*
To compress a very long story into a very short narrative: the Taylor family married the Scott family. A young member of the latter tribe – C.P. Scott – became editor at the age of 25: by the time he died in 1932 he had not only edited the paper for 57 years, he also owned it. On the death, in rapid succession, of Scott and his son Edward, the family placed the paper into the care and ownership of the Scott Trust in 1936 to preserve and protect the Guardian ‘in perpetuity’.
The Scotts could have made themselves very wealthy by selling the Manchester Guardian to Lord Beaverbrook or any other number of suitors: instead they gave away their inheritance in order to sustain decent, serious, liberal journalism. They were not in it for the money. The Manchester Guardian was a public service.
Pause and reflect on that very unusual moment – described by Winston Churchill’s future lord chancellor, Gavin Simonds, as ‘very repugnant’ (‘you are trying to divest yourself of a property right’).2 Sir William Hayley, later editor of the Times, said of John Scott’s decision to, in effect, give away the Guardian: ‘He could have been a rich man; he chose a Spartan existence. And when he made up his mind to divest himself of all beneficial interest in them he did so with as little display of emotion as if he had been solving an algebraical problem. Most men making so large a sacrifice would have exacted at least the price of an attitude.’3
On the paper’s 100th birthday in 1921 Scott – who’d been editing for nearly 50 years – wrote perhaps the most famous short essay on journalism, with its pithy aphorism: ‘Comment is free, but facts are sacred.’4 He used the article to underscore his passionate belief that, while a newspaper was a business, it had little point unless it was more than a business. A newspaper could – then, as now – aim to be ‘something of a monopoly’. Many business people might relish that. Scott felt the opposite. The Guardian, he thought, should ‘shun its temptations’.
A newspaper has two sides to it. It is a business, like any other, and has to pay in the material sense in order to live. But it is much more than a business; it is an institution; it reflects and it influences the life of a whole community; it may affect even wider destinies. It is, in its way, an instrument of government. It plays on the minds and consciences of men. It may educate, stimulate, assist, or it may do the opposite. It has, therefore, a moral as well as a material existence, and its character and influence are in the main determined by the balance of these two forces . . . It may make profit or power its first object, or it may conceive itself as fulfilling a higher and more exacting function. I think I may honestly say that, from the day of its foundation, there has not been much doubt as to 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,