My Mentor: Richard Ingrams on Claud Cockburn
'Claud made us interested in what is now knownas investigative journalism'
Monday, 6 August 2007
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I read Claud Cockburn's memoirs when I was at Oxford so he was kind of a hero as far as I as concerned. He started as a journalist on The Times and then became a communist and worked on the Daily Worker. In the 1930s he started a paper called The Week which he wrote entirely himself. It was a bit like Private Eye but more political.
Shortly after Private Eye started, I went on my honeymoon to Ireland; I was writing for the Sunday Telegraph and the editor recommended I go and see Claud. He lived in a tumbledown mansion in County Cork, and he was very friendly. I invited him to guest edit Private Eye and it coincided with the climax of the Profumo affair in 1963. He made a lot of trouble and named the head of MI5 and MI6 and after that he was a regular contributor.
What he did as far as Private Eye was concerned was to make us interested in what is now known as investigative journalism. It was taken up later by Paul Foot but it was Claud who started it. One story he wrote, about a man who died in police custody, caused a lot of headlines and was taken up by MPs. We had never done anything like that in Private Eye before and we started doing serious political stories under his influence.
He told me that if in doubt about how to write a political story you should think: what is the worst thing that the government could do in these particular circumstances? And then assume that they had done it. I frequently used that when writing the Denis Thatcher letters.
Claud was accused of being very cavalier about facts but he said it was pointless to think about facts as such: there were no facts until you had decided what the story was, then the facts fitted in.
All his children are journalists. Alexander and Andrew are in America and Patrick is The Independent's award-winning foreign correspondent. All three are very influenced by their father. He sounds very serious but in fact he was a very amusing man, and we were great friends until he died in 1981.
Richard Ingrams is the editor of The Oldie, and edited Private Eye from 1962 to 1986.
