Barrie Clement, The Independent’s former labour editor and transport editor, on a newspaper that didn’t toe the line
Farewell to the P
erhaps the philosophy of The Independent was best illustrated by an encounter in the newsroom.
A perplexed but highly regarded reporter who had recently left the Daily Mail – and was still bearing the scars – approached the determinedly anarchic Indy newsdesk in want of guidance. “What quotes do you want?” she asked home editor John Price. “What quotes do I want? What do you mean what quotes do I want?” said Price. “Just take down what the bloke says and we’ll put it in the paper.”
It was the only newsroom I worked in where there was absolutely no “line”. Unusually, the reporter’s function was not to gather information to reinforce the prejudices of the proprietor. In fact, there was no proprietor as such because ownership of the company was deliberately spread widely, across 30 City institutions. Opinion in the paper’s leader columns was pro market on economic issues and centre left on politics, although no one felt any pressure – overt or covert – to reflect that in news stories.
It could be a pretty lively place. The sports section in particular was 100 per cent “bloke”. It was directed by then sports editor Simon Kelner, who subsequently became editor in chief, and the subeditors used to sing “line full, line full” to the tune of the Portsmouth FC fans’ “Play Up Pompey”. Apparently, this was to celebrate the successful completion of a particularly tricky headline to which the whole department had contributed.
Then there was the “fairy dell”, as Price called it. This was not a politically incorrect reference to the sexual preferences of the inhabitants of this part of the newsroom, more a reference to their eccentricities.
Most afternoons, the casual observer might have ventured that there seemed to be a postprandial torpor in the newsroom. The casual observer might have had a point. Half-cut or not, we produced a great newspaper under the benign stewardship of Andreas Whittam Smith, founder of the paper along with fellow Telegraph refugees Stephen Glover and Matthew Symonds.
After an initial bedding-in period, it became the best national newspaper in the UK. Bar none. And it was brilliant fun. It was a kind of Guardian for grown-ups, written by journalists whose politics varied from right-wing anarchist to Trotskyist.
The tests were: is your piece accurate? Is it true? Can you
prove it? Is it well written? Is it fair? And … erm … if it’s not fair, is it interesting?
The paper specialised in breaking new ground. It was one of the first – possibly the first – broadsheet to devote a whole front page to a picture; this was a graphic photograph of the
12 | theJournalist
Clapham Rail crash in December 1988. It did much to change the way quality papers used images.
Despite his benign persona, Andreas could be brusque. Labour MPs Angela Eagle and Ann Clywd once came to the office to complain at length about a piece by reporter Peter Dunn which was an attack on New Labour based on interviews with activists. The Blessed Whittam Strobes, as Private Eye called him, finally had enough. The future film censor leant across the table and told the MPs: “You are not going to tell me how to run my fucking paper.” Andreas wasn’t averse to bad language in the paper either, provided a reasonable case could be made for it. The Indy was probably the first national newspaper to print the “c” word. During the Faisalabad cricket test in 1987, Pakistani umpire Shakoor Rana, with some justification apparently, called England captain Mike Gatting “a fucking cheating cunt” – a quote used verbatim by The Indie.
“ ”
The tests were: is your piece accurate? Is it true? Can you prove it? Is it well written? Is it fair? And … erm … if it’s not fair, is it interesting?
Perhaps The Indy’s greatest innovation was its reincarnation as a tabloid. It was the first “heavy” paper to do so. It was followed by The Times, while the Guardian made a Guardianesque decision to fudge the issue, eventually coming out in “Berliner” format, which was a half-way house. I arrived at The Independent in 1986 just ahead of its launch, with two colleagues from The Times labour staff. Don Macintyre, David Felton and I had declined Rupert Murdoch’s invitation to cross picket lines at Wapping and were in desperate need of a permanent gig. We fell on our feet. It was a bitter irony that The Indy’s state-of-the-art electronic production methods had been made possible by Murdoch’s cynical flit to Wapping and the consequent emasculation of the print unions. At least the new paper was produced at unionised printing plants.
Subsequently, Murdoch took his revenge on the successful Independent by halving the cover price of The Times. Whittam Smith’s idiosyncratic reaction was to increase the price of our paper. The rationale was that the increase was a symbol of the quality of The Independent and that people were always prepared to pay extra for quality. They weren’t. I will always remember the meeting to set up the NUJ chapel. A refugee from Wapping, no less, asked whether there was any point in having a branch of the union at The Independent. After all, Andreas was such a nice chap (I paraphrase). I was about to make a robust intervention, but was restrained by the peerlessly reasonable Macintyre who successfully argued for the establishment of the chapel without resorting to industrial language.
One thing I remember about the company structure at the beginning was that no one earned more than 10 times the wage of the lowest paid. This was a system that contrasted vividly with other businesses at the time – and certainly bears
CHRIS RATCLIFFE
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28