The rise and fall of the Independent

It had been many years since I had seen anything of Andreas Whittam Smith, but he popped up on the television last week to discuss the fate of the

Independent, the newspaper he founded 30 years ago but which is now about to close. I was pleased to see that at 78 he had acquired a knighthood. The strange thing, though, is that he was given it for services to the Church of England, to which he became a financial adviser, and not for his lifetime achievement in founding and successfully editing a national daily newspaper.

When this happened in 1986 he gave up a good job as city editor of the Daily Telegraph, persuaded two

younger Telegraph jour- nalists, Matthew Symonds and Stephen Glover, to join him, and managed to raise the money to start and manage a newspaper that promised to be the only one in Fleet Street beholden to no individual or ideology, and offered unbiased coverage. Hence its title, the Independent, and its advertising slogan, ‘It is. Are you?’

Andreas, calm and dignified looked far less like a press baron than the country clergyman his father had been, but he pulled off this astonishing feat and for several years surprised everybody by making his newspaper a great success.

The timing was perfect. Rupert Murdoch was in the process of ending the print union’s stranglehold over the newspaper industry. It felt like the moment for something fresh and new, and many journalists rallied enthusiastically to the call. I was among them, resigning as deputy editor to Peregrine Worsthorne on the Sunday Telegraph to take a job as the Independent’s first correspondent in Washington.

I loved working with Perry, but the Telegraph ihad come to be stuffy and US was exciting.

The public responded too. Within a few years, the Independent’s circula- tion rose to 400,000, and I remember the elation in the office when it briefly overtook the Times. The paper’s claim to independence was exemplified by one or two largely symbolic gestures — its refusal to join the House of Commons Lobby system, for example, or to publish tittle-tattle about the royal family.

It was all intoxicating for a while, but then things started to go wrong. Circulation declined, money ran short, and there were bailouts that undermined its claim to independence that in 2011 it dropped from its front page a slogan that read “free from proprietorial influence”. Alexander Lebedev, who bought the Independent in 2010, is a benevolent proprietor, but a proprietor nevertheless.

Lebedev insists that the only thing that’s closing down is the print edition; that the Independent will break new ground as the first online-only newspaper. This is portrayed as another exciting development. Even Andreas promotes this line, but there’s no concealing the fact that it’s really a consequence of miserable failure. How else could one describe a fall in circulation from more than 400,000 to just 50,000?

The reasons for this are not obvious to me. The Independent may have lost some of its star recruits, but it remained — and remains — a good newspaper, committed to quality journalism. It was born, like the Social Democratic Party (SDP), at a time of widespread revulsion against both Thatcherism and i leftwing Labour party; and, like the SDP, it was eventually doomed by its failure to establish deep roots in British society.

But Andreas turned out to be the improbable instigator of an exciting adventure that few will ever forget. Many people thought that the Independent would last for no more than a few weeks, but instead it enjoyed several years of success and made an enduring mark in journalism. It was hairy to begin with. I wrote my first reports from the US in a shabby Washington hotel room with a phone and a TV. But I never regretted throwing in my lot with this quixotic enterprise.