It had been many years since I had seen anything of Andreas Whittam Smith, but he popped up on the television this week to discuss the fate of the Independent, the newspaper he founded 30 years ago but which is now about to close. I was pleased to see that at 78 he had acquired a knighthood, for this was an honour he had deserved for a long time. The strange thing, though, is that he was given it for services to the Church of England, to which he later became a financial adviser, and not for his great lifetime achievement in founding and successfully editing a national daily newspaper.
When this happened in 1986 he gave up a good job as City editor of the Daily Telegraph, persuaded two younger Telegraph journalists, Matthew Symonds and Stephen Glover, to join him, and somehow managed to raise the money to start and efficiently manage a newspaper that promised to be the only one in Fleet Street beholden to no individual and to no ideology, but to be frank, fearless and free and to offer unbiased coverage of world events.
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