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 The Remarkable Lives of Bill Deedes.
By Stephen Robinson Abacus |
Bill pointed to his
own scandal from
beyond the grave
Exposing a national treasure’s secret love life meant a rough ride for his biographer, writes Gerald Isaaman
The Remarkable Lives of Bill Deedes.
By Stephen Robinson Abacus
SCANDAL in Fleet Street! It is perhaps appropriately perverse that while the Daily Telegraph fulfils its national muck-racking mission exposing our MPs and their diabolical expenses, scandal should reappear on its own doorstep with the paperback edition of Stephen Robinson’s brilliant biography of its much favoured son Bill Deedes.
While it is not exactly corrosive scandal that is in the air – or the bedroom for that matter – Robinson’s authorised account of the life of a man who became something of a national treasure was dramatically dogged by two time-bombs left under his deathbed.
And they both exploded when the book appeared last year, undoubtedly exciting its sale and giving Robinson a public hand-bagging at the time.
One, as he recounts in an Afterword chapter in the new edition, was Deedes’ abhorrence of the current owners of the newspaper, the millionaire Barclay brothers, whom, as something of a guardian angel of the paper he worked on – and edited – for decades, Deedes regarded as unsuitable stewards of its future.
But the other arcane area of Deedes’s life was the revelation of his doting love for a young reporter named Victoria Combe during the last years of his life – he was 94 when he died in 2007 – which shattered his readers’ beloved image of him and caused some family distress.
And the most remarkable fact is that Deedes never completed the deed – never went to bed with Victoria as she travelled round the world with him as his cosy companion, though Robinson’s recounted scene of her appearing in his bedroom one night in Mozambique dressed in a gym vest, certainly set tongues wagging.
So much so that Robinson got slapped down by angry Victoria – and then by a woman visitor who lashed out at him verbally at a literary festival – so much so that he has felt obliged to revisit the scene and declare, unequivocally this time, that any hanky panky was undoubtedly only in Bill’s mind, if nowhere else, and that no physical embrace took place.
“I think they were soul mates,” insists 47-year-old Robinson, who lives off Regents Park Road, Primrose Hill. “For Bill, his trips abroad with Victoria were probably the happiest weeks of his life. It was heaven for him to go away in an English winter to South Africa or the Sudan or wherever with young Victoria.”
And he is not even sure that Bill – he was born in Hampstead, of course – would have contemplated sex outside marriage because he was, above all, a man of honour, a brave soldier who won an MC, fighter against fascism, MP and Cabinet minister, someone considered a gentleman with a reputation beyond fair criticism.
Yet while Bill’s sister, Mary, was outraged, his own children were robust in recognising their father’s tryst, one daughter declaring that he would not have left his confessional papers behind for Robinson to read unless he wanted the romantic story to be told.
The children equally believed that Victoria herself, only 27 when she met Bill, was naïve if she did not acknowledge their father’s affection for her, the more so because they felt unhappily rejected by him.
The troubles probably resulted from the two worlds Bill engulfed during a long life that encompassed the major events of the 20th century and the start of the 21st, including Mrs Thatcher’s reign, and the very different attitudes between today’s young people and their forebears.
That was one reason for Robinson’s Afterword. “I thought there was a certain misunderstanding when the book came out, which almost certainly is my fault,” he admits. “Bill Deedes appeared slightly differently to the outside world than he appeared to his own family. And I didn’t know that.
“I didn’t realise the way his children felt rejected. And I was taken aback a bit by that. I knew the book would cause a fuss. He left his papers for me to read and it was pretty tough on Victoria because I’m pretty sure she didn’t know that, and was reasonably surprised by the depths of his feelings for her.
“Did he want to go to bed with her? I’m not even sure that he did. For him it was the very idea of it. Having sex outside marriage would have appalled him. Nevertheless, he was emotionally infatuated with Victoria and certainly physically drawn to her.
“But I don’t think it occurred to Bill to act upon it.”
Of course all this sounds like a twitter in a tram shed compared to the real scandals of the Telegraph, which has instituted mass sackings of staff, Robinson included after 20 loyal years, as it attempts to stay alive in the internet age of reckless banking and dire recession.
Yet it has boosted a flagging circulation – and its esteem – with its on-going expose of parliamentary excesses, though Robinson is not sure that Deedes, the very model for Evelyn Waugh’s dithering reporter hero in Scoop, would have approved of paying for allegedly purloined computer discs revealing so much abuse and corruption.
“Bill would have been uncomfortable about paying for the story,” he says. “I think, honestly, he would have disapproved.”
But he didn’t, apparently, worry that much about the small scandals he so deliberately left behind for his biographer – provided he was dead when they hit the headlines.
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