Once Fleet Street's most feared editor, he now speaks for the countryside. But can he ever learn to be a gentleman? Max Hastings profiled
If anyone thought when Max Hastings stepped down from the editorship of the London Evening Standard that their hearing was now safe from the Hastings boom, or that his noxious cigars would trouble their nostrils no more, they couldn't have been more wrong. The picture byline of the newly knighted Sir Max is to be seen everywhere, pontificating not only from the usual pulpits like the Daily Mail and the Spectator, but also from such uncharted territory as the Observer.
As the recently elected president of the Council for the Protection of Rural England, Hastings is beating the drum for the countryside and has declared that he will be holding his head high (very high, given that he is nearly 6ft 5in) in next month's Liberty and Livelihood march in London. His views on the countryside are well known, although the vehemence with which he is wont to express them seems to have caught the CPRE off guard. A recent broadside, in which the Hastings blunderbuss peppered not only John Prescott's ample backside but also the slimmer cheeks of the Shadow Chancellor, Michael Howard, carried the rider: "This article reflects his personal opinions, not those of the council."
But it is his new book, The Editor, to be published in October, that will attract most attention. The magnum opus chronicles his ten years running the Daily Telegraph, and, according to Macmillan, his publisher, "it is unblushing about the author's failures and embarrassments as well as his successes". No one doubts Hastings's willingness to record his successes - witness his ubiquity in coverage of the 20th anniversary of the Falklands war, at the end of which he was the first man into Port Stanley. There have been some achievements of note; even his fiercest critics acknowledge his role in revitalising the Telegraph. Former colleagues and employees are entitled to wonder, however, just how much space will be given to the failures and embarrassments?
It is unlikely that Hastings, 56, looks back on his early years with enormous fondness. Although he worshipped his father, the war correspondent and gentleman journalist Macdonald Hastings, relations with his mother, Anne Scott-James, were troubled. A former editor of Harper's Bazaar and one of the first female personality columnists, Scott-James was divorced from Macdonald Hastings in 1963 and later married Sir Osbert Lancaster. A friend of Max says he used to complain that she holidayed on the Riviera whereas he went to Butlin's with the nanny. Even today, one who moves in Lady Lancaster's circle declares: "Max has nothing to do with his mother."
Of his time at Charterhouse, he has hardly a good word. He wasn't sporty - "my left leg never knew what my right arm was doing. I was a disastrous schoolboy" - and describes the experience as "hellish".
The school cadet force led to a stint with the Parachute Regiment in the year before Oxford. This was not a great success, either; he is said to have earned the disapproval of his peers by bribing a Cypriot boy to bring him water while on exercise. But the experience clearly cemented his passion for matters military, which later led him to write some highly praised history books. So proud is he of one of them that when Evening Standard executives opened their gifts at a Christmas dinner Max had thrown, they found they had all received the same present - an inscribed copy of Bomber Command.
Despite winning an exhibition to University College, Oxford, Hastings departed from the banks of the Isis after only a year. There then followed reporting jobs at the BBC and the Evening Standard, columns, despatches from war zones and, most notably, the Falklands. After striding into the Upland Goose and "recapturing" Port Stanley, the spotlight was shone on two of Max's foremost traits - ambition and ruthlessness. Other journalists loathed him, especially after their pooled report (entrusted to him) failed to get through while the Hastings exclusive did. Michael Nicholson of ITN described him as "an insufferably pompous, bumptious egoist". Ian Bruce of the Glasgow Herald went for him with a bayonet. Hastings's response: "You are playing to win. You are not playing to play the game."
This attitude, though more widespread in the 1980s, was not reflected in the civilised if slow-moving waters of the Daily Telegraph, where Hastings arrived in 1986. The snug, comfortable atmosphere of the old Telegraph was quickly dispelled with a crack of the Hastings rhino-whip (he did have one, which he used to flick about the Evening Standard when he edited the paper's Londoner's Diary). No one doubts that changes needed to be made.
"There was a crisis," says one former broadsheet editor. "He was a brilliant choice, a man for the hour." It was his methods that some deemed suspect: "He made sackings as painful as possible. When he sacked Carol Thatcher, he seemed to enjoy rubbing her nose in it."
It was the first high-level executive position he had occupied, and it was evident he had not been to any charm schools on the way. "If you were senior, he might extend a modicum of politeness to you," says one former employee. "But he was quite capable of bawling out executives on the editorial floor in front of all the staff, even when he was in the wrong. He has the attention span of a gnat, and would start tapping the table with his pen and looking at the ceiling when someone else was talking in conference."
These habits continued when he edited the Evening Standard between 1996 and 2002. An incoming deputy news editor hadn't been informed that a copy of the news list, however rough, must be placed in front of Hastings within the first minute of the 8.30am conference. Ignorant of this, he began cheerfully going through his team's stories until his flow was broken by an eruption from the other end of the table. "Where's the fucking news list?" bellowed Hastings, in the tones that led him to be feared rather than respected.
A former colleague contrasts his passion for the life of the country manor with his lack of the paternalistic manners that its inhabitants traditionally espoused. "He's not a gentleman in any sense, even though that's what he wants to be. He sees no need for decency between people, none of the finer feelings of the old world he likes. He has a tremendous chip on his shoulder about that milieu." One probably apocryphal story has Hastings being driven up the driveway of a ducal mansion. On the way, he asks his chauffeur to stop. Hearing a sniff-sniff in the back of the car, the chauffeur asks him if anything is wrong. "I'm crying because I know I'll never have a house like this," replies Max.
It is noteworthy that his forthcoming memoir concentrates largely on his years at the Telegraph. "In his heart, I think he thought there was something rather infra dig about editing the Standard," says one old sparring partner. He transferred to Derry Street because the political gulf between his version of wet Toryism and the Telegraph proprietor Conrad Black's bracingly right-wing convictions was becoming more and more of a problem. Black's earnest young men were graduating from the Spectator nursery and demanding to know why the group's flagship publication was being edited by a man who counted Michael Heseltine and Ken Clarke among his friends. Hastings's courage in standing up to his proprietor, especially over the use of US bases in Britain to bomb Libya, was commendable.
But he never identified with the Standard in the same way. Although he makes much of having spent his formative years in London, it seems unlikely that he could navigate unaided from Catford to Crouch End. His keenness to depart for the country on Fridays, straight after lunch, was well known. At least he was handsomely rewarded - to the tune of £400,000 pa - for the arduous labour of editing the capital's newspaper.
Marriage (his second) to Penny Levinson, formerly Mrs (Michael) Grade (which is, bizarrely, how he used to introduce her before they were married), is said to have mellowed him. And the suicide of his son in China was a tragedy that he bore with great fortitude. Hastings does have a tolerant side. He cannot abide anti-Semitism, and established a trainee scheme at the Standard specifically for journalists from black or Asian backgrounds. He is acknowledged to be a fearless and eloquent writer and will no doubt prove a forceful cheerleader for the countryside; and The Editor will be of interest to those who have worked for him.
It is doubtful, however, whether the many who have suffered his rages, his snobbishness and his unreasonableness will find in his autobiography anything to disprove the assessment of Sir Peregrine Worsthorne: "Max has high principles in every area apart from his own behaviour."
Sholto Byrnes is a staff writer on the Independent and the Independent on Sunday
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