Peter Franklin and Graeme Archer have gone, and Daniel Hannan and Nick Timothy have come. But in my three years as ConservativeHome Editor no member of the core team – Mark Wallace, Andrew Gimson, Harry Phibbs, Henry Hill, Peter Hoskin and myself – has left to date, which is unusual in the swift-moving world of journalism.
Until now. Peter has been with us for longer than all but one of those others, and he’s moving on to write less about politics and more about other matters, which is sad for us (though understandable for him). Indeed, there are very few matters about which he is not capable of writing: to get a sense of his breadth of interest, read this Spectator piece about the Kardashians, squint at one of his superbly-assembled graphs for his To The Point series, or return to this ConHome piece on Young Mr Lincoln, one of his favourite films.
There are also very few things he’s not capable of doing – from sorting the annual ConHome party conference newspaper through getting new rigour into the monthly survey to pushing for civil service reform, Peter’s contribution to this site has been consistently high-quality. He can do both the arty bit (he designed beautiful front-page graphics when we had them) and the stats bit (some of those To the Points, like this one last week on Osborne’s stealth taxes, broke new ground). How he packed so much material into his newslinks when editing remains a mystery to me.
We will miss him particularly at Budget and Autumn Statement time, when he calmly helped to co-ordinate our coverage. Everyone who leaves is irreplaceable in one sense, and this is of course true of Peter, but we have a new appointment to write about the economy and politics who will be announced next week.