Charles Prestwich Scott (26 October 1846 – 1 January 1932) was a
British journalist, publisher and politician. Born in
Bath,
Somerset, he was the editor of the
Manchester Guardian from 1872 until 1929 and its owner from 1907 until his death. He was also a
Liberal Member of Parliament and pursued a progressive liberal agenda in the pages of the newspaper.
Educated at Hove House and Clapham Grammar School, Scott went up to Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He took a first in Greats in the autumn of 1869, then in 1870 went to Edinburgh to train on The Scotsman. While at Oxford, his cousin John Taylor, who ran the London office of the Manchester Guardian, decided that the paper needed an editor based in Manchester and offered Scott the post. Scott already enjoyed a familial connection with the paper; its founder, John Edward Taylor, was his uncle, and at the time of his birth Scott's father, Russell Scott, was the paper's owner, though he later sold it back to Taylor's sons under the terms of Taylor's will. Accepting the offer, Scott joined the paper as their London editor in February 1871. and became its editor on 1 January 1872.
As editor Scott initially maintained the Guardian's well-established moderate Liberal line, "to the right of the party, to the right, indeed, of much of its own special reporting" (Ayerst, 1971). However, when in 1886 the whigs led by Lord Hartington and a few radicals led by Joseph Chamberlain, split the party, formed the Liberal Unionist Party and gave their backing to the Conservatives, Scott's Guardian swung to the left and helped Gladstone lead the party towards support for Irish Home Rule and ultimately the "new liberalism".
In 1886, Scott fought his first general election as a Liberal candidate, an unsuccessful attempt in the Manchester North East constituency; he stood again for the same seat in 1891 and 1892. He was elected at the 1895 election as MP for Leigh, and thereafter spent long periods away in London during the parliamentary session. His combined position as a Liberal backbencher, the editor of an important Liberal newspaper, and the president of the Manchester Liberal Federation made him an influential figure in Liberal circles, albeit in the middle of a long period of opposition. He was re-elected at the 1900 election despite the unpopular stand against the Boer War that the Guardian had taken, but retired from Parliament at the time of the Liberal landslide victory in 1906, at which time he was occupied with the difficult process of becoming owner of the newspaper he edited.
