Hugo Young

Hugo John Smelter Young (13 October 1938 – 22 September 2003) was a British journalist and columnist and senior political commentator at The Guardian.

Born in Sheffield into an old recusant family, he was head boy at Ampleforth College in North Yorkshire during his youth; later, he read law at Balliol College, Oxford, and worked for the Yorkshire Post in Leeds from 1961. In 1963, he spent a year as a Harkness Fellow in the US and he spent the next year working as a congressional fellow.

In 1965, Young returned to the United Kingdom. He was recruited by Denis Hamilton of The Sunday Times. In his second year there, he became chief leader writer, a position he kept until 1977. From 1973–84, he was also the paper's political editor. He established a Sunday column, "Inside Politics", that made him famous. Beginning in 1981, he also held the position of joint deputy editor. However, Young's relationship with The Sunday Times cooled notably when Rupert Murdoch took over the paper in 1981. The conflict culminated in a series of battles with editor Andrew Neil, particularly over the US invasion of Grenada in 1983. This ultimately led to Young's leaving The Sunday Times and joining The Guardian in 1984.

Young continued to write a twice-weekly political column at The Guardian until his death, and was widely acclaimed as one of the most important and influential figures in modern British journalism. Young was a strong proponent of European integration, and sharply expressed his disappointment with the British government's eurosceptic politics in his columns, including Prime Minister Tony Blair's decision to side with George W. Bush instead of his EU partners in the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Despite these differences, Young remained on good terms with British government ministers, including Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher. He wrote a critical biography of the latter, One of Us (1989), in addition to a very critical article he wrote two weeks before his death but which was not published until after Thatcher's death, nearly ten years after his own. He wrote other books, including This Blessed Plot: Britain And Europe From Churchill To Blair, which was published in 1998. From 1989 onwards, Young was the chairman of the Scott Trust, which owns The Guardian and other news media, and helped the paper through important developments such as the purchase of The Observer. His papers are held at the Guardian News & Media Archive in London.

There is now an annual Hugo Young lecture, organised by The Guardian in Young's memory. It has been delivered by figures such as David Cameron, Nick Clegg, Ed Miliband, Marjorie Scardino and Alex Salmond.

Young married twice. His first wife, Helen Mason, with whom he had three daughters, including the film director Emily Young, and one son, died in 1989 of lung cancer. He remarried a year later, this time to American artist Lucy Waring. He died at age 64 of colon cancer.