Good Times, Bad Times

"Well, yes. But it covers a wider period than that. Harry Evans was a really wonderful editor – and a fantastic journalist. If you asked British journalists today who they think is the best journalist of all time I imagine a large proportion would say Harry Evans, straight off. Under his leadership, the Sunday Times was well ahead of the pack. And you couldn’t tell what its politics were. It’s a different paper now – I wouldn’t have it in my house these days. The reason he was so good was that he understood reporting, which many editors don’t, and he really loved reporting, which many editors don’t. He would never back away from a fight. Yes, but more than that. Take the Philby case, for example. They took on MI6. Many editors would back away from that. When I first started working at The Guardian it suffered from a very weak leadership. I remember they would have stories and simply not print them. I did one investigation that wasn’t published, so I simply handed it to a politician who read out long passages in the Commons. As soon as that happened, and it all kicked off, The Guardian jumped on it and printed it without a problem. It’s not like that at all now. Yes, The Guardian were brave with that. And all the more so because they had just finished a very lengthy and rather scary legal battle with Tesco over tax-dodging allegations. It must have been tempting to have backed away from printing this investigation, but Alan [Rusbridger, editor of The Guardian ] is very good. It was a bold move, too, in that long articles about corporate tax aren’t going to sell millions of copies. But doing investigations like these is a very important job for newspapers. One of the reactions we had was from journalists on other papers saying that this was the kind of work they had come into newspapers to do and wishing that their newsrooms would let them. Not political interference. I’ve had weak editors pulling stories out of fear of one kind or another and you’ll get very commercially minded editors who interfere in the choice of stories and in the way that they’re written in order to sell the paper. There’s a lot of that in Fleet Street. Well, not before it was published. I was still being paid a freelancer’s retainer from The Guardian while I was writing the book, and that didn’t stop me writing quite a detailed chapter on some of the practices of its sister paper, The Observer . Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . After it was published some people were quite upset with me – some named individuals who hadn’t come out of it very well, and some Fleet Street dinosaurs who simply didn’t want me writing about what goes on in the newsroom. But I also had a lot of feedback from journalists from all over this country – and then from all over the developed world, really masses of them – saying, effectively, “Thank God you wrote that, because it’s the same where I work”."