In a career that spanned seven decades, WF Deedes proved more than pretty good in a spectacular range of professions. A confident and ambitious journalist at twenty-two, Deedes began a life-long relationship with the Daily Telegraph when reporting from Abyssinia alongside Evelyn Waugh in the 1930s. He served as an officer during the Second World War and was awarded the Military Cross for his heroism. After the war he became an MP and a Cabinet Minister and was made a life peer by Margaret Thatcher in 1986. As journalism s most enduring by-line, Bill Deedes continued to work even after his retirement and was only kept from reporting in Iraq by an essential medical procedure. He published his final article in the Telegraph on 3 August 2007. He died two weeks later.

Deedes consented to this authorized biography on the understanding that it would be published only after his death. Thus, this is a franker and fuller account of Deedes' life than that put across in his own memoirs.