Securing a scoop can come as a result of many aspects of a
journalist’s skill. There’s investigative work, pot luck, a canny eye or
even an extensive knowledge of some arcane legal twist, but it is rare
that a sofa is instrumental in securing a good story. Peter Millar,
however, managed to grab an exclusive as the Berlin Wall came down in
1989 on the strength of having taken a sofa through Checkpoint Charlie
some years before.
’I had got to know a border guard, who I called Rita, as a result of
struggling through the gate with this sofa for my home in East Berlin
back in the 1980s,’ he explains. ’I was chatting to her after the wall
went down and she revealed that the whole thing had been a huge
mistake.
An East German minister had said border restrictions were to be relaxed,
which the East German media misheard as dropped. Thousands of people
converged on the wall, the guards tuned into the state broadcasters and
heard the restrictions had been dropped and let everyone through. By the
time the mistake had been realised, it was too late to do anything about
it.’
Millar has been associate editor of the European since July, but cut his
journalistic teeth in and around central Europe during the Cold War
working for, variously, Reuters, the Daily and Sunday Telegraph and the
Sunday Times. He was working for the Sunday Times when the revolutions
swept the former Eastern bloc. Millar threw himself into the reporting,
even going as far as getting arrested in East Berlin and being carted
off to a police station in a deserted quarter of the city where they
beat his fellow detainees around the knees with truncheons.
His experience with the Stasi prepared him thoroughly for the trials
that were soon to follow - working for Robert Maxwell on the launch of
the original European - with all of the editorial interference that
Maxwell reserved for the Daily Mirror. Millar points out that his
interview questions, once asked, were picked up by Maxwell and rephrased
before the subject answered. Unsurprisingly, Millar left the old
European newspaper after a year.
The new European is less of a newspaper and more a magazine on the lines
of the Economist. Although Millar avoids using words like relaunch,
there has clearly been one. In July, shortly after he joined his old
Sunday Times boss Andrew Neil on the paper, it became a tabloid and
dropped its news lead cover page for a lead feature illustration.
’I think the European in the past has been run by people who were very
good journalists, but the wrong people for the job,’ Millar argues. ’We
have decided to aim for a tight penetration of opinion formers and we’ll
be calling it a magazine rather than a newspaper. There will be more
analysis of issues, more in depth pieces, especially the cover story
and, as I am personally very pro-European, we clearly aren’t going to be
furiously Eurosceptic.’
HIGHLIGHTS
1986
Central Europe correspondent, the Sunday Telegraph
1989
Central Europe correspondent, the Sunday Times
1990
Deputy editor, the European
1991
Freelance
1997
Associate editor, the European
