Long life | 18 June 2015

My friend Alan Rusbridger has just given up editing the Guardian after a distinguished 20-year reign that has climaxed, as befits an accomplished musician and former chair of Britain’s National Youth Orchestra, with a magnificent crescendo of earthshaking scoops. He has now, at 61, ascended to more serene heights as chairman of the Scott Trust, the company that owns the Guardian, and also as principal of an Oxford college, Lady Margaret Hall. His departure from the Guardian after one of the most outstanding, if also rocky, periods in its long history has been appropriately marked by articles, interviews, speeches and other celebrations in which he has reflected with shrewdness and modesty on the lessons of his editorship for the troubled and topsy-turvy world of journalism today.

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The moment in the ‘grooming gangs’ debate that shamed Jess Phillips

Among the interviews was one by the well-known media commentator Ray Snoddy in a bimonthly magazine called inPublishing that landed unprompted on my desk last week. In it Rusbridger expressed interesting views about the uncertain future of journalism as it migrates from printed newspapers to the internet, but forgive me in advance for a dramatic lowering in the tone of this column; for what struck me most in his interview were the startling words he used to describe his reaction when the Guardian’s investigative reporter, Nick Davies, first came into his office with his explosive phone-hacking story. They were not words you would normally expect from a journalist of Rusbridger’s civility and aesthetic sensibilities, let alone from the principal of Lady Margaret Hall. But this is what he said: ‘If your reporters bring in stories you believe in and are good, then what do you do? You either shit or get off the pot.’

‘You either shit or get off the pot’ is not an expression I have ever heard anybody use before, though that is probably because I have led too sheltered a life.