Miles & Me by Jonathan Sale

'He could, from time to time, also be enormously touchy and grumpy: as our contributor Alan Brien remarked, he was a manic-depressive without the manic bit.'

For more than two decades, Miles Kington's daily musings on culture, politics and modern life were cherished by readers of The Independent. His death this week robs Britain of one its most original humorists. Here, friends reflect on the man they loved, while over the page are extracts from some of his finest columns

Friday, 1 February 2008 The Independent

Laughing all the way: Miles Kington pictured in 2006 © Geraint Lewis

There was only one occasion when my father, a retiring Cambridge academic, actually picked up the phone and dialled my number to congratulate me. It was after he'd read a piece I had written for Punch magazine – in collaboration with Miles Kington. The idea for the feature had been mine – "A history of demolition", prompted by the fact that half of London was being demolished to make way for the building boom of the early Seventies – but the fine touches, needless to say, had all belonged to Miles.


When we were preparing that article, some of the bits of work that we threw out for reasons of space were more imaginative than the efforts that other contributors to Punch would come up with in an entire year. "A history of demolition" was our only joint byline in my 17 years on the magazine, and by far the best thing I ever put my name to. On other weeks, it would have been me who phoned my old man.

Many people are so-called humorous journalists. Give us (or, to be precise, give me) a sandwich board inscribed "The End Of The World Is At Hand" and we (I) can turn out a jolly 1,500 words about what Japanese tourists said to us as we strapped it on and paraded up and down Oxford Street. Miles, however, was that rarity, a real humorist. He wouldn't have had to do that stunt – because he would have been able to come up with something far, far better.

Other journalists might write about sex. Miles wrote a wonderful spread on "How To Write a Sex Manual", which was illustrated with explicit photographs of the author engaged in foreplay with a typewriter and stroking the keyboard in a post-coital sort of way.

As a literary editor and writer, Miles was the best of colleagues and the worst of colleagues. He was my closest friend, and biggest pain in the neck. He was senior enough to "OK" my ideas, and junior enough for me not to be in trouble when I admitted that I had boobed. We were the only cyclists at Punch, in an office where the other blokes were always making pretentious remarks about their over-the-top motors.

He could, from time to time, also be enormously touchy and grumpy: as our contributor Alan Brien remarked, he was a manic-depressive without the manic bit. He could be pointlessly rude, but democratically so: he would be offhand to someone in the post-room (which was not admirable) and to the editor (which was foolhardy). He could mooch off early, leaving the rest of us to drown in a flood of page proofs.

One editor wanted to have him locked up. This was allegedly so that Miles could write an article about a night in the cells. More seriously, the same editor, Bill Davis, finally had enough and asked the rest of us if Miles was worth his keep. I protested that he was worth his weight in new typewriter ribbons (a judgement I later began to revise somewhat) and was pleased when no more was said about throwing the book at the then literary editor.

The feeling between editor and employee was clearly mutual. After a Punch works outing, in which as usual the drink had flowed even faster than the bons mots, a loud crashing was heard from the editor's office. This turned out to be Miles, expressing his feelings towards that editor by kicking hell out of his desk. He clearly felt better about getting this off his chest, and boot, and we put the desk together again – and expressed elaborate surprise when bits fell off it during the next editorial meeting.

My patience was tested after the next Punch works outing, when again the drinks flowed like printer's ink. Afterwards, Miles retired to the editor's office and yelled: "Hey, do you remember when I kicked the desk in?" In case I'd forgotten, he proceeded to wallop it again. I was reassembling the unoffending piece of furniture when Lord Barnetson, the chairman of the entire newspaper group, wandered in to see who was trashing his premises. I persuaded him that desks often fell to bits, thanks to shoddy modern manufacturing techniques.

"Kington works hard at his eccentricity," wrote Michael Parkinson in a piece about passing the Kingtons' flat while on the top deck of a bus and seeing Miles dreamily playing his double bass while his children ran round him and other people got ready to go to work. (This was back in the days when Kington rented a flat in Notting Hill and Parkinson travelled on buses.) Maybe there was an element of artifice in his demeanour; but certainly Kington cared less than most about appearances – his own appearance, anyway.

Tidying my office in a burst of keenness during my first month, I burrowed down through archaeological layers of dusty correspondence to long-gone members of staff. Round about the Pleistocene age, I discovered a pair of trousers. "Ah," said Miles, "I wondered what had happened to them." They were probably his best pair. He tended to wear old jeans, as he went everywhere on an old sit-up-and-beg bicycle, stopping occasionally to pull The Times out of the basket and fill in a crossword clue.

He dressed, said a cartoonist, as if someone had given him a 20-quid Millets voucher. Yet he always seemed more elegant and handsome, in a raffish sort of way, than anyone else. You would never have guessed it, but there seemed to be money in the background. While the rest of the staff were scraping around for mortgages, he quietly mentioned that he would buy his house outright. But in his family in general, he saw himself as being of the church mouse persuasion; there was or had been a castle somewhere in the family tree but it had gone to another branch.

When Alan Coren, the new editor, took over, Miles would have expected to move up to become deputy editor, but maybe his CV – the desk-bashing etc – stood in his way. Alan announced nervously that there would not be a deputy editor as such. In fact there was, but it wasn't Miles. This may have been the safe decision but it didn't please Miles, then literary editor, who became somewhat less reliable. During one of his unexplained absences from the office, Coren was forced to ring around various BBC recording studios to see if anyone had seen him playing there with his band, Instant Sunshine.

Miles always said that he didn't realise he had been sacked. He left when he was asked to present a programme about a train journey in the Andes. This involved, clearly, going to the Andes, which would make it hard to pull his weight around the office for a while. He asked if Coren minded. Coren didn't mind at all, but said that he would have to hire another literary editor to fill the enormous gap left by Miles, as indeed he did. That was much nicer than saying: "On your bike."

Posy Simmonds

Posy was shipwrecked on Desert Island Discs, yesterday, Sunday 29th June 2008 (repeated this coming Friday). Posy lodged with Jill before either of them worked on The Guardian and part of the arrangement was that she collect Luke from nursery school.

Posy went to the Central School for Art and Design and the Sunday Times cartoonist Mel Calman, who spotted her work at her degree show, introduced her to Jill.

One of Posy's strips caricatured Alan. Jane Andromache knows which one.

See NPG 6247 Women's Page Contributors to The Guardian by Sarah Raphael. oil on paper laid on board, 1994. The sitters are:

Dame Elizabeth Anne Lucy Forgan Show (1944-), Journalist and media director.
Posy Simmonds Show (1945-), Cartoonist.
Mary Stott Show (1907-2002), Journalist.
Polly Toynbee Show (1946-), Journalist.
Jill Sheila Tweedie Show (1936-1993), Journalist.