Memory: Peter Preston

Former Guardian Editor Peter Preston has died, aged 79
See Obituary


Towards the end of 1992 I was working on a fixed-term contract as a subeditor at the Guardian's Weekend magazine, when I got a message from Michael Pilgrim, then editor of the Observer's colour-supplement Sunday equivalent. He wanted to talk, so we met in a nearby greasy-spoon cafe and he offered me the job of Chief Subeditor on the Observer Magazine. The Guardian and the Observer were sister papers and I knew Michael slightly from the past. He had been editor of Record Mirror when I was working at Spotlight Publications stablemate Sounds. He knew my abilities and wanted a solid pair of hands. I was flattered by the offer but also very happy with the work I was then doing at the Guardian. First under the editorship of Roger Alton and then with Deborah Orr, a day's work on Weekend was as stimulating as it can get. The stories were lively, fascinating and a pleasure to work on. The writing was outstanding and new leaps in design were underway following the magazine's move to full colour. I was very happy where I was.

But I was coming to the end of a six-month contract with Weekend, with no guarantee of future employment, so I decided to tell editor Deborah about Pilgrim's offer. All she said was "leave it with me". The next week I got an email from Peter Preston and a request to "pop down to my office". I got there to find him at his desk and the offer of a coveted staff job. The meeting was short and warm. Peter had worked in my hometown Liverpool when he was younger and retained fond memories. He told me of the loyalty I had inspired in Deborah, who, I was told, practically ordered him to give me a job and, furthermore, to "tell Pilgrim to keep his fucking hands off my people". The starting rate for a Guardian subeditor at the time was £29,000 a year. Peter told me this bluntly, as if negotiation was out of the question, then added softly, "you can talk me up to thirty if you want". I took him up on that and he offered his polio-affected hand in congratulation, which I remember thinking was a brave thing to do. I'm not sure Peter would ever have seen it that way.

All of this sounds quaint now, but back then what made a publication better than its rivals was the passion and commitment of its workers, its internal ethos. Only those on the inside could see this in action, and sometimes you could never be sure whether a gross stand-up, foaming-at-the-mouth argument was a personal tiff between two clashing egos or a battle over journalistic principles. The two often merged in a way that made them indistinguishable. Peter was as passionate as the next person, but he rarely showed it publicly. His authority was quiet. Weekend editor Deborah was not someone you would choose to mess with. She did not suffer fools easily and did not hesitate to express her displeasure with rich expletives. But she was fair and showed respect where respect was due. She loved good writing and good design and was as open in her praise as she was in her beady-eyed, nit-picking criticism.

Magazine editors have budgets and they use the money to buy the best stories they can find. How much to pay and what is value for money is one of the skills of the job. But without subsidy most of a magazine's revenue comes from advertising, so there is always a fight over how many of the magazine's pages are taken by money-spinning advertising and the number given to reader-friendly editorial. Editorial people often remark that readers do not open magazines for the ads. Advertising people counter that ad revenue pays staff wages and allows the magazine to continue to exist. At Weekend, key people in the editorial and advertising departments would meet weekly to scrap it out. As production editor, my job was to enact the decisions made at these meetings, to negotiate and to marshal the teamwork that would produce what Deborah modestly described as "the best fucking magazine in the world". This was more a statement of aspiration than a flash of arrogance.

Peter would sometimes sit in on these meetings, along with Managing Editor Ian 'Chalkie' Wright, who held the Guardian's purse strings. The form was for Advertising to report on its position and its requirements for that week, followed by Editorial, who would state the proposed contents for the next issue and why it was so bloody brilliant. At one meeting Deborah outlined a fabulous upcoming investigative story, with superb pictures, that could easily accommodate double the usual number of editorial pages. She knew advertising would resist because editorial pages are a cost and not a profit. And they did. Making the magazine bigger to fit an exceptional piece of journalism did not make short-term commercial sense. Not only would this deprive advertising of valuable space (ie, money), it would inflate costs even further because more paper and more machine and man hours at the print site sends your "price per page" through the roof. Preston did not flinch. He looked at Chalkie, got the nod, and ordered extra pages to be added to accommodate Deborah's wishes.

Deborah shot me a look of amazement. "Up-paging" would never be this easy again, least of all for a feature authored by Peter Preston. Later, when Weekend was planning a story to promote an exhibition by the paper's satirical cartoonist Steve Bell, Weekend's features editor wondered out loud who might write it. "Preston," I offered without hesitation. The editor then asked if I would sound him out. Peter was keen and straightaway asked how many words. Quality features in Weekend at the time ran to around 4,000 words. When I offered this, he declined. "I've probably got three thousand in me, but not four,"  he said. Three thousand it was, then. Thanks, Guv. And Peter Preston being staff, there was no fee to pay. Happy days.

Understatement seemed to be in his DNA. At around 7pm in the open-plan offices at Guardian HQ in Farringdon Road, the smell of pipe smoke started to drift around. This was the sign that Preston was on the prowl. He had seen the first edition of that day's paper off to bed and now moved upstairs from the news room on the first floor to the second, where the Features department sat. He would stop and chat, making no attempt to interfere with your work or to impress. It was on one such occasion that we talked about film and I ended up loaning him a book about Ingmar Bergman. I never got it back, and I never plucked up the courage to remind him.