For almost two decades, working for three successive owners, Donald Trelford, who has died at the age of 85, edited the Observer under exceptional, trying circumstances. Starved of resources that were available elsewhere in Fleet Street, Trelford was nonetheless able to produce editions of the highest quality and so ensured the survival of the world’s oldest Sunday newspaper.
“He loved nothing more than a cracking good story, his skills as a layout man meant he could always ensure it got a damn good show and he was also a canny political operator,” recalled Robin Lustig, a former Observer home affairs editor. “He was a newspaperman to his fingertips.”
Trelford, who was born in Coventry in 1937, joined the Observer in 1966 and became its deputy editor three years later. Appointed editor in 1975, he played a key role in helping to block the newspaper’s sale to Rupert Murdoch, a prospect that had universally horrified the Observer’s staff.
Robert Chesshyre, the newspaper’s former US correspondent, is clear about Trelford’s achievement. “Donald saved the Observer from Murdoch’s clutches, which would have been, in Clive James’s words, ‘like giving your daughter to a gorilla’.’”
The newspaper was instead bought from the Astor family’s trust by the US oil company Atlantic Richfield in 1977 before it was sold on to the multinational group Lonrho, which was run by controversial chief executive Tiny Rowland. The pairing of Trelford with the ever-manipulative Rowland created one of the most explosive partnerships in 20th-century journalism in Britain.
David Leigh, who was chief investigative reporter for the Observer from 1980 to 1989, observed the relationship at close hand – and is largely sympathetic to Trelford. “We came to blows in the end but I can truthfully say that working for him was the best fun I ever had in journalism.
“Every weekend, he belaboured the Thatcher government, running front pages on the unsavoury antics of Mark Thatcher, the spoilt son of an increasingly enraged Tory prime minister, as well as stories about MI5 secretly blacklisting BBC staff; the failed attempt to jail Falklands war official Clive Ponting for leaking [documents about the sinking of the Argentinian cruiser General Belgrano]; and the humiliation of British intelligence and the cabinet secretary over the Spycatcher affair.”
At the same time, Trelford was running a classy stable of some of Britain’s most distinguished feature writers and columnists. These included Neal Ascherson, Robert Harris, Clive James, Katharine Whitehorn and Hugh McIlvanney. He was, for many years, a gifted journalistic ringmaster.
And to begin with, he was able to resist the pressure put on him by Rowland. In 1984, Trelford visited Zimbabwe and discovered that thousands of Ndebele people opposed to the government of Robert Mugabe had been killed during an uprising in Matabeleland. Trelford wrote the front page story himself. It was a superb piece of reportage, though Rowland – who had vast African business interests – was furious and threatened to sack Trelford, who survived thanks to backing from the Observer’s independent directors.
It could not last, however. The Observer rarely made money and Trelford was constantly at the mercy of its owner. “He fended off the worst predations of Tiny Rowland for as long as he could, but eventually it was a losing battle, as we all knew it would be,” said Lustig.
Pressed to pursue stories that supported Rowland’s business causes, Trelford leant on reporters to follow up these tales to keep the newspaper’s owner off his back. Leigh was asked to write stories of alleged corruption by some of Lonrho’s competitors. “Donald began well and bravely … but by the end of the 1980s, he allowed himself to be bullied into printing what Rowland wanted,” said Leigh, who eventually resigned.
Worse, a Department of Trade and Industry report, highly critical of the Fayeds, who had beaten Lonrho to the ownership of Harrods in 1985, was obtained by Rowland in 1990. Trelford published pre-emptively in the first and only-ever midweek edition of the paper. The move marked the beginning of the end of his editorship. Lonrho put the Observer up for sale and it was subsequently bought by the Guardian Media Group in 1993.
Alan Rusbridger, a former Observer writer who later became editor-in-chief of the Guardian, was sympathetic to Trelford’s position at the time. “Donald was not always lucky in the matter of proprietors, but his nimble political skills mostly – if not always – stood him in good stead. Certainly, his Observer was a beacon of enlightened liberal journalism.”
It is a view backed by Lustig. “I doubt that anyone else could have held out longer than Donald did.”
Undoubtedly, those of us who got their first foothold in Fleet Street at the Observer in those days have much to thank Trelford for. For most of his time as editor, he ran an enlightened regime in which young reporters were given freedom to write what they believed in – provided they could provide supporting facts. “It was the antithesis of many other papers, where reporters were expected only to provide facts that fitted with editorial policy,” said Chesshyre.
The slightly chaotic journalism that ensued was best depicted by former columnist Michael Frayn, who based John Dyson – the key character in his classic Fleet Street satire Towards the End of the Morning – on the paper’s real-life leader page editor John Silverlight. Frayn, too, is warm in his appreciation of Trelford. “It was a heroic achievement to follow David Astor into the chair – and to make a success of it.”
