My Greatest Mistake: Rosie Boycott, former editor of The Express and Independent on Sunday

'I wanted to have semi-naked girls on the front cover '

In about 1993, I was into my second year of being editor at Esquire magazine. In those days, all men's magazines were very straight. This was before Loaded and FHM. Terry Mansfield, my then boss, and I had been out somewhere and came up with the wheeze that we ought to have a semi-naked girl on the front cover. I thought this was a really good idea. But when I went back to the office, I was greeted with outcry as to how could I (or anyone else) do this because it would be a politically incorrect and non-feminist thing to do. As a feminist, I felt peculiar about being confronted by blokes on this idea, and I gave into them. About 18 months later, Loaded was launched and sold 400,000 overnight. If I had stuck to my guns and not been so cowed by men, I have no doubt that Esquire could have leapt into pole position as the bestselling men's magazine in Britain. As it was, we had to be content with just being the best written.

A few weeks ago, I appeared on The Weakest Link TV quiz show for charity when I had flu. (It's out in a few weeks). When I got home, I found my temperature was 102 degrees. I felt like hell and could hardly stand up, and ended up being sent to bed. I thought it was the most miserable day of my life. It also happened to be my birthday. I couldn't remember anything. It's just general knowledge, but I went blank. I was feeling so ill that they had to bring me a chair to sit down on in between each round. There is a point when you have to say, actually, I'm too sick to do this. I've always been someone who thought you should never be sick, but this was one of those occasions when I just should have said, I'm going home.

I suppose if I could do everything all over again, I'd like to have stayed on at The Independent on Sunday as editor, and done that for a few more years. It was a mistake to leave that job because I liked it so much. But the greatest mistake in all this is that when someone wants you for a job, you should make unbelievable demands about the things you want, and both times that I went to newspapers, when I was in the first days of being there, I didn't make those demands strongly enough, especially when I went to The Express as editor in 1998. I could have extracted many more promises on paper out of the proprietors – such as budgets being increased rather than decreased. The lesson here is to capitalise on your first day at work, never believe things, and always push the fact that you are in the driving seat, so you get all that you can for your staff and your budgets. On starting a new job, there's a honeymoon period – there was probably only a 48-hour window in which I could have got huge promises from The Express, but I didn't.

Interview by Charlotte Cripps