Geordie Greig’s tribute to co-founder of The Independent Andreas Whittam Smith

Current editor-in-chief of The Independent, Geordie Greig, has delivered an address at the memorial service for Sir Andreas Whittam Smith, the co-founder and former editor of the paper, who died late last year.

The pioneering editor and media entrepreneur, who passed away on 29 November 2025, was a driving force behind the paper since its inception.

In an address at a celebration of the editor’s life at St Bride’s Church on London’s Fleet Street, attended by journalists, editors and Whittam Smith’s family, Greig paid tribute. The full text is quoted below:

“The last time I saw Andreas, I had gone along to pay homage as the newest editor of The Independent. It was, I suppose, my own small step for editor-kind towards his giant leap for media-kind. Waiting in The Garrick, he was as polite and poised as a character from an Anthony Powell novel. A touch of the dandy, the bearing of a Guards officer, slightly stooped, the hooded intelligence of a Cambridge don.

Always a degree of enigma, a hint of being from another age but acutely tuned to the currents, arguments and news of today. I had one question for this doyenne of editors: What was his advice for the 11th editor of the paper he had co-founded more than three decades earlier?

His answer was both revealing and resonant. It contained the iron-clad certainty of Socrates and the ambivalence of Chauncey Gardner, the brilliant Peter Sellers character in the film Being There whose simple observations on truth and power combined a sense of saintly innocence and Intelligence Secret Service savvy.

His one word of advice: Imagination.

And so I left lunch pondering his bon mot. Just as Chauncey Gardener allowed cumulus clouds and garden plants to be signals to understanding realpolitik and world strategy, so Andreas triggered a sense of cut-through and confidence.

Imagination… I loved his answer in that it captured him and was also incorporate, unexpected, fresh and unformulaic. It was original and true – straight from his heart, that mighty donnish head and baleful soul. A leap of imagination is what encaptures so much of his life. The dapper writer, the empowering and empowered editor, the restrictive and/or permissive film censor, the Church of England consigliere, the kind and beloved husband of Valerie, father of Ben and Mark and grandfather of Saul, Jude and Ivo, the eminence grise of Fleet Street.

The man who was the least likely dragon slayer who took on the totemic dragons of the media and the proof of his success and legacy is that today his Independent still thrives.

Andreas had a long and extraordinary life of leading and listening, learning and leaving a legacy

And of course, he proved that chapter twos and threes were possible in life. There was Andreas 2.0: film censor and 3.0 Church of England grandee. As head of the British Board of Film Classification, he may have seemed an unlikely choice, but he relished the role.

He was, he revealed, relatively relaxed on sex in films but definitely queasy about violence and drugs. He allowed The Exorcist and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to sail through. His censorship role was almost misaligned with his liberal view that ‘in my deepest heart I object to notions of paternalism’, but of course he brought originality and imagination to the role.

The church seemed a more obvious fit. Andreas could merrily discuss atheism, faith, ecclesiastical architecture and heresy as well as the bottom line in church company accounts and lines of bottoms in films he had to watch as the nation's chief censor. He kept it light, but he could talk heavyweight. One more than suggestive film he had to endure was Pregnant and Milking No 5. His imaginative take: ‘It was the Number 5 that got me.’ He was the honest but sweetly innocent bystander in some ways, as he confessed to being bemused by the lack of plot in films on the more porn side of the movie industry

‘It was like going to the dentist – not as bad as you feared but’, he added: ‘when it’s bad, I feel my mind has been soiled.’ Andreas had a long and extraordinary life of leading and listening, learning and leaving a legacy.

Gathered here today on a tidal wave of affection are his admirers, his disciples, followers, his editors, reporters, designers, clergy, directors, and of course, his family.

He was that rare thing in the rough-and-tumble world of journalism, a man resolutely polite, even genteel and civilised. No shouting or crass swearing to get his way. Persuasion and polemic maybe. Passion certainly. Positivity always. His schtick was to encourage and empower. Yet he was also prepared to have a full-on clash. At your peril underestimate Andreas Whittam Smith. His name and demeanour might have suggested a facade of Wodehousian decency and deference, but he could wield a mighty sword and fight the good fight if he felt a cause was in need.

But he did not follow a predictable formula. One of his co-founders called him 90 per cent bishop, 10 per cent member of the Baader-Meinhof Gang. Steel and saintliness, possibly the necessary formula for all saints, although most definitely not for all terrorists, even those on the right side if the percentage formula had been reversed. A word which has struck me, although some might not have immediately attributed it to him – forget that Garrick tie as a symbol of establishment, by the way – he was a disrupter. It was in some ways his modus operandi.

He was a visionary in all he embraced

Given the gently teasing sobriquet Saint Andreas by Private Eye, which he never liked – like he was not totally holy – but he was sometimes wholly ruthless. One of his more quixotic plans was to buy The Observer only to close it down to protect the readership of his beloved Indy. More visionary than perfect 20-20 vision describes Andreas.

After all, at the height of a newspaper price war, he once announced with total assurance to the whole Independent newsroom when Rupert Murdoch raised the cover price of The Times in an aggressive upward move, that he would increase the price of The Independent, as quality readers would always pay for quality. We lost almost a third of our sales overnight.

Born in Macclesfield in Cheshire, the son of a Church of England vicar, Canon JE smith, he went from Birkenhead School to Keble, Oxford, before going into financial journalism, a spell at the Stock Exchange Gazette and then to the FT, Times, Telegraph and The Guardian – a full flush.

But it was the Indy which was to define his greatest accomplishment. His role alongside his co-founders in the birth of the Indy was pivotal to creating a blast of fresh air in the media industry, as the paper was intoxicatingly free of constraints, influence and interference and thank goodness he and his founders Stephen Glover and Matthew Symonds landed on the perfect name: The Independent. It was a stroke of genius. It said it all on the tin. As the advertising slogan went: ‘It is. Are you?’

Thank God he ignored the marketing team who wanted to call his paper ‘The Meridian’.

He was like a Pied Piper as a staff of 100 refugees from the Wapping era News UK stable descended and ascended. He made global strides and brilliant appointments. Star writers. Foreign reports and analysis which altered views and visions. Some of whom are here today.

He was a visionary in all he embraced: church, film and media – all embraced him and vice versa. He was widely and richly acclaimed and rewarded.

An Hon degree of law from the University of Bath

A CBE in 2003, 2015 saw him knighted. He was also awarded the Canterbury Cross for services to the Church of England by Justin Welby. But always there was the shade of his beginning, throwing a long shadow like a sort of invisible halo which he could never quite dislodge. He was born in a vicarage, sang in the choir, rang bells and laid out hymn books. Prayer, he once said was his ‘daily spiritual exercise’. And so, like it or not Private Eye, as is so often the case, was not wrong. He was a righteous combatant armed with imagination; that is how I see him.

He liked to encourage people not to use the saintliness tag, as, most importantly to him, it was far from his whole truth. But for many of us, him quibbling over his correct degree of saintliness was a nice kind of first world problem.

It does not take even the smallest leap of imagination and indeed faith to know he lived life supremely full and well.

Thank you, Andreas, for lighting up all of our imaginations.”