No one can fill the hole left in British journalism by Ian Jack. He had a huge body of work behind him, of course, as a reporter, feature writer, author and editor. Yet to demonstrate his quality you’d only to have to refer someone who hadn’t read him to his pieces over the past few months when he was writing as well as ever – not something you could say about many 77-year-olds.
His last column for the Guardian, a mere week ago, was an example – on the face of it a rich elegy on what the BBC had meant to him since his earliest years, yet in fact, and without a shred of polemic, a subliminal reminder of why the Corporation needed defending against its encircling enemies. This was typical. No journalist had a deeper sense of history than Jack. He frequently recalled his childhood and his formative years, after his parents moved back to Scotland when he was seven, in North Queensferry, Fife – where he interviewed with rare insight and sensibility the then chancellor in 2003 in a piece that began: “Gordon Brown lives in the house I once delivered newspapers to.”
