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Deedes has a similar sensitivity to cant, as we discover on joining him at Buckingham Palace in 1981. Along with other editors when he occupied the Telegraph chair, our now nonagenarian hero of the higher reportage heard the Queen complain gently that poor Princess Diana was unable even to pop into a sweet-shop without being besieged by photographers. The editor of the News of the World ‘plaintively’ asked why she couldn’t send out a footman for her sweets. ‘I think,’ said the Queen, ‘that is the most pompous remark I ever heard in my life.’
Over the decades Dear Bill’s ear has been at the world’s keyhole. It is the nature of his eye to see things in perspective, from foreign parts (like the Philippines when Imelda Marcos held sway) to such home events as the more comprehensible than reprehensible rise of Oswald Mosley, which he treats almost with tenderness. Directly he never says much for himself; the nearest he gets to the personal is catching the 5pm to his Ashford constituency with No
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