The Bevins Prize

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Anthony Bevins

By Andrew Marr

Monday, 26 2001

Anthony John Bevins, journalist: born Liverpool 16 August 1942;
Deputy Chief Sub-Editor, Liverpool Daily Post 1969-70,
Political Correspondent 1970-73;
political staff, Sunday Express 1973;
Political Correspondent, The Sun 1973-76;
Political Correspondent, Daily Mail 1976-81;
Political Correspondent, The Times 1981-86;
Political Editor, The Independent 1986-93, 1996-98;
Political Editor, The Observer 1993-96;
Political Editor, The Express 1998-2000;
married 1965 Mishtuni Roy (died 2001; one son, one daughter);
died Slough, Berkshire 23 March 2001.

Anthony John Bevins, journalist: born Liverpool 16 August 1942; Deputy Chief Sub-Editor, Liverpool Daily Post 1969-70, Political Correspondent 1970-73; political staff, Sunday Express 1973; Political Correspondent, The Sun 1973-76; Political Correspondent, Daily Mail 1976-81; Political Correspondent, The Times 1981-86; Political Editor, The Independent 1986-93, 1996-98; Political Editor, The Observer 1993-96; Political Editor, The Express 1998-2000; married 1965 Mishtuni Roy (died 2001; one son, one daughter); died Slough, Berkshire 23 March 2001.

His friends called him Tony, some older ones Anthony. To his wife he was "Ani"; but this brilliant political journalist usually sailed under the simple, piratical flag of "Bevins". Bevins worked for an awesome range of papers in his time, including The Sun of the mid-1970s, the Daily Mail, The Times, The Express and The Observer. But his real home, the paper he loved most, was The Independent, whose political editor he was when it launched in 1986, for seven years to 1993, and then again from 1996 to 1998.

This paper gave him his best times, freeing him from heavy-handed proprietors, infusing him with energy and optimism. He rewarded it with a string of great political exclusives and, more important still, gave it a political tone all of its own - genuinely independent, fiery and, where power was concerned, coolly insolent. Bevins was one of the real creators of The Independent, as much as the founders themselves.

From this paper, he fought the clubby, self-important, secret-society journalism of the old parliamentary lobby with relish and gusto. This battle for openness infuriated gentler and more conservative colleagues. But Bevins won, since the lobby's more absurd rules have collapsed and its briefings are now honestly attributed to the Prime Minister's spokesman. Without him, it would not have happened.

Like many others, I found Bevins alarming, even slightly frightening, when I first met him. Imagine a tall, wiry, intense-looking man, very much as Buddy Holly would have looked had he lived longer, hunched over his desk in The Independent's cramped Commons office. Neatly annotated but bulging files around him, Bevins would be devouring, with grunts and cackles, some hefty official government document that few other journalists would have bothered to open. In an age when too much political reporting has become the retelling of bar-room gossip, unsourced and sometimes invented, he believed in facts and hard work.

The clues were there, the trail could be picked up: there were, he would tell his subordinates, hordes of real stories buried in ignored appendices, obscure records, and the blizzard of written government answers published each week. As word spread that here was a reporter who actually did the work, so a network of senior officials and independent-minded MPs responded, feeding him tip-offs and quiet advice. With some, like Labour's Dale Campbell-Savours, he operated a guerrilla war, using parliamentary questions like snipers' bullets; with others, like Michael Heseltine, whose help for his native Liverpool turned him into that rarest of beasts, a Bevins hero, he talked grand strategy.

Among his famous scoops was his realisation, far ahead of the pack, that Margaret Thatcher was going to be challenged as leader, and his revelation of secret talks between the Major government and the IRA, winning him awards for his work in 1990 and 1993. But no picture of Bevins that fails to start with the long hours of careful reading, phoning and cross-checking gets anywhere near him.

There was also, however, the dramatic Bevins, at press conferences, for instance, with one huge bony hand raised until the hapless politician could finally not avoid him any longer. His questioning could be devastatingly direct: if you, Margaret Thatcher, love the NHS so much, why don't you use it? Or, to John Prescott, standing down from a Labour deputy leadership battle, "Now you have done a U-turn and totally humiliated yourself, do you think you have any future in politics?"

He was regarded by less energetic or driven journalists as a kind of latter-day Savonarola; in return he had bottomless contempt for idle journalists, or those whose fair-mindedness had been bought by their proprietors. It was characteristic of him that he resigned from The Express as soon as it was bought by Richard Desmond, without knowing of any compensation, pay-off or alternative job offer. (In the event, no job was offered; editors are wary of passion and idiosyncrasy.)

Behind the public Bevins was one of the kindest and most personally generous men in British journalism. On a speaking trip to Bangladesh, or giving a rare broadcast interview, he would send the fee straight to charity. He took huge trouble to help and support younger colleagues and stuck by his friends with ferocious loyalty.

He and his wife Mishtu, who died just a few days before him, by terrible coincidence, gave uproarious dinner parties at their home in Cookham, Berkshire, where politicians from left and right, fellow journalists and other close friends would gather over home-made curries and huge puddings. Bevins would choreograph the arguments that inevitably erupted, egging them on with whoops of delight. In later life, disgusted by the treatment of animals in modern agriculture, he had become a vegetarian but he was never a puritan; by the end of a dinner party, he would be circulating with eau-de-vie, about as evil as his accompanying grin. This warm, unusual home included two adored children, Rabi and Nandini, and latterly the grandchildren Jack and Joshua: for a man who frightened so many politicians, he was wonderful with children.

The son of Reginald Bevins, Postmaster General in the early 1960s and the only working-class member of Harold Macmillan's Cabinet, Tony was born in Liverpool in 1942 and educated at the Liverpool Collegiate Grammar School, before attending the London School of Economics.

More important than university, however, were the two years he spent on VSO in India, where he met Mishtu and learned Bengali. This experience, and his father's treatment by the High Tory establishment, chronicled in his 1965 book The Greasy Pole, fiercely radicalised Bevins. When he returned home, he spent three years working in his home city for the Liverpool Daily Post before arriving as a political correspondent at Westminster in 1970. His longest service before the launch of The Independent was on the Daily Mail and The Times; among the many journalists he learned from and hugely admired was the Mail's late political editor Gordon Greig.

An easy assessment of Tony Bevins would have it that, when he was struck down, entirely unexpectedly, by viral pneumonia, the good years were already over. He was no longer a political editor. But this is wrong. Only a few weeks ago he was full of exuberant plans for books on the BSE disaster and on a sculptor he believed shamefully neglected. His personal life was taking new directions and he was rather quizzically amused by his lack of a regular income. He had a lot to live for and give. For his children and his friends, but also for British journalism, the past few days have been entirely comfortless.

I CAN PINPOINT the exact moment when I realised the uncomfortable reality that the House of Commons had lost the power and influence which it used to have, writes Tam Dalyell. It was in the summer of 1999, when I said to Tony Bevins, "Tony, it's some weeks since I've seen you in the Members' Lobby. Have you been off sick?" Bevins replied, "No, I haven't been sick at all. It's just that it's now not worth my time patrolling the Members' Lobby [as he had done for 30 years]. The stories I am interested in are to be found elsewhere, and particularly in Downing Street."

One of his favourite remarks was "Don't give me that cant". Bevins, albeit a loner, was one of the most penetrating political newshounds of our generation. From an MP's point of view the relationship was often close but never cosy.

I always thought that, deep down, he resented the politicians as a class because of the brutal way in which his working-class father, Reggie Bevins, had been turfed out of his post as Macmillan's Postmaster General in the Night of the Long Knives. He had a soft spot for some members of the Awkward Squad - Dale Campbell-Savours, Brian Sedgemore, Dennis Skinner and myself among them. But he was exceedingly careful to double-check any story that was given and to interrogate us, to make sure of the veracity of what he was writing.

It was this determination, laced with cynicism, and irreverence towards the great and the good, that made him a formidable figure even to his local MP on the Liverpool Daily Post circuit - Harold Wilson. Later, when Bevins was on the Daily Mail, the Prime Minister, then in his second term of office, solemnly rebuked at least two cabinet ministers for having talked too freely to that Tony Bevins.

Somehow serious political life will not be quite the same when never again on a Sunday afternoon will we receive the telephone call: "Bevins here."