Roger Alton - The guardian of old Fleet Street

Other editors may obsess about hubs and pods and online convergence, but as Roger Alton surveys the Observer newsroom - "It's fucking quiet here! It's like a fucking church!" - you suspect multi-platform digital integration is not uppermost in his mind.

And who can blame him? Against a dismal trend, two papers have outperformed their rivals in the quality Sunday market. One is this newspaper, which went compact last October, and the other is Alton's, which turned Berliner shortly afterwards. New formats, same trusty old paper. Which for an editor of the old school, complete with a vocabulary that would make Sir Alex Ferguson wince, must make him very happy. Well, up to a point ...

Where have your extra sales come from?

Some Sunday Times, some Mail on Sunday. It fluctuates. We went down a little last week, perhaps because we plugged a gay music issue on the masthead. But generally I'm very optimistic.

Do you get excited by the digital future?

No. I get excited by newspapers more. Significantly, for a large amount of our future, this is the platform that matters. Britain makes very good newspapers. The thrill you get online is the viral jokes, the bits of YouTube, the sheer enterprise and wit. Clearly, elements of what Will Lewis [editor of The Daily Telegraph] says are right, but if everybody's having to do everything all the time, there's a problem about the paper. If that's not actually any good then the role of the other stuff will be sabotaged.

Will 'Observer' journalists be doing vodcasts in the next few years?

Yes, of course they will. We go and interview, say, Daniel Craig. You could - as part of the deal - do a one-minute video and maybe a two-minute audio. That would be nice. But it's not Radio 4 and it's not Arena [the arts documentary series]. I got a radio reviewer to listen to a lot of newspaper podcasts and the quality of almost all of them is uniformly dire.

So are newspapers under-priced?

Some people seem to think everything should cost about 40 quid, but I think the market is a good thing. If it were in a different environment - producing shirts or chairs - you wouldn't incrementally go on making them more and more expensive, would you? But revenue is an issue we've got to address. Do you have more expensive papers or extra ways of raising revenue through advertising and other platforms? Or do you do it on vastly reduced staffs which will then weaken the product? I don't know.

You've been one of Fleet Street's most loyal supporters of Tony Blair. How do you feel about him now?

I think he's a very good prime minister and an exceptional politician who will be much missed when he's gone. Some of the hostility to him is quite baffling. I just can't understand it. It doesn't logically relate to things - I mean, if you think of civil partnerships, the minimum wage, improvements in health ...

Aren't we forgetting Iraq?

Well, you can rerun the tapes and cuttings but personally I can't find any kind of point of view which says the world would be a better place if Saddam Hussein was in power. Now whether mistakes have been made, there's an interesting article asking whetherBush in Iran is a parallel to Nixon in China. Is a humiliation in one conflict paving the way to a greater peace?

Do you regret backing the war?

No. I know lots of people disagree but I can't see that the world would be a better place with Saddam Hussein in power. Clearly, you have a very unpleasant situation going on in the region and nobody wants the coalition troops to come out because it would be much too unstable. Therefore you would hope the region would come together to bring some stability.

Not a great thing for Gordon Brown to inherit?

Well, he's been very much part of it and if I was Labour I'd look somewhere else. But Gordon is a solid citizen, a sound guy. He's increasingly mellowed; he's charming and has a great breadth of interests. There's still this tendency to jump in on civil liberties - he and [Lord] Falconer came in on the ludicrous prosecution of Nick Griffin, which should never have been brought - and to be over-authoritarian. One of the good things we've done is a series by Henry Porter on surveillance and civil liberties, which I know is getting under Blair's skin. One of Blair's drivers said Blair was saying "fucking Henry Porter", and last time I went to see Blair he name-checked Henry and got quite cross.

(Alton's phone rings. It is Mariella Frostrup)

"Mariella, thanks for a lovely evening ... Look, I've got The Independent on Sunday here. What do we think about Gordon Brown?" Gordon came to dinner with Mariella - and I was there - on Sunday. Well, Mariella's view would be that he listens and takes action on what people say.

But does Brown's wit and charm fail to translate on the screen?

That would be my fear. And he's got to stop talking this balls about putting a flag in your front garden and going on about Middle England ... Plus, clearly, around him there are some of the old-guard psychotics and all these socially malfunctioning types.

What do you think of Cameron?

I'm very fond of David Cameron. I think he's charming and nice, and tactically very skilful. He's taking a set of capsule values - stuff about chocolate oranges, rap lyrics, green, disabled, hoodies - that tie in with the idea that if you spend the entire time demonising young people, they will turn away from you. This may all be political balls and I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about, but if you get a position in which Labour moves ever further to the right and say: "Lock everyone up", then ...

Then you see Cameron winning the next election?

Ultimately, I do think he'll get elected as a sort of natural cycle. But the thing about the Conservatives I get worried about is people like the woman councillor who put that ghastly, racist poem on her website. Suddenly there's a rustle in the bushes and you think "Jesus!". The dark, dark underbelly of England. If I was Labour I'd be capitalising on it.

Was Stephen Glover right to suggest that 'The Observer' is pursuing a populist agenda similar to the 'Daily Mail', with a focus on stories about crime and sex?

That's utter balls. Triggered by the fact that we'd had a few good home affairs stories, like our exposé of the asylum centre where a nasty man was offering a visa for sex. I'd far rather read Stephen Glover about The Archers, like that slightly mad thing he did this morning ... I'm obsessed with The Archers. That episode when Ruth goes down to Oxford. I was being driven somewhere, so I asked the driver to stop and listen to it. The writing was really excellent.

You're 58. Do you have to retire at 60?

Fucking hope not! It's lovely doing this job. I'd have to be crowbarred out!

So you haven't been thinking about who might replace you?

[Laughs] I certainly haven't. That's the last thing I'm thinking about.

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