Setting the record straight

Since I was interviewed for the Swift Half podcast I've been feeling a bit guilty.

You see, I was asked by Chris Snowdon what I did before I joined Forest and before I knew it I was explaining how I left my first job in public relations to launch a national student magazine (the magazine I was selling when I met John Hayes – see previous post).

When I launched Campus in 1983 it was a completely new venture but the original publication on which it was based was launched not by me but by two other students, Peter Young and Chris Bones, at Aberdeen University in the spring of 1978, and in simplifying the story for the Swift Half I failed to credit them.

Neither would be too fussed, I’m sure, but I’d nevertheless like to set the record straight. The full story, as my increasingly fallible memory remembers it, is this.

Chris and Peter were members of the Federation of Conservative Students (FCS) and Campus was founded when the official student newspaper, Gaudie, fell victim to a strike by the print union SOGAT.

Peter, the driving force, found a non-union printer in Bristol and Campus was born, but when Gaudie returned after the summer break the original Campus team (all members of FCS) broke up, leaving Peter to carry on alone.

And that's when I came in.

I wasn't a member of FCS so, instead of being a de facto FCS publication devoted exclusively to politics, we developed a Private Eye-style of content in which all student politicians, including FCS members, were fair game for gossip, innuendo, and satire.

In fact, we were subsequently sued for defamation by a student who had been elected as an FCS representative on the Student Representative Council (SRC) with the matter eventually being settled out of court.

(A second student tried to sue us but Peter replied to his solicitor's letter with an Anglo-Saxon term rarely heard in legal discourse and we heard nothing more.)

As a further aside, in the autumn of 1979 our small editorial team was joined by two first year students and if the names Nicky Campbell and Allan Robb sound familiar, let me explain.

Friends from the age of four, they grew up in Edinburgh and were in their first year at Aberdeen when they answered our ad for new writers.

I don’t think they were entirely comfortable writing for Campus because they were only on board for two or three issues.

Either way, Nicky Campbell is now one of Britain's best known broadcasters and Allan Robb also had a long broadcasting career before he died, sadly, aged 49, in 2010.

I still have copies of Campus, both the Aberdeen students' newspaper and the later magazine that was banned by 40 student unions nationwide.

The reason – never formally confirmed – was our refusal to take student politicians or the National Union of Students seriously.

I've told this story before (it never grows old) but in 1984 we sent a representative to the NUS conference in Blackpool and when he was refused entry he used his initiative and found another way in.

Finding himself on the circle balcony overlooking the stalls, he distributed copies of the magazine by dropping them on to heads of the delegates seated below.

Cue pandemonium, or so I'm told. I wasn't there.

The funny thing is, Our Man in Blackpool went on to become the 'mysterious backroom Tory fixer feared by MPs'.

The plan, when launching Campus as a national student magazine, was to develop a sizeable following among students and then relaunch it under a new name with copies sold to the general public via WH Smith and other newsagents.

A story to this effect appeared in the Sunday Times written by Stephen Pile, a well known journalist at the time and, coincidentally, author of The Book of Heroic Failures.

Sadly, we never got close to achieving our ambition because our initial business model – using a network of students to sell Campus to students and keep 50 per cent of the cover price – didn't work for us.

We took the idea from Richard Branson who used it when he launched his own magazine, Student, in 1970, but there was a flaw we should have seen but didn't.

Our team of 'salesmen' often failed to pass on our share of the cover price, and we had no way of getting the money back.

In fact, we found it difficult to track whether the magazines we sent them had been sold at all, so the enterprise eventually failed, commercially at least, but thanks to some private benefactors and a handful of advertisers (including The Spectator) we somehow managed to break even.

Anyway, Campus was finally laid to rest in 1985 but it was fun while it lasted and it opened doors that led me, eventually, to Forest.

As for the original founders, a quick search of the internet reveals that Chris Bones went on to enjoy a successful and varied career in a number of roles.

Currently chairman of the Chartered Institute of Legal Executives and a former dean of the Henley Business School, you can read more about him here.

It’s Peter Young, though, who should really be credited with launching the title in 1978.

His subsequent career has featured a great many twists and turns (too many to list here) but I live in hope that he writes a memoir because the cast of extraordinary characters and the many clandestine adventures he could describe would be hugely entertaining.

Most recently he assisted the producers of a new Channel 4 series about the 1984 miners’ strike (Miners’ Strike 1984: The Battle for Britain), and even narrated part of episode 3, broadcast in February.

See also: The senior Tories with the secret Soviet past and Friends reunited.