Hugo Young remembered 10 years on

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/22/hugo-young-remembered

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It is 10 years since Hugo Young died in London from cancer at the age of 64. He had been the Guardian's pre-eminent political commentator since 1984 and, from 1989 until his death, chairman of the Scott Trust that owns the paper. He occupied a very special and elevated place in the minds of Guardian readers and writers during those years; no one who has come after him has come remotely close to emulating it.

Ten years on, British politics has changed radically from the world which Young described. Margaret Thatcher, about whom he wrote better than anyone else, is dead. Tony Blair, whom Young began by admiring but of whom he angrily despaired over Iraq (and to whom he spoke on the day before he died), has quit the stage. Europe, the cause to which the generally Olympian Young eventually committed himself more thoroughly than any other, has unravelled in ways that he would surely not have foreseen.

If anything, though, journalism has changed even more than politics in the decade since he died. Young was the last and greatest flowering of a school of often (though not invariably) non-partisan political commentators who respected those about whom they wrote, who were in turn respected by politicians, and who were widely read for their informed analysis in the daily and Sunday press. The political journalistic culture of which he was the foremost examplar no longer exists. Whether that is an advance for public affairs journalism or a loss is a question worth pondering.

Young was instrumental in getting me two jobs – first on the Sunday Times in 1981 and then on the Guardian in 1984. I saw him at his home two days before he died, on a sunny afternoon just before the Labour party conference. He gave me two pieces of advice: the first was to put not my trust in princes (he wrongly thought this might be from Shakespeare but we checked before I left and we found it in the Book of Psalms); the second was to fight the good fight.

I have often asked myself how Young would have written about the world of 2003-13. How would he have adjusted to the gathering crisis of Europe? How would he, no economist, have measured up to the financial crisis and its social impact? I am certain he would have despaired of Gordon Brown's tragic premiership. He would have been brilliant on US politics of the Obama era and fascinated by the way the Scottish question threatens to undo the British state. But how would he have judged the Cameron-Clegg coalition or responded to the dissolution of trust that followed the MPs' expenses scandal? Better than the rest of us, is all that one can say. There is still a space where his voice should be.

To choose one extract from Hugo's work by which to recall him 10 years later is a daunting task. But this essay, written as an introduction to his collection Supping With the Devils, which was published a few months before he died, is a powerful reminder of all that we lost in September 2003. He was the dean and paragon of our trade – and I am far from being the only one who misses him keenly.

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