They could as well have felled Big Ben, drained the Serpentine or butchered the ravens in the Tower. No more daily print edition of the Evening Standard. No headlines to greet us at every tube station. No cockney cries of: “Read all aba’it!” No news of what celebrity was where last night and with whom.

The Evening Standard, which has announced plans to shutter its daily newspaper in favour of a digital service and weekly magazine, was truly a London institution. Its tabloid rivals, the Star and Evening News, merged in 1960 and closed in 1980, but there was always a touch of class to the Standard. For journalists told to start their careers “working local”, it was a golden step to a proper Fleet Street job. Londoners needed to read the Standard.

With its early edition appearing at lunchtime, the Standard held pride of place in the daily news round. Its political editor in the 1960s, Robert Carvel, was granted a morning briefing by the prime minister, Harold Wilson. Its theatre critic, Milton Shulman, could make or (very rarely) break a show. It had its own correspondents in Paris and Washington.

When I first joined the paper (I served as editor from 1977 to 1979), it was edited, printed and........

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