Former Sporting Life Editor Tom Clarke writes in response to Mike Cattermole's column first published on May 7, 2020.
Corrections to and comments on Mike Cattermole’s piece in the sportinglife.com website on May 7 - full article available here.
First, the big correction. Mike writes that “the writing was on the wall for The Life when it lost its libel case over the infamous Top Cees affair, which set it back thousands on pounds in awards and costs."
Wrong. The Life was sentenced to death in December 1997, when Sheikh Mohammed of Dubai sold the Racing Post to Mirror Group, owners of The Life, for £1 – and among the conditions he laid down was that the Racing Post would be the principal title of the two merged papers.
That deal was more than two months before the end of the Top Cees libel case which brought damages totalling £195,000 (plus costs of £160,000) to Kieren Fallon and Lynda and Jack Ramsden. Our defeat in the High Court and the closure of The Life on May 12, 1998, were not related.
Twenty-two years on, I remain proud of the opinion piece which led to the court case and the way Alastair Down, who wrote it, and I defended it in the High Court. My great regret is that we lost.
The acquisition of the Racing Post for £1 was good business for Mirror Group. As Trinity Mirror, it sold the paper to an Irish consortium for £170million in 2007.
Back to Mike’s piece... "Tom was a nice enough guy but I don’t think he ever got what The Life was all about."
What I didn’t get was The Life as I found it when I arrived in April 1993. The offices in Orbit House at the back end of Mirror Group’s Holborn headquarters were a disgrace – dark, dirty and night-time rat-run.
More importantly, as I am quoted by James Lambie in his history of The Life, I inherited “sloppy leadership, both editorially and in management... There was no sense of discipline in the place. It was a disorganised paper and in many ways it was anarchic; the lunatics were running the asylum.
“Some of the subs were taking holidays far longer than the six-and-a-half-week norm; they were meant to be working a nine-day fortnight but were on a four-day week, and others were claiming expenses for going racing when they never went racing. I told Charlie Wilson [deputy managing director of Mirror Group and editor-in-chief of The Life] I was going to ‘clean out the stables’ and make the place work properly and I did. I’m very proud of that, although obviously, I didn’t make many friends in doing it."
Yes, I didn’t make many friends, but I cherish the memory of working with Alastair, David Ashforth, Jeremy Chapman, Geoff Lester, Monty Court, Chris McGrath and Bruce Millington and bringing in Mark Johnston and Martin Pipe as columnists. I also happily remember being part of our move to sparkling new offices on the 23rd floor of One Canada Square in Canary Wharf. That was a proper home for our talents and technology.
Yes, I did make mistakes, particularly in re-configuring the paper to make it more punter-friendly, but unfortunately seen as less friendly to the bookmaking chains.
Finally, a second correction to Mike Cattermole’s piece... It’s a minor one, Mike, but if you’re going to write about someone it’s best the spell their name correctly. My surname is not Clark, it’s Clarke.
