Sir Andreas Whittam Smith obituary

Few journalists succeed in launching a newspaper, let alone one that survives for more than a few editions, yet Andreas Whittam Smith, who has died aged 88, managed to do so in 1986 with the Independent, the first new national broadsheet for more than a century, of which he was the founding editor. That the paper kept going (and still does, now in an online edition) owed something to Whittam Smith’s financial skills, but perhaps more to Rupert Murdoch breaking the print unions’ stranglehold over Fleet Street. Yet Whittam Smith, an unlikely-looking figure for a journalist, with the appearance more of a high-ranking cleric than a hard-nosed editor and entrepreneur, not only saw the newspaper off the stone and on to newsstands, but also created a serious and stylish product with fine journalism and an eye-catching and innovative design that others, including the Guardian, came to emulate. It flourished among the liberal middle classes with its slogan “It Is. Are You?”, until its founders bit off more than they could chew with the launch in 1990 of a Sunday edition and the eventual loss of independence. Ian Jack, one of the Independent on Sunday’s early editors and later a Guardian columnist, described Whittam Smith with some affection as a “rational man from a Dickens novel,” saying that although Whittam Smith was conservative in his tastes, he was genuinely liberal when it came to letting people – not just journalists – do what they wanted, a characteristic that flourished when he later became president of the British Board of Film Censors. He was born in Macclesfield, Cheshire, the son of a Church of England vicar, Canon JE Smith, originally from a Manchester working-class family, whose parish was in an impoverished area near the docks of Birkenhead on Merseyside. His mother, Margaret (nee Barlow), a piano teacher, was the daughter of a Lancashire mill owner. Their son’s Christian name derived not from some exotic foreign relations but from a village on the Isle of Man where his parents had spent their honeymoon. Andreas was educated at Birkenhead school and obtained a third class degree in politics, philosophy and economics at Keble College, Oxford. A report from his national service in the Army apparently concluded that he was unfit to lead men. He moved into financial journalism after a brief spell in the City with NM Rothschild. He started with the Stock Exchange Gazette before moving to the national press, spending his entire career prior to the Independent focused on economic affairs, in turn at the Financial Times and the Times, then as deputy city editor of the Daily Telegraph, followed by a year as city editor of the Guardian (1969-70): “At one time on (the paper) but never of it,” the Guardian’s history says. From there he became editor of the Investors’ Chronicle before returning in 1977 to the Telegraph for an eight-year stint as its city editor. Under its hidebound Hartwell family ownership, the Telegraph was stagnating, with a readership whose average age was nudging 60. With any possible path to the Telegraph editorship apparently unattainable, and with Murdoch’s daring flit with his newspapers to Wapping showing the way forward, Whittam Smith and two colleagues, the leader writers Matthew Symonds and Stephen Glover, began secretly plotting the creation of a new quality newspaper. They raised City money and quietly recruited more than 100 experienced national newspaper journalists, mainly from the Telegraph but also some refuseniks from the Times’s move and from the Guardian. Their plans were already well advanced when the news leaked out. The Independent was not the first new newspaper venture – the entrepreneur Eddy Shah had tried first with a tabloid called Today – but it was the first to be launched self-consciously as a broadsheet into the quality end of the market for more than 130 years. It was aimed directly at the readerships of the existing broadsheets who were bored with their kneejerk politics and their dreary layouts. By challenging contrast, using new technology, freed from union constraints, the Indy, as it was soon known, published its first edition on 7 October 1986 – the first day of that year’s Conservative party conference – with Whittam Smith as editor, and chief executive of Newspaper Publishing, its publisher. Symonds was his deputy and Glover foreign editor. The new paper appeared like a breath of fresh air. Its typeface was clean, its layout spacious and its use of pictures bold and often large scale. Free of old constraints, its journalism was well-written and challenging too. Only in one area did the Indy high-mindedly refuse to compete – in its coverage of the royal family, which it all but declined to notice, until the wind direction changed and the travails of the royals became an important story later in the 1990s. “There was a tinge of republicanism,” Whittam Smith admitted to the Indy in 2020. “We wanted to avoid fawning coverage. We argued consistently that as many members of the royal family as possible should lead normal lives and pay their own way. We felt we should have a bicycling monarchy like the Netherlands.” In short order the paper was selling 400,000 copies a day, particularly challenging the Guardian, whose circulation had benefited from the year-long closure of the Times in the late 1970s but had grown complacent, and the Times itself. Hubris followed: Whittam Smith and his colleagues over-extended themselves at the start of 1990 with the launch of a Sunday edition into an already crowded market dominated by the Sunday Times. “The success of the daily went to all our heads,” Glover admitted later. Worse, as the British economy grew precarious, Murdoch and other proprietors launched price wars for their papers that left the Independent struggling. An attempt to buy the Observer to bolster the Independent on Sunday was headed off by the Guardian. Other media organisations circled: the Mirror group and then the media company of the Irish businessman Tony O’Reilly bought large stakes in the company and it lost its major selling point: it was no longer independent. Whittam Smith was forced out in a boardroom coup in August 1994. He moved on to take up other interests, including trusteeships and charities and in 1998 was surprisingly plucked by Jack Straw, the home secretary, as the Blair government’s choice to head the British Board of Film Classification – an appointment thought within the industry to presage a more conservative turn. But his four years in charge turned out to be more liberal than expected, allowing the release of films such as The Exorcist and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre on video and being more relaxed on the depiction of sex, so long as it was not violent or involving drugs. “One of my weaknesses as a censor is I can’t take horror seriously,” he said. “Adults should be able to make their own viewing decisions … the BBFC’s primary job should simply be to regulate children’s viewing. In my deepest heart I object to notions of paternalism.” No sooner had he stepped down than he became the First Church Estates Commissioner for the Church of England, in charge of its £6bn-worth of assets and investments, much of which sustained the pensions of ageing clergy. In the early 1990s it had been revealed that ill-advised property speculation had lost £500m of the church’s funds so Whittam Smith’s task was rebuilding the portfolio and also accommodating churchgoers’ consciences occasionally on ethical investments. In 2013 his suggestion of a £100m recruitment plan to boost the training of more clergy and so reverse the longstanding decline in churchgoing drew heavy criticism as a waste of money and unlikely to be effective, as indeed it proved. He stood down in 2017, having been knighted two years earlier. Whittam Smith is survived by his wife, Valerie (nee Sherry), whom he married in 1964, and their sons, Benedict and Mark, and three grandsons. • Andreas Whittam Smith, journalist, born 13 June 1937; died 29 November 2025