Anthony Sampson possessed three qualities that are indispensable in any good journalist. He wrote fast, fluently and with a pleasant wit, with phrases that stuck in the readers mind. He had courage, that virtue without which the other virtues are useless. Above all he was insatiably inquisitive: he wanted to understand how the world really worked.
I have a special debt of gratitude to him, because he rescued me from the self-satisfied mediocrity of the 1950s Times and took me to work with him, on the first day of the 1960s, at what was then the most exciting paper in London, The Observer.
But he was more than a talented and lovable friend. He was a role model: most of us would be proud to publish an article as wise as the one of his which appeared on the day of his death at the age of 78. More than that, he stood for values in journalism that it will be dangerous to lose.
Whats going wrong with the way Britain is governed? In May 2004, Anthony Sampson and Helena Kennedy discussed with openDemocracy their views of New Labours failings and what should be done. Read it here.
A passion for realism
Anthony Sampson came from a privileged, upper-middle-class English background. But after Westminster School, Oxford University and service as a naval officer, he escaped to Johannesburg where he spent four years editing Drum, a magazine largely written by and for black South Africans. Returning to England, he joined the Sunday Observer newspaper and became its diarist and wrote the best selling Anatomy of Britain (1962), which mapped the way the country worked and who ruled it.
When I met Anthony, he had fairly recently come back to London from editing Drum. While in South Africa, he had got to know many of the young black men and women who were challenging the self-righteous cruelty of apartheid. Among them was Nelson Mandela, who asked Anthony to be his biographer when, three decades later, he emerged from prison.
South Africa thrilled Anthony. It committed him at the deepest level to certain values he had no doubt respected even before he was plonked down, as a result of a more or less casual encounter with his acquaintance Jim Bailey, and with no journalistic experience, to edit Drum.
Anthony was never moralistic, but morally he was utterly reliable. You knew that he hated cruelty, despised racism and was repelled by hypocrisy and slime. But he never frothed at the mouth. He was never self-righteous. His attitude to ordinary human greed, cynicism or snobbery could seem urbane, an amused tolerance. It was only when you got to know him well that you realised how totally uncorrupted his own values were. And where real wickedness was present, as over the civilian casualties and the torture in Iraq, just as over apartheid, his anger was uncompromising.
At the same time Anthony shared the political attitudes of his generation, the young men and women who had served in the second world war. For those, like him, who had passed through a privileged education public school followed by Oxford or Cambridge University with their faculties intact, reform was desperately needed, meaning change based on realism about their country.
For two decades after 1918, British society had lived with make-believe. After the victory of 1945, owed in large part to American power and Russian sacrifice, the upper-middle-class English stumbled forward through a treacle of euphemism and self-deception. The British Commonwealth was, somehow, the British Empire purged of vice. London might not be the biggest or richest city in the world, but it was still by divine right the greatest. British engineering was still a byword for quality. There was much more in the same vein of increasingly unconvincing boasting. Still was the best that could be said.
Enough! said Anthony Sampson and his friends. I remember Anthony producing inside the Observer office a satirical glossary, deconstructing the euphemisms of 1950s obituaries: Jovial = alcoholic, Loves to encourage the young = paedophile. The mood was not cynical so much as a desperate need to be free from self-congratulation. He often said that above all what he was looking for, in the paper and elsewhere, was realism.
At the same time, he was never a Gadarene radical. He admired those, like Nelson Mandela, or Paul Foot, who were prepared to take on the whole juggernaut of established power and accumulated wealth and put their career and even their life at risk. But he was never in a hurry to pull down the pillars of the temple. I assume he voted Labour. But it would not surprise me to learn that there were also times when he voted Liberal or even Conservative.
It was not just that he had a certain fascinated curiosity about the world he illuminated so brilliantly in his Anatomy of Britain, the world of senior common rooms and merchant banks and dukes and London clubs. In part, it was because he enjoyed what he saw as the more harmless rituals of insidership. More seriously, he never supposed that simply tearing down the institutions of privilege would in itself make a better society. He had a global view that was, at least in the British context, far ahead of its time.
Like many British intellectuals of his generation, he believed that there was much to be rescued from the slightly seedy absurdity of the ancien regime. The elegant ambivalence of his biography of Harold Macmillan (Conservative prime minister of 1957-63) reveals a certain sympathy for the world Macmillan inhabited. In later years he was bemused, as well as amused and shocked, by the great developments he charted in his last revision of the Anatomy series, Who Runs This Place? (2004): the growing tyranny of money, the rise of corporate power and the enfeeblement of journalism.
Also by Godfrey Hodgson in openDemocracy:
- Can America go modest? (October 2001)
- From frontiersman to neocon (April 2003 )
- A comedy of errors: Tony Blair and America (April 2004 )
- Ronald Reagan: the feelgood president (June 2004 )
- Americas choice: inequality or democracy? (July 2004)
- Bush vs Kerry: what sort of people do we want to be? (October 2004)
Every year for the past quarter of a century Anthony and I were among a small group of ageing colleagues examined the cuttings submitted by several dozen young British journalists who aspired to spend some months on a fellowship at the Washington Post. I was surprised at the briskness of Anthonys judgments. He was interested in the attitudes of the writers, though more tolerant of those he disagreed with than those who did not know him well might imagine. But he was ruthless about those who did not seem to be interested in the quality of their writing. If you didnt care about writing, he would explain, there was no point in trying to be a journalist.
This was no mere literary fastidiousness or aestheticism. He thought that a journalist who couldnt be bothered to write in a thoughtful and lively way was simply not interested in communicating, and that if you were not interested in that, you shouldnt be a journalist at all.
Anthony was a very good reporter indeed, able to understand complex matters in many different fields and make them interesting. But he was no hard news man, uninterested in comment or opinion. At every stage in his career, from Drum on, and for many years in columns for Newsweek and The Independent, he offered his own opinions in columns, and very well worth reading they were. In fact I think he played an influential part in introducing the column that American import, like so much else in the history of British journalism into British papers in the 1960s.
The newspaper column
The column owed its popularity in American newspapers to the earthy fact that few of the 1,500 or so American newspapers in the mid-20th century could afford their own experts in Washington or New York or Hollywood, and thus found it economical to buy insight from Walter Lippmann, Hedda Hopper or any one of dozens of more or less genuine experts.
In the London press today, it has become all too often an alternative to reporting. Its attraction for management is largely a matter of money. Whereas 900 words of some young womans or middle-aged blokes thoughts about boyfriends or football referees cost a few hundred pounds a week, the work of an experienced reporter, licensed to travel and supported if he or she runs into legal trouble, costs many tens of thousands a year. Anthony Sampson reported on the grand scale. His books about ITT (1973), the oil companies and the arms trade benefited from the researches of a Senate committee in Washington; he had the sense to see that potentially formidable adversaries could be better tackled with the aid of Congresss investigative powers. Both in his Anatomy and in his lapidary biography of Mandela he managed to paint a whole nation by the brushwork of telling, carefully chosen fact. His columns took uncompromising, if generally moderate, positions; they were so persuasive because they were based on a serious effort to bring to bear relevant knowledge before proceeding to judgment.
And this is why this is a bad time for us to lose a journalist of his power and integrity. The trade of journalism has become a corporate business. Everywhere, in Europe and North America as well as in Britain, news is fighting to survive in a rising tide of entertainment, comment, opinion, sentiment and prurience. With circulations declining, television news and current affairs steadily pushed aside by reality TV, B- and C-list celebrity media, and anything else that can be made with a small budget, managements become ever further removed from the newsroom and the studio. They are easily persuaded that the elusive readers and viewers, and the golden harvest of advertising they could bring, are not interested in the expensive business of reporting the news. The Observer was not immune to this trend, in Anthonys view and although he was for some years on the Scott Trust, which now owns it, he was disappointed in the papers current fate.
Anthony Sampson belonged to a generation that saw news as both entertainment and liberation. He was very skilful at making the important interesting, and he found interest in many subjects that had conventionally been thought to be dull. But his great gift, developed by hard work and a commitment that was no weaker for being lightly worn, was his conviction that finding out how the world worked was the opposite of dull.
Anthony Sampson wrote 21 books and The Oxford Book of Ages with his wife Sally Sampson. His early and best-selling investigation of oil companies Seven Sisters was published in 1975, and was followed by an account of arms dealers (1977) and bankers (1982). He also served as an editorial adviser to the Brandt Commission. He assisted the launch of openDemocracy as a Trustee of the Open Trust.