It is unsettling reading the old emails of friends who have died. With their casual conversation, and urgent exclamation marks, and plans to meet in what was then the future, they speak to you as ghosts. So I have felt going through my inbox from Harry Evans, the great newspaper editor who has just died. His and his wife Tina's friendship is always there, in downtimes even more so than the ups: "come and stay with us" is the immediate demand after I'm ejected from my home in Number 11. But I wanted to read again the long email where Harry told me how to be a newspaper editor. "News matters". "Wit beats nastiness". "The Diary must bubble". "Find your Osbert Lancaster" (I did; he's called Christian Adams). "Set the political-economic policy in the editorial column". Above all, the great newspaper man told me "as you did in your other day job, develop policy themes". It was contrarian advice. Everyone else was telling me I had to stop behaving like a politician: let them take the decision; your job now is to throw the bricks from the sidelines.
