The splendid journalist Dennis Barker was the only person I encountered at the Guardian more clueless than I when it came to computers. He had left the paper then, but would often come in to complete a piece and, having eyed me conspiratorially, would ask, not very sotto voce, for cutting-edge tips on how to log on, or range left. The technology escaped him, yet the copy was, as David McKie wrote in his excellent account, “quick, fluent and deft”.
I first encountered Dennis in the early 1970s. He was covering an Islington housing story – of which there were then plenty. A caring landlord had removed the frontage of a property to incentivise the tenants to go, leaving the unfortunate family as the inhabitants of a huge dolls’ house. Dennis meanwhile was being berated about class struggle and the Guardian’s many iniquities by an extremely formidable OAP, billed I think by my then employer, Socialist Worker, as “battling Margaret Ryan, the pensioners’ friend”. Dennis, pen clutched in hand, dogged, bewildered, hapless and resigned, continued note-taking while Margaret, adoring owner of a rather aggressive cat, expressed her firm, radical opinions in brisk, no-nonsense terms. Dennis was, indeed, a professional.