If ever a man was damned by being described as “the cleverest young man in England” it was the economic journalist Peter Jay. When Time magazine decided on the epithet and chose him as one of its 150 world leaders of the future in 1974, Jay was already 37, so rather old to be a young hopeful.
However, he needed next to no encouragement to believe it, having already garnered a reputation at the Times, where he was then economics editor, for arrogance. It was scarcely the magazine’s fault that his highest elected office ended up being mayor of the Oxfordshire town of Woodstock, but as his career went into a slow decline following his brief period as British ambassador to Washington in the late 1970s – having been appointed to the post by his father-in-law the Labour prime minister James Callaghan – each mishap was accompanied by the sound of chortling schadenfreude in the British press.
Jay once claimed that his career was so disjointed that it was really no career at all, yet it was nevertheless garlanded with privilege: academic success, awards for his journalism at the Times and on television, executive appointments and the most glamorous ambassadorship at the youngest age of any previous holder. But Jay, who has died aged 87, might have been born to be mocked. He took himself seriously and was, looking at the glittering prizes he collected while young, an extremely able man.
However, his talents were undermined by a lack of judgment and common sense, so that if he fell short of what he considered his due he had no one to blame but himself.
He was born into the Hampstead Labour aristocracy, the son of Douglas Jay (later Lord Jay), a sometime fellow of All Souls, Oxford, and briefly president of the Board of Trade in Harold Wilson’s first cabinet – the man who once wrote that “the gentleman in Whitehall really does know better what is good for the people” – and his wife, Peggy Jay (nee Garnett), a long-time Labour member on the Greater London council.
Their son, one of four children, was educated at Winchester, where he became head boy – it was a time when Labour leaders were not embarrassed to educate their children privately. After national service on minesweepers in the Royal Navy, he went to Christ Church, Oxford, where he took a first in philosophy, politics and economics and became president of the Oxford Union debating society.
When a tutor allegedly first coined the phrase about Jay being the cleverest young man in England, his reaction was to ask whether there was someone cleverer in Wales. “I was one of those people who found it great fun to compete,” he acknowledged later. “Everything was a form of game.”
At Oxford, he met and married, in 1961, Margaret Callaghan (now Lady Jay of Paddington) who was even better connected than he was with Labour’s upper reaches, as the daughter of Jim Callaghan. They had three children Patrick, Tamsin and Alice.
Fast-tracked from Oxford into the Treasury as a civil servant, he then moved seamlessly into journalism at the age of 30, in 1967, with his appointment as economics editor of the Times, a post he held for 10 years. It was an ideal platform from which to display erudition and his weekly columns each Thursday became influential in a paper that still saw itself self-consciously as being written only for top people.
Thus, when a subeditor once complained that he could not understand what Jay had written, he was loftily informed that the column was not meant for him, but only intended to be understood by three people – two Treasury civil servants and the governor of the Bank of England.
He was, however, also read by Margaret Thatcher, who absorbed Jay’s argument in the rocky economic days of the early 70s that the money supply determined the rate of inflation – monetarism – and that Britain could not spend its way out of recession.
Jay, who regarded himself as a Keynesian, was delighted when his father-in-law repeated this to the Labour conference in 1976, but professed himself less pleased when Thatcher adopted monetarism in the 80s. “When I hear that,” he admitted, “I feel like the schoolmaster who first showed Genghis Khan a map of the world.”
If his cleverness was regarded with some respect, there was nevertheless astonishment when Callaghan appointed him British ambassador to Washington in 1977, and much ribald comment about the son-in-law also rising. After all, Jay’s reputation was hardly that of a diplomat and he had had no experience of foreign affairs.
It seems the move was recommended by David Owen, the foreign secretary who was a friend. Jay promoted US investment in Britain and countered Irish republican fundraising for arms in the American-Irish community. But the appointment ended when Thatcher came into power in 1979; she put a career diplomat in his place.
The ambassadorship also had a disastrous effect on the Jays’ marriage. Already rocky before the family moved to Washington, it disintegrated as Margaret embarked on a highly publicised affair with the journalist Carl Bernstein (subsequently dramatised by Bernstein’s wife Nora Ephron in the 1983 novel Heartburn, then made into a film).
Jay himself had a fling with the family’s nanny Jane Tustian, which resulted in her pregnancy and the birth of a son, Nicholas. For several years, Jay refused to acknowledge the boy’s paternity; but ultimately, a blood test proved it and a court case obliged him to pay maintenance. Jay’s marriage ended in divorce in 1986 and the same year he married Emma Thornton, a garden furniture designer, with whom he went on to have three sons.
In the 70s, while still at the Times, Jay had been the first presenter of the LWT Sunday morning politics programme Weekend World and became a friend of its ambitious young producer John Birt, pioneer of the “mission to explain” approach, which suited Jay’s lofty tendencies. Back in London from Washington, in 1980 he became chairman and chief executive of the new TV-am channel, set up to introduce breakfast television with other celebrity luminaries such as David Frost, Angela Rippon, Anna Ford and Michael Parkinson.
Ambushed by the BBC, which hurriedly set up its own breakfast programme in advance, Jay and his colleagues soon found that their mission to explain was not what the British public wanted in the mornings, and were rapidly replaced by the puppet Roland Rat.
The hapless career moves continued when Jay was recruited by the corrupt tycoon Robert Maxwell to be his chief of staff. Despite the impressive title, he soon found that his job was little more than that of a bag carrier and general dogsbody, which came with a heavy freight of bullying and humiliation by Maxwell, who enjoyed showing his power by ringing up Jay in the middle of the night merely to ask him the time.
“I thought I could house-train him, but after 18 months it became apparent that I couldn’t,” Jay said later. “My job was futile.” Nevertheless, he remained for three years and escaped not long before Maxwell’s villainy with the company pension funds was exposed after his death, falling from his yacht in 1991. Jay’s pay-off had been handed over in time, so he avoided the penury of many of the other employees.
By that time he had been rescued by his old friend Birt, now director general of the BBC, who appointed him economics and business editor for the corporation. This became the source of some resentment. A reporting job was scarcely Jay’s forte: he did not have a sympathetic on-screen manner, did not find soundbite explanations easy, and became an increasingly distant figure, rarely seen in the newsroom or available for major stories, and even having to receive briefings from other staff on Budget days before going on air.
An alternative job was found for him in 2000 as presenter of a documentary series called Road to Riches, about the history of human economic development, which took him away from news reporting and to locations around the world. The series showed him, among other stunts, swapping bananas with a chimpanzee. Scotland on Sunday’s reviewer wrote: “Jay is so manifestly uncomfortable in his role as our cheery tour guide with a nice line in economic theory that the series jars from the outset.”
The accompanying book received warmer reviews than the series, whose publicity was scarcely helped by his admission that, not only had he not entered a shop for many years but “basically, money bores me”.
Such stumbles were chronicled by the media, which continued to enjoy his reputation for arrogance, though perhaps naivety might be a better description for a surprisingly unworldly lack of self-awareness.
“I am difficult to live with and have quite a strong personality which expresses itself in the form of this is what I want to do and this is how I want you to be. I also bark,” he confided. “I don’t feel arrogant in my head, but so many people have said it that it must be true.”
Latterly, Jay retreated to his large house on the outskirts of Woodstock to pursue his hobbies of sailing and bridge and to be elected to the town council. He served as mayor between 2008 and 2010.
He is survived by Emma and his children.
• Peter Jay, journalist, broadcaster and diplomat, born 7 February 1937; died 22 September 2024
• This article was amended on 24 September 2024, to correct the spelling of Nora Ephron’s name.
