Vanity Fair: a lesson in the fine art of the narrative

Henry Porter, London editor of Vanity Fair, believes British journalists can learn from their US counterparts. By Ian Burrell

If pushed, he'd subject these people to a "drive-by", to borrow an expression from his great friend Graydon Carter, the legendary editor of one of the world's most prestigious magazines. Such a manoeuvre does not, London's socialites should be relieved to learn, involve hanging out of the open window of a slowly driven vehicle and opening up with a piece of "spray and pray" automatic weaponry.

"You go in, don't even have a drink, go straight to the host and say, 'You're looking great, 10 years younger, have you lost weight? Fantastic book, is that a new suit? Your wife looks amazing, is that your wife?' You make everyone happy, then piss off. That's a drive-by. It was Graydon's idea."

Having been London editor of Vanity Fair for 17 years, Porter, 56, can't see the point of schmoozing – he'd rather be lunching a politician off-the-record, attending a high-brow lecture, or scouring the news media for the kernel of a story that might merit the attentions of the famously fastidious magazine. Vanity Fair sells on average 1,144,001 copies in America. The UK edition, which is "sold here because it's American, not because it's some sort of English version of Vanity Fair", shifted 101,169 copies in its last six-monthly ABC figures, up 1.8 per cent on the previous year.

"We survive in the internet age because we have still got something that other people can't do, which is to tell a really good narrative. It makes you understand a story in a way that no other medium does," Porter explains of a magazine that in its most recent edition offers detailed insights into the economic meltdown in Iceland, the changing notion of the American Dream and the Bernard Madoff scandal. These are given treatments over nine, 12 and 16 pages respectively.

"It's not quite a book and it's certainly not the brief, cursory stuff of the internet. It's giving these really detailed, clear narratives. Oddly enough, very few people do that in London," he says.

Porter's explanation of the Condé Nast magazine's secret does not make for easy reading for British journalists. The star Vanity Fair writer William Langewiesche "doesn't take short cuts, he will do it the long way round and find out everything he needs to know. That is America, that is not Britain, in my view," says Porter. "I think Americans are culturally much more diligent. People given a task tend to do it thoroughly, and that applies to journalism, fact-checking, editing."

Langewiesche, who writes in the current edition of Vanity Fair about Somali pirates hijacking yachts in the Gulf of Aden, has an exceptional journalistic background. "He's a former airline pilot and it's like he's checking the plane, going through the manual. He's an extraordinarily well-honed reporter," says Porter, who spotted the piracy story himself ("way before anybody else did, I absolutely know I did"), but wanted Langewiesche to write it. "He understands stuff like navigation. He sails, he's got a little boat in France. He understands the technical stuff and he can talk to pilots and radar operators – that's a really rare thing in journalism, to have someone who has had a practical life."

Porter is sitting in Vanity Fair's London office at Vogue House, eating ginger biscuits. Educated at Wellington, the son of an army major, he is dressed in a navy blue Aquascutum suit and striped shirt; not the sort of chap who would lapse readily into a mid-Atlantic accent. His credentials within the London prints are impeccable, having worked for almost all the quality titles, from The Sunday Times to The Observer, not to mention having edited that venerable institution The Illustrated London News.

Porter says that "not many" British writers have found regular work with Vanity Fair. His advice to those with such aspirations is "very simple, to absolutely put all your effort into reporting, no short cuts, do the 40 calls, because you always pick up stuff. Transcribe your notes – don't think you remember them – then work on the art of narrative." Composition is an important part of a Vanity Fair piece, which might run to 7,000 words.

And then there is John Banta, the long-standing research director of Vanity Fair, who oversees a team of dedicated fact-checkers. "They save everybody. However good and diligent and careful you think you are, they save you. When we have big lawsuits, we go into bat knowing we've done everything we can to get the story as accurate as we can."

Other star Vanity Fair writers include financial specialist Bethany McLean, whose work for Fortune magazine led to the book and film documentary Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, and Michael Lewis, a former Wall Street bond salesman and best-selling author. Carter is "a very good picker of people," says Porter, who was one of his first hires. One exception to this rule is Toby Young, who documented his disastrous experiences at Vanity Fair in the book and film How to Lose Friends and Alienate People. "Graydon has this wonderful image of Toby Young," says the London editor, scraping his sole on the carpet and then putting on an American twang: "He's like a piece of gum on my shoe, this guy!"

Porter is also an author, specialising in espionage thrillers. The previous evening, he had been at a lecture given by former KGB colonel Oleg Gordievsky, and got chatting to a former French spy. At the Cheltenham literary festival he shared a platform with former MI5 director-general Dame Stella Rimington, picking up a story for the magazine in the process. More Porter networking led to British QC Philippe Sands uncovering the legal chain of command linked to torture at Guantanamo Bay. Sands wrote the story for Vanity Fair and gave evidence before Congress.

In 2006, thanks to his passionate interest in civil liberties, Porter was involved in an extraordinary exchange of emails with Tony Blair, the then Prime Minister, who responded with three long electronic missives to try to rebut Porter's claim that, through his use of security-driven legislation, he had become "a serious threat to British democracy". Although Porter keeps a blog, he is angry at the internet's – "straight theft, actually" – uploading of newspaper and book content. "I've got a book there, I'm handing it in this morning, final edit, done. It's called The Dying Light, a spy thriller that takes place in five years' time in London. I spent two years writing that, and the idea that someone would

think they had a right to steal it is completely wrong."

As for the day job, he is set to be busy. America's interest in Britain has been heightened by the two countries having collaborated in the financial meltdown. That's a story that Vanity Fair will be devoting ever more resources to. "We so mirror in our Anglo-Saxon risk-taking culture what happens in New York. There are a lot of bankers who live here who were responsible for the cataclysmic decisions, and they were happening in step in New York and London," he says. Maybe we're not so different from those Americans after all.

'We so mirror in our Anglo-Saxon risk-taking culture what happens in New York'