I worked for him. He was not always an easy man to work for. But by any standard, he was an extraordinary journalist of the old school.The Times, under him, was not always strictly neutral, but during his tenure a serious attempt was made to be fair to all sides, to separate news from analysis and to segregate both from opinion and partisanship.

Those days are long gone. Not just the Times but the entire media world is poorer for it.