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As a labour correspondent, as deputy editor of two national newspapers and as runner-up for the editorship of this one, John Cole, who has died aged 85, was one of the leading print journalists of his generation, respected above all for his honesty and integrity. However, it was as the BBC's political editor that he came into his own. His nightly appearances on the television news, with his unmistakable brogue and trademark tweed overcoat, made him instantly recognisable wherever he went.
Long after his official retirement in 1992, people still approached him at parties, in pubs and on trains to shake his hand – a process accepted with exemplary grace. Both brogue and overcoat became at times a bit of a trial to him. He did not enjoy the relentless jokes about his Belfast vowels, the Private Eye parodies in which every other paragraph started "hondootedly", or incomprehensible Spitting Image send-ups. He resented the public-school condescension from which they emanated, as if to speak in a Northern Irish accent was somehow quaint or invalid, a second-class way of talking compared with official English.
The son of an electrical engineer, George, who later ran his own business, and his wife, Alice, John was unmistakably a Protestant son of Belfast. After leaving Belfast Royal Academy, in 1945 he began in journalism, as reporter and industrial correspondent of the Belfast Telegraph, and for a time its political man at Stormont. His work caught the eye of the Manchester Guardian, which recruited him in 1956. His expertise was mainly industrial, and soon he was covering strikes, of which in the summer that year there were many. The following year he was posted to the London office as labour correspondent, then one of the three or four most crucial specialist jobs on the paper.
The brogue and the overcoat of his TV days signalled something close to the core of John, inescapably evident to those who worked with him over the years: his scepticism of fashion. That was one of the things that marked out him when, in 1963, Alastair Hetherington, the Guardian's editor, persuaded him to drop writing and reporting to reorganise a newsgathering operation regarded by most of the rest of Fleet Street as amateurish.
His speciality – which I came, as one of his tiny reporting staff, to see as his particular virtue – was to ask the awkward question that punctured glib assumptions and casual simplicities. This insistence was not always popular.
As news editor and later deputy editor of the Guardian, with a strong influence on what the paper had to say in its editorial commentary, John was frequently swimming against the tide. The most difficult issue was Ireland.
On a newspaper where too many assumed that the solutions to problems were simple – reunite the divided island, withdraw, and all would be well – John asserted a greater complexity, insisting that Protestants too had rights that a paper with the Guardian's liberal traditions ought to respect. However, even those sympathetic to that view were dismayed when he committed the paper through its leader columns to supporting internment.
Ireland has sometimes been cited as one of the reasons why, when Hetherington left the editorship in 1975, Peter Preston was chosen in preference to John by a committee set up by the Scott Trust, which owns and controls the paper, as his successor. It was not the conclusive factor. Some, especially those most concerned with commercial success, thought him too old-fashioned to run a late 20th-century newspaper.
John had joined the paper when it still carried the name of Manchester in its title (this was dropped in August 1959) and was edited from Manchester rather than London (as it was until 1964). He stood for a rooted adherence to old Guardian traditions of seriousness, even at the risk of solemnity, especially in politics, and a dogged distrust of metropolitan whim. He had been a crucial influence in mobilising staff resistance to, and shoring up the editor against, a bizarre attempt by the paper's management in a time of financial crisis in 1965-66 to engineer a merger with the Times.
Preston, however, represented adventure and change. John lacked the flair that Preston had in abundance. There was also unease about John's allegiance, never disguised, to the Labour party. But this, as others insisted – including Hetherington, who had sometimes been irked by his dogged party loyalties – did an injustice to John. While never concealing his political sympathies in the editorials he wrote, he had not been slow to assail the party when the Guardian's view of life demanded it.
His failure to become editor was a blow from which John took some time to recover. Preston invited him to stay as deputy editor, but he went to the Observer, and was for six years deputy editor to Donald Trelford. Here again, he was much admired and respected – though also at times resented by some who found him inflexible, and not only over Ireland.
But as time went on he became increasingly restive. He had now turned 50, and had never had the role he had always craved – reporting politics directly. In 1981, the BBC offered him the post of political editor. Though as a newspaper journalist he had often appeared on radio and TV, he had little direct experience of working with microphones and cameras. Yet here was a man, experienced and judicious, respected and trusted by politicians of all parties. The BBC took a chance on him.
It is not too much to say that John revolutionised the routine broadcast reporting of politics. He reported with the directness, and the readiness to commit himself, which was common among newspaper journalists. That is not to say that he allowed his private opinions, strong as they invariably were, to barge into what he reported. Anyone who talked to him knew what he believed in. For him, a supreme political issue, from his earliest reporting days in Belfast, was unemployment and the way it laid waste to lives. He would listen, impatience boiling only just beneath his professional courtesy, to those who explained that keeping people out of work was an unpleasant but necessary aspect of counter-inflation policy.
Again refusing to succumb to the dictates of fashion, he remained convinced of the worth and the necessity of trade unions. He was affronted by those who viewed working men and women in free association as enemies of the people.
That put him temperamentally on the opposite side of the argument to Margaret Thatcher's governments of his BBC years. One might have expected that a man with his sympathies would have been a constant subject of reproach and complaint. Yet such was John's scrupulousness and his readiness to give fair representation to causes with which he disagreed that few could be found to traduce the political editor of what some Tories delighted in calling the Bolshevik Broadcasting Corporation.
Perhaps his greatest exclusive was the late-night report in November 1990, at a time when few had suggested it, that Thatcher might stand down the next morning rather than risk defeat in the final stage of the Tory leadership contest. John trusted his sources to tell him the truth, and they did, being people whose trust he had earned.
In 1992, John "retired" as BBC political editor. In fact, there was no real retirement, merely the tuning-down of the demanding regime of the past 11 years. That endless round of activity was a source of apprehension to friends and family. Even Madge, his wife, whom he had married the year he joined the Guardian, whom he so often consulted and whose views, at times, he even deferred to, could not put a brake on his hyperactivity.
His health was never dependable. There was always a particular risk of the heart disease that had killed his father at 52 and his brother at 59. In February 1984, he was taken ill at the House of Commons and rushed to hospital. A long spell off work followed, and the continuing regular check-ups that did not always please his examiners. Someone in the hospital team always seemed to have heard him on Radio 4's Today programme the previous morning, or seen him on Newsnight the previous evening.
Stepping down from the political editorship allowed him to ration his radio and TV work, while giving him time to get back to writing. This was a real relief, for the soundbite constraints of broadcast news often left him frustrated, bursting to develop a case in a less perfunctory way.
After leaving the Guardian, John had taken time off to produce a book on third world development, The Poor of the Earth. In 1987 he published The Thatcher Years, a serviceable if slightly drab account of the prime minister's revolution in her first two terms. But now he started work on a book that became a bestseller, As It Seemed to Me (1995), a kind of cross between a political notebook and an autobiography. As ever, what he wrote was marked by his rugged refusal to be swayed by fashion. He even wrote with affection of Reginald Maudling, a name scarcely mentioned since its owner's plunge into political obloquy in the early 1970s.
In 2001, Weidenfeld & Nicolson published John's novel based in Northern Ireland during the latest troubles, A Clouded Peace, on which he had worked through endless revisions for several years, advised and encouraged by his publisher Ion Trewin, to whom, along with Madge, he dedicated the book.
John was far from a puritanical man, lacking in fun, exclusively obsessed with his work. He loved entertaining, going to parties, gossiping, setting the world to rights over a late-night drink.
Much more than most of the wives of political journalists, Madge was often there with him. In his retirement he took up golf and travel, making TV programmes about them, sometimes in tandem with her. The phenomenal success of his working life was Madge's achievement as well as his.
A committed Christian, latterly closely engaged with the United Reformed Church at Kingston upon Thames, near his home at Claygate in Surrey, he served on a churches commission on unemployment, a phenomenon that continued to haunt and outrage him. His last years were marred by ill-health – continuing heart trouble, two mildly disabling strokes and, in May 2009, the discovery that he had cancer, the treatment for which inevitably put an additional strain on his heart. He remained as ever devoted to his family and his friends, eager to philosophise and to argue, devoted to his church and his political causes, impervious to prevailing fashion. Sadly, he developed in his very last years progressive aphasia, which first quenched, and then silenced, the characteristic effervescent and irrepressible flow of his talk.
He is survived by Madge, their four sons, Donald, Patrick, David and Michael, and nine grandchildren.
• John Morrison Cole, journalist, born 23 November 1927; died 7 November 2013
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