Peter Jay, a British journalist, broadcaster and diplomat whose tenure as ambassador to the U.S. began and ended in controversy, died on Sept. 22 at his home in Woodstock, England. He was 87.
His death was confirmed by his son Patrick, who did not specify a cause.
Mr. Jay never quite lived up to his early promise as an economics journalist, a failing that the British press long took delight in pointing out, along with regular admonitions over his arrogance, which he felt obligated to confess. His anointment in the mid-1970s by Time magazine as one of the most promising men of his generation — he later expressed regret over it — was often mentioned.
Yet it was his reputation as a sharp analyst of the British economy (along with his family connections) that helped garner him the post of British ambassador to President Jimmy Carter’s Washington in May 1977 at the age of 40. That turned out to be the high point of his career.
The uproar in Parliament was immediate. Prime Minister James Callaghan was heckled. Mr. Jay had no diplomatic experience, but he was Mr. Callaghan’s son-in-law. He had married the prime minister’s daughter Margaret 16 years before, after graduating with honors from Oxford. Mr. Jay’s espousal of monetarism and his doubts about Keynes-style government spending, espoused on widely watched British television programs, influenced his Labour Party father-in-law.
A famous line in Mr. Callaghan’s speech to the 1976 Labour Party conference is often attributed to Mr. Jay: “We used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession, and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending. I tell you in all candor that option no longer exists.” Mr. Jay’s son, in an interview, could not confirm that the words came directly from his father.
Still, Mr. Jay’s appointment to Britain’s most important ambassadorial post was greeted with astonishment. “The Son-in-Law Also Rises” was the headline in The Daily Express.
He overcame the initial doubts about his aptitude for diplomacy, only to achieve notoriety, and an unwelcome sort of immortality, over a Washington episode that had nothing to do with either diplomacy or economics.
His wife’s much-publicized liaison with the journalist Carl Bernstein, best known for his coverage of Watergate, was memorialized by Mr. Bernstein’s ex-wife, Nora Ephron, in her “thinly disguised” — her words — 1983 novel, “Heartburn,” later made into a movie starring Meryl Streep.
Mr. Jay was depicted in the novel as the coldblooded State Department official Jonathan Rice, who, in a commiserative embrace with the novel’s betrayed Ephron character, can only say, “What’s happening to this country?” In her introduction to the 2004 edition of the book, Ms. Ephron said that Mr. Jay, whom she called an “extremely pompous British civil servant,” “constantly takes shots at me for the damage I did to his family.”
Mr. Jay himself was having an affair at the time with his family’s nanny at the embassy, Jane Tustian. She had to take him to court in 1984 to prove that he was the father of their son, Nicholas, and to get him to acknowledge it.
That episode emerged after Mr. Jay had left Washington; he was recalled in 1979 by the government of Margaret Thatcher, who wanted to install her own ambassador. But his meteoric career as one of Britain’s leading lights, intellectually and politically, was damaged. “How the Know-All Came a Cropper” was the headline in the tabloid newspaper The Sun.
“There’s a sense in which, after the embassy, I ceased to have any feelings of a career, or a trajectory,” he told The Observer in 2000.
Yet, according to contemporary press accounts, he had been an effective ambassador — speaking out against the Irish Republican Army, which was then influential in the U.S., and drumming up business for the British. “He used to make people feel uncomfortable by talking down to them,” an anonymous Carter administration official was quoted as saying in The New York Times in 1978. “But that side of him has disappeared. He has changed — he really has.”
He was impressed by Mr. Carter, he later told an interviewer: “Whenever I had to deal with Jimmy Carter, I found him entirely focused, professional, well briefed, intelligent and very unpolitical.”
At home with memorabilia from his Washington years, Mr. Jay told The Observer in 2000, “I thereafter thought of all my working activities as a kind of epilogue.” There were plenty:
A television program, “A Week in Politics,” that he began hosting in 1982; a failed British breakfast-television venture with David Frost in 1983; and, at the end of the 1980s, a tenure as chief of staff to the publishing magnate Robert Maxwell, who swindled his companies’ pension funds and wound up dead in the Mediterranean. Mr. Maxwell delighted in introducing Mr. Jay as “the ambassador”; Mr. Jay left Mr. Maxwell a year before his death to become economics and business editor at the BBC, where he stayed for 10 years and produced a number of notable economics programs.
“I was very good at successes,” he told The Guardian in 1997. “My very early life was all about ticking off successes. I did success, success was easy to me.”
Peter Jay was born on Feb. 7, 1937, in London, the son of Douglas Jay, a high official in several Labour Party governments, and Margaret (Garnett) Jay, known as Peggy, a Labour member of the London County Council and the Greater London Council.
He was educated at the Dragon School in Oxford and at Winchester College, a famous public school, where he was head boy, the top student leadership position. After service in the Royal Navy in the mid-1950s, he studied politics, philosophy and economics at Christ Church College, Oxford, graduating in 1960 with first-class honors. He was also president of the Oxford Union debating society.
He went to work at the British Treasury in 1961 and rose to become private secretary to the joint permanent secretary. In 1967, at 29, he was made economics editor of The Times of London. In an anecdote repeated for years in the British press, he once told a deputy editor there who complained about the difficulty of his columns, “I am writing for three people and you are not one of them.”
By the mid-1970s he was a major television personality in Britain, with his own show, “The Jay Interview.” After the Washington and Maxwell episodes, and following his return to the BBC, he produced “The Road to Riches,” a six-part series that aimed to “chart the story of mankind’s progress,” broadcast in 2000.
Along with his sons Patrick, from his first marriage, and Nicholas, Mr. Jay is survived by his second wife, Emma Thornton; his daughters from his first marriage, Tamsin and Alice Jay; three sons from his second marriage, Tommy, Sammy and Jamie; and six grandchildren. He and Margaret Callaghan divorced in 1986.
Patrick Jay recalled that, his reputation for arrogance notwithstanding, his father had a lifelong vocation to disseminate views that didn’t insult the intelligence of his listeners:
“He found that really important, to deliver on the mission to explain. In the era of insane disinformation, having real experts talk about substantive issues in a way that people can understand.”
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