Paul Anderson, Tribune 65th anniversary issue, 2 March 2002
I was editor of Tribune from 1991 to 1993, but I joined the paper in 1986 when it was edited by Nigel Williamson — a man who in a dozen years went from hippy to Bennite to Walworth Road apparatchik to senior Murdoch hack to hippy again. He made me reviews editor, a job I’d dreamed of doing since getting hooked on George Orwell in my early twenties, and the five years I did it were some of the happiest I’ve had. Neither Nigel nor his successor as editor, Phil Kelly, ever interfered with the pages. I commissioned and wrote just what I wanted.
I became editor when Phil left to become Michael Meacher’s spin-doctor, and I had two-and-a-bit years at the helm before defecting to the New Statesman. My first year covered the run-up to the 1992 general election — a journalistically frustrating time. Everyone in the Labour Party desperately wanted to win, so no one was prepared to write or say anything controversial.
After the defeat, the gloves came off, and life at the paper improved immeasurably. It’s not too boastful to say that Tribune had a year at its agenda-setting best, particularly after the pound crashed out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism on Black Wednesday. Looking at copies from that time, I’m struck both by the range of contributors and by the quality of Tribune’s journalism — particularly the feature pages edited by Caroline Rees and the interviews and news backgrounders written by staffers and regular freelances.
I’m proudest, however, of the stand we took on the disintegration of Yugoslavia. Alerted by Mark Thompson’s running commentary on the developing crisis and encouraged by Michael Foot, who moved into the Tribune office after retiring from the Commons in 1992, the paper was the first in the country to condemn British appeasement of Slobodan Milosevic and the first to demand intervention to save Bosnia.
Of course, editors and hacks have never really run Tribune. In my time on the paper, the real powers at 308 Gray’s Inn Road, as they had been for years, were the Sheilas (Noble and Marsh) and Jean (Gibbons), respectively the production editor, subscriptions manager and general manager of the paper.
Sheila N enforced standards of English and style more rigorous than any currently pertaining in the national daily press and somehow made sure everyone on the paper who wanted did lunch every Thursday. Sheila M persuaded subscribers who were about to lapse not to do so with personal letters dissociating herself and the socialists on the paper from the editorial line (a position of which I entirely approved). Jean managed to run the business side without ever issuing a rubber cheque — a considerable achievement in our desperate financial position. Had it not been for the generosity of its readers, Tribune would have closed in 1988, and it survived past 1991 only because of the savings we made from introducing desktop publishing.
It wasn’t all fun. Producing a political weekly on no money is stressful. We had rows in the office and in board meetings and repeated run-ins with politicians and spin-doctors. But I wouldn’t have missed a minute of it for anything. Here’s to the next 65 years.
