Lionel Barber leaves the pink ’un in the pink

As Lionel Barber recounts unrolling his pitch to replace me as editor of the Financial Times to the newspaper’s proprietor Marjorie Scardino, he retrospectively makes fun of his presentation: ‘You have to change the editor,’ he recalls telling the Pearson CEO in the summer of 2005. ‘Otherwise this sucker’s going down.’ Then an aside for readers: ‘Maybe she thought I had been watching too many Hollywood movies.’

Well, yes. There are some cinematic touches to Barber’s memoir of his long reign as FT editor from October 2005 to January 2020. This is true of his own self-portrait (gun-slinging journalistic enforcer in the Evans and Bradlee tradition, friend to the powerful, nemesis to the damned). It spills into his portrayal of the important people (many of them friends) he met while occupying the editor’s chair — the US treasury secretary who is ‘one tough hombre’, the financial masters of the universe with ‘matinee idol’ good looks, assorted despots and bureaucrats. That is a shame, because Barber has a good story to tell, and one that would have been better told without the swagger. In fact he has several good stories.

The first is one of journalistic success. He had a good run as FT head honcho — certainly much better than my briefer one that went before. He strengthened the pink ’un’s journalism and authority after wobbly times following the end of the dot-com boom. He advanced its international reputation — notably in the US — while maintaining its slightly challenged niche in the UK. Over time he charted a winning course for the FT as a digital news organisation with more than one million paying subscribers online and in print. The scoops (exposing massive fraud at Germany’s Wirecard to name the best) and must-read interviews (Putin’s attack on the idea of liberal democracy) with which he marked his last year or two werea fitting coda.

As important for the FT’s long-term future, he took the lead in embracing new owners after it was sold to Japan’s Nikkei.