Lord Deedes, the newspaper editor, Cabinet minister, war hero and perpetual journalist, died at home in Kent last night at the age of 94.

His was a career that spanned generations: the correspondent who had begun in the 1930s with a famous journey to Abyssinia as a fledgeling reporter was still filing copy a matter of days ago, with a newspaper column on another African war zone — the conflict in Darfur — this month.

Bill Deedes became one of Britain’s most celebrated and best-loved journalists, immortalised by Evelyn Waugh, affectionately satirised in later life in Private Eye’s Dear Bill letters.

Last night tributes were led by the Prime Minister and his predecessor Baroness Thatcher. “Few have served journalism and the British people for so long at such a high level of distinction and with such a popular following,” Gordon Brown said.

Baroness Thatcher told The Daily Telegraph: “Bill was a dear friend who will be greatly missed. He had a uniquely distinguished career in politics and journalism. He managed to appeal to new generations just as effectively as he did to earlier ones. I am deeply sorry at his passing.”

William Francis Deedes was born in 1913, and educated at Harrow. At 18 he joined the Morning Post and was soon sent on his first foreign job to cover the conflict in Abyssinia. With him in the British press pack went Waugh, who observed Deedes travelling with a quarter of a ton of luggage, including a cedarwood, zinc-lined trunk. Deedes became the model for William Boot, the hapless young man thrust into the role of war reporter in Waugh’s satirical novel Scoop.

Later Deedes always appeared too goodnatured to spoil the joke: in his recent book At War With Waugh he acknowledged that he had been the partial inspiration for Boot.

Major Bill Deedes saw war service in the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, winning the Military Cross in action in northern Europe. Right until his final column his war experiences shaped his journalism — on August 3 he compared what he had seen in Darfur to the Nazi death camp he had entered as a soldier.

In 1950, he left full-time journalism to enter politics, following in a family tradition. Three William Deedes before him had served East Kent in the 19th century; he became MP for Ashford and served until 1974.

He was a junior minister under Churchill, and Minister without Portfolio under Macmillan, where his role was to improve the Government’s relationship with the media. When the Profumo scandal erupted, fatally weakening Macmillan’s Government, he was one of the ministers who failed to elicit the truth from the War Minister.

In 1974 he returned full-time to Fleet Street, becoming Editor of The Daily Telegraph at the age of 61. There he remained until the end of 1985, when the paper was taken over by Conrad Black. Bill Deedes insisted on remaining, writing leading articles. He was acting partly out of a sense of duty — he blamed the financial straits of the paper on his own tenure as editor. He became a life peer in 1986 and continued to write columns and accept hazardous foreign assignments. In his nineties he was making visits to Ethiopia and Sudan to report graphically on the crises there.

He was a supporter of Diana, Princess of Wales, and in particular her campaign to outlaw landmines worldwide.

Richard Ingrams, co-founder of Private Eye and co-author of its Dear Bill letters, which played on Deedes’s friendship and golfing partnership with Baroness Thatcher’s late husband Denis, said last night: “He had this very deep humble attitude which is rare in somebody who has done the jobs he has. Partly, I think it was because he was a very religious man. Even when he was an editor he chose to go by bus and what I particularly admired was that when he lost the editorship he was very happy to serve in the ranks.”

Lord Deedes’s wife Hilary died in 2004. The couple had two sons, one of whom predeceased him, and three daughters.

His son Jeremy, who was managing director of the Telegraph Group, and retired before his father, said last night: “His dearest wish was to die in harness, which happily is how it ended.”

‘The moment when Boot began to make good’

He sat at the table, stood up, sat down again, stared gloomily at the wall for some minutes, lit his pipe, and then, laboriously, with a single first finger and his heart heavy with misgiving, he typed the first news story of his meteoric career. No one observing that sluggish and hesitant composition could have guessed that this was a moment of history – of legend, to be handed down among the great traditions of Fleet Street, quoted in books of reminiscence, held up as a model to aspiring pupils of Correspondence Schools of Profitable Writing, perennially fresh in the jaded memories of a hundred editors; the moment when Boot began to make good

From Scoop by Evelyn Waugh

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