Media Matters
How I founded the Independent with Boris’s potential father-in-law
If Carrie Symonds is installed as the chatelaine of Number 10, the media will want to know more about her background.
What about her mother? I can’t help there, never having spoken to Josephine Mcaffee – I once glimpsed her in a car. But I do know a lot about her father, Matthew Symonds, though I have barely talked to him for over 25 years for reasons that, oddly enough, have to do with Carrie. Along with Andreas Whittam Smith, Matthew and I were co-founders of the Independent in 1986.
I got to know Matthew after meeting him in the room of a mutual friend at Oxford more than a decade earlier. He was an amusing, colourful creature who drove a sporty red Renault at breakneck speeds. One of his friends was Benazir Bhutto, who later became Prime Minister of Pakistan and was assassinated in 2007. She had a bright yellow MGB. Matthew stayed with the Bhutto family in Sindh several years before her controversial father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, successively President and Prime Minister of Pakistan, was executed.
After Oxford, Matthew got a job in the syndication department of the Financial Times before fetching up writing leaders on the Daily Telegraph, where I was already doing the same thing. It was a strange role for him as he had never voted Tory (both his mother and father, unmarried, were of the Left) and had a sticker in the back window of his car promoting the nascent Social Democrats. But he was terrifically knowledgeable about defence and nuclear weapons and also – unlike Boris Johnson in this respect as in many others – strongly in favour of what was then called the European Community.
Matthew fell in with Andreas Whittam Smith, the Telegraph’s City editor, who was musing about launching a new national newspaper, and I joined them. In Matthew, Andreas had found a near
perfect launch partner. He was pushy, ambitious, clever – and occasionally abrasive. While Andreas was held back by the hope that Conrad Black, the Telegraph’s new owner, might appoint him the paper’s editor, and I was somewhat sceptical whether there was the appetite for another quality title, Matthew forged ahead, drawing us in his wake. Without him, the Independent would never have been launched.
After a stuttering start, the beautifully designed new paper was for a time a great success. Young people would display it as a kind of intellectual fashion accessory. To begin with, it was socially liberal but economically conservative, promulgating Thatcherite economics, and even looking back fondly on the Falklands War. I remember a daringly original editorial written by Matthew in defence of ticket touts – the argument being that they serve to establish the true market value of tickets. Later, largely because most of its journalists were of the Left, and there was no proprietor to anchor it in the centre where it had begun, the Independent unwisely drifted towards the political territory occupied by the Guardian.
Not very long after its launch, Matthew had an affair with Carrie’s mother, who did legal work for the paper. There was a tremendous kerfuffle. Andreas came round to my house and demanded Matthew’s resignation, largely because he had charged a double room when on company business at an extra cost of £10. I resisted, and Andreas soon calmed down. But Private Eye got wind of the affair – doubtless from hacks at the Independent who were not admirers of Matthew – and the magazine carried several disobliging items.
Here were the seeds of my rupture with my old friend. A few years later, I left the Independent after a bust-up with Andreas (with whom Matthew chose to side) and later still I wrote a book about the founding of the newspaper and its Sunday sibling. Aware that the affair was already in the public domain, and believing it was germane to the story of the newspaper, I mentioned it. Matthew cut me for many years, and even refused to speak to me at the Independent’s 20th-anniversary party at Lancaster House.
So, in an unexpected way, Carrie Symonds is part of the Independent’s history. Although it no longer exists in print form, the paper prospers on the web, where it is virulently anti-brexit. I have never met Carrie, though she and Boris were recently sitting at an adjacent table to me in a London club. I’m told she’s not close to her father, and we may be sure he thoroughly disapproves of Boris’s politics, in particular his championing of Brexit.
It’s odd more people don’t know about Matthew, who has had a distinguished career. Wikipedia only recently got round to carrying an entry on him. Maybe he avoids the limelight. After leaving the Independent, he worked for the BBC and then the Economist, and now runs a charitable foundation set up by Larry Ellison, the fabulously rich co-founder of computer-technology company Oracle.
He’s a remarkable person, and seems to have produced a remarkable daughter.