Leading Fleet Street journalist who reported on the upheavals of British industrial relations
Long after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the journalist Geoffrey Goodman, who has died aged 91, kept a bust of Lenin on his desk – more as a testament to his youth than an enduring belief in communism. During a career lasting more than half a century, and above all at the Daily Mirror in the 1970s and 1980s, he not only reported on the upheavals of British industrial relations in general, but also witnessed radical changes in his own industry.
Geoffrey was fond of the supposed Chinese curse: "May you live in interesting times." It certainly applied to his own life. He fought in the war that defeated fascism, saw his friend and hero Nye Bevan found the National Health Service, and had a ringside seat for the giddying rise of the trade union movement and its defeat under Margaret Thatcher. He watched as the dreams of his youth were finally turned to dust with the crumbling of international communism, and viewed with scepticism the rise of New Labour.
In an age when trade union power, strikes and privatisation were seen as issues defining the character of British society, the industrial editor had a lot to report. Goodman wrote lucidly, compassionately and wisely: he was a leading figure of the old Fleet Street who cast a light of great decency.
He was born in Stockport, Cheshire, the only child of Edith and Michael Goodman, the children of Russian immigrants. His Jewish heritage was an important part of Geoffrey's identity. When Michael lost his factory job in Manchester, the family moved, in search of better prospects, to London, where Michael made a living as a door-to-door salesman until becoming a civil servant. Geoffrey made his way from elementary schools in Stockport and Manchester to grammar schools in London and to the London School of Economics, where he was strongly influenced by Harold Laski.
In order to enlist at the outbreak of war, he added a year to his age. His second world war service came in the RAF as a Mosquito pilot (1940-46), and forever after he counted each day as a bonus. He began his journalistic career on the Manchester Guardian, and in January 1947 married Margit Freudenbergova, a Czechoslovak woman who shared his political commitment.
That year, too, he joined the Daily Mirror, though was fired, along with several other leftwingers, in a purge at Christmas 1948. In those pre-Cecil King and Hugh Cudlipp years, the Mirror was controlled by Guy Bartholomew. Although the paper supported the Labour party, telephones were tapped and mail opened in an atmosphere rather more redolent of George Orwell's Animal Farm.
Goodman was hired by the News Chronicle and worked happily there until its closure in 1959, when he joined the Daily Herald. In 1964, the paper, now owned by the Mirror Group, was relaunched as the Sun, and Goodman began his association with Cudlipp, who brought him back to the Daily Mirror in 1969 as industrial editor when Rupert Murdoch bought the Sun from IPC.
He found a paper transformed from the oppressive years of Bartholomew into a benignly tolerant regime that was the envy of Fleet Street for the consideration with which it treated the staff. In 1951, Goodman regretfully parted company with the Communist party, and from then on gave his allegiance to the Labour party. But his pedigree in politics gave him a unique advantage when dealing with the trade union barons. They trusted him because they knew where his heart was, and he understood and sympathised with the blundering giants of the TUC, even when they seemed mired in the class wars of the past and unable to understand the waning support of the general public.
It was not only the union chiefs who liked Goodman: he was on splendid terms with many of the captains of industry and much of the hierarchy of the Tory party. Again paradoxically, he was an internationalist who loved Britain, and was passionately opposed to the idea of a European superstate.
Pragmatically, he was not too angered about rank and privilege, as long as it had been earned and was not enjoyed at the expense of those at the bottom of the heap. But personally, he believed in practising socialism: when he needed a serious operation, he took his place in the NHS queue, even though the Daily Mirror insured its staff for private healthcare. His Who's Who recreations included "climbing – but not social".
On several occasions he was offered safe parliamentary seats that lay in the patronage of the unions, but he always preferred to stay in Fleet Street rather than endure the frustrations of life as a backbench Labour MP. One of the happiest periods of his life came in 1974-76, when he took a sabbatical at Nuffield College, Oxford, in order to write The Awkward Warrior (1979), a biography of Frank Cousins. It detailed Cousins's fight to bring democracy to the Transport and General Workers' Union, whose general secretary he had been from 1956 to 1969. Oxford University gave Goodman an honorary degree in 1977.
From July 1975, he took leave of absence from the Daily Mirror to run the Labour government's Counter-Inflation Publicity Unit for a year. Harold Wilson offered him a peerage, which he gracefully declined; he returned to his newspaper with the additional post of assistant editor.
When Robert Maxwell bought the Mirror in 1984, Goodman was sure that wholesale redundancies would follow. Maxwell had already dealt the print unions devastating blows, both at Pergamon Press and the British Printing Corporation, which he controlled.
Knowing of Goodman's excellent connections in the print unions and his strong links to the Labour party, Maxwell made strenuous efforts to stop him resigning, inviting him to join his innermost council on the Mirror, a group Maxwell referred to as "my politburo". In practice, the group had about as much effect on Maxwell's decisions as the actual politburo had on Stalin's.
After an early attempt to alter Goodman's column, Maxwell left his copy alone, but his brooding presence was enough to cast a blight over the Mirror that Goodman had come to love under Cudlipp's regime. He was relieved to retire in 1986.
Leaving the Mirror did not mean the end of work. Goodman set about raising the money to start the quarterly British Journalism Review, which he edited from 1989 to 2002. Its aim is to scrutinise the media, and act as a forum of analysis and debate.
Goodman wrote obituaries for the Guardian, and his other books included The Miners' Strike (1985), The State of the Nation: The Political Legacy of Aneurin Bevan (1997), From Bevan to Blair: Fifty Years' Reporting from the Political Front Line (2003) and a biography of Cousins's eventual TGWU successor, Bill Morris, the first black holder of such a post – Lord Bill: A Trade Union Miracle (2010). A regular broadcaster and commentator on radio and television, in 1998 Goodman was appointed CBE for services to journalism.
He is survived by Margit; their son, John, and daughter, Karen; two grandsons and two granddaughters; and three great-granddaughters.
• Geoffrey George Goodman, journalist, born 2 July 1922; died 5 September 2013