Hard to let go

Michael White, the distinguished Guardian journalist, had two retirements — one more formal and expected than the other.

The first more formal departure came nearly a decade ago after 45 years on the newspaper as Washington correspondent, parliamentary sketch writer, political editor and assistant editor (politics).

It was marked by a curious article in which White reminisced about his years on The Guardian, what made him tick as a journalist and what he believed was important and what was not. It was a bit like a journalistic obituary, or introducing yourself to your readers but only as you were going out the door.

In it, he confessed he would have liked to be a war correspondent, but only once, and revealed how sceptical he is about what most journalists lust for — scoops.

“Most scoops aren’t what they are cracked up to be. There are only half a dozen real crackers a year. I value sound judgement of known facts more highly,” White argued.

Then it was on to a second career as a freelance mainly writing for The New European, an obvious new perch for a Remainer.

His second “retirement” came unexpectedly one Tuesday lunchtime nearly five years ago, soon after filing what turned out to be his last 2,000-word piece for The New European.

“I sat down for lunch with my bride (of more than 50 years) and she noticed I was behaving oddly. I had already checked out the symptoms because hypertension had killed both my parents a long time ago,” said White.

Obviously, he was professional enough to ring The New European later that afternoon to check his copy from the stroke unit at the Charing Cross Hospital.

Even then, in common with many journalists of a certain age, there is never quite a final end to a career.

113k posts, and counting

In White’s case this includes being books editor of the British Journalism Review and above all, fighting the good fight on a daily basis on Twitter — and naturally he insists on calling it Twitter rather than Elon Musk’s X — where he describes himself as an Elderly Hack and Sage.

The system lists no less than 113,000 posts on Twitter by @michaelwhite since he first joined in 2008 only two years after the platform’s launch.

“I have ambiguous feelings about Twitter but I started when I was still working with the Guardian and soon after I retired, I continued to do Twitter because the Conservative / Lib-Dem coalition and all the things that were going on were interesting to me, very divisive and I was keen to comment,” says White.

He was particularly keen to comment on the apparent transformation of the historian Sir Niall Ferguson from ardent Remainer to a supporter of the new Brexit status quo.

“Sir Niall ought to know better, being an ardent pro-Remainer who had abused the Brexiteers and then he followed the money over to Brexit and proceeded to abuse the Remainers with equal passion: things like that needed calling out,” White says.

He added, almost unnecessarily: “I called him flip-flop Ferguson,” says the former Guardian journalist who says he always responds in kind.

He insists he is never mean to people who are distressed or in trouble and hardly ever blocks the numerous “bad guys” out there even those who attack him.

There was one exception, however, he did block one person who was rude about Alistair Darling (the former Labour chancellor) when he died.

On any given day, you can find the Elderly Hack and Sage out there fighting, with meticulous punctuation, what he obviously sees as the increasingly emboldened forces of unreason.

On a typical Twitter morning, White celebrates the fact that a US judge has kicked out — for now — President Trump’s multi-billion lawsuit against the New York Times for reporting things that Trump does not like.

Then he bounces someone called Goosey who suggests people seem to have forgotten the parlous state of the UK economy under Sir Keir Starmer.

“Yes, you have forgotten something; Failed Brexit, the chaotic misrule of Boris and Truss backed by the Daily Mail, which Sunak tried to sort out without the support of much of his party or the Daily Mail,” retorts White.

If he was a younger person on a different platform, he could easily be an important “influencer” making lots of money.

White’s media day

But, alas, he is merely an Elderly Hack and Sage who nowadays gets most of his newspaper content online through subscriptions to The Guardian, Financial Times and the New York Times.

There is one exception. Every morning, White walks to his local newsagent and, he says, “slightly to my surprise,” buys a hard copy of The Times.

These days, he believes The Times has fewer columns but on the whole better columns.

“The Guardian has far too many columns and always has had,” says White who was offered a weekly print column by The Guardian’s by then editor Alan Rusbridger.

“I said ‘no’ because I didn’t think I was good enough. There were already not good enough columns in The Guardian,” noted White pointedly.

The other reason White reads the Times every day is that it is a good substitute for reading the tabloids.

You get good foreign coverage but the domestic coverage in The Times also allows him to keep in touch with the Daily Mail, The Sun and the Daily Telegraph without actually having to read them.

He recalls how The Sun, under the editorship of Tony Gallagher splashed on the fact that Queen Elizabeth was a Brexiteer, apparently based on a lunchtime leak by the current editor of The Spectator, Lord Michael Gove.

“Turns out the story wasn’t true,” says White and Tony Gallagher, now editor of The Times, put the news that the late Queen was a Remainer after all, in a small story on an inside page.

“I pointed that out on Twitter too,” says White with relish.

He has always had a clear eye on where the lines should be drawn in the relationships been politicians and the journalists who cover them.

White is an admirer now, as then, of Sir Tony Blair, but when the Labour leader suggested early on in his prime ministership the two should see more of each other, the Guardian journalist made his excuses and left.

“Tony, it always ends in tears. You want what I cannot give you,” White told him.

White was involved in an almost tabloid controversy almost 35 years ago, involving then Daily Mirror journalist Alastair Campbell when Mirror owner Robert Maxwell — Capt’n Bob — drowned off his luxury yacht.

White in celebratory mood went to the Mirror office in Westminster and started singing “Capt’n Bob bob bob...” and Campbell hit him while White retaliated to ensure his 15 minutes of fame.

Responsible journalism

The Guardian journalist also had firm ideas about when it was right not to publish a story.

A Tory politician told him that the government was in secret talks with the IRA to end the conflict in Northern Ireland.

It would have been his best scoop but he decided not to print because he didn’t have a second source, the politician might have had ulterior motives and if it had been wrong, people could have got killed.

All these years later, he has no regrets.

“I think you have to think of the consequences. Most people disagree with me but I am still of my original opinion,” says White who also knew when to turn down potentially attractive job offers.

In the bar of the Garrick Club, the legendary Sunday Times editor, Harry Evans, then editing The Times, asked him to become the daily’s New York correspondent.

“I thought that night, will Harry still be in post when I get off the plane at Kennedy, and almost to the day he wasn’t,” recalls White who in the best traditions of journalism eventually was able to parlay the approach into becoming The Guardian’s Washington correspondent.

There he got a decent scoop, spotting a vote of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee to condemn apartheid, with President Ronald Reagan likely to follow.

It was a page lead in The Guardian but the splash in the New York Times the following day.

Cornish-born White had no family connections to journalism — his father was a master mariner — and after a history degree at University College London, he planned a career in industry.

A few rejections later, amid a growing realisation that he was “an observer not a doer”, White got his start on the Reading Evening Post one of the string of Thomson regional dailies designed to encircle London.

Then, by way of the London Evening Standard, Michael White began his 45-year Gurdian career, initially as a features sub-editor.

As he observes the “very challenging” current newspaper scene, it’s difficult not to worry.

As one of his three sons, Joe working in tech in California puts it, the high-tech billionaires just happen to have come for newspapers first and will eventually take over everything including the banks.

“The first thing you have to start with is that the business model (for newspapers) collapsed,” says White, who adds that there has also been a disturbing polarisation in response to social media.

“I think you have to travel optimistically and if you are not an optimist, you have to try and find a way of cracking this,” concludes White who believes a way must be found to regulate the high-tech publishers and get them to pay to fund journalism in some way.

As he heads towards his eightieth birthday, you can be sure that Michael White will continue to cast a sardonic eye over the media, politics and all matters in between, as Elderly Hack and Sage, albeit in condensed form @michaelwhite on Twitter