Thread by @peterjukes

Short thread on how a journalist saved my life. "This morning I woke up to an email that put a lump in my throat. My former editor Tina Brown wrote that her husband Harry Evans had died.. "
bylinetimes.com/2020/09/24/sir…

"And at that moment, instead of breaking with sadness and a sense of misfortune, another feeling entirely overwhelmed me. Joy. Celebration. We were so lucky to have ever had him." bylinetimes.com/2020/09/24/sir…

Whenever you met him, you felt a little miracle could be in the making. But he never forgot how lucky he was and how unfair his home country still is. Unlike others who have ascended the rungs of the British class system, he always pulled the ladder back down to help others

Among the closed courtyards and fenced-off defensiveness of British journalism, he was a rare thing: not a gatekeeper but a gate-opener.

During his 14 years editing the Sunday Times, Harry opened the gates for so many people who probably will never even know his name. I think particularly of one 14-year-old boy down on his luck in the 1970s....

That boy was me. I still bear the scars on my left wrist of those dark days living in the grounds of the psychiatric hospital, but the torch Harry passed over outshines them by megawatts.

“The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good” goes the famous maxim, and from my personal experience of meeting Harry four decades later, he was a giant.

“The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good” goes the famous maxim, and from my personal experience of meeting Harry four decades later, he was a giant.

He showed us a different way, an example even more vivid in his absence, to be remembered long after the time servers, sycophants and stenographers have gone to their well-furnished oblivion.

Like that hushed moment in a theatre when the curtain falls on some tremendous, life-affirming drama, even though there are tears in your eyes because there will be no encore, you just have to stand and applaud until your hands hurt.

Bravo, Harry. Bravo. And farewell.