Adam Boulton Diary – Mortality and mentors
The pandemic has sharpened our awareness of mortality. During the longueurs of lockdown I’ve found memories resurfacing of people and their remarks from long ago. One such remark came from my thickly bearded music master, John Baird, a distinguished Wagnerian and conductor. He mused to his class of teenagers following the death of a parent: “You realise that the queue for the ticket booth is thinning out in front of you.”
As you grow older so inevitably the losses mount up – grandparents, uncles and aunts, parents and then, just a shocking few drops at first, those who were your friends in their own right rather than through family connections.
Mentors are the most senior of these friends of one’s own. As I push on into what my late mother would helpfully call “your seventh decade” – I’m sixty-two this month – I have now run out of living mentors.
I’m lucky enough to have had more than my share of those schoolteachers we rightly celebrate for having changed our lives – I can think of at least four to whom I owe much. At work two bosses gave me opportunities, encouragement and advice about what and what not to do. I couldn’t have had a better start in British journalism than under Leslie Stone, the free-thinking HCCAT (Head of Central Current Affairs Talks) at the BBC External Service. In contrast to many employers, Leslie actually encouraged me to move on and make the jump into Breakfast ITV. There, eventually, after much managerial blood on the carpet, I came under the tutelage of another high-achieving iconoclast, Bruce Gyngell, the Australian grandee who saved TV-am. Andrew Neil is the only person to have given me a job twice. Jon Snow has always been a font of upbeat advice about our industry.
The man who changed my life and the reason why I became a journalist died last week. Unlike those I’ve already mentioned Godfrey Hodgson had no institutional obligation towards me, he was just the father of my closest friend. A scholar at Winchester and Magdalen Oxford, Godfrey was fiercely intelligent. Until I met him, I had no idea that journalism could be a satisfactory pursuit for someone like him.
He and his generation entered the media, as newspapers and broadcasting weren’t called then, at a golden time. News reporting was expanding. The background to events and people in the news was starting to be blended with the raw facts and opinions. The work which resulted had a much richer texture, ranging from extended features to what became known as investigative journalism. In the US Woodward and Bernstein doggedly exposed the Watergate Scandal. Here the likes of Nicholas Tomalin, Anne Leslie, Simon Winchester, the Dimbleby brothers, David Frost and Hodgson dug deeper, applying their well-cultivated brains to the expanding spectrum of subjects which they also helped to open up during the 1960s.
At The Sunday Times, Godfrey was part of the Insight team, set up by the late, great Harry Evans. He worked on investigations including those into the birth-defect causing drug Thalidomide and the American fraudster Bernie Cornfeld.
His strongest personal interest was always America, fine-tuned by a post graduate scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania and a stint as Washington correspondent for the Observer in the early sixties, coinciding with the Civil Rights movement. For The Sunday Times Hodgson co-authored An American Melodrama about the tumultuous and violent 1968 Presidential campaign, widely recognized as one of the great books about twentieth century US politics.
His magnum opus was America in Our Time: From World War II to Nixon. First published in 1976, it has been continuously in print ever since. Drawing on sociological trends in the US he identified what he dubbed “the liberal consensus” which delineated the bipartisan compromise struck between the political leaders of the time. This concept seems outmoded now in the century of Trump, but An American Melodrama had already spotted the shift that could be on the way in the shape of Ronald Reagan, then dismissed by most as a fringe candidate. As his friend and former colleague John Shirley wrote in his Guardian obituary, “it was a measure of Hodgson’s intellectual honesty that in 2017 he could contribute to collection of essays The Liberal Consensus Reconsidered, reflecting on the inadequacies of his earlier theory…”.
Not surprisingly, Godfrey advised me to do a post graduate degree in the US before going into traineeship for journalism. He told me which university to go to and even drew a map by hand of the places to go in Washington DC. The centre of this universe was the Childe Harold, a now defunct bar on Dupont Circle. Later Christopher Hitchens, who was a colleague of Godfrey’s at The New Statesman during Bruce Page’s editorship, settled in the same area.
Godfrey left the Sunday Times after the lockout which led to Rupert Murdoch’s purchase of Thomson Newspapers. He had a parallel career as presenter of LWT’s London Programme and Channel 4 News and was briefly Foreign Editor of The Independent. But he was increasingly drawn to academia, both as a lecturer and as the author of numerous books. He was the Director of the Reuters Foundation at Oxford University for a decade, acting as a generous mentor to dozens of young journalists from around the world. He and Sir David Butler co-hosted the celebrated Friday afternoon talks by politicians and journalists at Nuffield College.
Hodgson and Butler, two widowers, ended up living along the corridor from each other in a block of flats for retired academics off the Banbury Road. Godfrey had a deep love for Oxford, which he did not pass on to his two sons or to me. He was very proud of the “Oxford Vaccine” and an enthusiastic supporter of the inoculation programme, having had an arm damaged for life by osteomyelitis as a boy. Godfrey died last week, of heart disease, a few days after his second Covid injection – I don’t know whether it was the “Oxford” brand. He was a few days short of his eighty-seventh birthday.
You take the bits that are useful to you from your mentors and forgive or overlook the rest. To me, Godfrey belonged to an entitled cohort of post-war journalists shrewd enough to see how powerful the media would become. They enjoyed the best of unexplored waters which are now chronically over-fished.
Technology has taken my career in a different direction. Godfrey deplored my working for outlets owned by Rupert Murdoch. I place a premium on the impartiality mandated for British broadcasters. Mentors open your eyes to opportunities and teach you how to avoid messing them up, sometimes by not following their hard-lived example.
Godfrey loved talking and drinking, making connections between and about people. To the end he was a voracious reader in several languages. Typically, his favourite novels were Anthony Powell’s very English stab at roman-fleuve. Godfrey could tell you who the anti-hero Widmerpool was really based on and he had probably met them. I will be forever grateful to Godfrey for pushing me out into my own Dance to the Music of Time.