My Mentor: Geoffrey Wheatcroft on Alexander Chancellor

Although Alexander Chancellor would be surprised to find himself anyone's mentor, he has to take responsibility for having given me my first job in journalism. After leaving Oxford, I spent six and a half years in publishing. Soon after I was sacked from my last publishing job in 1975, I bumped into Alexander. He mentored me through an evening of serious drinking and then offered me a job at The Spectator, where he had just become editor under the new ownership of Henry Keswick. None of us really knew what we were doing to begin with, so I suppose to an extent we taught each other.

Alexander was a very good editor and he hasn't quite had the credit he deserves because circulation, which had fallen well below 10,000, didn't break through any barriers under him. But he transformed the magazine. He had a curious knack of knowing who was the right person to get to write for the paper and the right subject to get them on - and he also showed that producing a magazine could be fun rather than a ritual ordeal. And this was a time when the New Statesman became immensely serious. As it went out of its way to get rid of entertaining writers, Alexander collected them. It's true that on one occasion he lost an article by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, but happily he managed not to lose the best pieces of that time.

The same was true in the office, which was hilariously shambolic - not to say notably bibulous - but very good fun. Thursday was, in effect, a day off. We looked through the magazine, sometimes with astonishment, to see what was in it. We talked vaguely about next week's paper and then sat down to very long and memorable lunches cooked by Jennifer Patterson, the famous Fat Lady, in the dining room at the top of the office.

I left The Spectator in 1981, but for better or worse journalism has been my trade ever since, all thanks to bumping into Alexander.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft's 'Yo, Blair!' is published by Politico's at £9.99