Martin Ivens, Fleet Street giant, bids farewell to the Sunday Times

After seven years as Editor of the Sunday Times, Martin Ivens is to step down. He will be replaced by Emma Tucker, the paper’s first female Editor in more than a century.

One of the last generation of journalists to work in Fleet Street, Ivens is widely respected for his integrity. His editorship has been dominated by Brexit, a huge challenge for any paper, but the Sunday Times has been outstanding in news and comment throughout.

Ivens, 61, began his career on the Daily Telegraph when newspapers were still printed on hot metal presses. As a young journalist, he learnt his trade under Sir Peregrine Worsthorne during the latter’s brief but colourful tenure at the Sunday Telegraph.

This was the heyday of Thatcherism, a revolution that his father, Michael Ivens, had helped to nurture by challenging the corporatism of British industry. Ivens pére was also an old-fashioned Hampstead intellectual and a fine poet. Martin inherited his bookishness and something of his radical politics.

At the Telegraph Ivens, who had read history at Oxford, was quickly identified as an homme serieux and his reputation only grew when he moved to the Times. There he ran some of the best foreign and comment pages of the early 1990s. As he rose through the corporate hierarchy, however, Ivens never lost his romantic attachment to newspapers.

In 1996 Ivens moved to the Sunday Times, where he remained deputy editor under John Witherow for 17 years. During that time, Ivens was among the most omnicompetent journalists in the business. From 2007 he wrote a political column which was well-informed and shrewd, but eschewed fireworks. Together with Witherow, he kept the paper on an even keel during the Blair and Brown era, when Thatcherism became deeply unfashionable and Rupert Murdoch flirted with New Labour.

Finally promoted to Acting Editor and then Editor in 2013, after Witherow moved to the Times, Ivens was immediately catapulted into controversy by the veteran cartoonist Gerald Scarfe. A gory depiction of Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, building a wall with the corpses and blood of Palestinians appeared on Holocaust Memorial Day. The image was generally regarded as anti-Semitic and caused such widespread offence that Murdoch himself apologised for it, as of course did Ivens. His reputation was such, however, that nobody in the Jewish community held it against him.

The husband of Anne McElvoy, a prominent journalist of the Left, Martin Ivens has always been cautious about expressing his own political opinions directly. He prefers to give a platform to superb columnists such as Dominic Lawson, Niall Ferguson, Adam Boulton,  Camilla Long and Sarah Baxter. He broke many great stories in fields as various as sport and royalty, but his real love was for politics. In any political gathering, Ivens would always be where the action was, listening and questioning.

Like any good newspaperman, Ivens has never hesitated to run stories that were awkward for those to whom he might normally be sympathetic; under him the Sunday Times was relentless in exposing the weak leadership of Theresa May, for example. He never doubted that the EU referendum had marked a turning point in British politics and that Brexit would happen. The readers, most of whom had voted Remain, needed careful handling, but circulation held up during the long period of uncertainty after 2016, though it has fallen in the last year. Advertising, on the other hand, suffered severely, not least in newspapers. Even the Sunday Times has not been immune to the dearth.

Now that Ivens is moving on, it is a good moment to remember the glory days of Fleet Street. Though the papers decamped to remote corners of the capital, the decade after the Wapping dispute in 1986 was an Indian summer for the trade. New titles came and went, salaries rose and talent was rewarded. The last two decades have been very different: journalism took a long time to adapt to the digital revolution and business fell out of love with newspapers. New online platforms are emerging to provide the quality that discerning readers still crave and older titles are no longer squandering resources.

Newspaper editors are no longer household names, but they still matter. Martin Ivens has been a force for good in our politics and our culture. He has always valued writing above all else and treated his writers with irreverent reverence. Though he will be missed as an editor, nothing can detract from his achievements. Ivens is, quite simply, a great newspaperman.