Sir Harold Evans obituary

Sir Harold Evans, who has died aged 92, lived a life of two halves, almost two distinct lives. In his first life, he was the Manchester lad who grew up to be the most famous and most admired newspaper editor of his generation in Britain.

His second life was as an exile in New York, rich and fashionable, successful as the editor of the powerful Random House publishing company, but sometimes outshone in the world of the Manhattan glitterati by his second wife, the magazine editor Tina Brown.

The hinge in this story, which contains as much of classic tragedy as can be squared with the pasta and Pellegrino lunches of midtown Manhattan, was the tempting of Evans by his nemesis, Rupert Murdoch. It was a real moral drama, compounded of the clash between solidarity and ambition. Friends and former colleagues remain divided over whether or not he should have taken Murdoch’s shilling.

In the late 1970s Evans’s reputation was at its height. For a decade, he and the team of talented and aggressive journalists he led at the Sunday Times pulled off one triumph after another. There was the revelation of Kim Philby as the highest-placed traitor in the history of British intelligence. The exposé of the anti-morning sickness drug thalidomide and the successful legal battle, involving two judicial trips to the House of Lords, to win compensation for the children born with its effects. The showing-up as a fraudster of the MP and publisher Robert Maxwell. The publication of Richard Crossman’s diaries. Not to mention a steady quality of journalism of many kinds.

In the meantime, the management of the Sunday Times and Times, then controlled by the Lords Thomson, father and son, staggered from one defeat to another in relations with the printing unions, culminating in the catastrophic lockout of 1978-79 that cost Times Newspapers £30m. The Thomsons gave up, the younger lord retiring to Canada to lick his wounds and more than make up for his losses. Enter Murdoch, like a pantomime demon leaping from the wings.

The journalists at the Times, and especially at the Sunday Times, were game to resist a proprietor they thought would be disastrous for the paper’s editorial quality and integrity. They looked to Evans as the saviour who would lead them.

There was a secret lunch on 4 January 1981 between Margaret Thatcher and Murdoch, denied for 30 years. It was essentially a deal. Thatcher allowed Murdoch to acquire the Times and the Sunday Times. Murdoch agreed to make those two influential and highly respected papers favourable to Thatcher. The deal involved many lies by many people.

At the age of 52, Evans, the engine driver’s son from Manchester, was made editor of the Times. Few who had risen so high from his working-class background by his own brilliant talents would have refused that coronation. But it was to be the high point of the division between the two halves of Evans’s career.

Evans’s life was already in some turmoil. In 1978 his marriage to Enid Parker, a teacher he met as an undergraduate at Durham University, with whom he had three children, was dissolved, and he was sharing his life with Brown, a gifted, ambitious young Oxford graduate, on his staff when they met.

His editorship at the Times was brief and unhappy. After a year, Murdoch paid him off handsomely. Evans sat down to write his angry version of the relationship, Good Times, Bad Times, published in 1983. Later, when one of his former proteges, William Shawcross, came out with a Murdoch biography that did not wholly accept his version of events Evans flew across the Atlantic to reproach him.

Evans’s early life was the perfect paradigm of the working-class boy made good. His father, Frederick, was an engine driver and a socialist; his mother, Mary, started a shop in the front room so the family could afford a car. That and his father’s steady job, in depression-era Manchester, were enough to earn him the nickname of “posh Evans” at St Mary’s Road central school, which overlooked the Newton Road sheds where his father worked.

He always wanted to be a journalist, so, after he left school at 16, he went off to take shorthand classes, the only lad in a room full of lasses. His first job was on a paper at Ashton-under-Lyne. He remembered being sent to report on a visit by General George Carpenter of the Salvation Army. When the great man asked the assembled Salvationists whether they had been saved, young Evans explained that he was from the press. “But you can still be saved!”

His national service in the postwar RAF gave him more experience as the editor of a service paper. His readers were pleased when he put Diana Dors on the cover wearing not a great deal more than a fur wrap.

In 1949 he went to Durham University, and then went to work for the Manchester Evening News. A decisive break came in 1956 when he was awarded a Commonwealth Fund fellowship to the US, where he studied at the University of Chicago and at Stanford. Shortly after he returned, he was made assistant editor, and in 1961 came his first editorial chair, at the Northern Echo in Darlington, a job hallowed for him by the fact that one of his predecessors was the great WT Stead, who went on to be the crusading editor of the Edwardian Pall Mall Gazette. Evans kept a picture of Stead in his office.

In the spirit of Stead’s campaigning – he went to prison for his exposé of white slavery – Evans took up the case of Timothy Evans, who was hanged for a sensational crime of the 1950s, the Rillington Place murder. The Northern Echo proved that his execution was a miscarriage of justice. That brought the brave provincial editor to the attention of Denis Hamilton, then the editor of the Sunday Times.

Evans went down to London to be Hamilton’s chief assistant and, in about a year, after Roy Thomson bought the Times and Hamilton moved up to be editor-in-chief of the two papers, Evans was in the Sunday Times chair himself. He was lucky in the paper he had inherited. Thomson, a homespun Canadian, kept the paper well-funded and free from interference. Hamilton, a journalist from the north-east who had risen to be one of Montgomery’s brigadiers in his 20s, was a Tory but open-minded, and had accumulated a remarkable staff, as talented as it was diverse. Evans was free to show what he and his team could do.

He was an all-rounder. He was a brilliant technician. He knew exactly how far you could push your luck with hot metal and touchy compositors, and in particular how late you could leave a page change or the remake of a running story.

He could grasp the point and scope of a story at speed. When Anthony Mascarenhas brought in his 1971 scoop on the repression in East Bengal, which led to the birth of Bangladesh amid millions of refugees, a cholera epidemic and war, Evans swept away a pedestrian headline (written by myself) and replaced it with a single word, Genocide, in 72-point type.

He was famously courageous. He was the first editor to ignore a D-notice, the supposedly voluntary “guidance” given by a senior intelligence officer on stories that might breach the Official Secrets Act: Evans considered that this particular notice, issued during the uncovering of the spying activities of Philby who by then had defected to Moscow, was intended to preserve the government from embarrassment, not the nation from danger, and went ahead and printed.

His energy was perhaps the secret of his success. He skated round the office, occasionally grabbing a piece of paper, ramming it into a typewriter, and blocking out an intro the way he saw it for some hesitant reporter, typing so fast that the draft was full of x’s and zeds, then rushing off to another part of the Saturday battlefield. His seminars over a glass of scotch after the first edition had gone on a Saturday night were models of instruction and motivation. His energy and competitiveness made him a fierce opponent at squash or table tennis. He would dash off in the lunch hour with a colleague to the Royal Automobile Club, play squash until he had won, then plunge into the pool and swim lengths until it was time to go back to the office.

Between 1972 and 1977, while in the thick of the editorial battle he found the time to produce one of the few classic books about journalism, five volumes of Editing and Design, of which at least two, Newsman’s English, on writing for newspapers, and Pictures on a Page, on the choice and use of photographs, are works of rare insight and quality.

He had his faults. His experience of reporting, as opposed to editing and layout, was limited to his earliest youth. He sometimes seemed too keen to please the powerful. The brevity of his attention span was an office joke. He was painfully class-conscious. He once said he thought knowledge was something that had to be prised from the upper class, and when he wrote his book about the Times, he meticulously listed the public schools his colleagues had attended.

But these were foibles to be joked over. He was, in fact, loved by most of his staff, not an easy thing for a man with power over the careers and reputations of ferociously ambitious and competitive people.

That was at the Sunday Times. His reception at the Times in 1981 was more cautious. He put that down to snobbery, and there may have been some of that. The truth was that the paper was then in a bad way, and he did make mistakes. The colleagues he brought with him did not fit very well, and he spent much of his time in furious altercations with Murdoch.

He went to New York essentially because Brown, who had been the editor of Tatler, was offered the editorship of Vanity Fair (she was later editor of the New Yorker, as well as founder of the Daily Beast news website). They were married in 1981 in a glamorous mansion owned by Ben Bradlee, the editor of the Washington Post, in the Hamptons.

Evans expected a big job in the US, but he did not get it at first. He was given a home by the Canadian real estate millionaire Mort Zuckerman, at the Atlantic Monthly Press, then at US News and World Report, an ailing, reactionary weekly that trailed far behind Time and Newsweek. Then he helped to start a glossy but lively travel magazine, Condé Nast Traveller, for the Newhouse group.

It was not until he had become best known as Mr Tina Brown, something he found painful but bore with grace, that he got a job worth his steel. After only brief experience of book publishing he was made president and publisher of Random House, then owned by Si Newhouse. Once again he was in his element, in the middle of things. He loved the power-lunching, being invited everywhere, courted by writers and glamorous people.

His talent for publicity and self-publicity made him one of the most talked-about people in Manhattan. His style as a publisher was to offer gigantic advances, so big that they became a story in themselves and eventually helped to publicise the books. He offered $5m for Marlon Brando’s memoirs, which flopped. In 1995 he paid $6.5m for a book by Colin Powell, the former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff and got involved in a publicity campaign he hoped would blow Powell into the White House, until Powell decided he did not want to run.

He milked the mystery surrounding Joe Klein’s 1996 Bill Clinton-based roman à clef Primary Colors. The end came with the $2.5m Evans offered as an advance for the memoirs of Clinton’s adviser Dick Morris, in which he described how he would talk to the president while the aide was having his toe sucked by a sex worker in a Washington hotel. Newhouse, a puritan who had accumulated the money Evans was sloshing around, was not amused.

When New Labour won the 1997 election, Tony and Cherie Blair were feted by the Evanses, as one glamorous New Labour couple to another, and there were rumours that Harry and Tina would move back to Britain, or perhaps, their friends predicted, move down to the British embassy in Washington. But by that time, Brown was firmly established in New York, their two children at school there. Evans had become a US citizen in 1993, though he insisted that he felt British, and claimed he “teared up” when he saw Big Ben on millennium night.

In 1998 Evans published The American Century, an accessible history of the US from 1889 to 1989, which he had been working on for 15 years. Like everything he did, it was done with the full abundance of his energy. It was well received, and was made into a TV miniseries. Its 2004 sequel, They Made America, chronicled the lives of some of his adopted country’s notable inventors and innovators, and in the year it was published, Evans was knighted.

Reviewing Evans’s 2009 memoir My Paper Chase, fellow journalist Donald Trelford wondered whether Evans had mellowed, in particular in his portrait of Murdoch, but the opinions he expressed in the aftermath of Murdoch’s appearance at the Leveson inquiry did not bear this out. He continued to contribute to various news organisations, including the Guardian and the BBC. In 2011, a fortnight before his 83rd birthday, he was appointed editor-at-large by Reuters: he once told an interviewer that he hoped to keep on walking until he fell off the cliff.

Evans is survived by Tina and their son, George, and daughter, Isabel, and by his son, Michael, and two daughters, Ruth and Kate, from his first marriage.

• Harold Matthew Evans, editor and publisher, born 28 June 1928; died 23 September 2020