R.I.P. Lord Deedes

On Friday last, the U.K.’s Telegraph lost one of its finest: W.F. Deedes. He died, age 94, halfway through his final column, putting his laptop to the side of his bed only when he was simply too weak to continue. Check out the Telegraph’s tribute page.

Lord Deedes had been a British peer for over twenty years, being knighted just under ten years ago for services to humanity. Not only did he sit as a Conservative member of Commons, a minister in Harold MacMillan’s government in the 1960s, he is the only person to have served in Cabinet and been the editor of a national newspaper. Bill Deedes was a journalist for 76 years.

I read his columns semi-regularly, always enjoying what he wrote and how he wrote it. If ever there was the “gentleman journalist,” he was it, and he died “in harness,” remaining an active contributor to the paper he loved.

From commentaries on him ….

… on his instinctive compassionate conservatism:

He was not flashy. But if you wanted something done, Bill Deedes was your man.

The virtues that Lord Deedes exhibited are underrated today, when it frequently seems that surface glitter is more appreciated than substance.

Lord Deedes devoted much of his life to trying to help the disadvantaged, without ever drawing attention to that fact.

He was, perhaps, the best exemplar of a compassionate Conservative: someone who sees that the best way to diminish life’s inevitable unfairnesses and injuries is not to set up a government committee or to wait for someone else to do something, but to get on with trying to combat the troubles he encounters.

As the Conservative Party ponders the path to take and which values to project, it should remember Bill Deedes. The life he lived could stand as a model for both.

… on his other-worldly good nature:

In 2000, when I became comment editor of The Daily Telegraph, I was lucky enough to work with him. He would come to the afternoon leader conferences at which it was decided what the leading articles should be and what line they should take. He was only 87 then, but my impressions from meeting him in the corridor or over a pint in the Henry Addington (or later the Cat and Canary) had been that he was rather distant from the world, a bit deaf and isolated. The impression was reinforced by his habit of singing little tunes, a bit like Winnie the Pooh.

But I soon discovered my mistake. I was utterly wrong. He would show immediate insight into topics under discussion in leader conferences, and amusingly bring to bear his memories of parallel political circumstances from the days of Stanley Baldwin, say.

From his own hand …

… on new lefties vrs. old lefties:

And she a Socialist! But Mrs Castle makes no bones about her liking for the good things of life, a good dinner, high company, a little pomp and circumstance - all right, she says, as long as you don’t inhale!

On her own front, through most of these Diaries, she is in pitched battles with consultants, with junior doctors and defenders of paybeds.

Of course one should argue that she misdirected prodigious energy on wrong and damaging objectives. Yet, after reading it all and taking a political holiday, I would argue something different.

These Diaries are, as perhaps she intended, more a portrait of Mrs Castle than of anyone else. They are, overall, the portrait of a parliamentary democrat.

With the advent of the new and nasty Left, one reads Mrs Castle’s Diaries with something like nostalgia. Again, one can argue, and some will, that it was precisely the likes of her that paved the way to the new and nasty Left; that from just such political wombs the monster sprang.

But one thing that distinguishes the old Left from the new Left is the capacity occasionally to laugh at yourself.

… on not blaming all of Africa’s problems on the West:

… not all African woes can be attributed to neglect by the West. That claim raises the temperature, sets people marching to attack greedy nations that misruled Africans in the past and now turn a cold shoulder to their needs. It also falsifies history. I have always conceded that we granted independence to Africa on the tail of Harold Macmillan’s “wind of change” too precipitately. No administrative framework was in place. The countries hastily granted independence were up for grabs.

By contrast, Southern Rhodesia was put on the road to freedom by Margaret Thatcher and with an orderly election. And who won? Mugabe, of whose misrule we still read most days of the week. There is no sensible way forward for Africa until we recognise the extent to which African rulers rather than the West are so heavily responsible for its plight.

… on Darfur, his last column, two weeks ago:

It is time the world was shaken awake to the infamy of what is going on in Darfur. In terms of man’s inhumanity to man, what has been going on there for four years is now comparable to the death camps for which Germany’s Nazis were found guilty. That statement may provoke cries of outrage from some: surely the Holocaust stands alone?

Not to me it doesn’t, and as a soldier I had to enter one of those camps and went to the trial of its commandant. I have also been to Darfur.

I can make comparisons. I can never get out of my mind the picture of families in Darfur striving to live under the shelter of thorn bushes, the children’s fingers clutching wretched little cooking pots to keep the rain out.

Women and children were hunted like wild animals, raped, robbed and left for dead. What has been happening in Darfur is unspeakable; and much of the world has simply shrugged its shoulders. They are an unknown people in a far-off land. What business is it of ours? It is very much our business, because behind this ghastly inhumanity lies the iron will of Islam in Khartoum.

I have learnt something about that will from countless visits to Sudan in recent years. It is that will which determines there shall be no effective peacekeeping force in Darfur. This newspaper is right to cry out against the idea that the United Nations could do the job and to reproach Gordon Brown for supporting the idea.

It could not do so because within the UN the influences of Islam are so strong. I don’t wish to seem offensive to Islam, but not to be aware of its power in the world today is to be half-awake.

A remarkable man!