Former Telegraph business journalist Roly Gribben, a ‘supreme professional of extraordinary integrity’, dies aged 86

Roland Gribben, who died on Friday aged 86, was a person of the most accomplished business enterprise journalists of his generation, a relentlessly really hard-operating and respectable person who was almost universally respected, and sometimes feared, among the the industrialists he wrote about for his consummate professionalism and commitment to truthful, incisive and exact reporting.

Baron Simon of Highbury, a former main government and chairman of BP as properly as a governing administration minister, stated: “He experienced a special ability to electrify the dullest of corporation push conferences with a 5-barrelled opening query that completely anticipated every little thing any person else might want to request. He was a person of the most astute reporters of his business enterprise generation, who often appeared to know as substantially about the organizations he covered as the people who ran them.”

Equally effusive in his praise is Sir Max Hastings, editor of The Daily Telegraph from 1986 to 1996. “Roly was a supreme qualified of incredible integrity. Those text might sound banal, until we think how fairly handful of journalists of any type, and especially business enterprise journalists, benefit the identical accolade,” he stated. 

“He was boundlessly painstaking, drily humorous, sceptical, immensely educated about British business enterprise, sincerely outraged by wrongdoing of any type. If it was achievable to put Roly’s qualities in a bottle and sell them to aspiring media editors, they would represent every little thing we should really seem for in the extremely most effective of British journalism.”

Charles Moore, who succeeded Sir Max, stated Gribben combined qualified resolve with gentlemanly manners. 

“He experienced the terrific gifts of lucid clarification and a sense of the place the accurate story lay. Whilst he took huge pride in his operate, he hardly ever let ego get in the way. As befitted a person who covered field, Roly was immensely industrious. His experiences could generally be dependable, which is truly the best praise.” 

In a vocation spanning much more than sixty many years, the terrific bulk of it at The Daily Telegraph, Gribben chronicled numerous of the terrific industrial and business enterprise stories of the write-up-war interval, from the drop of Britain’s motor vehicle field to the increase of the North Sea oil and gas sector.