Pete Clark, RIP

Just read that journalist Pete Clark died early last month. A former colleague, Nick Curtis, wrote this tribute:

One of the Evening Standard’s most distinctive, witty and stylish writers from the 1990s to the 2010s, Pete Clark, has died aged 71. Initially a pop critic his brief expanded to cover TV, food, drink, travel, sport and cars, not to mention an infamous column in praise of smoking in ES magazine.

See Pete Clark: in praise of one of the Evening Standard's most distinctive, witty and stylish writers (Evening Standard, November 5, 2024).

I met Pete a few times.

The first occasion, I think, was at Auberon Waugh’s Academy Club in Soho. Forest had been ‘persuaded’ to sponsor a series of soirées at the club (in reality a single smoke-filled room accessed via a creaky wooden staircase) and guests were predominantly writers and journalists.

Another occasion was on No Smoking Day, in March 2000. The previous year (my first at Forest) we had sent a crack team of operatives to Paris, the ‘European capital of smoking’, to escape No Smoking Day in favour of having lunch at a restaurant that was used by the Resistance during the war.

In 2000 we decided to do something closer to home so we hosted a smoker-friendly champagne fry-up at one of London’s most famous restaurants, Simpson’s-in-the-Strand. Pete was one of the guests and within hours he had written a glowing report for the evening edition of the Standard.

Other guests that day included Forest chairman Lord Harris, Claire Fox (now Baroness Fox), Charlie Methven (Daily Telegraph), Chris Burke (Loaded), and Lauren Booth, Cherie Blair’s half sister and the daughter of actor Tony Booth (Till Death Us Do Part).

Lauren was a journalist writing for the New Statesman. She subsequently converted to Islam but at that time she enjoyed a rather different lifestyle. She was great fun and attended another Forest event the following year at Antony Worrall Thompson’s restaurant in Notting Hill. But that’s another story.

By 2003 however Pete appears to have stopped smoking, a combination of hypnotherapy and acupuncture enabling him to give up his 30-year habit. According to this archived account:



‘I stared into space until it was time to close my eyes,' he told readers of the London Evening Standard, 'and was gently led to a place where I was a person without a cigarette. I won't pretend that I went fully under - I don't think that's the point - but it was a profoundly relaxing experience. And to a smoker who has used a cigarette to 'relax' on countless occasions, it proved it was possible to do it the natural way.'

After the hypnotherapy, said Clark, came the acupuncture. 'I stretched out on the couch, and within a couple of minutes was covered in pins from, literally, head to toe, while  soft oriental music played. The pins do not hurt when they are inserted, but when [they were jiggled] there was a most curious mixture of pain and pleasure ...

‘After the session I felt quietly invigorated and, as with the hypnotherapy, utterly relaxed ... Apart from during the course of one vivid dream, I have not had a cigarette since my first visit. Two months and not counting any more.'

Sadly, very few of his many articles are online because much of his output preceded the internet, but even more recent pieces have disappeared because newspapers have a bad habit of updating their websites without archiving older articles.

Here are three I’ve found that do feature his byline:

Who goes to … the MCC? (Evening Standard)
Everybody needs good neighbours (Evening Standard)
The slow death of Soho (Guardian)

One thing he might not want to be remembered for is being sued for libel. (Cleese has last laugh with £13,500 win for newspaper libel.) Then again, it’s pretty much an occupational hazard if you’re a newspaper columnist.

I did wonder why he seemed to disappear after the mid Noughties but it turns out he was made redundant by the Standard in 2008 and wrote his last piece for the paper, as a freelance, in 2012.

When I moved to London in 1980 the Evening Standard - which was in fierce competition with the London Evening News - printed six editions a day. In September 2024 it printed its final daily edition and rebranded as The London Standard with a single weekly edition.

It’s ironic, perhaps, that having made his name at the Evening Standard, his death should coincide with the demise of a paper whose newsstands were once such a feature of the London landscape.

Pete Clark, far right, with fellow guests including Lauren Booth at our smoker-friendly fry-up at Simpson’s-in-the-Strand, March 2000