The best of times, the worst of times
Reflections on the “golden days” of the Evening Standard.
Every morning when I sit down at my desk, the first thing I see is a mock feature page from the Evening Standard. Headlined “Alcatraz-on-Thames” and dated 27 June 1997, the mock-up was inspired by one of the last articles I wrote for the paper - a feature that I am ashamed to say triggered the collapse of a high-profile IRA trial and my departure from the paper’s then Derry Street offices.
In the original article, published a few months earlier, I had gone undercover to describe security procedures at Belmarsh, a remand prison where many of the UK’s most dangerous criminals were, and still are, held pending trial. However, shortly before going to press, the features desk asked if it could illustrate my story with pictures of three high profile Belmarsh inmates. Though I had not mentioned any of the individuals in my story, I approved the desk’s choice.
What I did not know at the time, but should have, is that the individuals were all awaiting trial at Woolwich Crown Court in connection with an earlier escape from Whitemoor prison, a supposedly secure facility in Cambrdigeshire, and that the trial judge had imposed strict reporting restrictions on the case (one of the men, I later learnt, was serving time for the killing of an SAS captain in Northern Ireland; another for conspiracy to cause a series of bombings).
On the advice of the Standard’s lawyers, the paper’s then editor, Max Hastings, offered a grovelling apology and, to my relief, he and I avoided a night in the cells. However, in Hastings’ eyes my copybook had been blotted and, soon after, I left for the Independent on Sunday – or as the mock-up of my story about Belmarsh put it, the “brutal and unforgiving” regime of Canary Wharf.
I only mention the mock feature page now because I doubt that many of the journalists departing the London Evening Standard this week following the paper’s decision to cease its daily print edition, can look forward to a similar parting gift. If you can’t afford to print a paper more than once a week, you’re hardy likely to squander precious newsprint on your former employees.
Although I’m not proud of my article about Belmarsh, I look back on the five years I spent as a feature writer on the Evening Standard with fondness. The period may have encompassed some of the lowest moments in my career but, in those days, the Evening Standard punched well above its weight when it came to setting the national agenda. And under Hastings, and my previous editor, Stewart Stevens, the paper published some of my biggest scoops – including a year-long investigation into M16’s role in re-equipping the Argentine Navy as part of an “intelligence gathering operation” that contravened UK sanctions on Argentina that had followed the Falklands War.
True, Hastings also killed my investigation in 1996 into how the then Labour trade secretary Peter Mandelson had afforded a £475,000 house in Notting Hill on an MP’s salary (Mandelson swore on his “honour” that the source was “family money” but later admitted he had required a £373,000 loan from the former Paymaster General, Geoffrey Robinson). And under Stevens’ editorship I also churned out my share of celebrity pap, including one article, during a brief hiatus in Jonathan Ross’s career, headlined “What’s become of the ‘Woss’?” (when I last checked, Ross’s career was still going strong).
But in those days the Standard, like other remnants of the old Fleet Street, had deep pockets and one morning you could be doing a vox-pop in Kensington High Street, the next you could be on a plane to Gaza (yes, in those days, the Evening Standard boasted a ‘foreign desk’).
In other words, it was the best of times, and the worst of times. Worst, not only because we sometimes made unforgiveable errors but because we rarely let the facts get in the way of a “good story’, particularly when the story idea came from the editor (Stevens was oddly obsessed with the Spectator’s high-life columnist, Taki Theodoracopulos, and once sent me all the way to Athens in search of compromising material on the Greek playboy).
But best, because if your story promised to expose hypocrisy in high places, or was simply a cracking yarn, you were granted considerable reign. That was how one day I found myself in Zurich interviewing a Swiss lawyer who had helped the mafia launder millions of dollars of cancelled US corporate bonds that had been destined for an incinerator in New Jersey (the story was headlined: ‘The biggest robbery in the world”).
Speaking of money, the most creative time of the week came on Fridays when you submitted your expenses. On the features desk (I can’t speak for news) it was considered “poor form” to submit anything less than £200 a week (the equivalent of nearly £500 today). Not surprisingly, the subs desk did a brisk trade in taxi receipts. Others wined and dined family members or bribed maître d’s to pass them diners’ stubs, the more expensive the better.
It was the hey-day of London’s restaurant boom and soon we were on first name terms with all the “hot” new chefs. At lunchtime, we would think nothing of hailing a cab to the Oak Room at the Hyde Park Hotel to check out “Marco’s” (that’s Marco Pierre-White to you) latest Michelin-starred creation. Another staff favourite was Wodka, which had the advantage of being a short walk from Derry Street and where Ken Livingstone could be seen dining regularly with a junior member of the paper’s editorial team and his later wife, Emma Beal (they met when Livingstone was the MP for Brent East and the Standard’s restaurant critic).
I also seem to recall that when Nick Jones opened the first Soho House above Café Boheme in Greek Steet in 1995, half of Londoner’s Diary attended the topping-out ceremony and, afterwards, several were gifted founding memberships.
In those days, Londoner’s Diary had a reputation for being a short-cut to the editor’s chair – Hastings had got his start there, as had Sarah Sands, who went on to edit the Telegraph when Hastings returned to the Standard. It also carried real literary clout: angered by a diary scoop revealing he had demanded a £500,000 advance for his novel, The Information, and then spent £200,000 repairing his crooked teeth, Martin Amis banned the diary’s then editor, Rory Knight Bruce, from covering the novel’s launch. Undeterred, Bruce hid in a broom closet, eavesdropping on guests like Salman Rushdie, before emerging to demand Amis tell him whether he was the model for Rory Plantagenet, the “cornily patrician” editor of an unnamed London evening newspaper’s diary column satirized in his novel. Amis confirmed he was.
But the fun couldn’t last. Circulation was already falling and, as the paper struggled to appeal to younger, upwardly mobile urban readers, advertisers began to take fright and pages were cut. In retrospect, the turning point came with the Conservative’s defeat at the May 1997 general election. As John Major made way for the first Labour Prime Minister in 20 years, it seemed the era of the era of Thatcherism and the hunting and fishing brigade was coming to an end (oddly, for the editor of a metropolitan daily, Hastings’ was obsessed with fox hunting and other country pursuits).
It was around this time, that the words “Internet” and “world wide web” began to be heard around the office and, if I remember correctly, that Associated Newspapers, the Standard’s then owner, began distributing mobile phones to editorial staff – a novelty that we thought of at the time as another “freebie” but which would spell the end of the industry as we knew it.
Looking back, perhaps the only surprise is that the Standard kept going as long as it has.
Ah the heady days of mid-90s London. You capture it well. Reading the Standard on the tube on the way home was a ritual.