So much was written about Bill Deedes at the time of his death — not to mention his own two autobiographies and the mass of other doting media coverage in recent years — that readers might be forgiven for thinking that this intelligently probing and well-written authorised biography would have little fresh to say. Truth to tell, that is what this reviewer feared. My hopes for the book, however, were soon realised because early on Stephen Robinson, himself a veteran Telegraph man, tells us that Bill went to great lengths ‘to weed out all the disobliging references to himself in his voluminous filing cabinet’. Disobliging references? Shurely shome mistake. Why would anybody want to disoblige dear Bill? That is the question which this book tries to answer, and succeeds definitively. Quite simply, dear Bill was not nearly so dear as his legend would have us believe.

First of all that friendship with Denis Thatcher never really existed, if only because Deedes was incapable, until the very end of his life, of forming any close personal relationships, not even with his wife and children, whom he neglected cruelly. The friendship may have been important for Denis. But for the loner Deedes, it was, at best, a drinking and golfing companionship. Bill went along with the media fairytale because it provided him with a useful mask.

The same could be said of the popular belief, which Deedes never discouraged, that he was the wet-behind-the-ears young journalist in Scoop, on whom Evelyn Waugh based the comic character of Boot. It now transpires that there was little truth in this attribution. The real Boot, more likely than not, was another journalist called Bateson, who has never received his deserved immortality. Deedes had always known the truth but chose to keep quiet ‘so as not to destroy an amusing myth that did his career and reputation no harm’. Another mask.

It is also mildly disquieting to learn that Deedes actually hated Evelyn Waugh. Being himself a genuine patrician — from a long line of Kentish squires — he found Waugh’s middle-class kind of snobbery disagreeably ‘common’, rather in the same way as Deedes mocked Lord Snowdon for looking ‘more and more like a shop-walker’. None of this class consciousness accords with the dear Bill myth. Nor do young Deedes’s expressions of contempt for the working classes. ‘Down with the rodgering-dodgering proletariat’, he writes in a letter to an army friend during the 1945 elections. ‘How ghastly the lower orders and common people are.’ This Bollinger Club kind of talk, too, was another variety of mask, adopted for use in the officers’ mess.

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