Amol Rajan: The Independent was always radical – where others zigged, we zagged

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When I took the editor’s chair in 2013, having been told to come home from the stag do I had organised at the Sónar Festival in Barcelona, I wanted to go back to the future.

I felt the paper had been dragged about all over the place in an attempt to find a niche. We had a bubbly red masthead, close to the French title Libération, which didn’t work.

I spoke to Andreas Whittam Smith, the principal founder and first editor of The Independent, at length. He said he had a motto for the paper when it started, other than the celebrated “It is. Are you?” advertising slogan – a phrase to capture its ethos. This was: “Classic with a twist”. I embraced this fully.

We brought in Matt Willey, one of the best graphic designers of his generation. The masthead went back to black, and much closer to the original. And, in a genius move, Matt flicked the masthead so it ran down the side.

Looking back on those front pages, I feel enormous pride. After the Lib Dems got slaughtered in the 2015 election, I thought “The Strange Death of Liberal Britain” nailed it. But three other front pages stand out. The first was the one with a picture of Aylan Kurdi, a six-year-old boy whose body washed up on a shore in Turkey. Credit here to Richard Askwith, one of our legendary senior editors, who came up with the perfect headline: “Somebody’s Child”. Richard and Dan Gledhill, the deputy editor, were both touched by the mantle of greatness.

The night that Nelson Mandela died, we were at a rare office party where, if memory serves, I may have briefly attempted to DJ. I was more than one drink down when the news came in. I rushed back to the office to discover that, typically, the senior team were already there on the backbench. Most of the copy for the souvenir edition was long since commissioned, and good to go. My job was to nail the cover image. I thought about a fist, showing Mandela’s bid for freedom. But in the end, we alighted on his remarkable face. The next day, The Independent was the best newspaper in Britain.

The front page I am proudest of came the day after the Charlie Hebdo shooting, at the offices of the satirical magazine in Paris. This struck me as a battle between everything I love – satire, wit, freedom – and everything I hate – totalitarianism, bigotry, terror. We didn’t have a great set of pictures to choose from; they were mostly grainy CCTV stills. That night, I was dissatisfied with our cover.

Then Dave Brown, our brilliant cartoonist, sent in his daily effort. I had promoted the cartoon to page three, seeing it as a cleverer use of that first right-hand page than, say, The Sun’s old approach. And Dave’s image was perfection. A blood-stained, pen-holding hand emerging from a magazine, saying a glorious “F*** You” to the killers. I loved it, and asked Dave to amend it so that we could use it on page one.

A few days later, on the wires, I saw a picture from outside the offices of Charlie Hebdo. It was Dave’s – our – front page image, next to some flowers, which had been adopted as a symbol of international solidarity and defiance. That was one of the best moments of my life and career.

It is extremely difficult for people under 40, most of whom don’t take a daily newspaper and long ago stopped reading them in print, to understand the power that British newspapers had in 1986. It follows that they cannot fully grasp what a dazzling, audacious raid on occupied turf the launch of The Independent was.

You might argue that, being three years old at the time, I cannot fully grasp it either. And yet I know that launch was something very special, because I studied it in great detail prior to my appointment as editor. I read Stephen Glover’s beautiful, mischievous book Paper Dreams; I’ve spoken to countless “lifers” who were on the staff from day one; and I made a point of inspecting those first editions closely.

There was a very particular spirit about 1986, and a particular mission. What were those values, and what was that spirit? The first clue is in the name: “independent” is an adjective. Putting a definite article in front of it is jarring; and yet it works, because it immediately says what the paper is. Free from proprietorial interference; of no party or faction; non-tribal; and deeply maverick and independent-minded. Radical, brave and entrepreneurial. Where some zigged, The Independent would zag. This radicalism has manifested many times in the past 40 years.

When, in late 2015, I went for lunch with Andreas to discuss the closure of the print edition, he asked me a few times if the spirit of The Independent would live on. In Dave Brown’s front page image; in the memorial for our visionary founder; and in the surging growth and success of the digital product you are now reading, a resounding answer can be found.

Amol Rajan was the final editor of the Independent’s printed edition. He can now be found at The Amol Rajan Connection

The Independent and the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) have launched a new film festival as part of the paper’s 40th anniversary celebrations.

Celebrating Free Thinkers will mark the occasion with a series of specially curated events and screenings. For more information, visit https://www.ica.art/films/the-independent

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