Administrator
|
This is taken from The Guardian:
Gareth Butler Former editor of Radio 4's The World This Weekend and doyen of BBC political coverage by Jon Sopel Tuesday March 4 2008
Gareth Butler, who has died suddenly from a heart attack at the age of 42, was one of the cleverest, most knowledgeable and likeable people in broadcasting. As one would expect from someone who had taken over editing the series British Political Facts from his father, the psephologist David Butler, he held in his head facts and figures, policy details and statistical quirks that never ceased to amaze. Who needed Google when Gareth was in the office?
He was a natural to steer BBC Radio 4's election night coverage, taking charge of editing the general election programme of 2005, countless local council elections, European polls and US election nights. His last job at the BBC was as deputy editor of The Politics Show, which he had joined at its birth in 2003. The final programme he edited was from the World Economic Forum in Davos at the end of January, where we had gone to interview the prime minister.
But Gareth had decided that after 20 years with the BBC, it was time to move on. As we sat at dinner in the Swiss Alps, he talked excitedly about the future - first there were the plans he was making with his wife Jess, whom he had married last May; there would be a cricket tour to the West Indies with the BBC Radio News cricket team that he ran. Then he would consider the career options: would it be with a public affairs company, a thinktank, a pollster? It sounded as though the options were abundant and the headhunters were circling.
We also learned how Gareth would pass car journeys with the two children from his first marriage, Joel, 13, and Sacha, 11. They would give him a year, any year from the middle ages onwards, and he would provide a fascinating or obscure fact about it. Needless to say, once we discovered this, the rest of the dinner was spent trying to catch him out. We failed miserably.
Born and brought up in Oxford, after the Dragon school and then Abingdon school, Gareth won a scholarship to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he graduated in 1986 with a first in history. Academia would have been a natural choice - his father being a fellow of Nuffield College, his mother Marilyn a former rector of Exeter College, Oxford, and one of the country's foremost literary critics. But like his two brothers, he chose journalism. After brief stints as a House of Commons researcher with the former Labour chancellor, Denis Healey, and Labour frontbencher Tom Clarke, Gareth joined the BBC in 1987, at central talks and features in the current affairs department of Bush House. After that, he went on to special current affairs at Radio 4 to work on the programmes Law in Action and Stop Press. Inevitably, Gareth's acute political antennae led him to the World at One and The World This Weekend.
He became editor of The World This Weekend in 1995. This was the start of what became a major problem: how to manage the competing demands of having a job which required one to work at the weekend, with an Arsenal season ticket in your pocket. The ingenious solution was a very peculiar rota pattern at The World This Weekend - with a big gap in the middle of Saturday afternoon.
In 1997, Gareth went on to work for the then head of BBC News, and now chief executive of the Royal Opera House, Tony Hall. This was a job that required rather different skills. Here you needed the highly attuned antennae of the mandarin, dealing with complaints from the public, navigating a path through the often complex internal politics of the BBC and having the intellectual rigour to think through delicate editorial judgments on which, as an organisation, the BBC is rightly judged. Gareth upheld all that was good about the corporation's public service values.
But it was his ability to understand and communicate nuance that lent itself so well to covering politics, and why politics was always going to be the perfect job in journalism for him. He finally arrived in October 1999 at Millbank, the BBC's studios at Westminster, as an assistant editor of live programmes, producing programmes like Dispatch Box and, most recently, The Politics Show.
Gareth was not a showy person but was starting to move into the limelight himself. His first article since leaving the BBC is published in the current issue of the magazine Progress.
He is survived by Jess, Joel, Sacha, his parents and two brothers.
· Gareth Edgeworth Butler, broadcaster, born May 3 1965; died February 29 2008
|