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 Deedes enjoyed a 76-year career as a journalist – from cub reporter to editor |
Extraordinary true life Deedes of legendary Boot of the Beast
Editor, cabinet minister and unwitting hero of a literary classic – Bill Deedes’ life blurred the line between fantasy and reality, writes Geoffrey Goodman
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IN the obsessive ego culture of old Fleet Street (and probably new Fleet Street) where fantasy raced to overtake reality, sentiment became curdled by malice and remarkable talent emerged from the most improbable people, the quaint character of William Francis Deedes was somewhat unique.
Having spent most of his journalistic career as the victim of quiet, albeit friendly ridicule, he ended his days as a National Treasure – an over-liberally squandered term to be sure.
After reading this brilliant biography of Bill Deedes, the question I am still asking is whether his life was one of fantasy – or, more likely, of a man who never overcame his emotional and psychological deficiencies and therefore resorted, perhaps more consciously than he dared to admit, to fantasy.
He ended his 76 years as a journalist at 94 as a Fleet Street legend, of that there is no question; yet, it seems, like so many earlier legends from that street of faded ink, a tarnished one.
For much of his career, both as a journalist and a Conservative politician, Bill Deedes was a conspicuous failure – until his final 20 years when he returned to his original craft as a newspaper reporter.
From cub reporter, via brave war, dismal Cabinet role, weak editor of the Daily Telegraph, mocked in Private Eye etc – until, aged 73, on retirement from an inglorious editorial chair, he went back on the beat for 20 years as a hugely successful reporter, always the cornerstone of real journalism. For my money that is special.
Bill Deedes started as a cub reporter on the ultra-Tory Morning Post in June 1931 when his uncle, Brigadier-General Sir Wyndham Deedes, used his influence with the managing editor of the paper to ensure his nephew found a useful start in life.
His father, Herbert Deedes, had squandered the family fortune leaving them in dire finances. Uncle Wyndham came to the rescue and remained a surrogate father figure to young Bill. It was a psychological scar which may well explain Bill Deedes’ neutral attitude toward his own wife and children.
As a young reporter on the Morning Post he showed real talent and was sent to Addis Ababa where, aged 22, he was assigned to cover the Abyssinian war among some of the world’s finest foreign correspondents. There he met Evelyn Waugh, reporting the war for the Daily Mail. It was a chance relationship that was to immortalise Deedes as William Boot in Waugh’s 1938 novel Scoop.
Deedes’ Second World War service was probably his finest hour. He was awarded the Military Cross for his role in the D-Day landings, notably rescuing men under his command as they fought to cross a canal under crossfire.
Then came his return to Fleet Street and the Telegraph – first to work on the Peterborough column, the paper’s routinely dull daily diary; later to specialise in predictable Telegraph policy features, reflecting a traditional right-wing view on almost everything, including support for South African pro-white policies during the Apartheid era.
Then came a break when he was adopted and elected, in 1950, for the safe Tory seat of Ashford, near his Kent home.
Even so, he retained his Telegraph salary (£1,500 a year) in addition to his MP’s pay, which helped ease the family’s finances though not his relationship with his wife Hilary nor his two sons and three daughters from whom he remained almost entirely detached. He seemed incapable of demonstrating emotional warmth to any of them.
Deedes spent most of his time away from home, and to the end his children never forgave the way he neglected his wife Hilary whom he married in 1942.
Nor was his political career any more successful. After several junior ministerial posts, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan promoted Deedes to a Cabinet post in the role of Minister for Information where he operated as a bumbling spin-doctor, often confused amid various crises including the John Vassall spy case and the Profumo scandal of 1962, both of which Deedes mishandled.
When the Tories lost the 1964 general election he returned to the Telegraph where he was regarded as “a useful hack’ – popular with the paper’s journalists in the office pub, the King and Keys, but never regarded as potential top material.
He retired from Parliament in 1974 and a year later, to everyone’s amazement, Lord Hartwell, owner and editor-in-chief of the paper, appointed Bill Deedes editor.
Stephen Robinson’s book is at its best in his account of the intrigue, bitter in-fighting and managerial incompetence that lay behind the Telegraph’s Fleet Street headquarters. Although Deedes appointed Robinson as his official biographer, the former Telegraph journalist must be applauded not only for a superbly written objective assessment of his subject but also for a brilliantly drawn picture of a great newspaper in turmoil.
Robinson’s candour on the weakness of Deedes’ editing of the Telegraph and his subservience to Hartwell’s ultimately disastrous leadership cannot be faulted. He quotes comments from distinguished colleagues such as Frank Johnson, the incomparable political sketch writer, who described his editor as “an oleaginous creep”. No hagiography this…
It all came to a shattering climax when Conrad Black effectively stole the paper from Hartwell, dismissed Deedes, appointing Max Hastings to take over the editorship. It was Hastings’ inspired move to rescue Deedes by urging him write a regular weekly column and return to reporting – at the age of 73. There followed an entirely new career of reporting in numerous trouble spots across the globe, accompanying Diana, Princess of Wales on her extensive visits to landmine-stricken areas in Angola, Bosnia and elsewhere.
At the end of the book, Robinson draws heavily on Deedes’ emotional vulnerability in describing his obsession with a 27-year-old blonde Telegraph reporter Victoria Combe with whom he worked on numerous reporting assignments. He clearly was in love with her, though by all accounts never attempted to press his feelings to a physical relationship.
Robinson handles this extraordinary friendship with discretion. He sensitively describes the devastating reaction of the Deedes’ family – including a scene at the funeral of the 94-year-old legend last August when the hostility of the family was still evident.
Wisely Robinson resists drawing any psycho-babble conclusions from any of this, though it must have been hard to resist the near obvious one of this aged National Treasure once again in fantasising mode.
n Geoffrey Goodman is a former assistant editor, columnist, and industrial editor of Mirror Group newspapers, and founding editor of British Journalism Review.
n The Remarkable Lives of Bill Deedes.
By Stephen Robinson. Little Brown £20
Order online at www.thecnj.co.uk
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