Former druggie and drunk, and ex-editor of three nationals, this becalmed galleon is hailed by some as a new Joan Bakewell. Rosie Boycott profiled
Maybe the letter went something like this: "Dear Ms Boycott: Thank you for your expression of interest in chairing our Blairite little outfit. Your CV certainly intrigued us but we are giving the job to someone who, unlike you, has not fallen out with new Labour. Good luck with the rest of your career. Yours, Institute of Contemporary Arts."
Rosie Boycott, just turned 51, has got the yellow light on and is available (in the most respectable sense) for hire. The former druggie, drunk, Spare Rib founder, editor of Esquire, Fleet Street broadsheet and tabloid boss, is a becalmed galleon. The only breeze floating through her topsail is her newly announced position as - big drum roll, please, followed by a hollow pop - travel editor of the Oldie magazine.
To call Boycott a loser would be uncharitable. With her robust and honourable feminism, her notable career highs, and her considerable personal verve in overcoming addiction, she is a downright Good Thing. Even fans are forced to admit, however, that she presents a melancholy figure on the fringes of the modern establishment. What is to be done with Rosie?
By now, if things had gone to plan, she would have been a member of the reformed House of Lords, voting in liberal laws on sexuality and drugs. She would have been a quangocrat, a telegenic champion of modernism to match Helena Kennedy for husky charm (though perhaps not brains). Sinecures such as the ICA should have been sticking to her like burrs to the coat of a Golden Retriever. But the ICA job went to Alan Yentob, and Rosie, having been trounced horribly in the brutal world of Fleet Street power politics, remains strictly a Ms.
Cheltenham Ladies' College and the University of Kent (pure maths) were the foundations for a life that has not been so much a career, as a series of exotic kangaroo hops. She has lived in Kuwait, America and Cyprus, did time in a Thai jail, and spent much of the 1970s completely spaced out. Given the liver-pummelling she did in her youth, it is perhaps no surprise that she can occasionally seem distracted. She is a broad-brush person - a "hopeless listener" with "the attention span of an aphid" - which may be why it went wrong between her and new Labour. She listened to the buzz phrases and the Third Way muzak and she was swayed. If only she had examined the prospectus with greater intellectual curiosity, she might not have been so comprehensively suckered.
Boycott's early-Seventies Spare Rib experience gave way to a decade of substance abuse. By 1984, however, she had got her life into some sort of order. She had kicked heroin and alcohol, had a daughter (by her first husband, David Leitch) and worked for the Daily Mail, Sunday Telegraph and Harpers & Queen. In 1992, she bagged the editorship of Esquire and hit the celebrity literary world. She delighted in the company of Salman Rushdie, Tina Brown et al, and sprinkled herself with the glitter of post-addiction victimhood. The progressive Boycott seemed an editor with whom Labour modernisers could do business. Philip Gould, the polling guru, made contact. Tony Blair was "impressed".
After prolonged lobbying, the editorship of the Independent on Sunday came in 1996. She and her sacked predecessor, Peter Wilby (now editor of the NS), met to arrange the handover at the Groucho Club. The venue was her suggestion, and she is, in some ways, the quintessential Groucho member: world-weary yet impressed by what's "hot"; crumpled yet ambitious; New Age-approachable, but shy and introspective.
She was an editor only in name. Little actual editing or writing was done. At times, it was questionable that she even knew how to work her computer. Wilby's republicanism was dropped in favour of a brilliantly high-profile campaign to decriminalise cannabis. To the outside world, all was going swimmingly, but in the corporate piranha pool things were less convivial. David Montgomery and Charles Wilson, executives of the Mirror Group, which was then running the Independent, were unpleasant. There were reports of tears behind her office door.
Although in 1998 she briefly got to run the daily Independent, she soon had a bigger goal. Gould had stayed in touch, Peter Mandelson had become friendly, and Boycott got to hear that Lord Hollick, the Labour-supporting owner of the Express, was interested in appointing a new editor. How about it?
She was called to 10 Downing Street on her first day running the Express. Hollick, whose knowledge of newspapers was little deeper than a bidet, wanted to transform a ranting, provincial, old people's Tory blunderbuss into a moderate, metropolitan carbine for the Blairite young. To have changed one of these things in the first year would have been an achievement; to think they could be all done overnight was commercial innocence.
Boycott was no less naive in her political dealings. She hired Amanda Platell to run the Sunday Express. The ballsy Platell could have been a dream appointment, had Boycott only asked her about her political leanings. According to one source, she "simply assumed Amanda was a Blairite - she was Australian, after all". When Platell started running lurid tales about Labour ministers' sex lives, Millbank went bananas. One story in particular, a nudge-nudge number about Mandelson's "friend" Reinaldo, caused great displeasure. Platell left in 1999, and went on to work for the Tories.
Labour took the Express and the paper's editor for granted. Invitations to No 10 did not exactly dry up, but Boycott was seldom first to hear top-table gossip. Even when she did, it was questionable if she understood it. Her appreciation of the twists of politics has never been subtle.
Her best stunt at the Express was nothing to do with the young readers that newspaper executives so cravenly pursue. It was a spirited campaign for the elderly, following the government's parsimonious 75p increase in the weekly pension. "We were ostracised and bullied by Downing Street," she said later. "New Labour were incensed that the Express, considered to be 'on-message', should have the temerity to criticise." Boycott, having long regarded Labour as her natural home, became a doubter.
When she had joined the Express, one of her first acts was to move out of the swanky office occupied by her predecessors and to announce that she would be a hands-on editor, with a hands-on office in the middle of the newsroom. But she rarely ventured out of her box. The veteran writer Maureen Paton stomped into Boycott's office. "Do you know who I am?" she asked. "Did we just meet?" asked Boycott vaguely. "You just fired me," said Paton. Staff left by the score, some voluntarily. "You can't leave," Boycott pleaded with one man. "You're too good a writer." He replied: "But I'm a photographer."
There were better moments, when her hippie-ish, dotty side contrasted with the stuffy heritage of the Express. She gave Diwali parties at which the august boardroom of Express Newspapers would be decked in gay ribbons. The Hindujas and other prosperous Asians attended and a twanging sitar player squatted on the boardroom table. "Rosie never looked happier than at those Diwali parties," says one former member of staff. "Maybe it helped that the Asians are not big drinkers."
But then came new Labour's worst betrayal. The government approved the sale of the Express to Richard Desmond. Boycott the legendary feminist was told barely an hour before the publisher of Asian Babes sauntered in, wet cigar in mouth, to claim his prize. She stayed long enough to collect a big pay-off, and has since left Labour for the Lib Dems.
Her home life is now happy. Remarried, she lives in considerable comfort in Notting Hill. The new house is tidier than her old haunt in nearby Bayswater, with its constant flow of ill-kempt, unidentified lodgers. Her new husband is Charles Howard, QC, whom she dated as a teenager. Howard, half-brother of the 7th Earl of Effingham, is agreeably non-newspapery and likes cricket and gardening. They were reintroduced by the late George Carman. "There are three things you should know about Charlie," said Carman. "He's a bit depressed, just got divorced and is very rich." Bingo!
Boycott has been "wonderful to her stepchildren" (this from a non-admirer), while retaining an enviably close relationship with her own daughter, Daisy, a mature young woman, playing Saffy to Boycott's Edina. In her editing days, it was quite routine for Boycott to send flowers to female colleagues who were having a bad time domestically, and with moist eyes all round she helped the veteran columnist Peter Tory through a crisis. All very Ab-Fab. Yet this same Boycott so angered one reporter, James Hughes-Onslow, that, after being sacked, he inveigled his way in to her house and hid fish fingers behind a panel in the bathroom. The stink soon became unbearable.
In the past few months, she has fronted a BBC2 documentary series to middling effect, and her stints on Radio 4's Book Club have led some to label her "the new Joan Bakewell". Like the Oldie job, it is all reasonably amusing. It fills the time. But it does not seem quite enough for Rosie Boycott's undeniable talents.
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