Anthony Howard , British journalist, broadcaster and editor (New Statesman). died from a surgery for a ruptured aneurysm he was 76

 Anthony Michell Howard, CBE  was a prominent British journalist, broadcaster and writer. He was the editor of the New Statesman, The Listener and the deputy editor of The Observer died from a surgery for a ruptured aneurysm he was  76. He selected the passages used in "The Crossman Diaries", a book of entries taken from Richard Crossman's "The Diaries of a Cabinet Minister".


(12 February 1934 – 19 December 2010^[1])

 Early life

Howard was the son of a Church of England clergyman, Canon Guy Howard. He was educated at Purton Stoke School at Kintbury in Berkshire, Highgate School, Westminster and at Christ Church, Oxford where, in 1954, he was chairman of the Oxford University Labour Club and, the following year, President of the Oxford Union.
Howard had planned a career as a barrister, having been called to the Bar (Inner Temple) in 1956 while fulfilling his National Service obligations in the army, during which he saw active service in the Royal Fusiliers during the Suez War, but he "stumbled" into his career as a journalist in 1958, starting on Reynolds News as a political correspondent. Howard moved to the Manchester Guardian in 1959. The following year, he was awarded a Harkness Fellowship to study in the United States, though he remained on the Guardian’s staff.

Career

Howard was political correspondent of the New Statesman from 1961 until 1964. An admirer of Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell during this period, he was a strong advocate of the democratic process:

"I strongly believe that people should have the right to elect their own rulers and for a long time I was deeply affronted by what the Conservative Party did and never more affronted than when Alec Douglas-Home became leader of the Conservative Party. That seemed to me to be an Etonian fix organised by Harold Macmillan."^[2]

In January 1965, Howard joined The Sunday Times as its Whitehall correspondent, a post he saw as being in advance of the then current journalistic practices.^[3] Cabinet Ministers were instructed by Prime Minister Harold Wilson's private secretary not to co-operate with Howard. Civil servants received similar instructions.^[3] Howard though, was soon invited to become the Observer’s chief Washington correspondent, serving in the role from 1966 to 1969, later contributing a political column (1971-72). During his period in America he made regular contributions to The World At One on Radio 4. "It got to where I was almost the World at One Washington correspondent", he once remarked.^[4]
As editor of the New Statesman (1972-78), succeeding Richard Crossman, whose deputy he had been (1970-72), he appointed Robin Cook as the magazine's parliamentary adviser in 1974,^[5] (Cook also contributed articles), James Fenton, Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis as literary editor in 1977. Under Howard, the magazine published a rare non-British contributor: Gabriel García Márquez in March 1974, on the overthrow of Salvador Allende's elected government in Chile the previous September. Perhaps out of a sense of mischief, he featured a series of diatribes against the British Left, by the magazine's former editor Paul Johnson, a drinking companion and friend of Howard's, whose rightward drift was well advanced by then. Howard was unable to halt the magazine's fall in circulation, however. He then edited The Listener for two years (1979-81).
Howard was deputy editor of The Observer (1981-88), where one of his journalist protégés was the journalist and (later) novelist Robert Harris, whom he appointed as the newspaper's political editor. His professional relationship with the editor, Donald Trelford, ultimately broke down over allegations that Trelford had allowed the newspaper’s proprietor Tiny Rowland to interfere in editorial content. After leaving The Observer, following an ill-fated editorial coup against Trelford, he was a reporter on Newsnight and Panorama (1989-92), having previously presented Channel Four’s Face the Press (1982-85). His last editorial positions before turning freelance were at The Times as Obituaries editor (1993-99) and Chief Political Book Reviewer (1990-2004), though he contributed opinion columns to the newspaper until September 2005, when his regular column was discontinued.
Howard assisted Michael Heseltine on his memoirs, Life in the Jungle: My Autobiography (2000), and more recently published an official biography Basil Hume: The Monk Cardinal (2005), despite being an agnostic.

Personal life

Howard married Carol Anne Gaynor, herself a journalist, in 1965. He was awarded the CBE in 1997. He died in London, after surgery for a ruptured aneurysm.^[6]

To see more of who died in 2010 click here