David Astor

A gentleman amateur until the end, he is mourned by a generation of reporters who respected his integrity, sincerity, and above all his ability to admit when he was being an unrealistic idealist in an age of fiercely competitive media money-grubbers.

His greatest single achievement was to so thoroughly denounce Britain's last serious attempt to revive post-Second World War glories during the tragic and costly Suez invasion in 1956. His singlemost dire mistake was to underestimate the power of newspaper rivals who would sell their souls and the souls they so bully of those who work for them - which led one of Britain's most important newspapers, the Observer, for a short while to fall into the charlatan hands of Lonrho's Tiny Rowland.

When he died, such unlikely figures as the Queen and Nelson Mandela expressed sadness, the former issuing a statement from Buckingham Palace, the latter calling the legendary editor ''one of my best and most loyal friends''.

Added the almost as legendary and almost as great Anthony Sampson, who knew David Astor from 1955 to his death at the weekend: ''He was more like a Renaissance patron than an editor.''

His world was the world of ideas, and one of his weary

subordinates once declared: ''Chairman Mao invented the permanent revolution. But David Astor invented the permanent conference.''

Those who were there at the time said that Thursday and Friday conferences when the Observer was enjoying its glory days in the 1960s, usually went on all day and most of the night.

The owner/editor of a newspaper which was neither left nor right, Labour, Liberal, or Conservative, rocked a boat in which the British establishment so merrily sailed the seven seas.

And this scion of Britain's ruling classes said once and so famously: ''I edit the Observer for myself and my friends,'' adding: ''Life is great if you don't weaken.''

During his youth at Eton he proved the perfect Piscean, swimming in both directions at the same time, giving the distinct impression of death by drowning.

He fought against the dictates of his powerful mother at England's most prestigious public school, and against the formidable will of his father when at Oxford University. At the former he was often abysmally unhappy (like Winston Churchill at Harrow) and at the latter he suffered a nervous breakdown. He never took a degree and told a close friend at the end of his long, distinguished career that the Observer was the Balliol he never had, a statement which underscored something about his character and his motivation at a newspaper which so delighted in challenging society's norms.

Even when old, he saw journalists as fellow undergraduates, and journalism a platform for great causes and not money grubbing which throughout his long life he so despised.

He scorned Grub Street and those who had a mortgage in it as only the very rich can do. After all, in post-First World War Britain his family was regarded as second only to royalty.

Astor's father, the Second

Viscount Astor, had been one of the richest men in the world, inheriting vast properties in US and a highly lucrative fur-trading industry. His mother, Nancy, was the outrageous socialite who became world famous as Britain's first woman MP.

The dominating and, at times, domineering hostess of Cliveden desired to control absolutely the mind of young David who spent a great deal of his early manhood on the couch being (perhaps sadly for this young introvert) psycho-analysed by Anna Freud. ''He discovered himself through artists, intellectuals, and Labour politicians, and not through Tories or fellow aristocrats,'' commented Sampson, who at the age of 29 was lured from Africa where he edited Jim Bailey's famous Drum magazine.

Astor had little practical experience as a reporter.

He spent a single year at the Yorkshire Post before taking over one of the British greats. But almost from the word go he had been in the company of cabinet ministers who delighted in long weekends spent at Cliveden, the Thames resort which went on to become so famous in 1930 as a centre of Nazi-appeasement and then, 33 years later, as the place where young Christine Keeler went swimming in the nude and accidentally-on-purpose bumped into war minister John Profumo.

Throughout his life, Astor detested the way his sacred home had been so maligned by tabloid newspapers. He also grew angry when Astor family critics accused his mother of being anti-Jewish and pro-Hitler. Maybe by way of compensation for such cruel attacks, Astor spent a great deal of time, money, and effort championing the fight against apartheid which he saw as the post-Second World War of Nazism on a continent he much loved but never visited.

He handpicked his staff. What a collection.

They included Cyril Connelly, Arthur Koestler, Philip Toynbee, and George Orwell. Kenneth Tynan was a discovery along with Anthony Sampson, Colin Legum, and the man who eventually took over from him,

Donald Trelford.

My own first editor, the

legendary in Africa Richard Hall, was recruited by Astor, and Hall went on to become the paper's intuitive and extraordinarily well-informed Africa correspondent. Hall told me that the white Africanists on the Observer (they included Colin Legum as well as Sampson and Hall) spent much time persuading Astor not to travel to the Dark Continent. ''We feared that if he went there and was exposed to the terrible corruption of independent Africa it might weaken his commitment to The Cause which was the destruction of white rule in Africa and apartheid in South Africa.''

They also feared that they would lose their jobs.

Astor never did see the continent he cared about so much, which is fortunate for Nelson Mandela who admired him

so much.

Denying he was ever a socialist (a doctrinaire Marxist one, at least), Astor delighted in taking his entire staff to the family home every year, letting reporters and their wives roam free around one of southern England's most stately homes. On one visit, Lady Astor asked a senior staff member if

he worked for Astor ''and all those niggers and communists on the Observer''.

Even when the Observer was losing money hand over fist, when competition became so fiercely stiff against the Sunday Times, Astor stopped his advertising department from carrying alcohol advertisements. Mummy was a Christian Scientist and objected.

Astor resigned as editor of the Observer in 1975. It was not the wrath of the establishment that weakened his will to stay on, but his rather slow and rather painful realisation that in the mid-1970s he was the child, the creature, and the creation of another age - an age of beauty, truth, and ideas, but certainly not Roy Thomson who was running the rival Sunday Times, creating colour magazines which appealed to advertisers and PR executives. The Observer was in danger of defeat, even collapse, not because of Astor's politics, but rather because newsprint rationing had been lifted, allowing papers to carry as much advertising as they could get.

This battle for advertising punters changed the nature of the British media. Newspapers demanded features about the here and now that appealed to consumers not to a collection of strange, stray, and often dangerously alcohol-driven aesthetes who were quite highly paid connoisseurs of European culture and the arts.

Once he was relieved of the responsibility for the paper, it was sold to Robert O Anderson, the chairman of Atlantic Richfield. Astor was able to give more of his time to worthwhile causes - battered wives, abused children, prisons and prison officers, peace in the Middle East, and (above all) freedom for blacks in Africa.

Under Atlantic Richfields's ownership he remained a director of the Observer but resigned when the American oil company, against all of Astor's expectations, sold the Observer to Tiny Rowland, CEO of Lonrho which had such vast interests in Africa.

Rowland had been rejected out of hand as a buyer by the newspaper's trustees a few years earlier, but the Monopolies Commission was reassured, and one of the men who did the reassuring was Richard Hall, that Rowland would not interfere in the day-to-day running of his latest acquisition.

But when Lonrho sold it to the owners of the Guardian in 1993, Astor was said to be personally delighted. At the age of 82, and at the instigation of his old friend Roy Jenkins, Astor was created a Companion of Honour in the New Year's honours list of 1994.

He leaves a wife Bridget and their two sons and three daughters, and the daughter of his first marriage to Melenee.

David Astor, CH, proprietor and editor of the Observer newspaper; born on March 5, 1912; died December 6, 2001.