Long life | 10 January 2013

William Rees-Mogg, who has died, the Oxford-educated member of an old Somerset family, was widely seen as the archetypal ‘gentleman journalist’, but he aspired to be rather grander than that. Even before he became editor of the Times in 1967 he had upstaged his landowning forebears by buying himself an enormous 18th-century country house, Ston Easton Park near Bath, complete with fancy plasterwork, which he set about restoring and embellishing. He even asked the Times’s then Rome correspondent, the late Peter Nichols, to see about getting a replica made of Bernini’s boat-shaped fountain in the Piazza di Spagna — the famous Fontana della Barcaccia — for placing on the gravel sweep in front of the house. Nothing came of the idea, and perhaps it was never completely serious; but it was what Peter told me, and, given the character of the man, it seemed quite plausible.

Rees-Mogg felt destined to become a pillar of the Establishment; and when he was thwarted in his political ambitions, he achieved his goal through journalism. His grave, thoughtful appearance assisted his rise: he just looked the part of an Establishment grandee. And he was a reassuring presence among the rich and powerful, someone who could articulate their opinions for them and make them feel cleverer than they were. He was himself, of course, clever and an excellent journalist, and he was far from being the pompous ass he was sometimes caricatured as. He was kind and generous, and, like most journalists, he enjoyed gossip and jokes and trouble.

It is to Rees-Mogg’s troublemaking side that I owe the fact that ever since 1980 my birthday has been published in the Times each year. In 1979, the late Auberon Waugh, in one of his weekly columns in The Spectator (of which I was then editor), had described what happened when he tried to get his own birthday mentioned in the Times.