The personality of today’s Observer was shaped in good measure by David Astor, its editor from 1948 to 1975. His enormously wealthy family had bought the paper in 1911, mainly in order to acquire political influence and support the Conservative party. Both his father and his mother – the terrifying Nancy Astor – had been Tory MPs. But David, to the occasional fury of his mother, had more progressive ideas. And as it turned out, he had five great qualities as editor.
First, he was brilliant at spotting and nurturing talent. He pulled together an astonishing line up of writers – people like George Orwell, ‘Fritz’ Schumacher, Anthony Sampson, Michael Davie, Nora Beloff, Kenneth Tynan, Clive James, Katharine Whitehorn and many others. His idea was to recruit talented people and turn them into journalists, and by and large he succeeded. He saw himself and his staff “as liberals, as internationalists, as journalists”.
Second, he liked to switch the editorial spotlight onto stories that really mattered but which, for one reason or another, were often being ignored by the rest of the media. The great example of this was sub-Saharan Africa, where what Prime Minister Harold Macmillan famously described as the winds of change were blowing hard in the 1960s. The Observer understood and supported the argument for democracy and independence across the continent, nowhere more so than in apartheid South Africa, where it was calling for sanctions against the government from very early days. Astor became a friend of Nelson Mandela before he was committed to prison, and supported him throughout his long ordeal.
His third quality was bravery. The outstanding but by no means the only example of this was the Observer’s aggressive coverage of Britain’s involvement in the Suez crisis of 1956. In response, Observer trustees resigned, advertisers ran for the hills, Colonel Blimps spluttered treason. But there is no doubt the paper had made the right call.
Fourth, he was just a very good editor. He wasn’t a great intellect, and he couldn’t always make up his mind: Katharine Whitehorn came up with the line “the editor’s indecision is final”. But he knew what he wanted and what he didn’t want in the paper, and he wasn’t as interested in breaking news as he was in what were called “scoops of interpretation” – shedding fresh light and new ideas about important issues. And given his personal wealth, he wasn’t much concerned with making money. The Observer was there to generate ideas, not dividends.
This meant he could take risks that others might not. For example, he loathed the idea that advertisers might seek to influence editorial content. An extreme case was the motor industry, where favourable write-ups of a new model could bring lavish entertainment for the journalist and lots of advertising for the paper. So Astor brought in an unknown Swiss journalist to report on the Earls Court Motor Show in 1961. The result was a firm thumbs down for British cars - and a large group of outraged manufacturers, who said they would never advertise in the Observer again.
The fifth and most important quality was that David Astor’s Observer had a sense of purpose. An independent editorial stance was important, but it was not enough. The paper also had to stand for a system of ideas and a pattern of constructive reform. And as it turned out, those ideas had been developed through personal experience. Astor explained what this meant in a memo written in 1959 under the headline On the Soul of the Paper.
“In the character of this paper, ethics matter more than politics. The particular ethics could be roughly defined as trying to do the opposite of what Hitler would have done. In fact, that may be their historic origin, as the paper’s present personality was established in and just after the last war by people drawn together more by being ‘anti-Fascist’ than by anything else”.
He went on: “Personally, I admit to being haunted by what Hitler showed to exist in all of us ordinary people, and therefore to being especially interested in antidotes to the kind of thinking he stimulated in people and they so readily adopted. I don’t think that kind of thought and behaviour is specifically German, and believe that those who do are themselves unconsciously thinking in his terms”.
The business of journalism has changed fundamentally over the past sixty years. Much increased competition meant that the Observer was struggling to find readers from the late 1960s onwards, and mounting losses eventually forced the family to sell the business.
But the values Astor stood for are still relevant today. At a time when autocrats are grabbing political power around the world, an independent and progressive voice like that of the Observer’s matters as much as it has ever done in the paper’s long history.
