Putting the Boot in

For a man whose mythic mantra was ‘never a cross word’, the news that in old age he told his daughter that he ‘hated women’ also comes as a bit of a shock, as, even more so, does the reason he gives for that hate. It was because, as a wartime company commander, it had been his duty to write letters of condolence to riflemen’s widows ‘whom he knew had been unfaithful to their husbands’. Not at all the kind of dark thoughts dear Bill would have had. Equally revealing in a rather different way is the reason he gave for disapproving of Malcolm Muggeridge’s notorious affair with Lady Pamela Berry, wife of Michael Berry (later Lord Hartwell) the then owner of the Daily Telegraph, who was the boss of both men. Such behaviour, Bill opined, ‘showed an important lack of respect and gratitude’.

Which brings us to the element in Deedes’s character which the Bertie Wooster/ dear Bill legend entirely ignores: his crippling and chronic reluctance under any circumstances to let those in positions of authority over him ever to feel the rough edge of his tongue, a habit which served him well as boy at Harrow. It was where ‘his skill at navigating his way out of trouble’ helped him to escape the rod, and even better as a junior officer in the army during the second world war when it facilitated the physical courage and leadership on the battlefield which won him the MC. It did not serve him so well in his career in journalism and politics where a willingness to tell the truth to power — as the phrase goes — is indispensable.

So about Deedes’s record as a cabinet minister in Harold Macmillan’s government, and then as editor of the Daily Telegraph, this book has little to his credit to say. Indeed one of the very few pieces of prose from these two periods that is quoted — tellingly described as ‘sinuous’, full of terms and curves — appears in an obsequious letter written by Deedes, who was by then already a cabinet minister for heaven’s sake, to Lord Hartwell, angling for a job. Nor does the ministerial record, which took in the Vassal and Profumo scandals, and the controversial succession of Lord Home to the prime ministership, fare much better. No one in Westminster, it seems, ‘took him seriously, least of all Deedes himself’. The biographer does his best to be fair, but hints of duplicity and mendacity cannot be missed. Truth to tell, neither as minister nor as editor does Deedes excel.

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