When I heard that Andreas Whittam Smith had died at the age of 88, I felt a greater sense of shock than I had expected. In the past 30-odd years, I had seen him only five or six times. We were no longer close. In fact, on one occasion around the turn of the century, he miraculously disappeared after we had been approaching each other in a quiet Kensington street. I had looked down for a few seconds to await the moment when we would stand face to face. I looked up again, expecting to see my old colleague and friend in front of me. He had vanished.
There was a time when I saw Andreas several times a day. Matthew Symonds, the other founder of The Independent, was often there. How many meetings did the three of us have, how many lunches and parties? Thousands, I would guess, from the time we began planning The Independent in June 1985, to the moment I left the company almost exactly six years later.
I remember the parties vividly. Andreas embraced any excuse to crack open a bottle of champagne. We celebrated raising £2million “seedcorn” capital in his Kensington house, not far from the street where he ducked behind a row of parked cars all those years later. There was a party when the raising of £18million was completed, and there was a huge, raucous shindig on the evening before our first issue appeared on October 7, 1986. Circulation milestones were regularly honoured. The launch of our Saturday magazine was marked, as, of course, was the birth of the Independent on Sunday.
The memory of all those parties, and of Andreas’s quietly exuberant presence, saddens me. It is not only that he is dead. The Independent as we conceived it is no more, though it survives online and makes a modest profit, which the printed version did only briefly in its early days. Indeed, Andreas told me in around 2010, during one of our rare meetings after I had left, that the paper and its Sunday sibling had notched up combined losses of more than £300million in their lifetimes. He and Matthew had by then long departed. For 15 years, it had lain in the benign, though perhaps not journalistically inspired, hands of the Irish billionaire Tony O’Reilly, and was about to become the property of the Russian-born Evgeny Lebedev.
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You have to be quite old to remember the launch. We claimed that it was the first new quality daily newspaper for more than a hundred years. It’s not true, as some later suggested, that it was an instant triumph. Sales declined alarmingly month by month, and losses were considerable – so much so that there was soon talk of refinancing. The title took time to develop its personality. Some people found it long-winded and boring. Private Eye, nicknamed it the Indescribablyboring, a moniker that wasn’t ditched when it became a success.
In February 1987, circulation bottomed out and began slowly to rise. The young title won some notoriety by running excerpts of Peter Wright’s Spycatcher, a candid account of his career in MI5 that the Thatcher government had banned. The fractious general election campaign of late May and early June 1987 was covered by The Independent in an even-handed way that lived up to its name. A poll we commissioned around that time suggested that our readers were split almost equally between the three main parties, Tory, Labour and Alliance. No other title could have boasted that.
Happy days! Young people walked with The Independent tucked under their arms in such a way that the masthead could be seen. They wanted their association with this elegant, free-spirited, proprietor-less newspaper to be known. It could occasionally be spotted as a free prop in television advertisements for the same reason. It gave distinction to the perhaps humdrum “product” that was being promoted. Almost everywhere there was praise, sometimes even from journalists on rival papers. Acclaim went to all our heads, perhaps particularly Andreas’s.
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It is certain that The Independent would not have been born without him. After Eddy Shah’s plans to launch Today became known, Andreas asked a contact in the City in early 1985 whether in principle it would be possible to raise money for a new quality daily. The answer was yes. Andreas had previously tried to start at least two small businesses with no success. Yet the entrepreneurial spirit still smouldered in him. Aged nearly 48, he had been City editor of The Daily Telegraph for eight years. His entire journalistic career, which began in 1962 after a short stint working for NM Rothschild, had been spent in financial journalism. Few, if any, of his contemporaries had a pedigree that would appeal as much to the money men whose investments we would need.
He soon involved Matthew, a Telegraph leader writer who wrote a column on the paper’s City pages, and by June I had joined them. If it can be stated unequivocally that The Independent would never have existed had it not been for Andreas, it can be said with almost equal certainty that without Matthew’s drive and tenacity the project would have foundered in its early days.
Andreas still had not unrealistic hopes of succeeding Bill Deedes, who even his admirers agreed was flagging as editor of The Daily Telegraph. The paper was running out of money and Conrad Black, who had recently taken a small share in it, was hovering covetously in the wings. Andreas had the bright idea, which he put to Lord Hartwell, the Telegraph’s elderly proprietor, in May 1985 that new capital might be raised by inviting readers to invest.
Hartwell’s goose was cooked when his senior executives swiftly rejected the proposal. Seven months later, the paper was in Conrad Black’s hands.
Even by the summer, Andreas hadn’t wholly given up hopes of being installed as the Telegraph’s editor, either under the Hartwell regime or in the event of Black winning control. His heart was not yet entirely in our new enterprise. It was Matthew who pushed us on, arranging the next meeting, insisting that we produce more detailed financial plans and, a few months later, bringing in Douglas Long, a former chief executive of Mirror Group Newspapers, to give us invaluable advice.
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Andreas once said to me that he saw the function of an editor as being similar to that of a conductor of an orchestra. His role was to bring out the best in other journalists. In some ways, his long immurement in financial journalism was a limitation. There were lots of things he didn’t know, as he would have cheerfully admitted, at least in the early days. His experience in the City had given him a nose for a good story, and he had an eager appetite for a scoop. Yet there were inevitable weak spots.
One was design. The Independent, as it was described by us to prospective investors, would look to the future with its many pages of colour and bold headlines. The paper that appeared in October 1986 was restrained, and seemed as much part of the past as the future. Our first arts editor, Tom Sutcliffe, justly called it “classic with a twist”, borrowing the phrase from the fashion designer Sir Paul Smith.
In the months before launch, there had been heated and sometimes vituperative debates about the appearance of The Independent. Andreas, pulled in different directions by opposing factions grew increasingly exasperated. On one occasion, he exclaimed: “This is hopeless. Somebody says this is better, someone says that is better. It’s meaningless – it’s like discussing Bordeaux, saying that Chateau-this is better than Chateau-that.”
We got there in the end. Andreas, was usually guided by sound instinct in matters of which he was ignorant. It was a narrow squeak, though. I am almost certain that The Independent would have flopped if it had appeared in the garish raiment we outlined to our investors.
The paper’s famous use of black-and-white pictures wasn’t the brainwave of any of the founders. Brilliant photographers such as Brian Harris (who, sadly, has recently died) flocked to The Independent, whose modern regional presses enabled a higher standard of reproduction than Fleet Street with its antiquated machinery could then achieve.
Andreas wasn’t a hands-on editor in the mode of Paul Dacre or Harry Evans. For the most part, he let departmental heads get on with it, intervening only intermittently. He seldom took much interest in the foreign pages, which I edited. His talent lay in delegation and getting the best out of people. That is why he saw himself as a conductor.
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Colleagues sometimes compared Andreas to a bishop. He had an episcopal air – lofty and deliberative – that justified the description. His father was a canon in the Church of England, as, curiously, was mine. But if he was a bishop, he was an unusual one. Many years later, I described him in a Daily Mail column as “an odd mix of 90 per cent Anglican bishop, 10 per cent member of the Baader-Meinhof gang”. It was a joke with a core of truth. The Baader-Meinhof gang were, of course, left-wing terrorists who operated in West Germany during the 70s.
When I wrote that piece, Andreas was president of the British Board of Film Classification, in which role he was gaining a reputation as a very liberal-minded censor. He wanted to go further and had just written in The Independent recommending that there should be a sex shop in every town. His idea – which seemed to me utterly barmy – was that such a revolution would kill off a thriving underground market in extreme sex videos.
The combination of prelate and extremist, in which the former predominated, was often a winning one. He was at heart a conservative man – a liberal Tory, I would say. But he was sometimes drawn to more radical ideas. For example, he once delivered a sermon to me about the iniquity of passing on any wealth to one’s children.
As an editor, he embraced some policies that certainly weren’t Tory. He had a republican streak and made known his dislike of royal stories. He was delighted when the home editor Jonathan Fenby relegated the birth of the Duchess of York’s first child to a news-in-brief column on page two. The pages of The Independent became a no-go area for members of the royal family, except for the Queen and, very occasionally, Prince Charles.
The paper migrated to the left in its early years, until it occupied roughly the same political territory as The Guardian. That wasn’t the original intention of the founders; if nothing else, it was commercially unwise. I believe that the leftwards journey was hastened by a large number of Wapping “refuseniks” who joined the paper before its launch – journalists from The Times and Sunday Times who couldn’t stomach Rupert Murdoch’s attempt to crush the unruly print unions. Andreas appeared to be relaxed about the drift to the left. There is much truth in Robert Conquest’s dictum that “any institution not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing”.
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If Andreas inclined more to the left as time went on, in commercial matters he remained a fully-fledged capitalist. Ralph Dahrendorf, a German academic of leftist persuasion who had succeeded Marcus Sieff as chairman of our company, known as Newspaper Publishing, dismissed him as “a man of the political right”. The two fell out when Andreas, supported by Matthew and some directors, tried to buy The Observer in 1993. Their apparent intention was to close down the venerable Sunday paper to give free rein to the Independent on Sunday. (I say “apparent” because by then I’d left the company after my own run-in with Andreas and have no first-hand knowledge. Their plan was never publicly stated.) Dahrendorf believed that the deal was morally flawed. It collapsed, partly because three Newspaper Publishing executives were spotted watching The Observer being printed, as though the paper were already their own. Even Tiny Rowland, who had finally agreed to sell the Sunday title, was reportedly angry. In the end, it was The Guardian that bought The Observer.
Andreas was chief executive of Newspaper Publishing, as well as editor of The Independent, until shortly before he was ousted in 1994. The sometimes tiresome chores involved in running a company didn’t greatly engage him but he was attracted to deal-making almost from the beginning. He loved the drama of it. As early as the summer of 1987, he talked about acquiring The Times, though nothing came of that idea. There was a lengthy first attempt to buy The Observer. As Newspaper Publishing grew weaker, there were successive negotiations with European newspaper investors La Repubblica and El Pais in which we were increasingly cast as supplicants. The final talks were with Mirror Group Newspapers and also Tony O’Reilly, who ended up taking over the company.
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Why did The Independent fall from the heights? There was hubris, and there was fate in the shape of Rupert Murdoch. We managed to launch the Independent on Sunday on the cusp of the worst recession since the Second World War. Even so, the company eventually stabilised. By September 1993, The Independent was selling roughly the same number of copies as The Times. Then Murdoch launched his price war, slashing the cover price of The Times from 45 pence to 30 pence, and later to 20 pence. The paper we had started was wounded and never really recovered. Its circulation fell and went on falling. Notwithstanding all our propaganda against proprietors. The Independent was forced to find an owner, though Tony O’Reilly, and later Evgeny Lebedev, were hardly ideal.
After Andreas’s death, Amol Rajan, the last editor of the print edition of The Independent, wrote on social media that Andreas “profoundly transformed British journalism for the better, and forever”. I hope, but don’t know, that this is true. For a time, the newspaper illuminated the firmament. Who can be sure what legacy it has left, or know how many lives it enriched? The work of many hands, some of them never acknowledged by Andreas, in the end it stands as his unforgettable creation.