Goodbye Evening Standard

Today marks the end of the Evening Standard in printed form.  Outside London no-one cares, and within the capital the paper’s absence will be scarcely be noticed by the end of the week, let alone the end of the month.  London’s last surviving multi-edition newspaper has been on a downward spiral for years, and its chances of survival online must be slim.  In today’s Guardian Zoe Williams’s column contains an amusing portrait of the Evening Standard‘s newsroom in the early 1990s, not that different from fifty years before.  Back in the middle of the last century the Evening Standard boasted a stellar line-up of journalists, columnists, free-lancers and cartoonists – the latter was a major selling point, with the paper employing David Low in the 1930s and 1940s, and Vicky in the 1950s.  The Daily Express was Express Newspapers’ cash cow, but the Evening Standard was in many ways its flagship newspaper.  Lord Beaverbrook was unscrupulous in his weaponisation of the Daily and Sunday Express, exerting a tight editorial control, but took perverse pleasure in allowing the Evening Standard to maintain a left-of-centre even radical profile, in both content and personnel.  Beaverbrook cultivated his image as a maverick, respecting the Evening Standard‘s editorial independence was seen as on a par with his cultivating the friendship of AJP Taylor (Max Aitken’s eventual biographer) and Aneurin Bevan.  Frank Owen and Michael Foot, successive editors before and during World War 2, pursued an aggressive anti-appeasement line, culminating in the blistering polemic from the summer of 1940, Guilty Men.  Foot became acting editor in 1943 when Frank Owen accepted Mountbatten’s invitation to set up the newspaper SEAC, soon compulsory reading in Burma for Slim’s 14th ‘Forgotten’ Army.  At the end of the war another Beaverbrook stalwart, Tom Driberg, travelled east to report on Lord and Lady Mountbatten’s post-surrender efforts to repatriate POWs and to temper the European colonial powers’ response to nationalist demands across India and south-east Asia.  Driberg’s relationship with Beaverbrook never recovered, the press baron having switched from prewar intimacy with the Mountbattens to sworn enmity (reasons include a jibe at the Daily Express‘s pro-appeasement line in In Which We Serve, the loss of so many Canadians at Dieppe, the suspicion that Dickie had slept with Beaverbrook’s mistress Jean Norton, the recruitment of the Standard‘s energetic manager Mike Wardell to Combined Ops and then SEAC, and the justified belief that Dickie and Edwina sympathised strongly with Congress over early independence for India – the latter also fuelling Churchill’s break with his one-time protege).  The Mountbattens, especially Edwina, provided regular copy for ‘Londoner’s Diary’, the other reason along with David Low why the Evening Standard‘s sales were so much greater than its historic rival, the Evening News.  ‘Londoner’s Diary’ boasted a remarkable range of contributors, including a youthful post-FO Harold Nicolson and another former diplomat, Robert Bruce-Lockhart.  With expenses no object and an astonishing list of contacts Bruce-Lockhart in the early 1930s traded off his adventures in revolutionary Russia to chase stories and interviews across Europe – the first volume of his published diaries see him interrogating the Kaiser in Dutch exile and quizzing the Prince of Wales on the fairway.  Arguably it was Bruce-Lockhart who made ‘Londoner’s Diary’ a must-read for the capital’s devotees of high society gossip.  He went on to combine a career as a freelance writer and journalist with wartime service as chair of the Political Warfare Executive and then shadowy Cold War activities consistent with his reputation inside Russia as Lenin’s failed assassin.  Were the bulk of Bruce-Lockhart’s papers not held in a Midwest university a Ben McIntyre figure would have written a best-selling biography years ago.  It’s sad to compare the Evening Standard of the past few decades with Britain’s most interesting newspaper in the middle of the last century.  Fleet Street in its heyday had many faults, and there’s no need for nostalgia, but within the ‘Street of Shame’ there were remarkable writers (and cartoonists) producing remarkable copy, and the loss of a newspaper with such a noteworthy history is to be lamented by all of us whose priority for news and comment remains the printed page.