Peter Jay

“I am absolutely not indifferent to money. I love money and I'm very keen to have money.” – Peter Jay

Peter Jay on the Money Programme.

Peter Jay is a British journalist who was an early advocate for neoliberal economics and was particularly influential in this regard during the 1970s. Along with his friend John Birt (the former Director-General of the BBC) Jay is also well known as an outspoken advocate of high brow analytical journalism – as apposed to the adversarial style (at least theoretically) favoured by current affairs journalists.

1937–67: Early life, education and civil service

Jay was born on 7 February 1937, the son of Douglas and Margaret (Peggy) Jay (née Garnett). Both his parents were Labour Party politicians although they came from privileged liberal, rather than socialist, backgrounds. The Observer describes Jay as being born to ‘Hampstead Royalty’. Jay recalls that his father was an ‘egalitarian and a social reformer’ but was ‘passionately anti-Marxist’ and an imperialist who ‘thought the British Empire in its way, in its time, had been a glorious thing’.

Jay attended the Dragon school, a private prep school in Oxford, and then Winchester College, a prestigious private school attended by his grandfather, his father, and later his son. After school he served in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve as Midshipman and was promoted to Sub-Lieutenant. He then attended Oxford University where he took a degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics and was President of the Student Union.

Jay later commented that despite focusing almost entirely on philosophy: ‘I subsequently passed myself off as an economist which was a bit of a cheek really because I rather neglected my economic studies when doing PPE.’ At Oxford he was reportedly called ‘the cleverest young man in England’ by his Tutors, to which he responded: ‘Is there someone cleverer in Wales?’.

After graduating in 1960, Jay took the Civil Service exam and in January 1961 joined the Treasury where he spent six years. In 1961 he married Margaret Callaghan, daughter of the future Prime Minister Jim Callaghan, who was then the shadow chancellor. The couple had met at University and would divorce after a high profile separation on the late 1970s.

1967–1977: Media, Monetarism and the ‘Mission to Explain’

Peter Jay in the BBC documentary Tory! Tory! Tory.

In 1967 Jay left the civil service to join The Times as its economics editor. He worked at the paper for ten years, during which time he was also associate editor of its business news. Jay says his appointment was the result of a conversation with a BBC producer at a New Year’s Eve Party in 1966/7 (Jay’s wife was also a BBC producer). The producer asked if Jay had ever thought of being a journalist and the next day recommended him to William Rees-Mogg who had been appointed editor in waiting after a takeover of The Times.

In the BBC documentary Tory! Tory! Tory! William Rees-Mogg states: ‘I asked him to join The Times, which he agreed to do and about a year later I asked him to go as the economic correspondent of The Times to the United States, because I felt that the economic weather was coming across the Atlantic and that if we covered what was happening in America we might get right what was going to happen next in Britain.’ In the US, Jay was introduced to right-wing ‘free market’ economics by a friend from the British Embassy. Jay told the BBC his friend ‘had made it his job to get very close to the American economists including the Chicago based people, and he began to open my eyes to what the Chicago based people were saying; what Milton Friedman was saying…’

Under the influence of the Chicago school, Jay came to believe that, in his words, ‘there was some kind of fundamental crisis in the assumptions on which economic policy had been up until then largely conducted. In which case a different approach, or something, was needed.’ That ‘something’ turned out to be the political project now known as neoliberalism, which then tended to be referred to as ‘monetarism’ because of the movement’s focus at that time on the theoretical link between, unemployment, inflation and the money supply.

Along with Samuel Brittan at the Financial Times, Jay used his newspaper column to promote the new monetarist ideology in Britain. Recalling this period Brittan writes:

In the middle years of the 1970s, Peter Jay, who was then economic editor of The Times, and I were regarded by many in the British economic establishment as two terrible monetarist twins because of our scepticism of the Heath dash for growth… Jay and I had slightly different starting points. Nevertheless, unlike many purely technical monetarists, Jay never flinched from the implications of the new (or rediscovered) ideas on the ultimate futility of traditional full employment policies - witness his role in James Callaghan's famous speech to the 1976 Labour Conference in which the former Prime Minister delivered his much-cited speech about governments not being able to spend their way to prosperity.

During this period at The Times, Jay also became involved in television. From 1972 to 1977 he was a presenter on LWT’s high brow current affairs programme Weekend World which was created by Jay’s friend, the future BBC Director-General, John Birt. Whilst at LWT, Jay and Birt developed a critique of television news and current affairs which appeared in a series of editorials printed in The Times in 1975/6. They argued that television had a ‘bias against understanding’ and that television producers should recruit journalists with special expertise and develop a more analytical style. What became known as the ‘mission to explain’ formed the intellectual framework for a series of changes to BBC editorial practises in BBC News and Current Affairs under John Birt.

During the 1970s Jay also fronted an ITV series called The Jay Interview. The programme ran for two series, each consisting of six hour long episodes broadcast late on Sunday evenings. The first series, on which John Birt worked as Executive Producer, was broadcast in 1975 and consisted of interviews with liberal intellectuals like the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, the Keynesian economic James Meade and the moral philosopher Bernard Williams. The second series, broadcast in 1976 and produced by the then left wing journalist John Lloyd, consciously embraced more marginal figures. It was entitled ‘Alternatives to Liberal Democracy’ and included an interview with the anarchist intellectual Noam Chomsky and the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm.

1977–1979: Ambassador to Washington

In 1977 Jay was appointed Ambassador to Washington by David Owen, the right-wing Labour Foreign Secretary who later split the party under Thatcher by co-founding the Social Democratic Party. According to Jay, Owen was suspicious of the senior Foreign Office officials and had come to believe that there was a ‘circle or network’ of civil servants from which he was excluded. Owen explained to Jay that ‘the only way he could be sure that some such exclusive network was not operating without his knowledge, was by appointing somebody whom he could, in this respect, completely trust to a key position in the network.’ The appointment of Jay was highly controversial because of his marriage to the daughter of the Labour leader.

Jay was posted to Washington from the summer of 1977 to the summer of 1979, staying on for a month after the Labour government was ousted by the Conservatives. According to Jay’s account he was removed as Ambassador because of the media’s expectation of a change under Thatcher. During his time in Washington, Jay was tennis partners with the then Director of the CIA and his successor:

The CIA was a most important relationship. I used to play tennis most mornings at seven o’clock, with Stan Turner, who was the Director of the CIA. We didn’t discuss very secret things over the tennis court, or over our breakfast afterwards, but it was an important relationship. And not only the CIA, but also the other shadowy agencies… Bill Webster was another tennis partner. He was the Director of the FBI before he became director of the CIA. But also agencies like the NSA and NPIC - all those sorts of organisations that are the equivalent of GCHQ. I don’t think we have an equivalent of NPIC. But NPIC was very important.

1979–2009

In 1979 Jay joined the Economist Group as a consultant and from 1979 to 1983 was director of the Economist Intelligence Unit, the business intelligence firm affiliation with The Economist magazine. From 1979 to 1980 he was also appointed a Visiting Scholar at the right-wing US think-tank the Brookings Institution.

In 1980 Jay presented a series of studio discussions to accompany the broadcast of Milton Friedman’s neoliberal polemic Free to Choose. The 10-part television documentary was produced by the British company Video Arts Television after Friedman and his collaborator Bob Chitester had failed to find a production team in the US considered sufficiently sympathetic to their philosophy. The BBC bought the rights to six of the programmes, five of which were broadcast with studio discussions with Milton Friedman hosted by Jay.

In March 1980 Jay was approached by David Frost to head a bid for the ITV breakfast franchise. Jay agreed and headed what became TV-am until 1983 when he was forced to resign amid criticisms of his management style. According to the Observer:

[Jay] won the franchise and launched the station with much ballyhoo about its 'mission to explain' and its Famous Five presenters (David Frost, Angela Rippon, Michael Parkinson, Anna Ford and Robert Kee). Viewers turned off in droves. A month after the launch, the ratings were down to 400,000 and Jay resigned, stabbed not in the back but in the front by his co-director and former friend Jonathan Aitken in a boardroom coup. Greg Dyke stepped in to save the station with Roland Rat.

From 1983 to 1986 he presented Channel 4’s weekly news programme A Week in Politics and from 1986 to 1989 was chief of staff to the press tycoon Robert Maxwell. He also worked on the Chartered Institute of Bankers monthly magazine Banking World, as an Editor from 1984 to 1986 and a Supervising Editor until 1989.

In 1985 Jay's 'terrible monetarist twin' Sam Brittan was appointed to the Committee on Financing the BBC, better known as the Peacock Committee. This had been set up by the Thatcher government and was informed by the same neoliberal thinking on broadcasting that Jay and others had developed. Chris Horrie and Steve Clarke note that whilst the committee was conducting its inquiry, Samuel Brittan was in close contact with Jay:

Brittan had developed his theories with Peter Jay, the former economics editor of The Times and presenter of LWT’s Weekend World. Jay was not on the committee, but had strong thought of his own on the future of television. He and Brittan were to spend long sessions together at Jay’s Ealing home, effectively forming their own private committee, and wildly exceeding Peacock’s original brief.

In 1990 he was appointed Economics Editor of the BBC by his old ally John Birt.

In 2003 he became a Director (non-executive) of the Bank of England.

Affiliations

Garrick Club