[A-List] Hugo Young

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

Since his items were forwarded regularly here, this might be of interest.
His final column, on the loss of British sovereignty to the US, was among
his best in terms of its fundamentally correct analysis of the conjuncture.
While I was never taken with his rather patrician bourgeois outlook and
manner, his perspective was, undoubtedly, a very useful window on a vitally
important set of interests comprising a particular fraction of British state
and capital. Seeking to understand the struggles within the British state
apparatus is going to be more difficult without him.

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Guardian political columnist Hugo Young dies at 64

Michael White
Tuesday September 23, 2003
The Guardian

Hugo Young, the Guardian's senior political commentator, died last night
after an arduous battle against cancer. He was 64 and wrote his last column
a week ago.

As chairman since 1989 of the Scott trust, which owns the Guardian and its
sister publications, he helped the paper through important developments,
including the purchase of the Observer.

He was born into a prominent Sheffield family and Catholicism was an
important part of his life. He was head boy at Ampleforth and read law at
Balliol College, Oxford. Primarily a political journalist, he rose to deputy
editor of the Sunday Times until Murdoch prompted his move to the Guardian.

Europe became his dominant concern and his disappointment with the
equivocation of successive British governments was sharply expressed, most
recently when Tony Blair chose George Bush's America over his EU partners in
the Iraq war.

Yet he remained on good terms with the prime minister despite their
differences. More remarkably still, he was respected by Margaret Thatcher
even after writing a critical biography, One of Us, in 1989.

He married twice, first to Helen with whom he had four children; after her
death to American artist Lucy Waring.
Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian, said: "Hugo was, simply, a towering
figure in British journalism. His twice-weekly Guardian column was the
sharpest, best informed and most humane political column in any newspaper in
this country. To lose him at the peak of his powers is a shattering blow for
us and for his family."