Digging deep

It could hardly have been a more dramatic news day for Peter Kellner, now best known for election punditry and polling, to begin his newspaper career.

He turned up at the Sunday Times on Tuesday July 22nd, 1969 for his first day when the news was dominated by man’s first steps on the moon, after the Apollo II spacecraft had landed in the early hours of the previous day.

Like many careers in journalism and publishing, there was a strong element of chance in where Kellner turned up.

The grammar schoolboy who studied maths at Cambridge, but switched to economics because he wanted more, as he saw it, of the real world, was planning to teach in Uganda under a Commonwealth voluntary service scheme.

Then in the accompanying paperwork, the young Kellner noticed a discussion about how many houseboys to employ. The overtones of imperialism stuck in his left-of-centre throat.

“I couldn’t get my head round a couple of black kids doing my washing and ironing,” says Kellner who was all too aware of the dilemma involved — that if he didn’t employ anyone, they might remain unemployed.

It was, however, enough to put Kellner off and move on to his other possible career option — journalism.

He had been writing for Anti-Apartheid News, then edited by Bruce Page’s wife Anne, and got to know Sunday Times investigative journalist Bruce who introduced him to Peter Wilsher, editor of the paper’s Business News.

“Business journalism was expanding massively at the time and Peter wanted to hire two more people. Because he was able to hire a properly trained journalist, he was able to take a risk on the second,” says Kellner who was put down as a specialist statistical writer.

This got round the NUJ rule that everyone needed two years’ experience outside London before coming to Fleet Street.

“I shudder with embarrassment. After going to an all-male college then getting a job on the Sunday Times through knowing the right people at the right time,” says Kellner who sees himself as “an accidental beneficiary” of a vanished world.

He could write “to a degree” but had to learn the basic things, such as holding the reader’s attention, on the job.

He remembers one of the dictats of his legendary editor, Harry Evans. There is no such Sunday Times word as ‘miniscule’ wrote Harry. If you want to say something is tiny, say tiny.

Establishing the facts

Kellner treasures another Evans parable. A journalist meets two men. One says they have just cut all the grass on a meadow, while the other says they just lay in the grass drinking beer.

According to the late Sir Harry Evans, a bad journalist quotes one of the men, a mediocre journalist quotes both while a good journalist goes to the meadow and checks out their claims.

In a way, that is what Kellner did when running the Sunday Times Insight team, although in this case, the ‘meadow’ was the oft-repeated claims in the left-wing press, that Israel was torturing Palestinian prisoners.

Kellner said to Evans, let’s find out what is going on and whatever the outcome, we will publish it.

“Two very good journalists, Paul Eddy and Peter Gillman, were out there for three months and they established beyond any doubt that there was systematic torture and mistreatment of Palestinian prisoners,” says Kellner.

He is half-Jewish — his father was an exile from Nazi Germany — so was attacked in the Israeli press as a “Jew-hating Jew”.

President Jimmy Carter raised the story with then Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin who denied it.

“Carter said, I have had my people look into it and the story is right. Begin had nowhere to go and for a time, it stopped,” Kellner says.

Another story that stands out in his memory demonstrated that BP was involved in helping Rhodesia get round oil sanctions.

First, the Sunday Times got a copy of BP’s evidence to a government inquiry which amounted to a confession.

The company’s share price was badly hit by publication but BP claimed the sanction-busting was historic.

“Then we established a couple of weeks later it was still going on. BP flatly denied the story and Harry said, are you sure,” recalls Kellner, who adds that two weeks later, BP came to the Sunday Times and admitted that a South African subsidiary had indeed been carrying on suppling oil without BP’s knowledge in London.

“I didn’t realise how lucky I was having Harry Evans as editor for 11 years because he had been my only editor. He had the attention span of a butterfly but when it mattered, he was magnificent and courageous and understood the fundamental purpose of journalism,” recalls Kellner.

Later, working at the Evening Standard, he rated Max Hastings as “another really great editor”.

Political journalism

Bruce Page, by then editor of the New Statesman, popped up again in Kellner’s career and asked him to become political editor, writing the weekly political slot.

There was a pay-cut but he was able to branch out into broadcasting and also wrote a fortnightly column for The Times.

“That was when my journalistic brand became political commentary. It was not a great time for the centre-left but it was a great time to be writing about the centre-left — the SDP years, the Kinnock years,” he notes.

Then there was also a political polling and analysis slot on Channel 4’s A Week in Politics before moving to Newsnight.

Newsnight meant making one or two films a week, eight or 12 minutes long.

“I didn’t enjoy that, the hanging around, the time-wasting. I much prefer writing. It is a much more efficient way of gathering and imparting information,” says Kellner.

But he loved live broadcasting, most of all, election nights and the pleasure of seeing first-hand, David Dimbleby in action displaying “a lesson in professionalism”.

What does he think of Newsnight now that all the films and exclusive reports have gone?

“I hardly ever watch it. I don’t regard interview programmes or Question Time or Any Questions as journalism. I am not saying there is not a place for ‘on the one hand, on the other hand’ representation of views, but it isn’t journalism,” he says.

Instead of asking viewers to make up their own minds, Kellner wants evidence and facts to be properly tested so that someone can say, “ah that’s what happened”.

Journalist turned pollster

Kellner’s journalistic homes also included The Independent although by the late 1990s, his ‘brand’ had narrowed to analysis and polling.

So, it was hardly surprising that when YouGov started polling online, the first in the UK to do so, they turned to Kellner as an advisor because they thought it would be a mistake to hire an existing pollster.

There was then another career evolution partly because of the expanding political career of his second wife Cathy, Baroness Ashton, the Labour minister who went on to become Leader of the House of Lords and First Vice-President of the European Commission.

Kellner had been writing a political column for the Evening Standard but increasingly thought he couldn’t do the job the way he wanted to without betraying confidences.

YouGov, by then concentrating entirely on polling, offered Kellner the full-time chairmanship.

“That gave the opportunity to avoid going into the frozen world of pure freelance writing,” says Kellner who chaired YouGov for six years before stepping down when the company decided to go public and expand internationally.

Since then, he has often defended polls and criticised the expectations journalists have of them, sometimes forgetting about issues such as the margins of error involved.

“There is a deeper point. We have a media culture which is not very comfortable with numbers whether it’s polls, economic forecasts or Bank of England inflation figures. Journalists want figures to be right or wrong,” Kellner argues.

In the real world, economic numbers are very seldom exactly right and very seldom totally wrong and you have to know a bit about probability to make sense of it all.

He has recently been defending US pollsters.

All the polls in the swing states in the presidential election were very close. Some thought Kamala Harris would just win Pennsylvania and Michigan, others Arizona and Nevada while she just lost all of them.

“They were wrong because they predicted Harris would win by 1 per cent whereas Trump won by 1.5 per cent,” says Kellner who moved quickly to show that a dramatic Iowa poll showing a considerable lead for Harris was almost certainly wrong.

The night it appeared, Kelner delved into the technical notes in the Des Moines Register website and found that the poll had not been weighted for educational level or previous voting behaviour but just did age, general and congressional district.

“This meant, as I saw it, the Harris vote was significantly over-represented. I wrote a blog saying I know what I want to be true but my heart and my head are telling me different things, says Kellner.

Surveying the publishing scene in the UK, he believes we still get some of the best journalism in the world, in the Sunday Times, for example, and in the Financial Times which is a lot more courageous than it was 30 or 40 years ago.

“I think the Tory press has become a disgrace. The Daily Telegraph used to be a really good, reliable newspaper without political bias. It is now a broadsheet version of the Daily Mail,” says Kellner.

The Sun is the one he finds “least often offensively wrong” perhaps because of the Murdoch legacy of watching the way the wind is blowing.

There is one strange omission from the career of Peter Kellner. He has co-authored books and written chapters for books but never written one on his own — apart from a private memoir for his family.

That is not going to change.

“I lack the mental stamina,” he claims. Anything he wants to say can be said in 1,000 words or just occasionally 10,000 but never 100,000.

But his trenchant views on politics and polling can still be read for free on Substack whenever the spirit moves him, and only then.