Bill's still up to the Deedes of a good reporter

Bill Deedes, celebrated British journalist, is still on the frontline at 86, writes MAUREEN JOHNSON in London

IN 1935, Bill Deedes covered the Abyssinian war in what is now Ethiopia alongside novelist Evelyn Waugh, who turned the experience into the celebrated book Scoop.

In 1999 -- at the age of 86 -- his crumpled face and twinkling eyes look out from the pages of London's Daily Telegraph over reports from refugee camps on the Albania-Macedonia border and from ravaged Kosovo villages, where he first showed up right after Nato peacekeepers.

Humour and modesty are the hallmarks of Deedes -- former newspaper editor, one-time Cabinet minister, confidant of Margaret Thatcher during her tenure as prime minister, campaigner with Princess Diana against land mines, and peer of the realm since 1986.

But most of all, as he looks back on one century and prepares to enter another, Lord Deedes is a reporter.

Deedes' stint in Kosovo followed reporting duties in Sudan, Ethiopia, Russia, South Africa, Bosnia, Rwanda, and Angola.

Just about wherever news happens, he is there, writing articles or chronicling in his weekly newspaper column the foibles and quirks behind the story.

"It's a drug really, isn't it?" he says, courteously considering a well-worn question about whether he might ever contemplate retiring from journalism. "I like never knowing what you are going to be asked to do next."

Deedes has long made news, too. He was a Conservative Party MP for 24 years until 1974, including a 1962-64 stint as a somewhat reluctant minister without portfolio in the Cabinet of Tory Prime Minister Harold Macmillan.

And throughout Margaret Thatcher's formidable tenure as prime minister from 1979 to 1990, he was "Dear Bill," the recipient of a fake letter the satirical magazine Private Eye carried each week from her husband, Denis Thatcher.

The letters -- mostly written during Deedes' stint as editor of the staunchly conservative Daily Telegraph -- portrayed the prime minister's husband as hen-pecked, gin-loving and forever laying plans to escape for a round of golf from a tedious trail of official engagements with "the Boss".

Far from taking offence at also being targeted by the satire, Deedes called his 1997 autobiography "Dear Bill".

It is an understated, riveting chronicle of a life spanning most of the century -- from childhood in an upper middle-class family that ran out of money, through private school, working as a trainee reporter in London's Fleet Street in 1931, serving as a soldier -- he was decorated for valour -- as the allies pushed through Nazi Germany, and taking on different roles in politics and journalism.

In the past decade, Deedes has linked up with aid agencies, most notably Unicef, Care and Save the Children. It is, he modestly explains, "a safe way to get into famines, wars, conflicts".

It was through the agencies that Deedes met Princess Diana and, together in 1997, they went to Bosnia, visiting land mine victims and publicising their shared cause.

In public, she was a serious crusader. In private, she played tricks on him, such as uttering the phrase, "Have a gin and tonic," watching his eyes light up and then producing a glass of water.

Two years earlier, Deedes had encouraged her to take up the crusade, and, as he puts it, referring to her maiden outcry against the devices, "I lent a hand with the speech".

They had planned more trips to protest against land mines, but Diana was killed in a car crash in Paris in August 1997.

"Diana was a riveting example of someone who showed us you don't have to be a saint to do good in the world," he says. "You can be subject to human frailty and still have a terrific influence on humanity."

Almost everything interests Deedes, and almost everything reminds him of something else.

"At least in Germany in 1945 we had some idea how the country was to be run. But in Kosovo, everything, from schools to taxation, is non-existent," Deedes wrote after Nato forces took over.

He was grateful that his hotel lift at least worked. "At a certain age, walking up 10 flights of stairs to your bedroom becomes an ordeal," he wrote in another dispatch.

The comment represented one of the rare concessions he makes to age. -- Sapa-AP