I

12 August 1976 could be given as the date at which the traditional, defining, ethos of the obituary – de mortuis nil nisi bonum – breathed its last.Footnote ² That day, Lord Bradwell (1905–76), as Tom Driberg had only recently become, became the first person to be ‘outed’ in theirs, an obituary in, of all places, the Times, soi-disant journal of record. Its passing did not seem to discourage the obituarially minded from quoting the dictum, and invariably in Latin, in such reflections on necrological writing as there were. When Driberg’s heart gave up on a broiling morning in the back of a black cab en route from Paddington Station to his flat at the Barbican, the Times chose to be proactive, and spurn well-established codes of obituarial norm, precisely ten years before, as it is here christened, the ‘obituarial turn’: when pointed portrayal came to complement – and then threaten to overwhelm – mere record.

Even given the relatively rarefied realm in which they exist – the ‘serious’ newspapers – and the length of time over which they may have been written – political careers often lasting decades – political obituaries, as well as being of their subject, necessarily reflect their time. Matters of race and gender came to obtain, but historically, class predominated, not least as obituaries were written about, by, and for, the same ‘public’; The Times was, after all, the newspaper that ‘Top People’ took.Footnote ³ Indifference to the obituary for most of the century reflected broader social change: the questioning not only of those ‘born to rule’, but the very notion of such birthright; the mainspring for their resurrection towards its end was as much through prurience as egalitarianism. Change was marked in death. Just as the tone of piety and lamentation had changed, so had the vocabulary, and what it connoted.

As the temperature rose yet further, at that day’s editorial conference Louis Heren (1919–95), deputy editor of The Times, was shown a yellowing proof of Driberg’s notice that had been on the stocks for years. As was the norm, it was only a little more than a Who’s Who entry rendered in prose, so Heren and his editor, William Rees-Mogg (1928–2012), wrote a new proem.Footnote ⁴ Driberg had been preparing to fly to Italy and a writing vacation with his friend Gore Vidal (1925–2012), a ‘pansexualist’ ardent that Driberg’s much-flaunted memoirs, Ruling Passions, should be sensationalist. But there was no mention of Driberg’s sexuality in the Daily Telegraph or Daily Mail obituaries; nor, for that matter, in that of the Guardian.Footnote ⁵ Henry Boyne (1910–97), the Telegraph’s political correspondent, who would have known not only that Driberg was gay, but that his life as a gay man was so central to his being, archly polished boilerplate obituarial euphemism. (‘His marriage at 46 came as a surprise to friends who had come to regard him as a confirmed bachelor.’)Footnote ⁶

Driberg’s Times obituary was as explicit as those of others remained opaque. Anthony Blunt (1907–83), another septuagenarian with a public profile whose sexuality was consequential, received a substantial obituary (‘most extraordinary of double lives’) almost devoid of personal information.Footnote ⁷ Blunt’s partner, John Gaskin (1919–88), was mentioned, though as a ‘friend’. Even the Guardian, foregrounding Andrew Boyle (1919–91), who had revealed Blunt’s spying four years earlier, neither mentioned nor intimated his treachery for all that it was germane to Boyle’s own specialism.Footnote ⁸ Bob Boothby (1900–86) departed on the very cusp of the turn: though it was widely known, the Telegraph chose not to mention that for years Boothby (‘belonged more to the 18th than the 20th century’) had, in the argot of the time, cuckolded Harold Macmillan (1894–1986) through his long-standing affair with Dorothy Macmillan (1900–66).Footnote ⁹ For the Times obituaries editor John Grigg (1924–2001), allusion sufficed (‘he had earlier done Macmillan a grave personal wrong’).Footnote ¹⁰

Driberg’s Times obituary was the hyphen which joined the eras: though its indiscretion was without precedent, it was also about a matter of fact, and inasmuch as it was both true and not widely known (publicly of a public figure), constituted ‘news’. Newspapers were perforce concerned with news, and an obituary – as distinct from a death notice – was the opposite. Yet the public disclosure was both news and comment, the coexistence of which foreshadowed their blurring. Such matters were of more usual interest to that section of the press – in 1976 almost all of it – which did not routinely carry obituaries. They became of greater sensitivity, precisely ten years later. The ‘obituary aesthetic’ – euphemism in peccadillo, anonymity in authorship – meant that mentioning the cause of death of even the relatively young had long been eschewed, and the new, unknown, AIDS pandemic meant that many who perished – the relatively young especially – might wish to conceal the identity of their illness; some, partly in consequence, were outed in life.

The historic maleness of obituaries – both subjects and writers – was even more notable than their apparent heteronormativity. In that political obituaries concerned those who had occupied prominent public office in the living past, obituarial women were largely final-paragraph spouses – a sentence, even; a matrimonial clause – in the notice of their esteemed husband. Or were merely agents of reproduction, with those to whom they may have had issue often given greater prominence. In Lord Birkenhead’s substantial – for its time – obituary, his wife, Margaret (against whom he had earlier done grave personal wrong), exists in nine words, as many as his father-in-law.Footnote ¹¹ Hence, perhaps understandable, overcorrections. (Florence Horsbrugh [1889–1969], the first Conservative woman Cabinet minister, over-eulogised for her ‘many victories for feminism’.)Footnote ¹² Patriarchal norms persisted. Ninety years later, the Guardian, historically the most feminist newspaper, alone, decided to print an obituary of an infamous serial killer of women – the prolonged failure to apprehend whom caused embarrassment for successive governments – and was excoriated.Footnote ¹³

It was both the challenge and the reward that, despite the pressure of an often unexpected deadline, the obituary is expected to endure. One Labour MP elected in 1964, aged 35, died three years later. Harold Evans (1928–2020) thought that the Times ought to carry an obituary, and asked another Labour MP to write it. Though grieving at the loss of his friend, Roy Hattersley would be pleased he agreed.Footnote ¹⁴ In the future, ‘PhD students from mid-Western universities, biographers of politicians who lived longer and therefore did more, amateurs who are just interested in the past – will stumble across the name Christopher Rowland and, if I did my job half-adequately, realise that he might have played a greater part in British history.’Footnote ¹⁵ Other than Hattersley’s – anonymous – obituary, all other notices of Rowland’s death were more concerned with how unwelcome the consequent by-election would be for a beleaguered Harold Wilson (1916–95).

Political obituaries were a specific branch of obituarial genre, albeit one that once constituted the overwhelming majority of provision. The American culture of newspaper obituary – dozens at a time, an International Association of Obituarists, conferences – being democratic (or, indiscriminate) did not apply to political lives, the conventional subjects of whom were the antithesis of the voiceless. As is not uncommon with practitioners as distinct from observers, there was little self-reflection; Rowland’s was a commission. Even so prolific a political obituarist as Anthony Howard (1934–2010) or Tam Dalyell (1932–2017) barely mentioned them in their own writing, or in their writing on others. Obituaries of obituarists similarly tended to not take note. Reflections on so recherché a genre of political writing were rare, both before and after the turn.

II

Obituaries, in both quantity and quality, extent and form, have always been a particular interest for the British press, part of a broader national proclivity for biography, as Leslie Stephen (1832–1904) and Lytton Strachey (1880–1932) contrastingly demonstrated. Truistically, though newspaper journalism was a trade, obituaries came to be held to be an art. Rees-Mogg’s predecessor, Sir William Haley (1901–87), an expansionary, egalitarian, editor between 1952 and 1966, reflected that though ‘[e]pitaphs, eulogies, elegies, threnodies, panegyrics are now in disuse’, obituaries persisted.Footnote ¹⁷ They were, from the outset, imbued with values and assumptions of the day; the Gentleman’s Magazine, which first dealt in the currency from 1778, made such concerns titular. But the Times became the principal publisher, recording significant deaths ever since its birth in 1785. Elsewhere obituary coverage was inconsistent, at times but a list (‘Death has been busy during the past twelve months.’)Footnote ¹⁸ The Victorian appetite for life-writing meant that John Delane (1817–79) was the first editor to prepare authoritative accounts written when the subject was alive (his obituary of Victoria [1837–1901], at 60,000 words, remains the longest). Biography mattered to the people, obituaries mattered to the paper, and the Times mattered to that eminent monument of Victorian necrology, Stephen’s Dictionary of National Biography (DNB) (1885). But obituaries were still a matter for news pages; only in 1920 was there an obituaries editor, and a daily page came later still. One evening during her father-in-law’s wartime coalition – beset as the Prime Minister was, markedly, by the Times – Cynthia Asquith (1887–1960) found Geoffrey Dawson (1874–1944), its editor, ruminating about obituaries, and ‘how awful it was when he was taken by surprise and had to sit up all night at ghoulish writing’. Dawson went through them every few months, ‘but all the same, Jo Chamberlain’s the only case in which they were fully prepared’.Footnote ¹⁹

Haley was the most obituarially engaged editor to that point.Footnote ²⁰ Obituaries editors at the Times by the 1950s were well-established, well-known, indeed even famous, journalists. The first, Frederic Lowndes (1868–1940), Rupert Hart-Davis (1907–99) recalled, ‘was extremely deaf, and every day one of the sub-editors would fling open the door of his room and bellow: “Any OBITS today, Lowndes?”.Footnote ²¹ Unable to hear, but not to see, Lowndes spent days in the Athenaeum, scrutinising fellow members for intimations of mortality (Pall Mall and St James’s might be considered a cordon of obituarial antechambers). Colin Watson, appointed by Haley in 1956 with no prior experience or even special interest, survived as obituaries editor until 1982, tasked ‘in addition to preparing each night’s deaths, to a survey of perhaps 100 or more obituaries to see what was up to snuff and what wasn’t’, he recalled. ‘How fared HM? Was the PM up to date?’Footnote ²² When, owing to industrial disputes, the Times was not printed for most of 1979, there was no obituary column in British newspapers. Absence offered opportunity for the Telegraph, which already had a much larger circulation, but its editor, Bill Deedes (1913–2007), told Hugh Massingberd (1946–2007), whose suggestion it was, ‘Rather bad form, dear boy, to take advantage of the absence of “Another Newspaper”’.Footnote ²³ Moreover, its owners, the Berry family, were ‘not that keen on death’. So Telegraph obituaries remained news items, and shortish ones at that. Deedes averred: ‘stick strictly to what’s in the cuts – “In 1934, he was appointed Postmaster-General. In 1937, he was arrested for indecent exposure” – you know the formula?’.Footnote ²⁴

There was an inverted solipsism to the authorial anonymity which prevailed. The traditional belief was that an unsigned obituary was more likely to be read without preconception, and also written with that freedom: an account of the subject’s life, and not of their relations with the author. It was also deemed to confer an authority befitting an obituary of record. ‘The tradition that Times obituaries are anonymous is sound and not to be transgressed’, Grigg stipulated, indeed, it ‘was essential to their character’. ‘The authorship of particular pieces, in whole or part, should not, therefore, be betrayed, even long after the event.’ Unsigned notices ‘can communicate a sense of magisterial objectivity while still embodying a distinctive editorial voice’.Footnote ²⁵ Greater historical veracity there may have been in someone being ‘accountable’, but authority was accorded by being the word of the paper: form was, almost, content. Given the timescale of composition, many became ‘elaborate composites’, regularly updated, by more than several authors.Footnote ²⁶ Anonymity was the authorial convention in the British press generally until the practice of by-lines came from the American; ‘The Thunderer’ was the last to acquiesce, reluctant to relinquish ‘that almost mystical concept’, the idea, as Louis Heren put it, ‘of The Times as a corporate body’.Footnote ²⁷ So anonymity for obituaries was retained, and authorship embargoed for a century.Footnote ²⁸ One who traversed Westminster and Fleet Street more than most, Woodrow Wyatt (1918–97) – a stranger to confidences – confessed, ‘I have never met anyone who disclosed himself even confidentially as a Times obituarist’.Footnote ²⁹

At Printing House Square, the Times’s obituaries department had a separate room – ‘the morgue’ – to protect confidentiality of the files. The ‘names of some people whose work for the feature was frequent and of exceptional value’ Grigg would permit, ‘provided there is no specific attribution’.Footnote ³⁰ For politicians and journalists, the principal obituarists were, from the right, Peter Utley (1921–88), formerly of the Telegraph; from the left, John Beavan (1910–94) historically of the Guardian, and, to his left, Margaret Cole (1893–1980), an academic. For historians’ obituaries, the Times used Roger Fulford (1902–83) and the storied A. J. P. Taylor (1906–90); for service personnel, Basil Liddell Hart (1895–1970) and Cyril Falls (1888–1971) (land), and Stephen Roskill (1903–82) (sea). Grigg recalled beneficially that Times obituarists ‘worked with an indifference to financial reward matched only by contributors to the Dictionary of National Biography’.Footnote ³¹ One pound and one shilling per 100 words. Many writers refused payment. Only the letters page cost less to produce. Monetising, and further consecrating, Times associate editor Godfrey Smith (1926–2017), in a four-year paroxysm under Rees-Mogg, published over 2,500 pages of large-format hardcover books of old obituaries, almost as a rival DNB, decades before more commercially minded, themed, volumes proliferated.Footnote ³²

Watson was intent on simplifying the language of the articles for readers, while upholding accuracy and – pagination permitting – completeness, for historians and biographers. He established ‘forward planning’: ‘who could best write a memoir of so-and-so which could join the others on the files, ready for use when the day came’, as Iverach McDonald (1908–2006), a Times Director, had it; ‘or, if the unexpected happened, he knew whom to ring at short notice’.Footnote ³³ But it was not enough to have obits written, they needed regularly to be revised without exceeding whatever space was thought appropriate. Tip-offs were no less helpful on the obituaries than on the sports desk. A Peer’s butler phoned. ‘His Lordship does not expect to survive the night.’ His Lordship’s obituary appeared the next morning.Footnote ³⁴

Content reflected changes. With advances in printing, photographic illustrations of the dead became more prominent, but whether of the prime of life or nearer publication date had to be decided: the longer the life, the more inexhaustible the images. Before e-publishing, error was not only easier, but harder to efface. Such was the expected success of the Boxer rebellion in Peking in 1900 that Sir Robert Hart was granted an obituary on the grounds that ‘we have unfortunately no reason to think that he has been spared’.Footnote ³⁵ It was much longer than that printed when he did meet his end, eleven years later, in Berkshire.Footnote ³⁶ Labour MP John Stonehouse (1925–88), dead too briefly to have been obituarised in 1974, had to wait fourteen years, when the fraudster’s condition was permanent. On 7 October 1993 Ivor Bulmer-Thomas (1905–93), inter alia Labour, Independent, and Conservative MP for the same constituency in the same year (and obituarist for the Times), had only just posted a letter to the Telegraph when he suffered a fatal heart attack. The letter was published the next day in the same edition as his obituary. Which was illustrated by a photograph of Sir Ivor Broadbent Thomas (1890–1955).Footnote ³⁷ In a marmalade-dropper, thick-cut, on 2 December 1920 the former Conservative MP Lord Desborough read about his death, ‘which occurred very suddenly in Birmingham last night’. Lord Bessborough, the former secretary to the Commons Speaker, had, in fact, expired; ‘the mistake arose owing to a confusion of similar sounding names on the telephone’, the newspaper subsequently explained.Footnote ³⁸

Rather than ‘immediate comment’ – what the subject was, rather than what they did – and chronological convention, published sources were used; and even the yet-to-be deceased. The New York Times carried formal obituaries only from 1965, and Alden Whitman (1913–90), its chief obituarist, was also the first to interview his subjects, including Anthony Eden (1897–1977). Eden initially declined (‘I have never given a private interview’), but assented on being told when it would be published.Footnote ³⁹ Hugo Vickers thought the highest praise of a Times obituary was that it ‘sniffs of an inside job’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Still-rarefied obituaries were ‘savoured by connoisseurs who read between the lines of the traditional orotund language as though solving the cryptic crossword’.Footnote ⁴¹ In obituarial code, of Cambridge dons ‘he died at Northampton’ was a euphemism for having ‘crossed the Styx’ at Fulbourn mental hospital. Political journalists’ obituaries of political journalists were saturated with euphemism.Footnote ⁴² She was ‘vivacious’; he an ‘unreliable after-dinner speaker’. And beware the ‘tireless raconteur’.

The ‘object of biography is to fortify self-confidence’, H. H. Asquith (1852–1928), ‘the last of the Romans’, was said to have pronounced, monumentally; ‘object of obituary notices is to increase caution’.Footnote ⁴³ Not that the subject would know though. The key was immediacy. ‘An obituary can impress itself more on the mind than later memorials’, Haley maintained. ‘Its subconscious influence can be great.’Footnote ⁴⁴ Context was easier the more significant the figure. Praise could be authenticated by countervailing criticism, or questions posed. (‘When the importance of that social revolution and the smoothness with which it was effected are set beside the surface qualities of the man who presided over it there emerges the paradox that lurks in all assessments.’)Footnote ⁴⁵ A formal print obituary elevated, and controversial ones benefitted from, contextual reporting. Possessed of broad historical sweep and telling detail, the model political obituary practised storytelling and accuracy, and desired balance and subtlety of judgement. Haley may have advocated ‘judicial detachment’, but, almost in premonition of the turn, also said he did not want the Times to be ‘too damned courtierly’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Obituaries became better written, reflecting ‘the convergence of other, wider trends in journalism, notably an increase in competition at the “quality” end of the market’; indeed, they aspired to be the finest writing in a newspaper. Yet, imbued with the mortuary as they were, it was inevitable that obituaries of obituaries would eventually be mooted. ‘Obituary writing is a dying art’, was one view in 1971, befitting that nascent declinist decade.Footnote ⁴⁷

Then, on or about September 1986 obituarial character changed.

III

The ‘Obituary Revolution’ was the hyperbolic designation for ten months that shook the road. But it was not as if, unlike the rest of Fleet Street, obituaries had resisted change. ‘The obituary arrangements at The Times are haphazard and unsatisfactory’, Rupert Hart-Davis complained, pre-empting one revolution of the turn by thirty years. ‘The smallest civil servant’, he reproached the editor, ‘has at least a half-column about him in standing type in the office, but writers and artists are not provided for until they are eighty’. Chastened, ‘Haley promised to wake the department up’.Footnote ⁴⁹ Indeed, ‘on becoming editor I ruled that neither titles, nor rank, nor heredity, nor mere wealth should any longer be qualifications for an obituary notice in The Times, but only achievement’.Footnote ⁵⁰ The illusion that the post of obituaries’ editor was ‘held by the Recording Angel was, therefore, to a surprising degree, maintained’.Footnote ⁵¹ But there remained no serious obituarial competition to the Times, in ‘subfusc prose style’ its daily page still ‘favoured a relatively narrow selection of subjects’, still mainly politicians.Footnote ⁵² Much derived from the historic concentration of newspapers, their proprietors and journalists, uniquely, perhaps, to a single thoroughfare – a most concrete example of form informing content – and it was no coincidence that the obituarial coincided precisely with a locational revolution. At the beginning of 1986 News International journalists and printers decamped with manifest – if secret – destiny all of two miles from the western edge of the City to the East End. Violent though its consequences at times were, Rupert Murdoch’s Times was the dignified face of digitisation and the convulsions of de-unionisation. But refugees soon appeared, heading west. A third of the Independent’s launch journalists came from Wapping.Footnote ⁵³

The Telegraph still published only intermittent, often brief, obituaries, largely the recounting of doings; its obituary page, as such, began on 2 September 1986, when Hugh Massingberd convinced Deedes’s successor to guarantee two columns daily. ‘God knows we need someone’, Max Hastings told him. ‘We can’t hope to compete with the Times, of course, but it’s worth a try.’Footnote ⁵⁴ Inspired by John Aubrey’s Brief Lives, between 1669 and 1696, between 1986 and 1994 Massingberd went on to redefine the genre.Footnote ⁵⁵ ‘I determined to dedicate myself to chronicling what people were really like through informal anecdote, description and character sketch.’Footnote ⁵⁶ It transformed ‘the Obituary column’, as Hastings put it, thereby also affirming the wisdom of his decision, ‘from a musty backwater of the paper into the most brilliant feature of its kind in the business’.Footnote ⁵⁷

Obituaries being an expression of ‘the higher journalism’, it followed that the new, idealistic, Independent felt that it constituted, as it did in other areas, something of a tabula rasa. For one thing, there were no pre-existing obituaries. From its birth on 7 October 1986, the Independent foregrounded obituaries, on a whole page, up to four a day, the day after death was announced, signed, written not as a journalistic exercise but by experts, with reference to published sources and interviews with those who knew the deceased. ‘We sought to change the rules by signing obituaries, to give them a new dimension, and genuine authority’, obituaries editor James Fergusson reflected.Footnote ⁵⁸ He looked back to the DNB and the Gentleman’s Magazine as the Independent sought to ‘write a new agenda. Transparency would confer ‘historic worth and veracity’.Footnote ⁵⁹ They were also boldly illustrated, and so was created, as one of the paper’s three founders, Stephen Glover, put it, thereby also affirming the wisdom of his decision, ‘one of the most distinguished and original parts of the newspaper’.Footnote ⁶⁰

Though only marginally younger than the Times, the Guardian had an obituary page only as old as The Independent. Initially in its G2 features and entertainment listings tabloid, its daily, newly authored, expanded, obituaries, not unlike those of the Telegraph (if for somewhat different reasons), made less of Westminster-centric political obituaries per se and sought to be representative of public life more broadly. (The prevailing gender imbalance became perhaps the more notable at a time when the country had for the first time a female head both of state and government.) In response, the Times, too, expanded. There had long been post-obituary ‘appreciations’; they evolved into ‘Lives Remembered’, with feedback solicited and corrections offered. Reflecting more demotic times, the genre became one connected with readers. The Economist did not carry an obituary for 150 years until Bill Emmott became convinced of the need for history and humanity in its anonymously austere pages, and so 1,000 perky words appeared weekly, at the back.Footnote ⁶¹ But with coverage spread over pages, overkill threatened the impact of the obituaries page: excess was a measure of decline. There was the encroachment of entertainment, both in tone – even by 1984 Gavin Stamp sniffed ‘a degree of sensationalism’ – and subject – for John Grigg that the length of the obituary for Richard Burton (1925–84) conspicuously exceeded that for Arthur Koestler (1905–83), was not merely ‘grotesque and insulting’, or even a ‘scandal’, but ‘a betrayal’.Footnote ⁶²

The ending of the Cold War coincided with something of an obituarial arms race. Ominously, the genre took the form of what the visiting American writer Marilyn Johnson dubbed ‘the four horsemen of the apocalypse’: Times, Guardian, Telegraph, Independent.Footnote ⁶³ The first, trying perhaps a little too hard to lead, could overstep. Anthony Howard’s ‘stiffs’ page’ (1993–99), included his own execratory obituary of Brian Masters (1932–98), Bishop of Edmonton (‘One of the last relics of Graham Leonard’s ten-year rule over the London diocese’), whom he reproached (‘stiff and rigid views’) for his opposition to women priests, and length of homily (‘the best that could be said for his sermons was they tended to be short’). Complaints ensued.Footnote ⁶⁴ Fred Mulley (1918–95), when Defence Secretary, famously fell fast asleep at a public event whilst sat alongside Elizabeth II (1926–2022). The Times presented the scene as his obituarial illustration. Objections from readers exacted a fulsome apology to Lady Mulley from the paper, as, no doubt, had the transmission of displeasure from the Palace.Footnote ⁶⁵

Indebted more to Strachey than to Stephen, seen from across the Atlantic British obituaries were now ‘gossipy, contentious and cutthroat’; for Elaine Showalter American obituary writing remained a matter of news ‘rather than an aspect of belles lettres’.Footnote ⁶⁶ The British were also belles pages: ‘works of art’.Footnote ⁶⁷ Given how America can appear to British eyes generally to be in a bigger font, so the pagination of its newspapers which could accommodate (encourage) prolixity. But where Fleet Street’s physical density had almost been manifested in its writing, digitisation and de-unionisation made for change that was as much physical as cultural: increased pagination. The first material turn was soon eclipsed by the second. The internet – no medium could be better suited to the age of mass politics – was the transformational continuation, to which the obituary ‘adapted itself seamlessly’; sprouting, for one editor, ‘evergreen content’.Footnote ⁶⁸ All told, the British obituary, rather than a prosaic résumé the timeliness of which was all-important, had become ‘an opinionated gem of a biography, informed by all kinds of history, high and low, including gossip’ (such indeed as had for some impugned the merits of a certain sort of high-political scholarship).Footnote ⁶⁹ Anecdote peppered sketches (‘On one occasion …’); notwithstanding conventions, colour encouraged each obituary to differ (‘On another occasion …’).

‘I believe the dead have rights’, Tam Dalyell had written in an introduction to his memoir – in feel an extended obituary – of his friend Richard Crossman (1907–74) ‘and one of these rights is, where possible, the right of fair treatment by posterity and certainly by their friends’.Footnote ⁷⁰ (Grigg was not to know quite how much longer Koestler’s obituary might have been had the writer lived another ten years, or predeceased Jill Craigie (1911–99).)Footnote ⁷¹ After the turn, it needed to be said, and, online, could be: obituaries were forever revisable. Idiosyncratically and independently, they mutated. More subtle yet less euphemistic, most obituarial innovation related to genres other than the political; political obituaries looked stale by comparison, and became less common (abetted by their, living, relation, the ‘profile’; a portrait).Footnote ⁷² The Telegraph saw itself as having established a ‘new style of honest obituary’.Footnote ⁷³ Yet innovation perpetuated the opacity of authorial anonymity. Thus the Independent (which for the same reasons had eschewed parliamentary lobby journalism), intent on challenging the Times (‘whose primacy, looking back, we perhaps overestimated’)Footnote ⁷⁴ as the newspaper of obituarial record. Six years after its launch, Murdoch did his best, waging a cross-subsidised price war to ensure that one day the Times would publish an obituary of the Independent. Eventually, it did.Footnote ⁷⁵

IV

There was the obituary as revision. Edward Pearce (1939–2018) on Peter Shore (1924-–2001) provoked protests (‘grotesque caricature … vindictive and petty’, ‘carping and mean-spirited … borderline racist’).Footnote ⁷⁷ By contrast, Anthony Bevins, in an obituarial commentary – an ob-ed, as it were – of Eric Heffer (1922–91) recoiled against the effusions Heffer’s death had elicited.Footnote ⁷⁸ ‘Middle-class Labour leaders are recaptured by the Establishment’, Tony Benn (1925–2014) lamented; ‘Attlee is “forgiven” for being a socialist and the past is forgotten’.Footnote ⁷⁹ But propinquity carried with it its own risks. After Iain Macleod (1913–70) suffered a fatal heart attack one month into his Chancellorship of the Exchequer, Rees-Mogg thought the Times obituary too critical, and had another written. But for so strong a personality, it privileged reverence (‘statesman of spirit and conviction’) over perceptiveness (not so the Guardian: ‘Acid tongue, kind heart’).Footnote ⁸⁰

There was the obituary as coeval. The death of Roy Jenkins was for Benn ‘a reminder that you’re at the end of the road, and if you survive, your main function is to do obituaries of people you know’.Footnote ⁸¹ Having worked as a journalist at the Manchester Guardian in the 1950s, Lena Jeger (1915–2007) continued to write political obituaries as an MP and peer; the trades unionist Jim Middleton (1878–1962), whose journalism was part of his activism, carried on obituarising trades unionists long after he retired. Given that it seemed to the former Conservative MP Sir Edward Clarke (1841–1931) ‘that an obituary notice of a man should be written by himself’, he sent his own to the Times.Footnote ⁸² Sir Gerald Nabarro (1913–73) – a stranger to reticence – sent his to the Telegraph.Footnote ⁸³ (At the very least) one ex-MP was personally munificent towards anyone he suspected of having the slightest influence over obituaries of ex-MPs at the Times.Footnote ⁸⁴

There was the obituary as critique. Cold War ideologies provided an opportunity for more sharply critical obituaries than was then the norm. The communist trades unionist Jack Dash (1907–89) both ‘fought for decent wages’ and managed ‘to destroy a whole industry’.Footnote ⁸⁵ Of Hugh Gaitskell (1906–63) and John Smith (1938–94) – the only party leaders to require obituaries – most of the conservative newspapers were laudatory as each had kept the left at bay. (It was ever thus, as seen from that left. ‘The papers today are jampacked with obituaries and tributes to Tony Crosland [1918–77]’; Benn despaired at ‘an emotional spasm.’)Footnote ⁸⁶ John Strachey (1901–63) wrote an obituary of Gaitskell – ‘The unreaped harvest’ – as political point settling.Footnote ⁸⁷ As much applied to Aneurin Bevan (1897–1960) (‘regret was not inspired by the proverbial “de mortuis”’).Footnote ⁸⁸

There was the obituary as continuation. Rees-Mogg’s Rab Butler (1902–82) was sanitised by the paper mentioning neither mollification in 1938 nor defeatism in 1940, merely the subject’s ‘[a]ssociation with the controversial appeasement policies of Neville Chamberlain’, and his ‘surprisingly’ delayed departure from the Foreign Office in 1941.Footnote ⁸⁹ Elsewhere, he ‘played a prominent part’, this ‘Man of Munich’.Footnote ⁹⁰ Butler’s role in education policy however was measuredly appraised, as was that of Bridget Plowden (1910–2000), though for Edward Boyle (1923–81) the controversies of comprehensivisation were elided.Footnote ⁹¹ Macleod, additionally, received a ‘leader’ and tributes, as, thirty years earlier, did Sir John Gilmour, Minister of Shipping (‘the first casualty of the war in the ranks of the Government’).Footnote ⁹² As too did John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) (arguably the last casualty of the war in the ranks of government).Footnote ⁹³

There was the obituary as recitation. For John Profumo (1915–2006), the Telegraph and Times recounted his eponymous scandal of scandals in dedicated detail.Footnote ⁹⁴ ‘If an obituarist dwells on these events’, Dalyell added to that by Dennis Kavanagh in the Independent, ‘it must be because it is they, not his otherwise estimable life of 48 years before, and 43 years after, 1963’ that made Profumo ‘a person of lasting public fascination’.Footnote ⁹⁵ Anthony Eden’s indulgence of Alden Whitman may also have been from feeling – at least to the Countess of Avon (1920–2021) – that the Suez Canal was less likely to flow through an American obituarial drawing, room though there was.

There was the obituary as narrative. ‘“De mortuis nihil nisi bunkum” is a comment sometimes made on politicians’ obituaries’, the Telegraph reminded readers. ‘Once dead, the most disastrous politician is so often found to have had remarkable saving graces.’ Apart from Ramsay MacDonald (1866–1937), that is (for whom A. J. P. Taylor’s literal littoral – ‘died at sea’ – was almost the last word).Footnote ⁹⁶ The Telegraph used the occasion of a new public memorial to pronounce that ‘Time has been unfair.’ MacDonald ‘was a man in an impossible situation’, as a socialist trying to govern a capitalist country. ‘Ineffective compromises and bitter internal conflicts become inevitable. Mr Wilson, like Mr MacDonald, is now wrestling against the facts of life.’Footnote ⁹⁷ The following week Mr Wilson lost Mr Rowland’s by-election.

There was the obituary as augury. Imperialist orthodoxy in notices in the Times around 1900 provided a self-congratulatory thread teleologically tugged decades later (‘he found it a land of danger and left it a land of hope’).Footnote ⁹⁸ The appeal for obituary pages in celebrating imperial lives were conceivably to offer succour of an idealised past against an ignominious present. Moreover, where the press had once been a culture reflective of micro-geopolitics – in London EC4 – the fin de siècle fracturing of the United Kingdom – from London SW1 – into different parliaments may have segregated readerships, and obituaries increasingly became (sub) national lives. Donald Dewar (1937–2000), connecting the two, was in almost every notice ‘father of the nation’.Footnote ⁹⁹ Paternity was not contested with his reputationally sullied duellist Alex Salmond (1954–2024) who was in almost as many notices ‘towering but divisive’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

There was the obituary as satire – the facetious turn. (Smith may well be dead, but would ‘still beat Major’.)Footnote ¹⁰¹ With the passing of the Commonwealth Immigration Act 1968 Private Eye mocked-up a Times obituary for the Labour Party.Footnote ¹⁰² Later that year, trying perhaps a little too hard to stay on-trend, Punch ran an awkward series of ‘coming obituaries’ for public figures in peril.Footnote ¹⁰³ Indeed, the most common usage of ‘political obituary’ came to become as a real-time shorthand for a career in difficulty, at risk of premature termination. There came, in less forgiving times (‘[He] enjoyed more power than almost any other British politician of his era. The only problem was he did so in a country other than his own’), the snide turn.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

There was the obituary as memoir, such as Kingsley Martin (‘I had a tremendous row with him’) on William Beveridge.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ There were the near-self-obituaries of (inevitably) newspapermen. The Telegraph’s notice of its erstwhile owner Lord Hartwell (1911–2001) blamed on him ‘the true state of the Telegraph’s affairs’, that the present owner Conrad Black had set himself selflessly to save when he bought the title in 1985.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ At the Sunday Express John Junor (1919–97; ‘room for debate about [his] success as an editor’)Footnote ¹⁰⁷ recoiled when the Telegraph published what he regarded as a ‘vitriolic and cruel obituary’ of the wife of Lord Stevens, proprietor of Express newspapers.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Applying the ornamental turn, Woodrow Wyatt defended her honour (‘not often that attractive women make so great a success out of life’).Footnote ¹⁰⁹

There was the obituary as manifesto. A political career cut short by death was by definition also an opportunity. Roy Jenkins, bereft, having just heard of Gaitskell’s death, was phoned by the Daily Express for a tribute, the journalist expressing disapproving surprise when the deceased’s disciple felt unable. ‘Harold Wilson, who is in New York, was able to give us a very moving one without difficulty’ Jenkins was informed. ‘“Yes,” I said bitterly, “but you have to remember that he was very fond of Gaitskell,” and rang off.’ Weapons-grade sarcasm betrayed a revulsion that a man he ‘deeply distrusted’ might succeed as leader a man ‘I loved and revered’.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Gaitskell’s deputy, George Brown (1914–85) was able not only to give a very moving tribute without difficulty (‘a giant among men’)Footnote ¹¹¹ but also to resume his own publicity tour (‘I think I know the man well enough to know he would want me to.’Footnote ¹¹² Dalyell received an urgent phone call from Fergusson. ‘Would you do an obituary for John Smith for tomorrow’s paper?’ ‘Five hundred words top-up?’ Dalyell asked, assuming, not least as it regarded a party leader who had already suffered a serious heart attack, there was a draft on file. ‘No, the cupboard is bare. Three thousand.’Footnote ¹¹³ Legend was that Gordon Brown spent too long writing his obituary of his mentor – who a year earlier he might have expected to succeed – whilst Tony Blair was off on his own publicity tour.

There was the obituary as agency. Macmillan’s death, at the peak of Thatcherism, was thus viewed through that prism. Illustrated incongruously by a photograph of Thatcher, trying perhaps a little too hard – as Elizabeth II herself regularly experienced – to genuflect, at his feet, the tone of the Telegraph obituary was anything but reverent (‘animated long after it had ceased to be relevant with the generous urge to defeat the scourge of unemployment … helped to weaken the defences against the more imminent threat of inflation’).Footnote ¹¹⁴ Wilson expired during the juvenescence of Blair’s own leadership of the Labour Party, and was epitaphically so cast.Footnote ¹¹⁵ V. S. Pritchett’s George Orwell was the ‘wintry conscience of a generation’.Footnote ¹¹⁶

There was the obituary as moment. Before Wilson became Prime Minister, Peter Hill commissioned a journalist to prepare a New Statesman obituary. ‘You can’t say that about him when he’s dead’, Hill told the author. ‘Well, it’s all true’, Gerald Kaufman (1930–2017) replied, ‘and I can’t say it when he’s alive’.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Kaufman shortly thereafter joined Wilson’s press team. Of Wilson’s Times obituary, three years later a young man went to the Private Eye office on Greek Street and showed Richard Ingrams a galley proof (‘Revised and updated Oct. 1966’). Ingrams paid £10, and it led the next issue of the magazine. ‘It is always difficult when a man is in high office and still comparatively young to allot him a length’, the chief of the Times obituary department had pondered. ‘At the moment I am inclined to think that we need 5000 words.’ They included:

Ingrams subsequently discovered that the proofs had been stolen, by a young acquaintance, from the residence of Tom Driberg.Footnote ¹¹⁹

And there was the obituary as anachronism. An effective Royal Prerogative of Mercy temporarily pardoned the newspaper political obituary, on paper, and with expansive souvenir supplements at that. The lavishly illustrated editions were less profitable than when they had been planned, given the explosion in the cost of newsprint (and the age of the subject), but still sold out, despite extra printing, as the second Elizabethan age finally passed.Footnote ¹²⁰

V

There were political obituaries before, and there were political obituaries after, the obituarial turn. But their place in long-form political journalism, and, in another genre, life-writing – the end point as a starting point for biographical political writing more generally – had changed. The effects of obituaries in the real-world political process as a whole, before and after that change, was reflective. The shift – wrought as it was by the Thatcher revolution – was one both of form – more paper, then no paper – and also of content (diversity, as also evinced in 2004’s ODNB when compared to 1885’s DNB; Massingberd was to obituary what Strachey was to biography) but also of tone. Political obituaries necessarily self-select those who die full of years, and thereby necessarily convey change over time. While it is not so neglected a genre that it is not pregnant with cliché (the last word on obituaries, the art of the obituary, the living and the dead; concerned with life not death, death as merely the peg for publication) but with political lives, death leaves legacies, and invites successors. Overtly humanistic, qualitative, necessarily partial, often impressionistic, even anecdotal, obituaries can reflect a life, or at least a political career, more accurately more succinctly than in other genres; individual agency is prominent, and subject to the attentions of journalists and other politicians. Their appeal is their idiosyncrasy, subjectivity; that they exist more by example than precept. As may here have been proven, this can make scholarly treatment – and not slippage into the merely diverting or the antiquarian – challenging. Unlike other subjects, political figures have also been assessed in life, with less likelihood of obituaries being radically outdated by subsequent revelations. Allusion would not have shielded Bob Boothby and Dorothy Macmillan for very long, and certainly not after Boothby and Harold Macmillan both died. In 1986.

Political obituaries rest at the crossroad of journalism, politics, and historicism. They provide passage to writers who were of more than one, or wished to be of another. In that, they bridge the gap between journalists, politicians, historians, and the public. That the obituarial public is not a mass one in part may explain the overlooked disregard of them. But political history and biography ignore them – the more curiously still given how important obituaries are as a source, and even a subject – as do newspaper histories. As life-writing, even more so than with biography, there is an imposed neatness of narrative throughout the collective process: from obituaries editor to obituarist to sub-editors and then editor. Much of their appeal – the personal; the art, the craft, of them – is as the appeal of political journalism (a slightly bigger genre of political writing): colour and personality; Cromwellian warts; the shift from piety to entertainment; an obituary for lives not worth a biography; stringency lost to colour; the ephemeral confronting the permanent. The latter was true in another respect: the exodus of newspapers from Fleet Street that began at the beginning of 1986 was complete within thirty years.

To the passing of piety, and patriarchy, there is also that of the press. The obituarial spring was sprung by an unholy alliance of the old – newsprint – and the new: the internet. The transformation in political publishing is particularly pertinent to political obituaries. The authority of print dwindled. Fewer and fewer readers read a physical newspaper, the obituary’s natural habitat; the clipping, the cutting, unalterable but for discolouration, that lives forever even when its perspective is mutable. No genre of political writing is more prone to be discredited or outdated, as no other purports to be the last word; the obituary appears once – its subject, after all, is over – and unlike biography was not open for re-evaluation. And for all that there seemed a sense of permanence – that that first draft of history would always be with us – without physicality the life span of what was adjudged at the time is short. The online iteration endlessly can be modified, for myriad reasons, but a changeable historical record is also an unreliable historical record. (How anachronistic page numbers in citations came to look; how absurd the laboured physical distribution of days-old ‘news’; and that it was paid for!) It was brief, that fin de siècle, when aesthetics augmented the experience, before the deadening sequence, as on a darkling plain, of price wars, tabloidisation, and digitisation. Before the obituary of print.

There has always been obituarial change – reinforcing the apparent contradiction that a paper of news could also expressly be about the past – and the latest, for once, really was also the most significant. The normalisation, and then the fullest expression, of the obituary coincided with the end of the newspaper, while the popularisation of its tone and contents coincided with a broader decline – or at least a broadening – of high politics in public discourse. The Independent, rather than the Telegraph, was the more auspicious for the political obituary (and indeed for newspapers, in being the first to cease to exist in print). But that promise, familiar to many political careers, was equally familiarly to be lost. The new centrality of the once marginal militated against orthodox political obituaries, the subjects of which remain the faces of the nation’s (and nations’) past. The obituarial turn bypassed political obituaries, except in that, by definition, being generally neither fun nor diverse, they simply became fewer. There was a pattern, one seen more widely in the public realm. Levity, entertainment, ‘likes’, parliamentary sketches rather than parliamentary reporting, comedians on panel programmes: a long, withdrawing roar, heard by the melancholic, as out of touch as the old marmoreal political elite of a pre-devolution national polity. Obituarial lives, as unreliable in their undoubted distinction as some were, may come to be regarded as a peculiarly British genre of writing politics.