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Peter Wilby

British journalist

Peter John Wilby (born 7 November 1944) is a British journalist. He is a former editor of The Independent on Sunday (April 1995–October 1996) and the New Statesman (1998–2005). Wilby joined The Observer as a reporter in 1968. He was appointed as the newspaper's education correspondent around 1972, and subsequently worked in this field for the New Statesman (1975–77) and The Sunday Times (1977–1986). In August 2023, Wilby was convicted of making indecent images of children, some in the most serious category, and sentenced to 10 months imprisonment suspended for two years.

Quotes

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2001–2002

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  • [Editorial on the September 11 attacks published shortly afterwards] American bond traders, you may say, are as innocent and as undeserving of terror as Vietnamese or Iraqi peasants. Well, yes and no. Yes, because such large-scale carnage is beyond justification, since it can never distinguish between the innocent and the guilty. No, because Americans, unlike Iraqis and many others in poor countries, at least have the privileges of democracy and freedom that allow them to vote and speak in favour of a different order. If the United States often seems a greedy and overweening power, that is partly because its people have willed it. They preferred George Bush to Al Gore and both to Ralph Nader.
  • [Y]ou may be sure that, if the Soviet Union were still a reality and a threat, the debt crisis, which now affects some 50 countries and has reached previously unimagined levels (some countries have to use a quarter of their export earnings to service debt), would not exist.
  • The death of the Soviet Union also deprived the global poor of something more intangible: not exactly hope, perhaps, but the sense of an alternative, of possibility.
  • [T]he US government and media (along with their British cheerleaders) themselves raise the ideological stakes when they claim that we have seen attacks on freedom and democracy. That is one way of putting it: another is to say that these attacks, using deeply symbolic targets, have hit a civilisation that has grown complacent, selfish and in some respects decadent.
    • "In buildings thought indestructible", New Statesman (17 September 2017).
    • Unsigned editorial identified as by "staff blogger" on the archived page, but Wilby soon confirmed he wrote it (see below).
  • When I watched the murderous attacks on New York and Washington, my first reactions were of incredulity horror and sympathy for the victims and their families But when I came to write my weekly editorial for The New Statesman the following day (knowing that most readers would not see it until that Friday), I thought I should raise wider issues. I suggested that billions of poor people throughout the world would support the attacks because they blamed America for their plight and saw no alternative but to strike out in rage.
  • For our issue dated 14 January, the New Statesman published a cover showing the Star of David standing on a Union Jack, with the words: "A kosher conspiracy?
  • We (or, more precisely, I) got it wrong. The cover was not intended to be anti-Semitic; the New Statesman is vigorously opposed to racism in all its forms. But it used images and words in such a way as to create unwittingly the impression that the New Statesman was following an anti-Semitic tradition that sees the Jews as a conspiracy piercing the heart of the nation. I doubt very much that one single person was provoked into hatred of Jews by our cover. But I accept that a few anti-Semites (as some comments on our website, quickly removed, suggested) took aid and comfort when it appeared that their prejudices were shared by a magazine of authority and standing. Moreover, the cover upset very many Jews, who are right to feel that, in the fight against anti-Semitism in particular and racism in general, this magazine ought to be on their side.
  • They [Jews] no longer routinely suffer gross or violent discrimination; indeed, in the US and Europe at least, Jews today are probably safer than most minorities.
  • If it had been known at the time that he'd got 'previous convictions' the context of the case would have been very different.

2005–2007

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  • [Nick] Cohen assures me that he has no intention of following [Paul] Johnson's long political journey. Since he is a personal friend, whose journalism I admire (I hired him twice, once on the Independent on Sunday, once on the NS), I believe him. But I don't underestimate the sense of betrayal on the left. When the rest of the press was cheering on [Tony] Blair, particularly in new Labour's early days, Cohen was his most virulent critic and almost the only coherent voice asserting "real left" values. Now, in some eyes, he has deserted the cause when it needs him most.
  • Is Johann Hari, the Independent‍'‍s twentysomething columnist, a twerp? Does he write twaddle? Since I brought Hari into journalism - I gave him his first job, on the NS - I rather hope not.
  • Teachers' unions advise members to avoid ever being alone with a pupil.
    Only close relatives (and not always they) dare show a child physical affection. Scouts and other youth organisations struggle to recruit volunteers. And I doubt that, if I were now 17, a young, single teacher would invite me to dine alone at her home. Since I had never previously dined out, I suppose that would be my loss.
    It is right that we now abhor child abuse and no longer tolerate abuse of authority for even low-level sexual gratification. But do we need to go so far? Can't we forbid the sex but still allow intimate relations between teachers and pupils, adults and children? Even as I write that sentence, I realise that "intimate relations" is itself ambiguous and that, no, we probably can't have our cake and eat it.
  • To wide indignation on Fleet Street, Sir Ian suggested newspapers' blanket and emotive coverage of such cases, compared with the cursory treatment of black children who go missing in the inner cities, betrayed institutional racism. Was he right? Perhaps it's not racism exactly but, if we are honest, the story is enhanced if the child is blonde, blue-eyed and nicely dressed, though no paper would dare to spell out the awful subtext: that a child who looks attractive to readers will also attract a potential abuser.
  • Even the belief that the Daily Express is a hopeless newspaper that couldn't tell you the time of day - one of the few certainties in a turbulent world - took a knock.
  • When I read last week that the Press Complaints Commission had censured FHM magazine for printing a photograph of a topless 14-year-old girl, I looked to the press for coverage and comment. Surely, I thought, newspapers that are so determined to root out "evil" paedophiles and to denounce "pervs" who view child pornography would have something to say. ... There was not a word, for example, in the Sun, whose editor, Rebekah Wade, has always been such a sturdy opponent of paedophilia. That wouldn't be - would it? - because the red-tops fear they might themselves be caught out one day.

2011–2022

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  • My reactions to 9/11 were, from the start, different from everyone else's. As we watched on the office television, somebody said with horror, "I can't believe this is happening in Manhattan!" To which, I thought, why not? Many countries had, at some point in the previous 90 years, experienced the effects of aerial bombardment, sometimes from American forces. Why should we regard Americans as uniquely immune from such barbarity? The US, after all, had become the world's sole great power and it revelled in this status.
  • Almost anybody should be thankful that the US, not the Soviet Union, won the cold war. But a dominant or imperial power, however benign or enlightened, will be resented. The violent 9/11 attacks were not right - they were a criminal atrocity - but they were hardly surprising.
  • Some of these thoughts, expressed more clumsily than I later wished, found their way into the New Statesman leader that, as editor, I wrote barely 24 hours after the attacks.
  • [A]buse is deeply distressing and highly damaging to the victim. It is not made significantly more so because the perpetrator holds a powerful political position or wears black robes. Such claims excite journalists and attract more public attention; they do not help victims.
  • Some "victims" will make false allegations, often prompted by lawyers, in the hope of substantial payments.
  • [W]hile those who allege abuse should be heard, accepting what they say as self-evidently true is not better than dismissing it as childish fantasy. It is just another form of not listening, and relying instead on prejudices and preconceptions. It also leads to a new set of victims. Abused children may suffer mental illness and suicidal thoughts. But so may those falsely accused.
  • Unearthing journalists' faulty predictions and poor judgements is always enjoyable. To my delight, I once discovered that the Sun, in a fawning interview in 1973, described Gary Glitter (later imprisoned for sexual offences against children) as "the rock’n’roll daddy who makes little girls ask to see more of his hairy chest". So before anybody else finds out, I will reveal that, during my editorship, the NS ran an article under the headline "Max Clifford is a nice chap shock". We reported that Clifford, who has just been convicted of sexually abusing four girls, was a man of "private modesty . . . committed to public service" whose "personal life has been a paragon of virtue". Since this was in 2000, we don't even have the excuse that it was the 1970s.

About Wilby

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2002–2005

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  • Peter Wilby, who succeeded [Ian] Hargreaves, is a committed socialist, an old-fashioned Bennite according to some, and the passage of the Blair years has done nothing to soften his stance. On the contrary he has become ever more critical of the Government, notably with the anti-American line he took after September 11, and he has given free rein to those like his friend, Nick Cohen, who seek to use the magazine to attack the Prime Minister in person.
    • Julia Langdon "Is the bell tolling for the weeklies?", British Journalism Review (Vol. 13, No. 2, 2002, pp. 7-13)
    • Wilby succeeded Ian Hargreaves as editor of the New Statesman. In the BJR article, Langdon writes "insiders" had told her deputy editor Cristina Odone was responsible for the "Kosher Conspiracy" cover. Odone told The Scotsman in 2004 (at the time she resigned from the New Statesman) the "Kosher Conspiracy" cover was a subject over which Wilby and herself had disagreed. "I've lost a lot of Jewish and American friends through the New Statesman", she said.
  • His vision of the Statesman was as a totally independent, and therefore fearless, mischief-maker. Sometimes this worked - the magazine's anti-Iraq war campaign was prescient and much copied; sometimes it did not - New Statesman covers could take on the wrong taboos, viz its Zionist conspiracy or its Blair as Stalin covers, or more recently the issue marking John Paul II's death, in which the late Pope's impact on Africa's Aids epidemic was compared with that of prostitutes and truck drivers.

2023–present

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  • Eight opinion articles he wrote that addressed British media coverage of sex offenders have been removed from the Guardian's digital platforms following his conviction in August 2023 for possession of child abuse imagery.
    • From Wilby's contributor page on the Guardian's website (added early September 2023)
  • [W]hat shocked me was the creeping realisation that he had used his position as an editor and columnist to create what the writer Beatrix Campbell has called a "hostile environment" for victims of abuse.
    It dawned on me that he had applied that "hostile environment" to me at the outset of my career when I was a freelance reporter at the Independent on Sunday, and he was its news editor.
  • As New Statesman editor, he published articles denigrating the north Wales victims as "damaged" and manipulated by journalists such as me, all part of a modern witch-hunt in which the real victims were those accused of abuse.
  • Wilby argued for "nuance" in these matters, while denigrating those who dared complain of abuse. There was nothing nuanced in the material Wilby collected and created over his career – they were crime scene photographs of our most vulnerable children being raped for his pleasure.
  • The New Statesman has now completed an internal review of all articles related to child sexual abuse that were published during Wilby’s editorship, or subsequently contributed by Wilby as a writer.
    Approximately 19,000 articles were published during Wilby's seven years as editor, of which 126 have a significant reference to child sexual abuse or paedophilia. Of those 126 articles, 12 contain comments or arguments that could reasonably be interpreted as either minimising the seriousness of child sexual abuse, or as questioning the integrity of victims, whistle-blowers, police or journalists investigating allegations of sexual abuse of children. Four of the 12 remained available on newstatesman.com as of 18 August, and they have now been taken down.
    Subsequent to his time as editor, Wilby contributed 659 columns or pieces to the New Statesman from 2006 to 2022, of which 37 contain a significant reference to child sexual abuse or paedophilia. Of those 37 articles, four contain arguments that the degree of public concern around child sexual abuse is out of proportion to the actual scope and scale of the horrendous crime. Those four articles have been taken down.
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