Lord Rees-Mogg obituary | The Times

Lord Rees-Mogg obituary

William Rees-Mogg, who has died of oesophageal cancer aged 84, was the editor of the Times during one of the most turbulent periods of its history, and a longstanding newspaper columnist of largely conservative, even Whiggish, opinions. In 1988 he was elevated to the peerage by Margaret Thatcher, though he sat in the Lords as a crossbencher.

His stately demeanour and slightly otherworldly, almost aristocratic appearance gave him the air of an Oxford don: bespectacled, pin-striped and with a floppy forelock, he was easy to mock and incongruous in the demotic and inky world of 1970s newspapers. There was a certain tweediness of opinions, too, that could be reminiscent of a Wodehousian country squire. But his remote and reserved manner belied a steely intelligence and ambition that saw him become a national newspaper editor before his 40th birthday and kept him active in journalism for decades. He was regularly derided as "Mystic Mogg" – a parody of a tabloid astrologer – for his occasionally perverse or wrong-headed assumptions, but none could deny that his columns were serious, if often pompous, or – a term he would have relished – influential in circles that mattered.

The son of Edmund Fletcher Rees-Mogg, William was born in Bristol into a family of Somerset gentry – Moggs have lived in the county for centuries – though one with a touch of exoticism: his American mother, Beatrice Warren, had been an actor and he inherited his Roman Catholicism from her. He was educated at Charterhouse school, Surrey, where his adolescent stuffiness and cunning was later ridiculed by his contemporary the louche novelist Simon Raven. He went to Oxford as a Brackenbury scholar, reading law at Balliol and becoming president of the Union debating society at a time when its status and self-regard was at its highest: his contemporaries included Jeremy Thorpe and Robin Day.

Rees-Mogg thought himself destined for a political career – standing as a Conservative candidate, he would later be heavily, even humiliatingly, defeated twice in the 1950s in the safely Labour seat of Chester-le-Street, County Durham – but an article he had written in a university magazine happened to be seen by an executive on the Financial Times and he was offered a post on the newspaper instead. In his memoirs, published in 2011, Rees-Mogg asserted: "I had the basic qualities not of a good historian, but of a good journalist – I had trenchant opinions: I wrote with vigour at short notice on any subject: I was manifestly clever, without being particularly consistent, accurate or profound … I showed promise; indeed, my whole educational career was based on showing promise."

The FT did not seem to mind that he was also writing speeches at the same time for the prime minister, Anthony Eden, which the newspaper would subsequently report.

Not for him the mucky-fingered provincial journalistic traineeship endured by other tyros of the period, or even an apprenticeship of reporting: within three years he was the paper's chief leader writer and within five assistant editor. From there, in 1960, still in his early 30s, he was plucked to become City editor of the Sunday Times, then separately owned from the Times, but when the paper's proprietor, the Canadian Lord Thomson of Fleet, acquired the daily in 1967, Rees-Mogg became the obvious man to be appointed editor.

The Times was a newspaper in flux, attempting somewhat desperately to shed aspects of its staid and fusty image and acquire a new sort of readership to broaden its appeal beyond the small establishment of "top people" who (in the words of a famous advertisement) would never have read anything else. It had recently failed in its attempt to merge with the Guardian and had taken the revolutionary step of putting news instead of classified advertisements on its front page.

Under Rees-Mogg, the last of the paper's "gentleman editors", it would go further, though how far he himself was responsible for such innovations was open to some debate. However there was improved and more extensive arts and sports coverage, a women's page, the introduction of journalists' bylines, the bringing in of the star columnist Bernard Levin and even an advertisement with a picture of a nude.

Perhaps most famously and disconcertingly for the paper's readers, Rees-Mogg soon penned a seminal editorial in the paper in July 1967, railing against the severity of prison sentences handed down to the Rolling Stones Mick Jagger and Keith Richards for drug offences, citing (and slightly misquoting) Alexander Pope's line "Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?" Rees-Mogg argued: "If we are going to make any case a symbol of the conflict between the sound traditional values of Britain and the new hedonism, then we must be sure that the sound traditional values include those of tolerance and equity. It should be the particular quality of British justice to ensure that Mr Jagger is treated exactly the same as anyone else, no better and no worse. There must remain a suspicion in this case that Mr Jagger received a more severe sentence than would have been thought proper for any purely anonymous young man."

Even in the Summer of Love, that was a bold move for an editor of the Times to make, although it also garnered useful publicity for the paper. However, the impression that he was a dilettante, disengaged editor, aloof from staff, interested in editorials, but not necessarily in news or layout – the nuts and bolts of newspaper production – was slow to dissipate. He was smoothly at home within the establishment, chatting to and occasionally interviewing politicians, prime ministers and world leaders with rather more relish than mingling on the editorial floor with his shirt-sleeved staff.

Louis Heren, the veteran foreign correspondent, believed that Rees-Mogg's attitude changed as his political ambitions declined during Edward Heath's time in office in the early 1970s: "It was said that he expected a life peerage and a cabinet seat and was offered something a good deal less. Whatever the truth, he was thereafter a more attentive and effective editor.

"The extra effort was certainly necessary. After the Thomson takeover, the board of Times Newspapers launched a massive circulation campaign. What had worked for the Sunday paper was confidently expected to work for the daily and for a time the circulation did indeed rise dramatically. The layout was changed and the editorial content popularised, if not trivialised. A business news and Saturday review section was introduced with too little planning and preparation and the combined result was almost disastrous for editorial morale. Rees-Mogg was not altogether responsible for these mistakes, but what amounted to mutiny among his senior colleagues concentrated his mind wonderfully. The paper returned to a more discreet layout, its old virtues and foibles were allowed to reassert themselves and Rees-Mogg regained his self-confidence. The editorial chair became the dispatch box and he thundered on almost every political and economic issue. A few of the positions he assumed were odd to say the least."

The 1970s were a thankless time to edit a national newspaper: tired printing presses produced murky and stereo typed pages, hidebound recruitment procedures gave rise to stultifying staffing and print union power held production of papers to capricious ransom. Towards the end of the decade, Thomson had had enough and eventually the Times suspended publication for nearly a year. Shortly after its return, the papers were sold to Rupert Murdoch, a figure about as antithetical in style and approach to Rees-Mogg – if not necessarily political opinions – as could be imagined. In photographs showing the two of them together following the takeover, they were almost comically ill at ease. In his memoirs, however, Rees-Mogg wrote: "Looking back, he has been an excellent proprietor for the Times, but also for Fleet Street ... The number of titles has increased; there are more and better-paid journalists than could be afforded in the old days. Above all, the power of the print unions was broken."

He continued to write opinion columns for the Times and other papers even after leaving the editor's chair in 1981: they were economically dry, socially conservative. He could also be remarkably haughty. His assertion during the Maastricht debates that John Major, the then prime minister, was over-promoted and unfit to govern – "his ideal level of political competence would be deputy chief whip or something of that standing" – was denounced in loyalist Tory ranks as pure snobbery. He subsequently lost a legal challenge that he mounted to the constitutionality of the treaty and had to pay costs.

There followed a succession of public positions including membership of the BBC's board of governors – there was an implicit understanding that he would become chairman, though that ultimately did not come to pass – and chairing the Broadcasting Standards Council. As vice-chairman of the BBC, he was accused by journalists at the corporation of being behind the governors' decision in 1985, after heavy government pressure, to block the transmission of a contentious programme about Northern Ireland. It was changed and subsequently broadcast, but in a period of high tension between ministers and the BBC, Rees-Mogg was very much on the establishment side.

He was also chairman of the Arts Council for most of the 1980s – a time during which the organisation was radically restructured and the number of arts bodies receiving grants was drastically cut – and even spent a year as high sheriff of Somerset in 1978. There were positions in publishing and a sideline selling antiquarian books at the top end of the market as chairman of Pickering and Chatto. There were occasional books from his own pen too, with apocalyptic titles such as The Reigning Error (1974), Blood in the Streets (with James Dale Davidson, 1988), The Great Reckoning (1991) and Picnics on Vesuvius (1992).

Rees-Mogg's stately pomposity was easily satirised by the likes of Private Eye: Mogadon Man when he expressed interest in liberalising drugs laws transmogrified into Mystic Mogg when his magisterially expressed predictions proved particularly off-beam. He had a mansion in Somerset and a country estate – "I don't feel very 20th century," he once said – and yet discerned the irony of being "a country person who spends most of his time in London". His last column appeared in the Times a fortnight ago.

In 1962, he married his secretary, Gillian Morris. She survives him, along with their children, Charlotte, Thomas, Emma, Jacob (now a Conservative MP for a Somerset constituency) and Annunziata (who failed in her attempt in a neighbouring constituency in 2010).

William Rees-Mogg, Lord Rees-Mogg, journalist and writer, born 14 July 1928; died 29 December 2012

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