On the day he was appointed editor of the Financial Times in 2005, Lionel Barber called Ben Bradlee, the man who turned the Washington Post from, as he puts it, “a provincial also-ran into a national must-read” (Bradlee was the paper’s editor at the time of the Watergate scandal). Did his mentor, he wondered, have any advice for him? Pleasingly, he did. Even more pleasingly, this advice sounded as if it had come straight from a movie script. First, Bradlee said, Barber should be sure to “walk the floor”, in other words, to remain visible to the troops. Second, he should remember that nothing lasts for ever. “The day you finish as editor, that’s when you find out who your real friends are,” he told Barber, sounding not unlike Jason Robards, who played Bradlee in All the President’s Men.
Was he right about this? Fifteen years on, Barber is at last in a position to know, having stood down as editor in January following what he describes in his about-to-be-published diaries as “three terms” in the job (by his own admission, Barber is obsessed by power and its processes and at moments he starts to sound weirdly presidential himself). He smiles. “He was partly right,” he says. “Mostly, people do call back. But just not as quickly.” And has he, in the months since, been through a grieving process? Such a job, glamorous and important, must have been hard to give up. “No, no, absolutely not. I had done what I needed to do. The succession had been managed. I’d turned 65. You want to go out on a home run, not with dodgy knees and a bad back.” A banker of his acquaintance once told him that running the FT sounded like being the manager of a rock band, a description that a possibly somewhat flattered Barber thought quite accurate. Now, though, the touring years are over. We meet at his home in suburban south London, a realm of bird tables and Ocado deliveries. No more jetlag. No more starry encounters with the rich and famous. No more creative differences with the editor of How to Spend It.
Freedom, in other words. Don’t imagine for a minute, though, that Barber is about to break the cardinal rule of the road (ie what goes on tour stays on tour). Yes, a lot of big names strut and dive across his book’s pages; among those he interviewed during his time at the FT (he was always, as he reminds me more than once, an editor-reporter) are Martin Amis, Barack Obama and Ai Weiwei. But there’s also something peculiarly discreet about it (either that or he’s the least nosy hack who ever lived).
Sure, he doesn’t mind dishing on the idiotic Prince Andrew, who tells him that the FT’s “man in Dubai” is causing a lot of trouble (HRH, having got the reporter’s name wrong, then admits to never having read a word he has written). But when, for instance, he goes to the Camerons’ London home for dinner in 2008, he tells us nothing at all about it, not even the colour of Sam’s curtains, perhaps because he’s too busy “pouting” at having been told that Dave would rather not discuss British politics. Two years later, he mentions that he has lunched at San Lorenzo in Knightsbridge with the “flame-haired” Rebekah Brooks, then the editor of the Sun and now the woman who runs Rupert Murdoch’s British operation. But he does not care to reveal what they might have discussed, nor even what impression she made on him. If Sasha Swire, the former Tory MP’s wife who recently published her diaries, was an unstoppable fountain of gossip, splashing the scandal all over, Barber is more of a dripping tap: a drop will come your way in the end, but in the meantime you’ll just have to listen patiently to his thoughts on such things as Davos (where “even newspaper editors are assigned rooms… with what appear to be moulded plastic showers”) and M&S underwear (“in my experience, always reliable”).
What makes this all the stranger is that his model while working on The Powerful and the Damned was Piers Morgan, whose diaries, wildly more juicy than his own, he considers “just fantastic”. But then, Barber is a different beast to the former editor of the Daily Mirror: more corporate, more establishment. In his book, for instance, he calls Ed Balls “an FT man”, as if the newspaper, which once employed the former chancellor, was a public school or an Oxbridge college. When we come to talk about the Daily Mail, he vigorously defends free speech while simultaneously insisting that he’s not willing to discuss what he thinks of its former editor, Paul Dacre. (Excessive, especially when you consider that the Mail once described Barber as a “weapons-grade social climber”.) Even more amazingly, he tells me rather proudly – “this is important” – that had Nikkei, the Japanese owner of the FT, not agreed to the publication of his diaries “sight unseen”, he would not have gone ahead with the project. Crikey. Is he serious? “Yes. I have a personal relationship with the proprietor. I would never do anything that wasn’t approved by him.” It’s hard to imagine Andrew Neil or Harry Evans having taken this line, even if they hadn’t fallen out with Rupert Murdoch.
Still, there are fascinating things in his book, if by fascinating we mean uncomfortable. How close should an editor get to certain players? What happens when journalism and social life become blurred? What do his diaries tell us about the ways in which Britain still works, behind the scenes? I was struck by Barber’s attendance in 2018 at a dinner hosted by Evgeny Lebedev, the owner of the Evening Standard, for Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia. It’s interesting to learn, especially in the light of the reported security concerns surrounding Lebedev’s recent elevation to the peerage (his father is an ex-KGB agent), that the Russian ambassador, Alexander Yakovenko, was there, too, furiously denying any Russian involvement in the attempted assassination of Sergei Skripal in Salisbury. But it’s also important to remember that only seven months after this, the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a man with whom Barber once lunched, was murdered in Turkey, allegedly by agents of the Saudi government. Do newspaper editors, like politicians (Tony Blair was another guest), need to think more carefully about their presence at such events? Are they in danger, sometimes, of providing a kind of endorsement?
“It’s a totally legitimate question to debate the balance between access and distance,” Barber says, graciously. “I am very aware that I enjoyed unique access to thugs and to very rich people. But it was my job to understand power, and how power is exercised, and I’m not easily seduced, believe me. Why wouldn’t you go to a dinner with 30 people, where you will bump into the Russian ambassador, and he will talk about Skripal, and you will also see the crown prince talk about his vision? That’s valuable.” He thinks the reader will find such scenes enlightening. “I don’t think the reader will be saying, ‘Oh, I’m not sure he should have gone to that dinner party’. I think they’ll be saying, ‘Oh, this is the way it is – I’ve penetrated the bubble’.” But they won’t admire it, will they? (His tone implies that they will.) “I don’t need to be admired.” What did he make of the fact that Boris Johnson made Lebedev a peer? “Totally neutral,” he says. How can he be neutral about it? He must have a view. “I think there are too many peers, but that’s a separate issue from [talking about] individuals.” Would he like a seat in the House of Lords? (Veronica Wadley, the former editor of the Evening Standard, also got one last time around.) He splutters. “No one is going to make me a peer. Do you think I’m that chummy with the people in this government?”
Maybe not. In his diaries, he reveals that shortly after the EU referendum in 2016, Johnson sent him a text in which he asked when the FT was going to accept that it had lost the argument (the paper was for Remain). “I have never seen such a load of weedy liberal confirmation bias,” Johnson wrote. Barber told him the FT was happy to discuss the road ahead but, as he points out, Johnson did not want to think about that. “You have to understand the character of the PM,” he says. “He’s someone who has never been prone to following the rules, who’s a cheerleader by temperament and who has now [thanks to the pandemic] been pitched into the biggest public policy crisis in 50 years. Plus, he’s having to manage an exit from the European Union, the difficulty of which I’m quite sure he underestimated.” Is he anxious about what lies ahead? “Catastrophe doesn’t meet it quite yet. But we’re in a hole.” Will there be a deal with the EU? “Ye-es… it’s 65% [certain]. But it will be a skinny deal. The skinniest of all deals.”
What role does he think journalism played in getting us to where we are now? “The original sin is the referendum,” he says. “That’s Cameron’s fault. He was casual beyond belief.” But were we, the media, too complacent? Did we miss the story? In his diaries, after all, he writes that he went to bed “with a bourbon on the rocks” feeling “relatively relaxed” about the result. He also describes the mood at the FT the next morning as one of “shock”, his colleagues “stunned and slightly embarrassed” (the following day, Barber and his shattered wife, Victoria, sought “refuge” from it all in the “mud and rain” of the Glastonbury festival, where they were, um, the “house guests” of another former FT man, Roland Rudd, the wealthy PR man who raised millions for Remain, who is the brother of Amber Rudd, the former home secretary, and also, like Barber, a trustee of the Tate).
“I acknowledge that,” he says. “We were too rational. The majority, we thought, won’t vote Leave because it doesn’t make economic sense. Our reporters all came back [from the regions] and said [it will be] Leave, but we failed to distinguish between signal and noise. People were not necessarily going to make rational economic choices. Other factors were in play. We missed that. But we weren’t responsible for losing the campaign.” What effect does he think this has had on confidence in journalism? He doesn’t exactly answer the question, telling me instead that he has some sympathy with what Tim Davie, the director general of the BBC, has said about journalists and social media. “They’re wearing two hats and they need to be careful,” he says.
Does he believe quality journalism can survive in a world where so much information is available for free? “I do. You promise serious journalism and you ask people to pay for it.” (And, sometimes, they do: by the time he stepped down, the FT had 1 million paying readers.) Did it ever strike him as uncomfortable that the FT was apt to trumpet on its masthead a long report on poverty in Blackpool alongside, say, a supplement extolling the virtues of £100,000 watches? “No. You can walk and chew gum at the same time. This idea that we’re just there for the elite… the nobles might have done a better job in 1789 if they’d known what was going on in Paris.” That said, five days after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008, he did draw the line at an edition of How to Spend It called “the Bonus issue”.
Barber insists that he was surprised to be made the editor of the FT; he never campaigned for the job and he’d lost out before. But he was always, perhaps, destined to be a journalist. His father, Frank, was a newspaper man to his bones (though he ended up at the BBC, he never gave up his weekend shifts at the Observer and the Sunday Times). “I’m a twin,” says Barber. “And one punishment that I remember was that we had to do a front page on the day after Martin Luther King was assassinated. He made us listen to Alistair Cooke [on the BBC] and then we had to get on with it. We would have been 11.”
The household was newspaper-obsessed: six were delivered every day. “My father grew up in Leeds. He left school at 15 and he was totally self-educated. He always wanted to be a journalist and he believed it was a vocation, not a profession, which I also believe intensely. The problem was that he was such a big figure. You thought: I’m never going to be as good as him.” After Oxford, Barber had a conviction that he was going to “help British industry” (it was the 1970s). But this didn’t work out – what did he know about selling? – and he took the only job he was offered, at the Scotsman. Was his father proud of his career? “Yes and that mattered to me. He was fairly uncompromising. We all wanted his blessing.” I sense a similar lack of compromise in his son. Even as I’m interviewing him, he keeps telling me how interviews should be done.
Of his own interviewees, who beguiled and who disappointed? “Well, I’d never go into an interview thinking: am I going to admire this person? It’s about unlocking them.” It was thrilling meeting Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin in 2019, “the most cold-blooded person, who is expert in destabilising people”. Donald Trump, in 2017, was “Tony Soprano without the charm”, while to be in the presence of Paul Kagame, the “warrior-president” of Rwanda, was to be in the presence of “real power… we talked for three-and-a-half hours. My bum was really sore afterwards.” Then there was his trip to Tehran in 2013 with Roula Khalaf, who would eventually succeed him as editor, during which he got President Hassan Rouhani on side by pretending to do a Scottish accent (Rouhani was a postgraduate student in Glasgow).
Barber tells me now that he believes you need a “zinger” when doing interviews: the disarming killer question. But I’m not so sure. Sometimes – quite often, in fact – people dish up themselves, on a plate. “I have got a sense of humour,” he suddenly tells me, as I get up to go. Only one of us is laughing (albeit on the inside) as I carefully write these words next to his email address in my notebook.
The Powerful and the Damned: Private Diaries in Turbulent Times is published by Ebury (£25). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
