“How do you fancy editing the New Statesman?” is not a question I ever expected to be asked, but that is what Pat Coyne, who has died aged 77, put to me in 1990 in a Fitzrovia pub once frequented by George Orwell.
As chief executive of New Statesman and Society (he had managed a merger with New Society in 1988), Pat needed someone to take up the reins. For the second time in three years, the magazine was in crisis: the Joseph Rowntree Trust, which had bankrolled the merger, was pulling out, and Stuart Weir had quit as editor.
I said yes, and in two years we halted a 25-year circulation slump, absorbing Marxism Today and turning in a profit in 1992. On a roll, we relaunched in 1993 – but it all went horribly wrong. The prime minister, John Major, keen to conceal his 1980s affair with Edwina Currie, sued us for libel over a story about rumours of him having an extramarital relationship with another woman. However, we had no libel insurance: the printers and distributors paid up and passed on the bills – landing us in deep trouble.
For three years Pat rallied the NSS troops with his irrepressible optimism and humour – “an India rubber ball of a man” as one reporter described him – as well as writing columns and recruiting potential investors. In 1996 he secured a rescue package with the businessman Phillip Jeffrey, but the board went with the millionaire Labour MP Geoffrey Robinson, after which Pat and the Statesman parted ways.
Pat was born in Whitehaven, Cumbria, to Patrick and his wife, Eilish (nee McCoy). The family moved to London when his father took up a job with the Port of London Authority, and after attending John Fisher boys’ school (now the John Fisher school), in Purley, Surrey, he studied physics at Sussex University and then South Bank Polytechnic.
In the early 1970s he was a mainstay of the pioneering alternative technology magazine Undercurrents – once contributing a satirical article on how to build an atomic bomb for urban guerrilla warfare – then worked for the publishing group IPC on trade titles, one of which, Energy Manager, he and some colleagues bought for a song after IPC decided to close it. It became the core of a successful publishing company, MCM, which they sold for a profit before he bought into NSS.
Post-Statesman, Pat set up a digital publishing outfit, Electric Book, which spawned the Academic Library, a major supplier of online books to academia. He also wrote several novels under the pseudonym Daniel McCoy.
He is survived by his wife, Caroline Mayow, an art teacher and artist, whom he married in 1979, their children, Nadja, Patrick and David, and by two grandchildren, Ida and Fedya.
