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1st July 1994

Bob Millar's tale


ALASTAIR CAMPBELL I HAD already written my column when the editor of Tribune asked me if I would instead write an obituary of Bob Millar. With pleasure. My attempted analysis of the respecti'e positions of Margaret Beckett and John Prescott on the political spectrum will have to wait. Bob, incidentally, intended to vote BlairPrescott. Blair because he thought he was best man for the job and Prescott for several reasons, not least the hospitality he showed to his wife Audrey when she went on a nostalgic visit to her Hull birthplace last year, and met Prescott on a train. Robert Millar was general manager of Tribune from 1956 to 1961, but he was much more than that title suggests. In seeking material for his funeral on Thursday, I explored dozens of cuttings books from his days on Reynolds News, Tribune and the Daily Express. It was on the Express that he spent more than 25 years of his working life.

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But it was the work for Tribune that gave him most pride. Not only was he Robert Millar, "the man who gets the facts", he was also John Kerr, who in a weekly column tore into banks, bosses and Tory politicians with a gusto that serves as an inspiration to those of us who seek to perform similarly now. "Tories Are To Blame For Coal Losses" was the headline on the first bylined Tribune article, dated May 1956. There is so much that could be written just as readily today as it was then. An 18-page Tribune pamphlet, The Naked City, on the Bank Rate Tribunal, was a real lesson in how sharp, succinct writing can combine with detailed research to expose wrong-doing and incompetence in high places. Full employment was a recurring theme too. "It isn't a gift from some far-off planet," he wrote in February 1959. "It doesn't fall like the gentle rain from heaven. Full employment is the result of sensible planning, a knowledge of the economic alphabet and a determination that jobs for all has top priority." POVERTY having left such vivid memories

A NYONE WHO HAS LIVED IN THE HEART 1 - 1, OF A...

a smaller county town. Brothers of all parties, even those of you who think that you have most... 1st January 1937

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of his childhood in working-class Paisley, it was the Tories' belief in unemployment as a weapon to keep the trade union movement in line and keep down wages that fuelled his loathing of their values. In 1959, taking as his headline "This Squalid Parliament" an attack from Aneurin Bevan, a friend and ally he wrote a passionate and quite brilliant denunciation of virtually every member of Harold Macmillan's Cabinet. "He has framed a new concept of Cabinet responsibility," he wrote of Macmillan. "No matter what you've done, you needn't resign". He didn't think much of John Major either. Nor did Labour leaders escape. "Say what you like about Ernest Bevin and Arthur Deakin," he wrote of the 1957 TUC. "They, at least, had the strength and courage of their own convictions." Their replacements on the TUC General Council, he argued, "look very much like the House of Lords decorative, self-important and impotent...spiritually uncertain, bereft of ideas, indecisive in battle and, as if that were not enough, just plain boring." Given that he went on to work for the Daily Express, his Tribune tirades against Lord Beverbrook make good reading now. But in going through thousands of his Express cuttings, I could not find a single word that in any way went against what Bob stood for. E ALSO launched Action Line, a pioneer in consumer journalism, and took immense pride in the letters from readers thanking him for sorting out a legal, financial or bureaucratic problem that he had solved. His two books, The Affluent Sheep and The New Classes, also pointed ahead both to the consumer revolution and changes in the class structure. (The changes were neither quick enough nor deep enough for Bob). The eldest of five boys raised in a one-bedroom flat, he started out as a shipyard worker, made his way to Ruskin College, Oxford, was a bomber pilot during the war, then a company secretary and then a journalist. He was writing his life story at the time of his death, not for publication, but for his five middleclass grandchildren. I will now declare an interest. Three of those grandchildren are my children. He was the finest father-in-law anyone could hope for, a credit to journalism, and socialist who meant it and lived by it. He died young, aged 72. Alastair Campbell is assistant editor (politics) of Today newspaper

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