Clik here to view.
The former Times editor whose remote manner belied a steely ambition that kept him active in journalism for decades
William Rees-Mogg, who has died aged 84, was editor of the Times during one of the most turbulent and unsettled periods of its history and a longstanding newspaper columnist of largely conservative, even Whiggish, opinions. In 1988 he was elevated to the peerage by Margaret Thatcher, though he sat in the Lords as a cross-bencher.
His stately demeanour and slightly otherworldly, almost aristocratic, appearance gave him the air of an Oxford don: bespectacled, pin-striped and with a floppy forelock he was easy to mock and incongruous in the demotic and inky world of 1970s newspapers. There was a certain tweediness of opinions too that could be reminiscent of a Wodehousian country squire. But his remote and reserved manner belied a steely intelligence and ambition that saw him become a national newspaper editor well before his 40th birthday and kept him active in journalism for decades afterwards.
He was regularly derided as "Mystic Mogg" – a parody of a tabloid astrologer – for his occasionally perverse or wrong-headed assumptions, but none could deny that his columns were serious, if often pompous, or – a term he would have relished – influential in circles that mattered.
Rees-Mogg was born into a Somerset gentry family – Moggs have lived in the county for centuries – though one with a touch of exoticism: his American mother had been an actor and he inherited his Roman Catholicism from her. He was educated at Charterhouse school, where his adolescent stuffiness and cunning was later ridiculed by his contemporary, the louche novelist Simon Raven, and went up to Oxford as a Brackenbury scholar, reading law at Balliol and becoming president of the Union debating society at a time when its status and self-regard was at its highest: contemporaries included Jeremy Thorpe and Robin Day.
Rees-Mogg thought himself destined for a political career – standing as a Conservative candidate he would later be heavily, even humiliatingly, defeated twice in the 1950s in the safely Labour seat of Chester-le-Street – but an article he had written in a university magazine happened to be seen by an executive on the Financial Times and he was offered a post on the newspaper instead. In his memoirs, published in 2011, Rees-Mogg asserted: "I had the basic qualities not of a good historian, but of a good journalist – I had trenchant opinions: I wrote with vigour at short notice on any subject: I was manifestly clever, without being particularly consistent, accurate or profound … I showed promise; indeed, my whole educational career was based on showing promise." The FT did not seem to mind that he was also writing speeches at the same time for the prime minister Anthony Eden, which the newspaper would subsequently report.
Not for him the mucky-fingered provincial journalistic traineeship endured by other tyros of the period, or even an apprenticeship of reporting: within three years he was the paper's chief leader writer and within five assistant editor. From there, in 1960, still in his early 30s, he was plucked to become City editor of the Sunday Times, then separately owned from the Times, but when the paper's proprietor the Canadian Lord Thomson of Fleet acquired the daily in 1967, Rees-Mogg became the obvious man to be appointed editor.
The Times was a newspaper in flux, attempting somewhat desperately to shed aspects of its staid and fusty image and acquire a new sort of readership to broaden its appeal beyond the small establishment of "top people" who (in the words of a famous advertisement) would never have read anything else. It had recently failed in its attempt to merge with the Guardian and the previous year had taken the revolutionary step of putting news instead of classified advertisements on its front page.
Under Rees-Mogg, the last of the paper's "gentleman editors", it would go further, though how far he himself was responsible for such innovations was open to some debate. However there was improved and more extensive arts and sports coverage, a women's page, the introduction of journalists' bylines, the bringing in the star columnist Bernard Levin and even an advertisement with a picture of a nude.
Perhaps most famously and disconcertingly for the paper's readers, Rees-Mogg soon penned a seminal editorial in the paper in July 1967, railing against the severity of prison sentences handed down to the Rolling Stones Mick Jagger and Keith Richards for drug offences, citing (and slightly misquoting) Alexander Pope's aphorism: "Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel." He argued: "If we are going to make any case a symbol of the conflict between the sound traditional values of Britain and the new hedonism, then we must be sure that the sound traditional values include those of tolerance and equity. It should be the particular quality of British justice to ensure that Mr Jagger is treated exactly the same as anyone else, no better and no worse. There must remain a suspicion in this case that Mr Jagger received a more severe sentence than would have been thought proper for any purely anonymous young man."
Even in the Summer of Love that was a bold move for an editor of the Times to make, although it also garnered useful publicity for the paper. However, the impression that he was a dilettante, disengaged editor, aloof from staff, interested in editorials, but not necessarily in news or layout – the nuts and bolts of newspaper production – was slow to dissipate. He was smoothly at home within the establishment, chatting to and occasionally interviewing politicians, prime ministers and world leaders with rather more relish than mingling on the editorial floor with his shirt-sleeved staff.
Louis Heren, a veteran foreign correspondent and executive of the paper, believed that Rees-Mogg's attitude changed as his political ambitions declined during the premiership of Edward Heath in the early 1970s: "It was said that he expected a life peerage and a cabinet seat and was offered something a good deal less. Whatever the truth, he was thereafter a more attentive and effective editor.
"The extra effort was certainly necessary. After the Thomson takeover, the board of Times Newspapers launched a massive circulation campaign. What had worked for the Sunday paper was confidently expected to work for the daily and for a time the circulation did indeed rise dramatically. The layout was changed and the editorial content popularised, if not trivialised. A business news and Saturday review section was introduced with to little planning and preparation and the combined result was almost disastrous for editorial morale. Rees-Mogg was not altogether responsible for these mistakes, but what amounted to mutiny among his senior colleagues concentrated his mind wonderfully. The paper returned to a more discreet layout, its old virtues and foibles were allowed to reassert themselves and Rees-Mogg regained his self-confidence. The editorial chair became the dispatch box and he thundered on almost every political and economic issue. A few of the positions he assumed were odd to say the least."
The 1970s were a thankless time to edit a national newspaper: tired printing presses produced murky and stereotyped pages, hidebound recruitment procedures gave rise to stultifying staffing and print union power held production of papers to capricious ransome. Towards the end of the decade, Thomson had had enough and eventually the Times suspended publication for nearly a year. Shortly after its return, the papers were sold to Rupert Murdoch, a figure about as antithetical in style and approach to Rees-Mogg – if not necessarily political opinions – as could be imagined. Photographs showing the two of them together following the takeover were almost comically ill at ease. In his memoirs however he would write: "Looking back, he has been an excellent proprietor for the Times, but also for Fleet Street ... The number of titles has increased; there are more and better-paid journalists than could be afforded in the old days. Above all, the power of the print unions was broken."
Rees-Mogg continued to write opinion columns for the Times and other papers even after leaving the editor's chair in 1981: economically dry, socially conservative. He could also be remarkably haughty. His assertion during the Maastricht debates that the prime minister John Major was over-promoted and unfit to govern - "his ideal level of political competence would be deputy chief whip or something of that standing" - was denounced in loyalist Tory ranks as pure snobbery. RHe subsequently lost a legal challenge that he mounted to the constitutionality of the treaty and had to pay costs.
There also followed a succession of public positions awarded by patronage: membership of the BBC's board of governors – there was an implicit understanding that he would become chairman, though that ultimately did not come to pass – and then chair of the Broadcasting Standards Council, arbiter of television taste, for five years. As vice-chairman of the BBC, Rees-Mogg was accused by journalists at the corporation of being behind the governors' decision in 1985, after heavy government pressure, to block the transmission of a contentious programme about Northern Ireland. The programme was changed and subsequently broadcast, but in a period of high tension between ministers and the BBC, Rees-Mogg was very much on the establishment side.
He was also chairman of the Arts Council for most of the 1980s – a time during which the organisation was radically restructured and the number of arts bodies receiving grants was drastically cut – and even a year as high sheriff of Somerset. There were positions in publishing and a sideline selling antiquarian books at the top end of the market as chairman of Pickering and Chatto. There were occasional books from his own pen too, with apocalyptic titles such as The Great Reckoning, The Reigning Error, Picnics on Vesuvius and Blood on the Streets.
Rees-Mogg's stately pomposity was easily satirised by the likes of Private Eye: Mogadon Man when he expressed interest in liberalising drugs laws transmogrified into Mystic Mogg when his magisterially-expressed predictions proved particularly off-beam. He had a mansion in Somerset and a country estate – "I don't feel very 20th century," he once said – and yet discerned the irony of being "a country person who spends most of his time in London".
In 1962, Rees-Mogg married his secretary, Gillian, and the couple had five children, one of whom, Jacob, is now a Conservative MP for a Somerset constituency and another, Annunziata, failed in her attempt to become the same in a neighbouring constituency in 2010.
Jacob Rees-Mogg said on Saturday that his father had recently been diagnosed with inoperable oesophageal cancer. "It has been a mercifully short illness … he was very prepared for it." Rees-Mogg's last column appeared in the Times a fortnight ago.
William Rees-Mogg, journalist and writer, born 14 July 1928; died 29 December 2012.