Bill Deedes: ‘Waugh was a pig’

Bill Deedes, the journalist who was still writing for the Daily Telegraph at the grand old age of 94 before his death last August, kept a secret all his adult life. Although he enjoyed the joke that Evelyn Waugh based the character Boot in Scoop, his satirical novel about journalism, on Deedes, he despised Waugh for being a snob.

In a biography - The Remarkable Lives of Bill Deedes - to be published later this month, Stephen Robinson claims that while Deedes avoided the subject in his own autobiographical books, he admitted to Robinson what he really thought of Waugh, whom he met when they covered Mussolini's invasion of Abyssinia together in 1935.

"Waugh was a natural shit," Deedes told Robinson. "Scoop shows his contempt for journalism and for the lower classes. He knew he was a pig, he knew of his awfulness, which is why he clung to his Catholicism: it was something he hoped would redeem him."

This was strong stuff for Deedes, who rarely spoke ill of anyone during his long career as a reporter, Tory Cabinet minister, and newspaper editor (of the Telegraph from 1974 - 1986). Characteristically, he never told Waugh what he thought of him. "I think he found me a bore; I found him a snob, but we were very civil, never a cross word."

Although Deedes enjoyed the long-held contention that Boot was based on him - "it added to his celebrity and it was a jolly good joke" - the journalist was quite unlike the fictional Boot, the timid country notes writer who is accidentally sent by the Beast to cover a war.

In fact, says Robinson, when they went off to Abyssinia in the summer of 1935, "Deedes was a handsome, dandyish young man about town, with four years of experience on the Morning Post under his belt... Undoubtedly Waugh found the sight of Deedes's quarter-ton of luggage at Addis Ababa railway station hilarious, but that is all Deedes brought to the hero of Scoop."