Richard Keith Stott, journalist: born Oxford 17 August 1943; reporter, Daily Mirror 1968-79, Features Editor 1979-81, Assistant Editor 1981-84, Editor 1985-89, 1991-92; Editor, Sunday People 1984-85; Editor, The People 1990-91; Editor, Today 1993-95; columnist, News of the World 1997-2000; columnist, Sunday Mirror 2001-07; married 1970 Penny Scragg (one son, two daughters); died London 30 July 2007.
The finest popular newspaper journalist of his generation, with an unequalled five national newspaper editorships to his name, Richard Stott commanded fierce loyalty and love from many who worked with and for him. Not all took to his demanding work ethic or a bulldog determination that could sometimes explode into verbal demolition of those found wanting, but many fine newspaper tumblers and tightrope walkers relished a ring master who ran a circus containing the unlimited panache and excitement of which adventurous journalists dream.
Twice editor of both the Daily Mirror and The People and subsequently of the now defunct Today, he was a wickedly funny man and a great deflator of pomposity, which was not so much pricked as lacerated by his inbuilt bullshit detector. At an out-of-town editorial conference he once sought to reward his People troops by ordering a bottle of port and when he felt the wine waiter was patronising their paper by asking if Sir realised just how expensive was the chosen vintage, replied, "In that case, we'll have two."
Conceived, he insisted, over an ironing board during an air-raid alert just before Christmas 1942, Richard Keith Stott was the son of Freddie Stott, an unambitious engineer with a fondness for drink, and Bertha, née Pickford, a publican's daughter who became a landlady to Oxford University students. The thought of a third child arriving in the family home - John and Judith were already there - drove the then 49-year-old Freddie to take a job in Wolverhampton, from whence he returned to the family's Oxford home only at weekends, to spend hours in the Lamb and Flag or the Randolph Hotel bar.
Bertha made sure both sons had a good start in life, sending them to Clifton College in Bristol even though she couldn't afford the fees and the absent Freddie paid only the rent of the Oxford house. The family's financial saviour was Richard's spinster godmother, Lilian Peacock, a successful landlady who met many of the bills.
At Clifton, Stott boxed and played cricket, as well as left-half in the school soccer team, and became the first boy to avoid military training with the Combined Cadet Force on the grounds of being unwilling to submit to its discipline. He was initially interested in following his sister Judith into the acting profession and later recalled:
The theatrical influences on me were fierce. My sister was currently an item with Albert Finney and she had previously had an affair with Robert Stephens. I had known Maggie Smith since I was a boy. I had met John Gielgud and Peggy Ashcroft, and run errands for Edith Evans (who looked disconcertingly like my godmother Lily P and often behaved like her. Both had the ability to fart loudly and totally ignore it).
Theatrical aspirations dimmed and, after being rejected by two Oxford colleges, Stott wrote unpublished theatre reviews of Ouds productions and then successfully answered an advertisement for a reporter on the weekly Bucks Herald. There he had his ambition fired in 1963 when reporting the Great Train Robbery - he broke the story of the size of the haul after being tipped off by an obliging train diver - alongside Fleet Street's finest. They drank Aylesbury dry within an hour, he recalled.
A spell at Ferrari's Press Agency in Bexley, Kent, where his fellow reporters included another future Fleet Street editor, Kelvin MacKenzie, led to shifts and then a job at the Daily Mirror. There he thrived under the editorship of Mike Molloy and soon was patrolling purely an investigative beat, writing penetrating series on Reginald Maudling, who died before his writs over accusations of corruption could progress, the disgraced MP John Stonehouse, and the former Transport Minister Ernest Marples, who had decamped to France hotly pursued by the Inland Revenue.
These were followed by an investigation into attempts at match-fixing and bribery by the England and former Leeds manager Don Revie, who resigned from his England job and scurried off to the United Arab Emirates as Stott's investigation began to bite. Thirty years ahead of Lord Stephens' inquiry, it uncovered far more evidence of corruption in football, although it has now been conveniently forgotten within the game. It did, however, see Stott elected as the Reporter of the Year in the 1977 British Press Awards.
He moved from reporting to an executive role as features editor of the Mirror and received rapid promotion to assistant editor. He was appointed to his first editorship in 1984, six months before Robert Maxwell gained control of the group despite assurances by Reed International that they wouldn't sell to a lone predator. Stott became skilful at the constant arm-wrestling necessary to retain editorial independence, winning as many such tussles as he lost but nevertheless succeeding Molloy as editor of the Daily Mirror after just 18 months at the helm of what was then the Sunday People.
An often tempestuous relationship with the proprietor continued - "I considered myself to be working for the Mirror, not Maxwell," Stott was to say - so it was a surprise when, towards the end of 1988, Maxwell appeared sympathetic to Stott's suggestion that the People was sold to him. The following year he returned to the Sunday paper in preparation for the buy-out, only for Maxwell - consumed by the imminent flotation of Mirror Group and purchase of the New York Daily News and facing mounting problems that would soon propel him from the deck of his yacht into the sea off Gran Canaria - to withdraw his co-operation.
Stott returned to the Mirror, whose editor, Roy Greenslade, had fallen foul of the proprietor, and it was there on the day following Maxwell's death that he produced the much-maligned front page headlined "The Man Who Saved The Mirror". Stott later was to write
. . . he had saved the Mirror, whatever the knockers and piss-takers said. Those of us who lived the Mirror every minute of the year knew he had. He was appalling but he had turned a puny profit into big bucks, he had revolutionised the workplace and smashed the print unions, most of it in the wake of Murdoch's Wapping, but he had played a considerable part and, above all, he had introduced colour . . . if you judged a newspaper proprietor by whether he leaves the paper in a better state than he found it, then Maxwell, for all his many faults, had been a successful owner.
Once it became apparent that the proprietor had plundered the company's pension fund, Stott's investigative flair and courage ensured that the paper pursued the story vigorously and reported it fully despite objections from board members and their advisers.
The emergence of David Montgomery - once a disliked Daily Mirror sub-editor and subsequently editor of Rupert Murdoch's News of the World and Today - at the forefront of the venture capital initiative that took over the Mirror Group resulted in Stott's removal, despite Montgomery's promise that "the editors of all titles remain in their positions". The wholesale sacking of staff and the collapse of the national newspaper circulations that followed prompted Stott to write in the British Journalism Review after Montgomery was himself removed as CEO in 1999: "Montgomery was about as good a businessman as he was a journalist, with a doomed strategy for both papers and business."
Murdoch was more prescient than his former employee and appointed Stott to edit Today, for which he won the What the Papers Say award as Editor of the Year in 1993. And the closure of the paper in 1995 did not signal his last journalistic hurrah, despite having earlier turned down Murdoch's offer of the editorship of The Sun.
He went on to become a pugnacious columnist at the News of the World and then the Sunday Mirror, holding true to the socialist beliefs that had characterised the politics of the papers he edited, ever prepared to attack New Labour over Iraq and any other deviations from what he considered compassionate policies. Even after his cancer had been diagnosed he took on the task of editing the now best-selling book The Blair Years, based on the diaries of his friend Alastair Campbell.
Richard Stott loved most of all his family but also watching cricket, a great many journalists, some lawyers - Derry Irving became a friend long before his appointment as Lord Chancellor - and a disparate bunch of rascals, including Cecil Parkinson and Peter Jay.
Richard and Penny, his wife of 37 years, were warm and generous hosts and their home in Kingston upon Thames was the scene of much merriment, especially on New year's Eve when, for many years, they entertained close friends at a dinner party notable for rumbustious hilarity and Richard singing along to his favourite records, Charlie Gracie's "Butterfly" and "Fabulous". They were the typically quirky choices of a singular man.
Bill Hagerty