A headline in his own lunchtime

A headline in his own lunchtime, William Deedes is about as near to legendary as a journalist can become; familiar to many as the supposed recipient of fictional letters from Denis Thatcher in Private Eye, assumed by many more to be the model for Boot in Evelyn Waugh's Scoop, he was a fearless war correspondent, editor of the Daily Telegraph and a Conservative Member of Parliament and Cabinet Minister during the 1950s and 1960s. In his seventies he did sterling work in the Third World and at the age of eighty-something he still works "more or less full-time" in a newspaper office. All of which ought to be inspirational: as indeed, recounted with typically British dryness, much of it is. But what emerges most strongly from the book is the extent to which British journalism and politics constitute, at the highest levels, a chummy club of right-minded chaps who, through selflessness, emergency meetings and almost constant use of the telephone, allow the heedless unwashed to sleep safely in their beds. An Evelyn Waugh novel, did somebody say? If only it were.