As editor Scott initially maintained The Manchester Guardian's well-established moderate Liberal line, "to the right of the party, to the right, indeed, of much of its own special reporting".

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.

[8] He was re-elected at the 1900 election despite the unpopular stand against the Boer War that the Guardian had taken,[9] but retired from Parliament at the time of the Liberal landslide victory in 1906, when he was occupied with the difficult process of becoming owner of the newspaper he edited.

His will provided that the trustees of his estate should give Scott first refusal on the copyright of the Manchester Guardian at £10,000, and recommended that they should offer him the offices and printing works of the paper on "moderate and reasonable terms".

Scott was therefore forced to dig deep to buy the paper: he paid a total of £240,000, taking large loans from his sisters and from Taylor's widow (who had been his chief supporter among the trustees) to do so.

His leaders denounced a "conspiracy to drag us into a war against England's interests", arguing that it would amount to a "crime against Europe" and warning that it would "throw away the accumulated progress of half a century".

He struck up a remarkable friendship with the Jewish émigré, whose intellectual brilliance and business savvy was lately attracting the attention of even the Tory Press and senior ministers.

Scott wrote regularly in the New Statesman dealing frankly and openly with the Samuel Memorandum; they would all come together in Downing Street for a top-level summit on the Palestine Question.

The Curragh incident had profoundly shocked the establishment in Ireland; on 27 July 1916 Scott would hold just a one-off meeting with General Macready, Lord Reading and Lloyd George in the aftermath of the Easter Rising.

His membership involved serious friendships with other editors, including G. Lowes Dickinson, but his closest political intimate was Irish leader John Dillon.

Despite Lloyd George's objection to the reporter's anonymity there remained little chance of compromising their French colleagues in a city already renowned for prostitution.

In a 1921 essay marking the Manchester Guardian's centenary (at which time he had served nearly fifty years as editor), Scott put down his opinions on the role of the newspaper.

While supporting female suffrage, Scott was hostile to militant suffragettes in his editorials, accusing them of employing 'every engine of misguided fanaticism in order to wreck, if it be in their power, the fair prospects of their cause'[17] He was just as disturbed by the General Strike of 1926, asking 'Will not the General Strike cease to be counted henceforth as a possible or legitimate weapon of industrial warfare'[18] Irish rebels were authors of their own destruction, he thought.

His successor as editor was his youngest son, Ted Scott, though C. P. remained as Governing Director of the company and was at the Guardian offices most evenings.

In 1882, having built a new house in Darley Dale in Derbyshire, Sir Joseph Whitworth leased The Firs in Fallowfield in Manchester to his friend C. P.