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 generation, a relentlessly challenging-operating and good guy who was pretty much universally revered, and once in a while feared, amongst the industrialists he wrote about for his consummate professionalism and determination to honest, incisive and correct reporting.

Baron Simon of Highbury, a former main executive and chairman of BP as properly as a government minister, explained: “He had a exceptional potential to electrify the dullest of enterprise press conferences with a five-barrelled opening question that correctly predicted almost everything any person else may possibly want to question. He was 1 of the most astute reporters of his enterprise generation, who frequently appeared to know as significantly about the organizations he lined as the persons who ran them.”

Similarly effusive in his praise is Sir Max Hastings, editor of The Daily Telegraph from 1986 to 1996. “Roly was a supreme skilled of amazing integrity. Those phrases may sound banal, till we imagine how fairly several journalists of any sort, and specifically enterprise journalists, merit the exact same accolade,” he explained. 

“He was boundlessly painstaking, drily amusing, sceptical, immensely informed about British enterprise, sincerely outraged by wrongdoing of any sort. If it was possible to put Roly’s traits in a bottle and promote them to aspiring media editors, they would represent almost everything we ought to look for in the pretty very best of British journalism.”

Charles Moore, who succeeded Sir Max, explained Gribben combined skilled willpower with gentlemanly manners. 

“He had the wonderful presents of lucid explanation and a perception of where the accurate story lay. Although he took huge satisfaction in his do the job, he never enable ego get in the way. As befitted a guy who lined marketplace, Roly was immensely industrious. His experiences could usually be trustworthy, which is really the maximum praise.” 

In a vocation spanning a lot more than 60 years, the wonderful bulk of it at The Daily Telegraph, Gribben chronicled lots of of the wonderful industrial and enterprise tales of the put up-war interval, from the decrease of Britain’s automobile marketplace to the increase of the North Sea oil and gas sector.