Bill Deedes is justly celebrated as a nice man and an English archetype, the sort of character Ian Carmichael used to play in Ealing comedies: Woosterish, emollient, never standing on his rank, always accepting Tory family values - usually expressed more forcefully by a fearsome, chauffeur-driven auntie figure, as played by Margaret Rutherford, or, in Deedes's own life, by Margaret Thatcher. Journalists love him - always have loved him - because he is so much one of them. When editor of the Daily Telegraph he horrified the paper's hierarchy by drinking regularly in the pub next door with fellow hacks. He tried, he says, to turn down his peerage, but was told by Thatcher's office that this was bad behaviour. So he accepted it but goes to the Lords as little as possible and refuses to take the daily allowance.

LRB 17 November 2005 | PDF Download