Journalism's magisterial voice

By Jim Naughtie
BBC Radio 4 Today programme

Hugo Young has died aged 64

Hugo Young's death robs political journalism of its most magisterial voice.

First on the Sunday Times and then, from the early Eighties, on the Guardian his were the columns that no serious politician (or newspaper rival) could afford to miss.

They were authoritative, sharply observant of the stratagems of government and political people and delivered in a lucid style that any essayist would wear with pride.

He was firmly on the liberal side of politics but had no truck with narrow party loyalty.

Driven by a strong moral sense - he was a devout Catholic - Young developed his ideas in the late Sixties and the Seventies on politics, Europe, the law and liberty and followed his own course thereafter, weaving a thread through all the passing events of the day that seemed to make sense of them.

Journalistic calling

He knew all the politicians who mattered, but used to say that very few of them indeed were close friends. It was deliberate. He kept his distance.

In that regard he was the British equivalent of one of the great American columnists like Walter Lippman - a part of the political scene who never allowed himself to be drawn into its dark recesses.

Journalism for him was a trade and a calling and, especially on his years on the Guardian, he was fearless in his dissection of policies or party manoeuvres which he believed were undermining the serious business of government (or opposition) even if the perpetrators might have been expected to be his ideological bedfellows.

Jim Naughtie worked with Hugo Young at the Guardian

His special quality lay in his consistency. On the Sunday Times he developed a fascination for questions touching on the law and individual liberty and he returned to them again and again.

On BBC Radio 4 he wrote and presented a groundbreaking series in the 1980s, produced by Anne Sloman, which probed deeper into the workings of the judiciary than any broadcast journalism had done before.

As with the law, so with Europe. From the Seventies onwards he charted meticulously the tangled relationship between Britain and the continent, arguing passionately for the commitment which he believed no government had had the courage to make. His book This Blessed Plot about that European history is a masterly study.

Alongside that volume, his biography of Margaret Thatcher, One of Us, published in 1989, was the first important exposition of her character and leadership - a book which was written from a fundamentally critical viewpoint but which won the admiration of many Conservatives, including the subject herself.

Somehow he was able to rise above the surface of political argument and seem a voice that had to be heard, or at least acknowledged.

Peer praise

As a colleague on the Guardian there was something headmasterly, or even priestly, about Hugo. He was known as The Cardinal.

This was affectionate, but carefully respectful. His professional habits were meticulous and impressive, always trying to raise journalism above the level which, instinctively, it often tries to sink below.

If he had something to say (and he never wrote a column if he didn't) he was going to say it with a flourish.

His education at Ampleforth and Balliol College, Oxford, gave him a certain authority, which could appear a touch arrogant to those who didn't know the personality underneath, and it was that style which gave his columns week by week their distinctive ring.

If he had something to say (and he never wrote a column if he didn't) he was going to say it with a flourish.

The big issues

Under six prime ministers, all of whom knew him well and had a sharp respect for his judgement, he chronicled the great questions of the day, and it was his interest in the big picture that made him the figure he become.

The sweep of policy towards Europe or in transatlantic relations (he was fascinated by the United States), the changes in the party system in Britain, the argument on the Left about tax and spending, on the Right about the proper attitude to "society" - all these were grist to his mill, which ground exceeding well.

Among politicians of every party and wherever political journalists gather he will be remembered as a man of decency and humanity, with fire in his belly

He was one of the first journalists to write seriously about the workings of Whitehall and to take trouble, over many years, to explain its ways, both in print and on radio.

The recent publication of a selection of his columns from the start of the Thatcher era to the present Blair crisis charts a career that kept him at the top for decades.

Since the early Nineties he had chaired the Scott Trust, owners of the Guardian, and supervised its acquisition of the Observer, one of the happier Fleet Street marriages.

He felt at home there, a Catholic who admired the non-conformist liberalism long associated with that stable and was writing his column as often as he could even during the illness of the last year. His final piece appeared last week.

Among politicians of every party and wherever political journalists gather he will be remembered as a man of decency and humanity, with fire in his belly.

To achieve such influence in journalism is rare; to exercise it with such distinction even rarer.