As an undergraduate, I had dabbled a little in writing for the press - to the extent of discovering that editors of hard-pressed weeklies could not always afford to pay contributors. Nevertheless, it was not an interest in journalism a as such which caused me to respond to a Financial Times notice at the Cambridge Appointments Board. I had been rejected by Shell, who could not imagine me standing in shorts selling oil cans in Lagos. The Bank of England had then no graduate recruitment scheme and told me I would spend my first few years copying documents 'with meticulous accuracy': I might prefer to start elsewhere. I had gone to see Manning Dacey, the economic adviser to Lloyds Bank, about possibilities in banking. But when he heard I was a possible First he thought it was not a good idea. On the economic side of Lloyds Bank, he remarked, 'there is only me'. His advice was firm: 'financial journalism'.

I therefore went to see Gordon Newton, the editor of the Financial Times, whose interviewing technique has been described exhaustively elsewhere, together with his role in bringing to London Oxbridge graduates who would otherwise have had to start in provincial journalism. I went in saying to myself, 'Let me see if I can't get this job'; and to cut the story short, I did.

Like many recruits, my first few years were spent in the general features department. While my near-contemporary Walter Eltis was writing refereed papers on subjects such as 'Investment, technical progress and economic growth' (Eltis 1963), I wrote features on the furniture industry or the efforts of a small firm at Hawick to enlist its labour force against a takeover. I was also sent on trips to Israel and Morocco, and to a French automated car plant in response to one of the periodic alarms about machines displacing human beings.

Newton was admirably patient most of the time. But I remember one particular outburst. I wrote a feature on the economics of the egg, which concentrated on market factors. Newton wanted the 'real economics of an egg': so much cost for feeding stuff, so much for heating, so much for labour - all illustrated on a sliced-up egg - which I had almost to invent because of the protestations of trade spokesmen that it all 'varied so much'. In the course of this project I had occasion to ask on the telephone, 'Is that the Society of Objectors to Compulsory Egg Marketing?', which drew hoots of laughter from my colleagues, loudest of all from Nigel Lawson, who afterwards became a prominent ministerial advocate of deregulation.

There was one shortcoming to my training, which I recognized even then. Unlike some other recruits I was not forced to spend a period in the companies section. I would never have been brilliant there; but at least I would have been forced to read a balance sheet, despite having been taught at Cambridge that capital could not be measured. To this day, when I hear that the economy is being held back by weak balance sheets, I never know whether this mysterious disease corresponds to something real for which we have no alternative but to suffer, or to accounting conventions which we could surmount.

David Kynaston (1988) has, in his centenary history of the FT, named some of the contemporary graduate recruits many of whom became well known. The influences from these years were greater than anything at Cambridge. Nevertheless on balance we were pushing in the wrong neocorporatist direction; and if the UK missed a chance of a dash for economic freedom at the right time, there was no prodding in the correct direction from the congregation of FT graduate journalists.

Not many years later I used to amuse myself by imagining the kind of leader that the FT would write if the Communists came to power in Britain. The article would acknowledge misgivings, but would point out that good Marxists were, like the FT, in favour of a high priority for investment.

Eventually the new government would find fresh methods of allocating investment funds. Meanwhile, however, the leader would conclude, it already had an instrument to hand in the stock exchange which it should consider retaining until a long-term substitute was found. Unfortunately, I delayed putting this skit down on paper before the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, after which it was too late.

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