Peter Stothard

Stothard is, currently, the editor of the Times Literary Supplement. After Trinity College, Oxford, he joined the BBC and wrote for the New Statesman, New Society and Plays and Players. He joined The Sunday Times in 1978 and The Times in 1981 where he was chief leader writer, deputy editor and US editor, based in Washington. He was knighted for 'services to the newspaper industry' in 2003.

He published Thirty Days: Tony Blair and the Test of History in 2004: whereby, on the whole, Blair comes across as a man of strength, conviction and genuine integrity.

During Stothard's editorship, under the ownership Rupert Murdoch, The Times engaged in a price war when it reduced its cover price to attack The Daily Telegraph and The Independent, its main rivals.

In an interview after his knighthood Stothard said:

"The honour represents in some sense that you are doing something in the public interest. There's a public service that's beyond that which you are doing for yourself or for your company [...] The very existence of newspapers - the very existence of a free press and successful newspapers is, in my view, based strongly in the public interest. But of course what we do each day is try and get stories that are better than other peoples - to write better than other people, to get better pictures than other people and to sell more copies than others which is directly related to our sense of what we're doing - that's what we get paid for and that's what people who own newspapers like."

Within a sentence this changes to:

"...there are those who say that you shouldn't do anything beyond what's in your own self-interest. Not just cynical modern people but there's a lot of people that many times in history have thought that society was best served by people only acting in their own best interest and not trying to second-guess or act in any other way. So it's a perfectly respectable position and not just a cynical one in a bad sense."

Sir Peter's greatest interview is stated to be the one with former England manager, Glenn Hoddle in which Hoddle said disabled children were paying the price of sins committed by their souls in past lives.

Affiliations

• Polis, advisory board.