SAYING SORRY FOR SARAH

the Guardian, a man whose motives

are never easy to fathom

IT SHOULD BE a time of triumph for Peter Preston. He is the editor at the cen- tre of his own story, a journalist with a scoop who is taking on the Government single-handed, a knight on a white charger riding to battle. But there is that little mat- ter of the faked fax on House of Commons notepaper and one is forced to think rather of Don Quixote, a naive knight- errant with good intentions but extremely poor judgment.

It is a cruel irony for Preston, since he has been waiting a long time for something like the Aitken affair to come along in the hope of expunging from memory the last time he made a disastrous mistake when apparently holding the fate of the Tory government in his hands.

That was in 1983, when Sarah Tisdall, a Foreign Office clerk, anonymously sent the Guardian a set of Cabinet documents which revealed the date when Cruise mis- siles would arrive at Greenham Common and the security arrangements the Govern- ment had planned to quell any subsequent protest. The Government demanded that the newspaper return the documents, and Preston, bowing to the pressure, decided to comply. In so doing, Tisdall was revealed as the source and was jailed for six months. Preston suffered lacerating criticism within and without the paper. Among the bleeding-heart liberals at the Guardian, not to mention its equally soppy readers, there were howls of protest. Jour- nalists across Fleet Street — that's where they were in those days — were amazed at such an error by Britain's only radical left- of-centre national newspaper. Though Pre- ston and his advisers did not knowingly shop anyone, it was obvious there was a risk that the return of documents would lead to the source being traced.

It is still not a subject Preston likes to discuss. 'The whole Tisdall muck-up was awful,' he admitted to an interviewer a couple of years ago, refusing to elucidate. Yet, in spite of his own misgivings and sense of guilt about Tisdall's fate, he resist- ed all calls at the time to resign. Whatever else Preston may be, he is not a quitter. He has a terrier-like tenacity, a mission to achieve, which stems, in part, from his childhood battle to overcome the debilitating effects of disease.

Born in Leicestershire in 1938, the son of a deputy manager of a wholesale green- grocery, Preston was 10 when he and his father were struck by one of the virulent post-war outbreaks of polio. His father died, and Peter was so badly afflicted that he spent 18 months in hospital in an iron lung. That he survived was considered remarkable; among his infirmities, he was left with a withered right arm and a dis- abled left arm. It is disconcerting on first meeting him to see how quickly he shoots out his left hand to clutch a clumsy hand- shake.

Yet the young Preston showed early signs of his will to succeed and desperate desire to defy his disability. He had fallen behind academically but worked hard enough to win a place at Loughborough grammar school. He also managed, against all the odds, to become a conjuror and join the Leicester Magic Circle, hard as it is to believe when one sees him typing, holding one wrist in the other hand and pressing down a key at a time.

He went up to St John's College, Oxford, where he read English literature, edited Cherwell and dabbled a little in Liberal pol- itics. This middle path, or fence-sitting as some describe it, has been Preston's pre- ferred political stance ever since. One of Preston's Oxford contemporaries — and no mean fence-sitter himself — was Sir Robin Butler, the Cabinet Secretary, the man he has pestered these past 18 months.

Having got a taste for journalism by writ- ing articles for his Magic Circle magazine, Preston joined the Liverpool Daily Post to learn his trade. Again, he showed that com- bination of determination and enthusiasm which has marked his life. Few were sur- prised when in 1963, immediately after his three-year apprenticeship, he won a covet- ed job as a political reporter on the Guardian. He has been with the paper ever since.

It was his spell as diary editor, which convinced the editor, Alastair Hethering- ton, of his young tyro's qualities. Preston suggested the column, then known as 'Lon- don Letter', be renamed 'Miscellany At Large', and it soon won a reputation with readers for its wit, and notoriety with politicians, particularly the Labour Cabi- net, for its impertinence. After a spell as features editor, Preston became production editor, a key role for a man hungry for promotion to the top rank. Not that he was expected to inherit Het- herington's job when he resigned in 1975. It was generally believed that the animated deputy editor, John Cole, would move into the chair. Instead, the Guardian board skipped a generation and handed the edi- torship to the 36-year-old Preston. Cole resigned and eventually turned his strange Ulster accent to good account by becoming the BBC's gloriously incomprehensible political editor. The late Seventies saw trade union power gradually eroding the credibility of Callaghan's Labour government. Once Mrs Thatcher came to power, Preston steered a course towards some kind of consensual middle, his favourite ground. As Cole was to remark, 'The paper became, by mutual, if implicit, agreement, the house journal of the Social Democrats.' In other words, Pre- ston never did declare himself. It has always been thus. However, it is fair to point out that he has followed the glorious- ly liberal directive given to every Guardian editor: 'Carry on the paper in the same spirit as before.' If one word can sum up Preston, it is wily. Though this sounds unkind, it is gen- erally regarded at the Guardian as a respectful way to describe a man everyone finds it hard to fathom. Even those val° have worked for years with PP, as he is always known, talk about the frustration of trying to deal with him. He often appears switched off, elsewhere, vacant, distant, detached. He is renowned for his leg- endary inability to charm: he has a discon- certing habit of smiling a greeting at people after being introduced and then remaining silent. He often affects to ignore people. Then, again, all his staff are con- scious that he misses little.

He may not have much in the way of man-management skills (and is regularly accused of being cold and manipulative), but no one underestimates his journalistic skills or his desire to hold on to the reins of power. He is a survivor and he has come through a lot a troubles, apart from the Tisdall episode. When he took over the Guardian it was selling 330,000 copies and was in a slow circulation decline, falling in two years to a perilous 260,000. Preston weathered the storm and had already turned it around when he had the extra fortune of the Times disappearing from sale for a year. Throughout the Eighties sales mounted, reaching 525,000 in 1986. Then the Independent arrived and it went into reverse again. By 1988, with sales dropping, Preston showed considerable ingenuity and daring by radically altering the Guardian's design. Several staff and thousands of readers were alienated by the change of typeface and odd white spaces. Preston ignored the controversy. It did not stop him from introducing a tabloid section — the first broadsheet to do so. Along the way, he eased out veterans long associated with the Paper, such as Jill Tweedie.

In his 20th year in charge — making him the longest-serving current newspaper edi- tor — Preston still retains that essential journalistic delight in getting the big one. But this big one — the Jonathan Aitken Ritz Hotel bill scandal — has been a story Plagued by all sorts of personal problems and compromises. The first was that Aitken and Preston had previously been, if not friends, certainly allies, in the sense that they had regularly shared platforms when campaigning for press freedom, par- ticularly after Aitken was prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act for an arti- cle he wrote in 1971 for the Sunday Tele- graph.

The second was that the source of the story was Mohammed Fayed, the Egyp- tian-bom businessman who is one of the most implausible guardians of public morals ever to emerge. A Department of Trade report into his takeover of Harrods `Brilliant. A freebie.' concluded that he and his brother had 'dis- honestly misrepresented their origins, their wealth, their business interests and their resources'.

When Preston wrote last May in the Guardian about the strange case of Aitken's bill at the Paris Ritz (owner: Fayed) the link with the Egyptian was not clear. Indeed, it was to protect his source (remember Tisdall) that he used the sub- terfuge of what he likes to call a 'cod fax' — less euphemistically, a forged letter to obtain a copy of Aitken's Ritz receipt.

Privately, Preston expresses proper scep- ticism about Fayed. He is very conscious that his major ally is a loose cannon who is capable of turning on anyone if he feels it to be to his advantage. But Preston has now become a hostage to Mohammed Fayed, as the use of the Commons headed notepaper proves. In his desire to get the story, whatever the so-called arrangement was, he took an extremely unwise step. In so doing, Preston, rather than Aitken, has become the target for MPs' spleen, even on the Labour side.

Not that Preston shows the slightest alarm. In his slightly unworldly way, he cannot see 'intrinsically' (his favourite word) why there's such a fuss. In rather hapless television appearances, in which he has appeared to agree that he made an error, he has maintained that the ends jus- tified the means. Off camera he hasn't stopped smiling, even at the motion calling for his dismissal and the MPs demanding he be prosecuted or called to the bar of the House.

It is just possible to imagine that he is seeking martyrdom. Perhaps a spell in jail is the only way he can finally redeem him- self for the blunder that cost Sarah Tisdell her freedom.