Rosie Boycott: People thought we were hippies – but The Independent understood Britain’s readers like no paper before

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I joined The Independent in 1996, having previously edited Esquire. The Guardian had published a piece in its (then) standalone Monday media section which said it was time that a woman edited a broadsheet. They made a number of suggestions, one of which was me. Somehow, the rumour began that I was in line for the job: at that point in my life I hadn’t met either David Montgomery or Tony O’Reilly, the owners of the paper, and I was very happy where I was. Esquire was selling well, we won awards, and we had the best group of writers any editor could wish for. But the rumour intensified and the more I denied it, the more it grew.

After some six months or so, I got a phone call from Montgomery. With a dry Northern Irish chuckle, he suggested we lunch. We didn’t talk about the newspaper at all – we simply got on very well. Many months later, he phoned again to tell me the job was mine.

The actual handover was confusing, since the outgoing editor was still in place. In the end, my boss at the National Magazine Company realised the situation was ludicrous, and simply rang David to say I was getting a taxi over to my new office. And that was that.

Walking in was nerve-wracking – aside from three months at The Daily Telegraph back in 1987, I had never worked in a main newspaper office. My news editor, Mike McCarthy, came in and told me not to worry; he’d take care of everything, since it was a Friday night and the paper was about to go into production. McCarthy was as good as his word and for the next few months I relied on him and Chris Blackhurst, the assistant editor, as my lifelines.

They were extraordinary: skilled, clever and fun and the same went for the amazing staff that had been assembled under previous editors. After a few weeks, I realised I was (more or less) able to steer the crazy train that is a newspaper. We published the entire script of David Cronenberg’s Crash in the magazine (it took up the whole thing) and suddenly we started to get some attention. We also had great access to the Labour Party. Elections were coming.

The Sunday before the 1997 election, we went out on a limb and predicted a huge landslide. Looking back, it seems everyone was predicting that outcome, but in fact we were the only paper to stick our neck out quite so far. I spent election night at the Southbank Centre, everyone cheering their socks off when Portillo lost his seat. At dawn, I made my way back to the office on the Tube and the bus, and it felt as though the whole world was smiling. By seven that morning, it was as if we had arrived in a new world. I remember the feeling very clearly, and I’ve never quite felt so optimistic about the state of Britain as I did that brilliant morning.

Not long after, we launched the campaign to decriminalise cannabis. David Montgomery backed it fully, even though plenty of people thought it was a terrible idea and that we looked like hippies holed up in a Canary Wharf tower. From day one, sales rose, and by about week three we were selling 330,000 copies a week – the highest the paper ever sold, before or since. O’Reilly wasn’t a fan, but as it was confined to the IOS and he was watching the sales figures, his objections soon fizzled out.

I remember the feeling very clearly, and I’ve never quite felt so optimistic about the state of Britain as I did that brilliant morning

The support came from everywhere. Paul McCartney sent a cheque, which wasn’t a huge surprise. Far more striking were the calls and letters from police chiefs in Florida and elsewhere in the US, from Europe, and from Colombia, all saying Britain (and the world) needed to face up to having lost the drug war. Teachers, police officers, health workers, social workers and probation officers wrote long, heartfelt letters about how prohibition was doing real harm, saddling young people who’d smoked a few joints with criminal records that dogged them for life.

I wrote – with some confidence – that I’d rather run into six blokes who’d been smoking dope than six who’d been drinking Special Brew in an alley late at night. I acquired the nickname “Rizla Rosie”, which I’ve always rather treasured.

Not long after, Diana died – timing her death, rather extraordinarily, for the Sunday papers. Mike McCarthy planned our funeral coverage like a military operation, complete with what we called “war briefings”.

We lived in the office all week, aiming to be off stone by 3pm and on the streets by 5pm. Everything went smoothly until Friday night around 10.30, when Mike suddenly clutched his chest and went white. I drove him through the darkened high-rises of Canary Wharf to the hospital on Commercial Road. The doctor asked about his diet; Mike admitted he ate little but drank around 40 Diet Cokes a day. The doctor, astonished, said that would send anyone’s heart into overdrive, but cleared him to leave.

We were back at our desks within hours, and got the edition out – three editions across Saturday, and a final one late that evening. We sold every edition we could get onto the streets, and our coverage – using journalists from the Sunday as well as the Daily – was absolutely superb.

We went home very tired but confident that we’d produced the best Sunday paper in the country.

Rosie Boycott was the editor of The Independent on Sunday from 1996 to 1998 and was editor of The Independent in 1998

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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