If the test of a good editor is the ability to stamp a new sense of style and purpose on a newspaper, then Charles Wintour, who has died 82, was one of the greatest editors of the second half of the century. He essentially invented the modern London Evening Standard - and, in doing so, influenced the development of papers far across Fleet Street. He was one of the acknowledged masters of his trade.
Wintour came from a military family and soldiering claimed him first. He had, after Oundle, barely emerged from Peterhouse, Cambridge, in 1939 when the Royal Norfolk Regiment carried him away to the war in Europe, where he was mentioned in dispatches and won an MBE. But there was a separate purpose to his peacetime life.
In 1946, as one of Lord Beaverbrook's many "bright young men", he was recruited by the Evening Standard. Eight years later, he was its deputy editor, and then, after a brief spell on the Daily Express, its editor. He held the post for 17 years at a stretch - with another couple of stopgap years later on; it was the job which defined him.
There were three London evening papers when Wintour first took over at the Standard, and it was already obvious that perhaps only one of them could survive. The broadsheet Evening News (owned by Associated Newspapers) held a big circulation lead: the Standard trailed in its wake. But the News's lead was frailer than it looked. The Harmsworth empire - long before the revival of the Daily Mail - had lost its flair and, in particular, lacked the upmarket readers who could bring it advertising to match its sales.
More than that, traffic congestion in London was mounting, making speed of distribution ever harder; the flight to the suburbs was well under way; and working people, through the day, were beginning to get their headline news from radio and television. The winner of this battle would be the editor who tried something new.
Wintour began determinedly to take the Standard's dormant strength of intelligence - and thus potential seriousness - and make it dynamic. It was already the paper with the most educated and influential readership. He built on that, taking brilliant political reporters like Robert Carvel and making them essential reading in Westminster and Whitehall.
He saw a fresh, more engaged and frenetic City of London growing. The Standard moved to become the paper that City commuters had to buy on their way back to Surrey. And a paper for commuters, of course, needed something still more substantial than the usual diet of crime and human interest tales. It needed a good read - pages of interesting features that reflected the lifestyle of its audience.
Here was Wintour's central genius. He realised that the Standard could be more than a stepping stone for young writing talent on its way to the national dailies; it could be a prestige platform in its own right. He gave his paper probing interviews by writers like Maureen Cleave, instant explanation of the big issues of the day by specialists as good as any in Britain, visionary columns by Simon Jenkins - and a Londoner's Diary which became the notice board for metropolitan gossip. This wasn't the usual evening brew of bits and pieces taken on the run. It was a paper that had been thought about just as much as any morning one.
There were casualties, of course, including any real attempt to get local news about areas of London into a London evening paper. Wintour was reshaping a surrogate national paper. But the diagnosis was spot on target and the advertisers agreed. Though the Standard never broke any circulation records, playing the quality game rather than the numbers game, the competition gradually wilted.
By 1976, when he moved into management, any deeper question of winning or losing was essentially resolved. The Standard was a winner in reputation and potential advertising appeal. Wintour felt "stale and tired" and wanted a younger hand at the helm. At only 33, Simon Jenkins, even then a passionate writer about London issues, was his natural, groomed successor.
But there were to be no easy triumphs after that. The old Beaverbrook organisation had been floundering for years; the Daily Express was wilting before the challenge of David English's rejuvenated Mail (which had picked up a few tips from Wintour's Standard) and the Sunday Express was looking stale and stuck in an ancient rut. There were new owners - the Trafalgar House conglomerate - with a new proprietor in the top office: Lord Vic Matthews, who knew more about building sites than he knew about newspapers. Over at the old enemy, Associated, Vere Harmsworth saw his chance to win in the boardroom and bank vault what couldn't be won on the editorial floor.
There was a brutal takeover fight which, for a time, the Standard survived: but Simon Jenkins was one of its casualties. Who could follow him in a seat suddenly looking too hot to handle? Wintour was managing director of the Daily Express at the time, turning it tabloid, but Matthews looked to him instinctively. "Charles created the paper," he said. "I jolly well know he can edit it again."
Wintour was 62, though, and it could be no more than a holding appointment. He fought his hardest, but Associated came again and the News was folded into the Standard brand under an editor from the Mail stable. Winning was seeing the title he loved best left alive; losing was seeing it fall into the hands of the traditional adversary.
Wintour did not fade from the scene. He held directorships and management roles for a time - and, in the early 1980s, devised and produced the Sunday Express colour magazine. Later, after leaving the Express, he edited the journalist's trade weekly, UK Press Gazette, for a while.
He never lost his love of newspapers or his fascination with the media. He ran his own publication company, held the presidency of the Media Society, had a consultancy role when Robert Maxwell tried to start his own London evening, and was in at the tumultuous start of TV-am. His book, The Rise And Fall Of Fleet Street, is one of the shrewdest analyses of the post-war newspaper era and the shift from big personality proprietors to the men of money.
But, if he was gone from the frontline of newspapers through the last two decades, Wintour was certainly never forgotten. The Evening Standard today still reflects the changes he engineered. It remains in many ways the paper he created. And a galaxy of writing talent, now spread across many papers, remembers with warmth his rare gift for spotting the best journalists early on and nursing them to stardom.
He was a kind, publicly quiet and courtly man with a sharp pen and a sharper private tongue. Those who worked for him did not always love him, but he commanded universal respect for his shrewdness and speedy decisiveness. He was, with military precision, the general in every battle.
Wintour had two daughters and two sons by his first wife, Eleanor Trego Baker, the daughter of a Harvard professor. Two of them, to his delight, became renowned journalists, too. Anna is editor of the American edition of Vogue; Patrick is political editor of the Observer. His second wife, Audrey Slaughter, who also survives him, was a distinguished magazine editor herself.
Together, bubbling with stories and innovative ideas, in love with the romance of journalism as well as each other, they were always a great team.