Peter Jay, the British journalist, broadcaster and diplomat whose tenure as ambassador to the United States was controversial and controversial, died on September 22 at his home in Woodstock, England. He was 87 years old.
His death was confirmed by his son Patrick, but the cause of death was not disclosed.
Mr. Jay never quite lived up to his initial promise as a financial journalist, but the British press had long been happy to point out his failures, and regularly admonished him for his arrogance, saying he had a duty to confess. . His anointing by Time magazine in the mid-1970s as one of the most promising figures of his generation (which he later expressed regret) was often mentioned.
But it was his reputation (and family connections) as an astute analyst of the British economy that won him the post of President Jimmy Carter’s British ambassador to Washington in May 1977, at the age of 40. A point in his career.
There was an immediate uproar in Congress. Prime Minister James Callaghan was heckled. Mr. Jay had no diplomatic experience, but was Mr. Callahan’s son-in-law. He had married the Prime Minister’s daughter Margaret 16 years earlier, after graduating with honors from Oxford University. Mr Jay’s beliefs in monetarism and Keynesian skepticism of government spending were disseminated on widely watched British television and influenced his father-in-law in the Labor Party.
A famous line from Mr Callaghan’s speech at the 1976 Labor Party conference is often attributed to Mr Jay. Frankly, that option no longer exists. ” Jay’s son said in an interview that he could not confirm whether the words came directly from his father.
Still, Jay’s appointment to Britain’s most important ambassadorship was met with surprise. The headline in the Daily Express was “Son-in-law rises too”.
He overcame initial doubts about his diplomatic aptitude, but an episode in Washington that had nothing to do with diplomacy or economics only gained him notoriety and a kind of unwelcome immortality. .
His wife’s affair with Carl Bernstein, a journalist best known for his coverage of the Watergate scandal, was highly publicized, and Bernstein’s ex-wife, Nora Ephron, revealed her “thinly disguised” (in her words) relationship in 1983. He was memorialized in the novel “Heartburn.” It was later made into a movie starring Meryl Streep.
Mr. Jay is portrayed in the novel as cold-blooded State Department official Jonathan Rice, who sympathetically embraces the novel’s betrayed Efron character and says, “What’s going on with this country? All I could say was, “What?” In the foreword to the 2004 edition of the book, Efron called Jay a “very arrogant British civil servant” who “constantly takes bullets at me for the damage I have caused his family.” said.
Mr. Jay himself was having an affair at the time with Jane Tastian, the family’s nanny at the embassy. She had to take him to court in 1984 to prove and have him admit that he was the father of her son Nicholas.
The episode surfaced after Mr. Jay left Washington. He was recalled by Margaret Thatcher’s government in 1979. The Thatcher government wanted to establish its own ambassadorship. But his illustrious career as one of Britain’s leading lights was tarnished both intellectually and politically. “How a know-it-all became a crop dealer” ran the headline in the tabloid The Sun.
“After I left the embassy, I felt like I had no feelings about my career or trajectory,” he told the Observer in 2000.
However, according to contemporary reports, he was an effective ambassador, speaking out against the Irish Republican Army, which had influence in the United States at the time, and boosting business to Britain. “He used to call people names and make them feel uncomfortable,” an anonymous Carter administration official reportedly told The New York Times in 1978. “But that side of him went away. He changed — really changed.”
He was impressed with Mr. Carter, later telling an interviewer: “Whenever I interacted with Jimmy Carter, I found him to be completely focused, professional, well-briefed, intelligent, and very apolitical.”
Mr. Jay told the Observer in 2000 from his home filled with memorabilia from his Washington days. “After that, I thought of all my work activities as a kind of epilogue.” There were many:
In 1982, he began hosting the TV show “A Week in Politics.” In 1983, he collaborated with David Frost on a British breakfast television venture, which failed. In the late 1980s, he served as chief of staff to publishing magnate Robert Maxwell, who swindled his company’s pension funds and died in the Mediterranean Sea. Mr. Maxwell was pleased to introduce Mr. Jay as an “ambassador.” Mr Jay left Mr Maxwell a year before his death to become the BBC’s economics and business editor, where he remained for 10 years and produced a number of high-profile economics programmes.
“I was very good at being successful,” he told the Guardian in 1997. I was successful, success was easy for me. ”
Peter Jay was born on 7 February 1937 in London, the son of Douglas Jay, a senior official in several Labor governments, and Margaret (Garnet) Jay, also known as Peggy, a Labor member of the London County Council. Ta. Greater London Council.
He was educated at Oxford’s Dragon School and the famous public school, Winchester College, where he held the position of head boy, the highest leader of the students. After serving in the Royal Navy in the mid-1950s, he studied politics, philosophy and economics at Christ Church College, Oxford, graduating with first class honors in 1960. He was also President of the Oxford Union Debating Society.
He joined the British Treasury in 1961 and was promoted to Private Secretary to the Joint Permanent Secretary. In 1967, at the age of 29, he was appointed economics editor of the London Times. In an anecdote repeated over the years in the British press, he once told a local deputy editor who had complained about the difficulty of his column, “I write for three people. There are, but you are not one of them.”
By the mid-1970s, he had become a major British television personality with his own show, The Jay Interview. After returning to the BBC after the Washington and Maxwell episodes, he produced The Road to Riches, a six-part series that aimed to “tell the story of human progress”, which aired in 2000. I did.
In addition to his sons Patrick and Nicholas from his first marriage, Mr. Jay is survived by his second wife, Emma Thornton. daughters Tamsin and Alice Jay from his first marriage; Three sons, Tommy, Sammy and Jamie from his second marriage. and six grandchildren. He and Margaret Callaghan divorced in 1986.
Patrick Jay recalls that despite his father’s reputation for arrogance, he made it his life’s mission to promote views that did not insult the intelligence of his listeners.
“He realized that it was really important to fulfill the mission of explaining. In an age of crazy disinformation, getting real experts to talk about essential issues in a way that people could understand. .”
