My days of whine and Rosie

The extraordinary decision to appoint a left-wing helpless reformed drunk to be editor of the right-leaning Express 

Rosie Boycott, the journalist and editor, became a poster girl for sobriety and decorum. It was not always like that.

 

Before she was Editor of the Independent on Sunday and then the Daily Express, she was a helpless, hopeless, legless drunk.

 

Boycott, with commendable character and fortitude, kicked the habit. But as we all know, the craving never goes away, and I put her angry, glowering tenure in the editor’s chair at the Express down to never-ending addiction.

 

She was at the heart of the most cockeyed, crackpot period for which I had a ringside seat in more than 30 years at the Express. Boycott swept into Blackfriars Road in May, 1998 with a gang of enforcers mostly from the Independent  and, curiously for a proselytising feminist, all men.

 

She ruled by diktat and the gang ensured that her wish was our command. They would deliver lectures to a Backbench they didn’t trust and end on a slightly sinister note: “All right, got that?” A nod wasn’t good enough; you had to say yes out loud.

 

I remember I had just finished one of these tiresome exchanges when a senior executive, a friend and survivor from the old regime, strolled over and murmured: “Charmless c***s, aren’t they?”

 

Well, yes. Stupid, too. They were following a brief that was doomed to fail from the very beginning: Turn the Express into a Labour-supporting newspaper and take it a little upmarket. The Express, for God’s sake.

 

We old lags had seen this sort of thing before, of course – a dizzying carousel of strategies, editors and managements, each one a desperate, short-lived, expensive failure. This one was presided over by Labour Peer Lord (Clive) Hollick.

 

Boycott, now 73, is a talented journalist. She co-founded Spare Rib, the feminist magazine of the Seventies, and was a director of Virago Press, a publisher for women writers. For the Express, she wrote a weekly column (in Saturday’s paper, I think) that was light and bright and seldom veered into feminist territory. I enjoyed it.

 

But I didn’t like her management style. She was abrasive and would brook no argument. She fired two people whom I liked and respected. Mike Graham, then Night Editor of the Daily Express, now the breakfast show host on Talk radio, was axed after escorting Boycott on a sweary, after-lunch meet and greet tour of the office.

 

Amanda Platell, Editor of the Sunday Express, had by then appointed me as her Night Editor. I was weeks into the job when I got a call from the Picture Editor, my old friend Terry Evans, who told me: “Amanda’s gone.”

 

Boycott, who was Editor-in-Chief of both papers, fired her for revealing that Machiavellian Peter Mandelson, Tony Blair’s fixer, was living with a Brazilian boyfriend. It was a good story but perhaps not for a paper that was meant to be joined at the hip with  Downing Street, so Platell had to go. Assistant Editor Ian Walker went with her, another huge loss.

 

Like many editors who made their way up through magazines and the posher end of Fleet Street, Boycott had barely-concealed contempt for sub-editors. She did not regard us as journalists, merely as typesetters who, at a pinch, could see to it that words such as embarrassing were spelled correctly.

 

She once waved dismissively towards the subs’ desk and referred to us as “the little people.” Another time, the fire alarm sounded and she was inclined to ignore it, But her deputy, Chris Blackhurst, persuaded her that it was essential to clear the building.

 

Boycott was fearful of the effect that the evacuation might have on the production of pages and the off-stone time, so as she was leaving, she said: “The subs can stay.” It didn’t matter if we fried.

 

I was forced to endure one serious scolding from La Boycott. I had changed the splash headline just before the paper went off stone because it said the polar opposite of what the story said.

 

There was no time to remake the page; the new heading had to fit in the shape of the old one. It did, too. But it contained the phrase “mums-to-be”. I knew it would spell trouble but I couldn’t let the offending headline go in.

 

Next morning at conference, I was treated to a long, patronising diatribe delivered in the testy tone of a principal of Cheltenham Ladies’ College, where Boycott spent her formative years.

 

Now, here’s a survival tip for bollockees: I maintained eye contact and nodded vigorously at appropriate moments, as though I were listening to Confucius imparting his priceless wisdom. And I did not rat out the culprit behind the flawed headline.

 

Boycott seemed naïve about the business of editing. One of her lieutenants told me how, after her first night in the job, she came in the following day and said: “Someone left a big bundle of newspapers on my doorstep last night.”

 

Well, yes, she was told. “You’re supposed to read them and see if there are any stories in the rivals that you want the newsdesk to follow up.”

 

Once she brought her daughter Daisy and some friends into the office to watch the unfolding of a major news story. The dog came, too. It was infested with fleas, which found a comfortable new home in the office carpet tiles. For weeks afterwards backbench journalists complained of flea bites to the ankles.

 

And the editor of this fine organ discovered that Rosie had a dog called Bingo and he, Bingo, had a dog called Rosie. Just fancy that!

 

Boycott would appoint women to senior jobs at every opportunity. Nothing wrong with that; I enjoyed working with most of them. Women bring a different perspective to the news. But it was a determined attempt to redress a historical imbalance, regardless sometimes of the candidate’s suitability for the job.

 

Boycott writes with shame and grim reality of her struggle with alcohol in an autobiography called A Nice Girl Like Me. She was working as a freelance when an old friend invited her to fly to Cyprus to edit a Middle Eastern weekly TV guide he was launching.

 

Her relationship with her lover was shaky and Boycott suspected she stayed with him out of apathy, not commitment. “Who else, I would wonder, would put up with the drunken excesses? Who else would love me? I was 30 years old, unmarried and I drank far too much.”

 

So she caught the flight to Nicosia. Within hours of landing, she was drunk and stayed that way until day eight. “Even to me,” she writes, “a bender of such proportions was outrageous.”

 

And so it continued. “Am I going mad? I would wonder as I struggled out of bed to look for another drink, my head splitting and my body racked with waves of nausea…

 

“It was finally decided that I had better go home. No one had the time or inclination to babysit a 30-year-old lush.”

 

Boycott checked into a clinic, where she suffered agonising withdrawal symptoms. “So this must be death,” she writes. “But I knew there was one way out, such a simple one. Spirits, any kind of spirits. Three inches of Scotch and the nerve endings would stop screaming. At any rate, they always had in the past…

 

“The symptoms of withdrawing from heroin addiction are supposed to be the ultimate hell on earth. I’d been through that and now knew it wasn’t true.”

 

She lived to tell the tale but thought her memoir would mean the end of her career – who would employ a recovering alcoholic with a rackety backstory? In fact, it was almost the other way round. Boycott became the first woman to edit the UK edition of the men’s magazine Esquire and almost doubled its circulation.

 

But always, perched on her shoulder, was the aching, nagging desire to drink. She gave up on Alcoholics Anonymous. She thought she had licked it, but she hadn’t.

 

Against the advice of her therapist, Boycott married war reporter and author David Leitch, also an alcoholic. He stayed sober for a while but then, inevitably, he fell off the wagon. She, fearing for her marriage, hit the bottle too. Eventually, they parted.

 

Boycott left the Express after Richard Desmond bought it. She was happily remarried to Charles Howard, KC, but the loss of the Express job plunged her into depression. When I heard about her car crash it never occurred to me that she might have relapsed.

 

She was in a collision on the A303, a road I know as extremely dangerous. Cars crossing it have to negotiate four lanes of fast-moving traffic with only a small sanctuary in the middle.

 

The crash left another driver seriously injured and Boycott with broken legs. She had to be cut from the wreckage and later tested positive for alcohol. She almost lost her right leg and spent 20 months on crutches.

 

With help from Alcoholics Anonymous, she overcame this setback too and six years ago she became Baroness Boycott of Whitefield in Somerset.

 

The craving has never left, of course, but she says: “On a lousy day, when things go wrong, I’m stressed and I haven’t accomplished anything, as long as I go to bed without having had a drink, knowing that my head hits the pillow in a sober state, then I have, in fact, accomplished the most important thing of all.”

 

*****

 

I’m always astonished at how much it costs to keep a child in nursery. It is so expensive that it virtually wipes out one of the salaries in a family with two earners.

 

Of course, nurseries are very labour intensive. Toddlers need a lot of supervision and safety must be a paramount concern. Also, rents are high and the place has to make a profit – it’s not Sweden, your taxes don’t cover it.

 

Lately I have begun to admire the people who work in them. It is a tough job. Imagine looking after a class of three-year-olds. One is bad enough. But it’s what they do, for very little reward.

 

My mind was changed when my latest grandson’s mother sent us his “learning journal”, compiled by his nursery. Our Oliver is now leaving for “big boy’s school” and the journal contains a pictorial record of his time there.

 

It details the tasks he was asked to master and assessments of how he coped with the challenges: Sorting shapes, making cupcakes, climbing stairs.

 

The journal shows his skills and confidence growing at the same rate as his little body, from the age of two until almost five. It is a wonderful document for his parents to cherish.

 

And I get it now. Nursery helpers are worth every penny.

 

*****

 

“I met this cowboy with a brown paper hat, paper waistcoat and paper trousers … he was wanted for rustling.” – Chic Murray

RICHARD DISMORE

20 August 2024