Q&A


What made you become a journalist? I went to Sussex University, which had a then cutting-edge approach involving doing bits of history, philosophy, literature, sociology, psychology and much else. I wrote a weekly essay on a subject I didn’t quite understand –perfect preparation for upmarket weekly journalism.


What other job might you have done/have you done? I applied to firms such as Ford and Unilever to work in marketing. But I told them at interview that they should be nationalised. They weren’t ready for that.


NUJ & Me


Peter Wilby is a former editor of the Independent on Sunday and the New Statesman


When did you join the NUJ and why? In 1968. An obvious thing for a Labour Party member to do.


Are many of your friends in the union? Since most of my friends are journalists, I should hope all of them are NUJ members.


What is the worst place you’ve ever worked in? Wapping, to which Rupert Murdoch moved the Times and Sunday Times (I was education correspondent at the latter) in 1986, sacking all the printers and clerical workers who had served the papers at their previous site. To work there, journalists had to cross picket lines. Some, calling


themselves ‘refuseniks’, refused to go. I joined them initially, then went, then left after a few months. That, I suppose, made me a ‘confusenik’.


And the best? The Independent in the first three years after its launch in 1986. It was a magical time as a new politically independent and, crucially,


proprietor-less newspaper steadily gained circulation until it was breathing down the necks of the Times and Guardian.


What advice would you give someone starting in journalism? Make yourself an indispensable expert in at least one subject.


Who is your biggest hero? Kingsley Martin, for surviving 29 years as New Statesman editor


And villain? Whichever of the Barclay family is most responsible for ruining the Daily Telegraph.


Which six people (alive or dead) would you invite to a dinner party? RH Tawney, Margaret Thatcher, Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, Rosa Luxembourg – and Joseph Heller who could make a comic novel out of such a riotous event.


What was your earliest political thought? That something wasn’t quite right about the British invading Egypt in 1956.


What are your hopes for journalism over the next five years? That it survives.


What’s been the best moment of your career? Becoming editor of the New Statesman in 1998, an ambition I had nurtured since I briefly worked as education correspondent for the magazine under Anthony Howard in the mid-1970s.


And fears? That it will be overwhelmed by fake news and penury.


How would you like to be remembered? I shall be flattered if I am remembered at all.


theJournalist | 19


2010 GEORGES DEKEERLE


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