Suzanne Moore’s departure is a sad day for the Guardian

Who runs a newspaper – and especially a great liberal newspaper – in a digital age when liberalism often seems to be in retreat, menaced by its enemies internal and external? In the not-too-recent past, the question would be easily answered: the editor, supported by his (for in the past it was usually ‘his’) senior journalists ran the paper. Things are more complicated now.

At least they appear more complicated at the Guardian and at the New York Times. At both papers, each the proud inheritors of certain liberal traditions, one may no longer say with confidence that editorial control of the paper resides with the editorial staff.

This evening, the columnist Suzanne Moore announced she is leaving the Guardian. It is hard to avoid the thought this is intimately related to the episode earlier this year when hundreds of Guardian staff and contractors, many of them working for the paper’s commercial and tech departments, denounced a column Moore had written.