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

Roland Gribben, who died on Friday aged 86, was 1 of the most completed enterprise journalists of his technology, a relentlessly hard-performing and good person who was almost universally highly regarded, and at times feared, between the industrialists he wrote about for his consummate professionalism and commitment to truthful, incisive and exact reporting.

Baron Simon of Highbury, a previous main executive and chairman of BP as effectively as a government minister, mentioned: “He had a distinctive means to electrify the dullest of organization push conferences with a 5-barrelled opening question that completely expected almost everything any one else may want to question. He was 1 of the most astute reporters of his enterprise technology, who normally appeared to know as considerably about the businesses he coated as the persons who ran them.”

Equally effusive in his praise is Sir Max Hastings, editor of The Each day Telegraph from 1986 to 1996. “Roly was a supreme skilled of incredible integrity. Those terms may seem banal, until we assume how fairly several journalists of any sort, and specially enterprise journalists, merit the exact accolade,” he mentioned. 

“He was boundlessly painstaking, drily humorous, sceptical, immensely educated about British enterprise, sincerely outraged by wrongdoing of any sort. If it was possible to put Roly’s characteristics in a bottle and offer them to aspiring media editors, they would characterize almost everything we must seem for in the pretty ideal of British journalism.”

Charles Moore, who succeeded Sir Max, mentioned Gribben put together skilled perseverance with gentlemanly manners. 

“He had the great presents of lucid rationalization and a sense of exactly where the real story lay. While he took enormous delight in his perform, he by no means permit moi get in the way. As befitted a person who coated field, Roly was immensely industrious. His reports could generally be reliable, which is definitely the optimum praise.” 

In a job spanning extra than sixty years, the great bulk of it at The Each day Telegraph, Gribben chronicled several of the great industrial and enterprise stories of the put up-war time period, from the decrease of Britain’s automobile field to the rise of the North Sea oil and gasoline sector.