“How do you fancy editing the New Statesman?” is not a question I ever expected to be asked, but that is what Pat Coyne, who has died aged 77, put to me in 1990 in a Fitzrovia pub once frequented by George Orwell.
As chief executive of New Statesman and Society (he had managed a merger with New Society in 1988), Pat needed someone to take up the reins. For the second time in three years, the magazine was in crisis: the Joseph Rowntree Trust, which had bankrolled the merger, was pulling out, and Stuart Weir had quit as editor.
