licking my wounds and wondering if I should
sign up for pottery classes. But then journo
friends started ringing to say they’d heard
this rumour, so I put the news on Twitter.
This was an entirely good move; I was over-
whelmed by the kindness and generosity of
the response. I said in my tweet that I was
looking for freelance work — ‘Interviewing
a speciality but also up for travel freebies or
anything that looks like fun.’ I assumed I’d
get lots of interview offers, as that was what
I was known for, but nary a one. Instead, I
was deluged with travel commissions. I didn’t
even know there were that many travel
pages in the world, but apparently the young,
having given up hope of ever buying a flat,spend all their disposable income on travel-
ling. I immediately accepted a commission
from the Financial Times to spend a week-
end celebrating the champagne harvest in
France, which cheered me up no end.
So now, at the age of 74, I am sailing the
choppy waters of freelance journalism and
realise how incredibly adrift I am. Many
of the editors who contacted me asked me
my rates. I didn’t actually know, because
I hadn’t been a freelance since 1982 when I
joined the staff of the Sunday Express, and
I moved seamlessly from there to the Inde-
pendent on Sunday, Vanity Fair, the Daily
Telegraph, the Observer and finally the
Sunday Times, under contract all the way.
I remember someone in the 1990s asking
what my rates were and I said £1 a word, butI only said it because Martin Amis did and it
sounded good. (Does anyone get £1 a word
nowadays? I know A.A. Gill did, and possi-
bly Jeremy Clarkson, but it must be rare.) I
consulted a very successful freelance friend,
Tanya Gold, who said I should ask for 70p a
word and settle for 60p. But in the first scary
weeks I settled for almost anything, as I just
wanted to see if I could still get any work at
all. And there are some publications — hello
Spectator! — who can get away with paying
peanuts because they know writers want to
come to their parties.
But discussing fees with editors was com-
paratively straightforward. What was really
baffling was the number of people who rang
and asked me to ‘join their platform’ or their
website or their brand. They invariably men-
tioned the Huffington Post, but when I asked
what they paid, they talked about ‘participa-
tion’, which seemed to mean nothing at all.
Some of them wanted me to meet them for
breakfast (out of the question) but several
offered lunch and I’m always up for a good
lunch. One charming man took me for lunch
at Robin Birley’s private club 5 Hertford
Street, which I was pleased to visit (lovely
decor, mediocre food), but even after two
hours I still didn’t understand what he want-
ed me to do, or what (if anything) he paid.
As a journalist, I am a dinosaur. I like
reading words on paper. I like writing long
interviews when everyone nowadays seems
to want short. I hate dealing with PRs. I
don’t follow any celebs on Twitter or Face-
book or Instagram, because I don’t know
who half of them are. One of the last inter-
views Eleanor asked me to do at the Sunday
Times was with Nick Grimshaw, the Radio 1
DJ. I’d interviewed him before and knew he
was a likable bloke, but I was rather baffled
as to why Sunday Times readers were sup-
posed to be interested in him. I was told the
answer was ‘clicks’. Apparently he has a large
Instagram and Twitter following among the
under- thirties and the idea was that they
would read the article and retweet it and the
Sunday Times would accumulate more clicks.
I’ve no idea whether this worked and frankly
I don’t care. I can’t write for clicks. I need to
know who I am writing for and why. But I
mean to go on writing.I
t was a shock but not really a surprise. I
came back from holiday at the beginning
of August to find an item in the UK Press
Gazette saying that Decca Aitkenhead had
just been appointed chief interviewer at the
Sunday Times, and an email from the Sunday
Times magazine editor, Eleanor Mills, saying
we needed to meet. It was not difficult to put
two and two together.
Eleanor suggested we meet at the Flask
in Highgate — which was kind because
it’s near my home — and when I arrived
she was already sitting there with a glass
of red wine lined up for me. Such unprec-
edented thoughtfulness made me wonder
for a mad moment if she was planning to
offer me a rise instead of sacking me, but no.
She announced within seconds that she had
been ‘rethinking contracts’ and that mine
was for the chop. But, she added, she would
pay me till the end of September, which she
seemed to think was generous and I thought
was bloody mean, given that it was already
August and I’d been at the Sunday Times for
nine years. So then I drank up my wine and
went home and read my contract (possibly
for the first time) and found that the paper
could indeed sack me at a month’s notice,
and for no stated reason. This was ironic
because my contract ran from October
to October and I’d habitually spent every
September worrying about whether they’d
renew it and then going ‘Phew!’ in October
thinking I was safe for another year. But
actually I was never safe.
How do I feel? Well, naturally I feel
bruised but, as I say, not really surprised. It
had been more or less open warfare with
Eleanor Mills ever since she arrived at the
magazine three years ago (I got on fine with
her predecessor, Sarah Baxter). It was hard
to deal with an editor who didn’t seem to like
reading — sending articles to her was like
dropping stones down a well. And then there
was the showdown over Katie Price, when
Eleanor actually wrote a sentence starting
‘As a feminist’ into my article. I said she’d
either got to take it out or change the byline
and she took it out, but after that it was only
a matter of time.
Because everyone was on holiday when
I was sacked, I spent a couple of weeks justOn being sacked
How do I feel? Bruised, but not surprised
LY N N BA R BER
‘I don’t care what the sales are
so long as they’re healthy.’Aged 74, I am sailing the choppy
waters of freelance journalism and
realise how incredibly adrift I am