dropping is intense, and readers are rarely allowed to forget the friends Barber counts among his sources. His later years as editor become, at times, a blur of “pro-consular visits” with his wife to foreign postings or weekend escapes to exclusive conferences in the woods or mountains with other alpha couples (“Sun Valley…was our favourite”). When Barber quotes the Daily Mail’s tag for him – “a weapons-grade social climber” – it feels less sneer than accolade.

Distracted by such fluff, the envious, the aggrieved or simply those more socially distanced than Barber might toss aside his memoir as celebrity gossip. They would be wrong, for two good reasons. As journalist and editor, Barber has much to be immodest about. As author of a newspaper memoir, he has found a clever way to lighten an often-ponderous genre.

Colleagues and competitors will attest that Barber was an excellent and rigorous editor. He steered the FT from being a print-first to digital-first paper. He kept in balance its competing editorial elements – politics and foreign affairs; business and finance; books, arts and high-end shopping; analysis and opinion. He encouraged outside and staff opinion writers – notably Martin Wolf in economics and Gideon Rachman in foreign affairs – to find fresh narratives for an international, business-minded liberalism now the old ones lie in ashes.

Commercial progress underpinned editorial success. In Barber’s years, the FT completed the switch from an advertising-based to subscription-based business model. It locked up online content, making readers pay (a lot) for every last comma. Reported paid readership topped one million in 2019, by which time the FT had lost any lingering sense of inferiority to its now-overtaken, Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal.

After a period of staff cuts, Barber restored morale. To complaints and threats from aggrieved notables, he stood by his journalists. When the FT exposed fraud in the publicly quoted German online payments processor Wirecard, its reporters in Germany faced threats of criminal charges for false reporting and market collusion. Once assured by outside lawyers that the charges were false and his journalists’ stories true, Barber backed them and won.

As editor, in sum, Barber earned the right to tell his story, and he tells it well. On show here is his chief talent: a sense of news, a feel for the nub, for what catches ear or eye. With verve, Barber runs two stories in parallel. One is a lightning tour of how “men of power” in business and politics have managed or mismanaged the big themes and episodes of the past two decades. The other is an inside and remarkably honest take on how well or badly the FT has held power’s feet to the fire.

Both stories are told in brief dated entries, few more than a page, with context, reflections and sharp judgments (often on Barber himself ) added below in italics. Barber entertains but also, in his way, informs. Readers who keep up with events do not learn a lot, but his pointed quotes and thumbnails nicely crystallise memories of persons, incidents and ideas.

Instead of thumb-sucking thoughts on American neo-unilateralism, Barber gives us Trump’s telling one-liner from a White House interview: “I believe in relationships…alliances have not worked out well for us, okay?” Rather than soliloquise about the rise of authoritarians and one-party politics, Barber quotes to better effect Putin’s withering brushback to him in the Kremlin. Barber asked Putin if popular distrust of government might not spread to Russia. Power’s task, Putin tells him, is to create “a stable, normal, safe and predictable life” for ordinary people. Western liberals forgot that truth and, in consequence, “the liberal idea has become obsolete”.

Barber, or his publisher, added a sub-title “Private Diaries in Turbulent Times”. A minor fib. Barber tells us he did not keep a daily diary but wrote from “notes and published material”. Colleagues, in this connection, have asked if Barber did not wrongly include material told him off the record. A delicate, contested point. Barber gives no direct defence for his reported indiscretions, although one is available from Max Hastings in Editor (2002): “A few politicians have made me blush by quoting some of my own sillier remarks in their memoirs and diaries, it seems not unfair to get a little of my own back.”

Certain internal FT episodes, notably Barber’s departure in January 2020, are left in half-light. Did Nikkei, which bought the FT from Pearson five years ago, fire him? Barber had outserved every FT editor but the celebrated Gordon Newton (1950-72). He suggests that by 2018 he expected to go within a year or two. Colleagues were still surprised to learn late last year, at a moment when the FT was again hitting commercial bad weather, that Barber’s goodbye package was just over £1.9million, including £505,000 for “loss of office”.

Editorially, what stands out by contrast in The Powerful and the Damned, besides Barber’s news sense, is his frankness about what the FT was aiming to do and how well it did it. He begins by admitting to big “misses”: identity politics, Brexit, popular distrust. After the financial meltdown of 2008, he wished he had given more of the front page to Martin Wolf ‘s doubts about “unfettered capitalism”.

Barber’s mea culpas, however, are not penitential. His paper, to put it crudely, is written for those engaged in, or concerned with, capitalism. Though rightly proud of its investigations, it is not Private Eye or Canard Enchainé. To report well on power, journalists have to mingle with the powerful. The line between spectator and player is blurry, especially for editors. Barber knows how far a non-muckraking paper can go. His mini-sermon on the last page about the mission of journalism is stirring, but should be read to the letter. With italics added, he was proud, he said, to be “able to speak the occasional truth to power”.