Hugo Young, who has died from cancer aged 64, was one of the leading British political columnists. For almost 20 years, after he left the Sunday Times, his authoritative pronouncements, twice a week, were mandatory reading for all who took politics seriously.
Because he worked so assiduously he came to each piece phenomenally well informed; and proceeded to tell you, in a language whose elegant periods reflected his devotion to Macaulay, exactly what he thought, without fear or favour.
He was also recognisable, first for the judicious authority of his commentary, then as a broadcaster of perception and shrewdness, and thereafter as the author of one of the great political biographies of the late 20th century, his life of Margaret Thatcher, One Of Us (first published in 1989).
He had read law at Oxford, and sometimes, especially when some malpractice or moral lapse offended him, his columns read like judgments delivered from the bench. Often he would take an issue, dissect it with skill and ingenuity, and arrive at no more than an interim conclusion. At other times his verdicts were stern to the point of brutality.
More than any other commentator in his trade in Britain, he was a serious moralist; the indignation that illuminated such columns came from the heart. There were many things in politics, and many practitioners, whom he liked, respected, honoured. There were other occasions when, in his view, tolerance was inexcusable. Sometimes the politicians he liked and admired fell, through some lapse, into the second category. Then they would not be spared.
People used to complain that his tone was Olympian, and so it sometimes was. He once wrote a sentence dismissing the former Labour leader, Neil Kinnock, in terms of a poor honours degree from a lesser university - a line he came to regret. It sounded vindictive, but that was not his intention. If a political leader seemed to him inadequate for the highest office, it was his duty to say so. He took no pleasure in it.
But the columns which became an institution within the Guardian were only one aspect of Hugo as a journalist. He was always a reporter, rarely happier than when he went to investigate some new territory, especially if it took him to the United States. He had spent a year there as a Harkness fellow in 1963 and in 1964 served as a congressional fellow.
In his last dozen years he was more than ever drawn back by his second marriage, to the American artist Lucy Waring, and his columns on the Bush administration over the past two years were some of the most incisive he ever wrote.
He was no fan of George W. Bush, but it was never his function just to condemn. Like any good reporter he wanted his readers to understand why Bush functioned as he did, and why he so much appealed to great swaths of the US public.
Hugo John Smelter Young came from Sheffield. His father, Gerard, ran a manufacturing firm in the city, was associated with a wealth of good Sheffield causes from the theatre and Radio Hallam to the university and the hospitals and was for 11 years lord lieutenant of South Yorkshire.
The Young family was Catholic, and he remained a strong, professing Catholic, though a far from uncritical one. He went, as his father had done, to Ampleforth when Basil Hume was teaching there. He then moved on to Balliol College, Oxford.
Power and the way it was exercised were Hugo's abiding concerns. The growing tension between politicians and lawyers, especially during David Blunkett's tenancy of the Home Office, was the subject of his unsparing scrutiny. He frequently wrote about justice and judges and the neglected defence of liberty; indeed, about the whole face of the law and its worrying imperfections.
Having trained on the Yorkshire Post in Leeds from 1961, he was soon, on his return from America, on his way to Fleet Street, joining the Sunday Times in 1965 and becoming chief leader-writer in his second year on the paper, a post he occupied until 1977.
Denis Hamilton had recruited him, but from 1967 his editor was the mercurial, unconventional and buccaneeringly adventurous Harold Evans, who was quick to appreciate the value of this austere and reserved young product of Balliol. From 1973 until 1984 he was the paper's political editor and from 1981 to 1984 its joint deputy editor.
But the likelihood of Young one day taking the editorship, either of the Times or the Sunday Times, receded into oblivion with the arrival of Rupert Murdoch in 1981. Young was not designed to appeal to Mr Murdoch or Mr Murdoch to him, and his life became untenable.
He was publicly undervalued, even humiliated: he was said to have learned from a noticeboard that a new deputy editor would be sharing his title.
On the face of it, the Guardian seemed a less than likely destination. His own politics remained a mystery. Some took him to be a liberal Tory, somewhere in the region of Ian Gilmour though, as he later wrote in a piece describing how he came to write his life of Margaret Thatcher, "I had all the wrong instincts, being neither a Conservative nor someone who believed political journalists should have other than sceptical connections with politicians."
Young might not have fitted the stereotype of a Guardian man, but the editor, Peter Preston, was anxious to acquire him, though there were risks because the Guardian already had a celebrated political columnist in Peter Jenkins, who was far from eager to share his position.
The first negotiation to bring Young on board collapsed, but Preston succeeded at the second attempt, and Jenkins finally left for the Sunday Times.
The battle which led to Young's departure from that paper was a clash of personalities with the new editor, Andrew Neil, which became a clash of cultures.
To Young, Neil's brand of journalism amounted - to use one of his favourite words - to a deformity. For Neil, as he later wrote, "Young was wary and aloof . . . He was the high priest of the collectivist consensus that had already brought Britain to its knees, imbued with the Oxbridge disdain for the supposedly crass world of commerce and the market."
There were bruising battles over principle. Young tackled Neil over a leader in which, against Young's judgment and that of most of the relevant editorial staff, the editor backed the 1983 US invasion of Grenada. Neil had decided he, and therefore the paper, was for it. Young wrote him a memo asking: "I would like to know whether you want . . . to make the leader column into a personal platform."
Before he left, he wrote a farewell column observing that "Today's Sunday Times may make profits but it no longer makes waves." "It was a relief to me," Neil wrote in his memoirs, "that his baleful presence had gone from the paper."
None the less, the circumstances in which Hugo broke with the Murdoch press were, in a very important sense, therapeutic. Admirers of his Sunday Times columns had one reservation: the analysis might be faultless, but he sometimes seemed to duck a conclusion. This was a writer too often unready to commit himself. His struggle with the forces of Murdoch seemed to have altered that. It had at last given Young the taste for a fight. His Guardian columns developed a combativeness which those on the Sunday Times had lacked. And though two columns were required of him weekly, rather than one as at the Sunday Times, he still had time to embark on the Thatcher biography.
His other big book was This Blessed Plot: Britain And Europe From Churchill To Blair (1998), which the Economist described as "a book of the decade, not just of the year". Though by no means free of criticism of the pro-European politicians whose aspirations Young came to share, it was, unlike the Thatcher book, the statement of a true believer.
Along with his Catholic faith, his belief in the European project became exempt from his "chronic detachment", and it kept on nosing its way into the argument. No fault in Tony Blair's record seemed more grievous to him than the failure to campaign for an early British adoption of the euro.
Even on Europe, though, Young kept his distance from the political process. Politicians were one tribe, journalists were another, and to mix up the disciplines as some of his newspaper counterparts did was in his view fatal.
As a man of no firm party allegiance, Young was worried by the development under Tony Blair of what he argued was becoming, mentally as well as politically, a one-party state. That ascendancy brought huge temptations, not least in the way New Labour was ready to steamroller civil liberties in the name of the fight against terrorism.
He was dismayed by Blair's alignment with Bush in the build-up to the Iraq war, believing against all denials that the Prime Minister had committed himself early to backing Bush, whatever the pointers against it.
At the end of March he returned to the paper after an absence of almost four months, writing one column a week. But these last columns were some of his most remarkable, suffused with a fierce urgency that perhaps reflected his sense of how little time there might be left.
Hugo John Smelter Young, journalist, born October 13th, 1938; died September 22nd, 2003