HAPPY first birthday to this column and thank you for spending the past year with me, wistfully recalling old haunts in Soho and some of the characters who painted this city’s history so vividly.

The character we miss the most, however, is the man who this page is affectionately named after.
Illtyd Harrington, a mentor and a friend, could write this weekly diary a thousand times better than you find it here.

Using his surname is simply a tribute to everything he gave to London and to our newspapers.

Please do not see it as an attempt to guess what he would have thought of the issues of the week, because his unpredictability was a joy. His columns in the West End Extra and Camden New Journal were laced with waspish mischief, wandering off in all directions but blessed with both insider gossip and outrage.

Oh how he loved to name drop who he had lunched with, but make no mistake over how he saw straight through the synthetic world of celebrity and soundbite politics.

An hour in his company was never wasted, such was his role as an insatiable raconteur, and he had no time for newspaper hierarchy. He enjoyed hearing from everybody from the cub on work experience to the editor, his old friend Eric Gordon.

Both have now passed, but their stamp is indelible on the newspapers our small independent group of three titles produces; we also publish the Islington Tribune.

Illtyd had been a teacher and later a Labour councillor in Westminster. Some people place him as Ken Livingstone’s Number 2 at the GLC but he was so much more than that. He walked his own path, not Mr Livingstone’s. This included his work on developing the Freedom Pass on the transport network for the elderly. He would expect our papers to vigorously defend that dispensation, and we regularly do.

He died seven years ago aged 84, but I can still hear him come through the newsroom door as if it was yesterday – asking after my children and then calling me something blue for not visiting him enough at his flat in Brighton. Needless to say, we all still miss him terribly and won’t let his name be forgotten.

RICHARD OSLEY, EDITOR