The artist formerly known as Johnny Rotten, John Lydon, will be joining Jennie Bond, Jordan, Kerry McFadden, Razor Ruddock, Mike Read and other showbusiness figures in the next series of I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here. He also took up posts that reflected his interest in the arts – a director of the London Film Commission, member of the Better English campaign and Chairman of the National Campaign for the Arts.Michael Leapman. For a while he was chairman of Punch, the humorous magazine, but failed to prevent its closure. He made less impact here than he had at the Sunday paper, and towards the end of his three-year tenure he had to answer for an embarrassing incident that reminded press watchers of the Leyland slush-fund fiasco all those years earlier.
In 1995 the Standard published an article criticising Tony Blair, the Labour leader and prospective prime minister, which it said had been written by Bryan Gould, a former member of the Shadow Cabinet. In fact it turned out to have been submitted by Nick Howard, the teenage son of Michael Howard, then the Conservative Home Secretary.At the end of that year Steven left the Standard but continued to write pungent columns for the Mail on Sunday. Steven was a long-standing friend of Archer and, like many editors, was often invited to his annual champagne and shepherd’s pie parties.In 1992 he stood down from the Mail on Sunday to become Editor of Associated’s London Evening Standard. This view led him into an expensive conflict with Adam Raphael of The Observer, in the fallout from Jeffrey Archer’s 1987 libel case.
When Raphael gave evidence against Archer in the trial, relying in part on something that the novelist had told him, Steven attacked him for lacking honour and integrity Raphael sued. The Mail on Sunday made an out-of-court settlement of £45,000 and printed a grovelling apology. In 1988 he wrote that, in his view, the right to privacy diminished with the increasing fame of the person being written about. Lord Rothermere, whose own private life had from time to time been subject to press intrusion (as indeed had Steven’s), wrote a letter to the Financial Times denouncing this view as “Utopian socialism”, and wondered why the price of success should be to live in the media spotlight. Steven responded: “People who own fame, fortune or political power in a democratic society must not be surprised if the press takes a greater degree of interest in their activities. It is not Utopian socialism but honest-to-God populism.”On the other hand, he believed passionately in the ethics of his profession, and in particular the convention that journalists should at all costs protect their sources.
