Few members of this disreputable trade deserve lengthy biographies, but Bill Deedes, I suppose, is one of them. He was, variously, a soldier, a Conservative MP and minister, and an editor of the Daily Telegraph: it is improbable that we shall ever see his like again. One might say, a little unkindly perhaps, that this is a good thing. Stephen Robinson - a long-time friend and colleague of Deedes - attempts to answer the salient question (without actually having posed it): was the esteem in which Deedes was held at the close of his life occasioned by anything more than his remarkable longevity? I suspect, on balance, the answer is no - which is not to deny his usually agreeable character, unquestioned bravery and very occasional flashes of journalistic insight. And, you have to say, he lived in interesting times - the affable chap who emerges here, dressed in his battered corduroys and with a pint of bitter in his hand, is a strange amalgam of Tim Nice-But-Dim and Woody Allen's Zelig. This may not be entirely fair, but seems not so very wide of the mark.

William Francis Deedes was born on June 1, 1913, to a family that was hard-up. That's not hard-up as you or I might recognise the term: it meant that the Deedeses were a bit stretched paying both for the upkeep of the very large castle in which they lived and William's fees at Harrow public school. As he was academically mediocre, his first job as a reporter was delivered to him via “a deplorable example of privilege, nepotism, elitism - there is hardly a strong enough word to condemn it”, as Deedes himself admitted. This was as a cub on the idiosyncratically right-wing and fervently anti-semitic Morning Post, a rag for yer upper classes that is mercifully no longer with us. Here he acquitted himself with an unspectacular competence - and then a stroke of luck: he was dispatched to Abyssinia as the Italians were about to invade, chosen for the role because he was young and single and therefore cheap to insure. He did not amount to much in Africa, journalistically - too prone to what Robinson describes as credulity when faced with authority and the Establishment. However, he showed a commendable sympathy for the Abyssinians that was at odds with most of his rival colleagues, who had no great time for “wogs” and in many cases harboured pro-fascist tendencies. Again, though, by a stroke of luck, Deedes is well remembered from his time there as being the supposed model for Evelyn Waugh's William Boot, the mild and hapless rural journalist plucked by mistake for an important foreign assignment in the novel Scoop. Robinson reckons that even this has the whiff of myth about it. Nonetheless, it is a story that clung to Deedes throughout the rest of his life and did not do him any harm.

Enlisted in the second world war, he proved himself a courageous and humane soldier, eventually winning an MC for his undoubted bravery in rescuing a comrade under a hail of German bullets. As the war drew to a close and it became evident that the British people had had enough of patronage, nepotism and the ruling classes, Deedes railed against the hankering for a new order and a Labour government in a letter to a friend: “The general election has made me madly Tory and I realise with a white-hot blast of horror how ghastly the lower orders and common people are... the lower orders are overpaid, overbearing and think they own the earth... down with workers and Socialists and left-wing fiends...” Not too long after this, through a process that seemed both mystifying and certainly no more taxing than ordering a round in a pub, he was selected as the Conservative party candidate for Ashford in Kent. He served in parliament for 24 years, becoming, along the way, through some equally mystifying elision, a junior minister, minister without portfolio and minister of information; and helping to foist upon the Conservative party, and the country, Alec Douglas-Home as party leader and prime minister, rather than the more extravagantly talented Rab Butler.

He had been for many years a writer on the Daily Telegraph's unjustly revered, ossified and moribund Peterborough diary column. Upon leaving parliament in 1974, he became the editor of the paper - and again one wonders a little at the strength of his journalistic credentials for such a role. It was a difficult time, mind, and he acquitted himself with that usual affable competence, both editorially and in his battles with the print unions. He certainly understood the mentality of the Telegraph's aged, dwindling (though still large) readership. He was replaced in 1986 by Max Hastings - a man who was, in journalistic terms, many times his superior, if not quite so high-born. It was only later that Deedes became the stuff of legend, partly through the Dear Bill columns of Private Eye, which parodied his friendship with Denis Thatcher - two convivial and bibulous old coves suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous modernity - but partly because the journalism of his regular columns towards the end of his life was undoubtedly the best work of his career. Shrewdly observed, fearless, humane and prescient, and betraying a neat turn of phrase, they proved that William Francis Deedes had at last discovered his niche.

Robinson's book is a fascinating study of an era in which men such as Deedes had high office, political and journalistic, thrust upon them.

The Remarkable Lives of Bill Deedes by Stephen Robinson

Little, Brown £20 pp480

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