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“... Has anyone ever been unkind in public about Bill Deedes? I rather doubt it. I was in the House of Commons with him from 1959 until 1964, and also had the occasional dealing with him when he presided over Hartwell’s Telegraph. In the House, he struck a newcomer as the ideal backbencher. He was intelligent (for a Tory, that is), enjoyed an excess of charm, and was a moderate in a party that was beginning to lose patience with Harold Macmillan ...”

“... 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 ...”