The Independent began as a start-up – and we’re still innovating

Andreas Whittam Smith explains how he effectively fired himself from The Daily Telegraph and went on to set up The Independent with two colleagues

Whittam Smith in the newsroom toasts the first edition on 6 October 1986 (Herbie Knott/Shutterstock)

You often read about start-ups. Thirty-five years ago, in October 1986, The Independent was one such, publishing its first ever issue. Start-ups generally comprise a group of friends with an ambitious project in their minds, who get together in one of their homes to make plans and seek useful contacts. In the case of the outstandingly successful Microsoft, for instance, Paul Allen, a programmer at Honeywell, purchased a magazine that described the first microcomputer. He immediately rushed round to his school friend, Bill Gates, to show him. The rest was history, as they say. Or, to take a famous 19th-century example, Marks & Spencer began operations when Michael Marks and Thomas Spencer acquired a permanent stall in Leeds covered market in 1894. Again, the rest was history.

The Independent began in this way but with an important difference, which I shall come to. I and two colleagues on The Daily Telegraph, Matthew Symonds and Stephen Glover, drew up plans to launch a new daily newspaper in October 1986, which was to be The Independent. None of us had been considering this daunting step for long. We began the planning in 1985. We launched a year later. Glover and Symonds were in their early thirties and I was nearly 50.

There were a number of aspects of the Fleet Street of the day that we didn’t like. Most newspapers were stridently political with right-wing views in the ascendant. Left-of-centre arguments got an outing only in the Daily Mirror and The Guardian. But by the 1980s, third-party politics had arrived.