The new proprietor took it into head-to-head competition with the Mirror – something that Cudlipp and Rogers had naturally been unwilling to do – and within a few years The Sun had overhauled the Mirror’s circulation.The group was reorganised in 1965 as the International Publishing Corporation (IPC), with Rogers as its managing director. Rogers, a firm but emollient negotiator, succeeded in keeping costs under control; but he came to recognise that eventually the proprietors would have to engineer a showdown with the unions, as Rupert Murdoch did more than two decades later.In 1961, after a takeover battle, the Mirror acquired Odhams Press, publishers of a string of successful magazines as well as the ailing Daily Herald. Rogers, along with the editorial director Hugh Cudlipp, initiated the transformation of the Herald into The Sun, a mid-market paper “born of the age we live in”. It failed to catch the public’s imagination and after five expensive years Rogers was a key figure in selling the title cheaply to Rupert Murdoch in 1969. His principal responsibility was to exert control over the print unions, whose powerful position in the industry made it hard to resist demands for ever-increasing wages and inflated manning levels.

He proved an able manager and in 1952 was sent out to Australia to run the Melbourne Argus, which the group had just acquired.He returned to London three years later and in 1960 was appointed to the board of the Daily Mirror, then dominant in the tabloid market with a circulation approaching five million. King took a liking to him and in 1949 Rogers and his wife Esma – they had married that year – headed for the tropics. Through contact with Herbert Morrison (“Lord Festival”), the cabinet member responsible for the events, Wright was offered a job in the Foreign Office. Key to the original conception of putting the whole country on display in 1951 were the eight major exhibitions and 2,000 or so local events held around Britain. But the central exhibition at the South Bank overshadowed the others by virtue of its scale and striking visual impact.The events were to be the springboard for many distinguished careers, including Wright’s own.

The copy was circulated to around 25 million people and as the first-ever advertisement of its size attracted much additional attention.That the Festival of Britain is now remembered only as an exhibition at the South Bank in London was, Wright admitted later, one of their failures. He decided to spend the whole of his $100,000 budget for North America on a four-page full-colour advertisement in Life magazine. But the fact that public spending on these events was greeted with almost unanimous approval by the press – despite other arguably worthier causes such as new housing – can certainly be linked to Wright and Gerald Barry’s experience in this area.Wright took risks in his publicity campaign that paid off. The BBC had signed up enthusiastically to the project, seeing in it a wealth of opportunities for radio broadcasts from festival sites around the country. Pre-festival polls show that the British public was well disposed, being in need of a morale boost after years of privations. To Wright, it was the calibre of those who contributed that also made it work.

On the main committee he sat alongside Hugh Casson, Director of Architecture, Gordon Russell, the Director of the Council of Industrial Design, and Huw Wheldon as Director of the Arts Council, all of whose contributions beyond the festival were significant.It is difficult to assess the specific contribution of Wright’s PR campaign to the overall success of the festival. The main ideas behind the celebrations – that they would cheer people up after the war while telling a detailed story about Britain’s achievements and potential – were agreed following extensive discussion. He and the other organisers made important decisions, Wright later told me, over “pints of beer and pipes”, during congenial country weekends away. The year before, his friend and Sussex neighbour Gerald Barry, previously Editor of the News Chronicle, had been appointed Director-General of the Festival of Britain. In 1948 he invited Wright to join his team.It was the consensual nature of the festival’s organisation that was key to its success. Over 16 million people were to visit the nationwide events, and the reception was to be almost universally enthusiastic.In 1948, having resigned on a matter of principle from his job at the National Coal Board, Wright was casting around for his next move.