Victoria Combe hits back at claims by Bill Deedes biographer

Was the venerable Bill Deedes, the long-serving Daily Telegraph journalist and former Cabinet minister who died last August at the age of 94, romantically involved with a woman journalist less than half his age, Victoria Combe? Absolutely not, says Combe, writing at the weekend in an effort to dispel the innuendo she believes is evident in a new biography by Stephen Robinson, The Remarkable Lives of Bill Deedes.

Combe travelled widely with Bill Deedes - to Sudan, Pakistan, Sarajevo and Mozambique among other countries - and co-wrote many articles with him in the years before his death. Because they became friends, she says, they bought each other gifts and once, when she was "particularly broke", he helped pay part of the costs of a trip she made to Africa with him.

But she says Robinson got the wrong end of the stick about their relationship, after interviewing her during his research. "I told him [Robinson] that there had never been a moment in 13 years I had known and worked with Bill when he had given me so much as a longing look, let alone made a pass. He was my dear friend and mentor, nothing else," she wrote in the Sunday Times.

But Robinson was convinced there was more to it, she says. Describing a trip to Mozambique, he writes: "They lingered briefly on the balcony, staring through the darkness at the Indian Ocean... Bill bedded down in his suite, no doubt contemplating what might have been, but before long there was a knocking on his door. He fumbled for a match to light his bedside candle and stumbled to the door to find Victoria standing in the corridor with a torch, asking for the return of her insect spray."

Combe says Robinson's "most unpleasant" claim is that Deedes's friendship with her was the reason why his wife Hilary left the family home in 1997 after more than 50 years of marriage and moved to Berwick-upon-Tweed in the Scottish borders.

Deedes told Combe that his wife had had an operation and wanted to be near her daughter Lucy. Deedes, who continued to live in Kent, intended to spend long weekends with her but could not bear to stop working and travelling on newspaper assignments.