Souls of journalists dead and gone. . .

Just as a butcher should have the best of Christmas turkeys, and the fireman's house deserves especially dutiful attention in a fire, the Obituaries Editor of a newspaper has to be sent off in style.

Exactly thus, and very stylishly indeed, came the story of Tony Howard's life in The Times today (available to on-line subscribers and surely worth the charge in itself), a piece which the great man would have approved, honest, accurate, elegantly balanced between the goods and bads, ups and downs, failures and successes of our trade.

The way in which journalists were treated in obituaries was a matter of special interest to Tony, when he ran the obituary pages of The Times throughout  the latter part of my decade as Editor. When I disagreed with his predecessors in that job, the cause was normally that some monstrous African dictator was getting the nil nisi bonum respect better fitting for a harmless Ministry of Agriculture mandarin. Any disagreement with Tony, however, was always in the opposite direction.

The former New Statesman Editor, Observer Deputy Editor and polymath of church and state approved of a stern approach. When some of us thought that a dead editor or columnist should be given the gentle treatment of the civil servant or headmaster, Tony tended to see them as worthy of the warts-and-all picture that a politician might get. He wrote some of these obituaries himself, sending off a brilliant colleague and rival once with a dissection of failed ambitions that would have been wholly appropriate for an assassinated monarch or disappointed dictator.

He did not always see the problems this caused. One reason was that he knew so much about so many people, having a thirst for gossip that exceeded all other journalistic thirsts. An obituary which he saw as kindly omitting many failings in a man might still contain material of considerable  surprise to the subject's closest friends. . . .

Enough of this sharp reflection. It somehow seems wrong to write about him in a blog at all. A blog? He published some of my very first squibs in the New Statesman when I was barely a journalist of any kind. He failed to persuade me to join The Observer - for which I regularly thanked him when he later joined The Times. He was one of those few whose presence, especially when seated at the tiny window table of the Gay Hussar in Greek Street, was a signal that not everything in the trade had changed.

I'm always going to think of him there at that table - just as, in Andrew's breakfast cafe by the TLS offfice, I still think of my first Sunday Times boss, Roger Eglin, fuelling up, as he believed was absolutely essential, before writing his 2000-word, Saturday-morning Focus on the latest steel strike; and just as, in the All Souls corner of the Langham Hotel bar, once the BBC club, I think of Brian Hanrahan, who read books there when everyone else was plotting.

None of these eating houses is exactly a Mermaid Tavern. But then souls of journalism dead and gone are hardly Miltons or Shakespeares either.

They were just all three great men of journalism, all dead now just before this Christmas comes.