In Pyjamas 
R.W. Johnson
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.
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R.W. Johnson, an emeritus fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, lives in Cape Town, where he is completing a book on South Africa since the advent of democracy.
Other articles by this contributor:
Burning Blankets · Robert Mugabe’s latest tidy-up
Nerds, Rabbits and a General Lack of Testosterone · Major and Lamont
Cads · Roosevelt’s Secret War: FDR and World War Two Espionage by Joseph Persico.
Mr Shepperd to you · Classes and Cultures: England 1918-51 by Ross McKibbin
Her Boy · Mark Thatcher
How Mugabe came to power · R.W. Johnson talks to Wilfred Mhanda
Where do we go from here? · Zimbabwe
Rogue’s Paradise · The Russians and the Anglo-Boer War by Apollon Davidson and Irina Filatova
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