EDITOR AT LARGE
HIS GENIUS was not just in taking on powerful vested interests, but also in articulating the dreams and frustrations of millions.
never afraid to speak his mind or challenge authority, he matched a campaigning, radical zeal with a love for the hurly-burly of political intrigue and hot gossip.
The death on Wednesday of Sir Harold Evans, aged 92, represents the end of an era. The son of a railway stoker and fireman, he emerged from the back streets of Manchester to become one of the great newspaper editors of our time — possibly the greatest at least according to a poll of his peers in 2002.
Fearless and determined, he made The Sunday Times into the most influential and envied newspaper in the world. For 16 years, his crusading journalism set a bar so high few rivals, if any, could come close.
In an era before the internet, the stories his newspaper broke set the agenda unlike any others.
under his watch, The Sunday Times exposed Kim Philby as a Soviet spy, published the outrageous diaries of the former Labour minister Richard Crossman, risking prosecution under the Official Secrets Act, and exposed the swindling insurance tycoon Emil Savundra.
But his most celebrated campaign was on behalf of the children blighted by Thalidomide, the morning sickness drug which left many with severe birth defects.
For eight years, Evans pursued Distillers, the manufacturers of the drug, through the courts, and setback after setback, before final vindication and a £28 million payout for the victims’ families.
And, at all times, he presided over his newspaper with an unrivalled combination of brilliance, ruthlessness and a down-toearth charm that owed much to that working-class upbringing and the values of self-improvement instilled by his parents.
Even in later years, when he brilliantly reinvented himself as a pre- eminent publisher and book editor in new York, he never lost his soft Mancunian twang.
FORMER colleagues talk of Evans as an inspiring figure. ‘He was always on the lookout for a fight with the biggest and highest people in the land,’ one person recalled. ‘ But it was never politically motivated.’
The fact is, however, he was far more than a very good editor. In America, with his glamorous second wife Tina Brown, former editor of Vanity Fair and the new Yorker magazines, he presided over a glittering, intellectual salon fizzing with ideas and interesting people.
From the mid-Eighties through to the millennium, they were the golden couple. Their Manhattan home, from where until very recently he would walk nine blocks to his office — after his morning swim, a habit he began 50 years ago — was a hothouse for some of the brightest names in literature and current affairs.
As president and publisher of the vast Random House book conglomerate he secured Marlon Brando’s memoirs and edited one of norman Mailer’s books that was so big, Evans joked, when he took it on a plane he had to declare excess baggage.
He was behind one of the publishing sensations of the nineties — Primary Colors, the novelisation of Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign. It was Sir Harry who came up with the original idea to describe its author — a political journalist — on the cover as ‘ Anonymous’. It was a huge international bestseller.
Along the way, Evans edited three books by the great American statesman Henry Kissinger and the life story of former gulf War general-turned-politician Colin Powell.
Another hit was publishing Donald