In more than 75 years as a news-paperman, WF Deedes, who died last week, never missed a deadline, never missed a story and never missed an opportunity to gossip. In an age when the public grew to despise journalists in general, Deedes – “Bill” to everyone from messenger boys to prime ministers – was held in almost universal affection.

From his first job as a reporter on the Morning Post in 1931 to his last job as a columnist on The Daily Telegraph, the paper he served for most of his life, Deedes was the incarnation of Fleet Street as an ideal. Long after the great exodus that scattered papers across the capital, he alone remained as a reminder of that lost world.

Deedes achieved a vicarious immortality very early when he was sent to cover the Abyssinian crisis in 1935 along with Evelyn Waugh, who based William Boot, the hero of his great comic novel Scoop, partly on the young Deedes.

In a letter that he wrote to me nearly 70 years later, Bill was sceptical about this “legendary tale”, but he admitted that, while they shared “digs” in Addis Ababa for several months, Waugh “did draw inspiration from the quarter ton of baggage with which the Morning Post saddled me for this expedition.”

“It is possible,” he added with typical modesty, “that the naivety of William Deedes, 22, on his first assignment as a war correspondent, shaped in Waugh’s mind the character of William Boot.” It is also possible that the episode become so much part of his life that Waugh’s satire shaped the character of Bill Deedes.

There was no doubt at all about his other claim to celebrity, as the Dear Bill to whom Denis Thatcher supposedly wrote his letters in Private Eye. Deedes knew how to turn this persona to advantage, and played the role for all it was worth in order to ensure that his retirement as editor of the Telegraph in 1986 did not mean the end of his career. As the confidant of the prime minister’s husband, he was unsackable.

Deedes’s tenure as Editor during the last decade of Lord Hartwell’s ownership of the paper could best be described as convivial anarchy. After a long liquid lunch in the King and Keys pub next door, the leader writers – who included figures of genius such as Colin Welch and TE Utley – would gather in mid-after-noon, with the beverage less likely to be tea than Famous Grouse. In the background would be the cartoonist Nick Garland, surreptitiously sketching the scene.

A typical conference was that held on the day in 1982 when Michael Fagan broke into Buck-ingham Palace to surprise the Queen. Deedes wanted his young turks to take no notice of the fact that the then home secretary, Willie Whitelaw, was his golfing partner. “Willie must go,” he told Charles Moore: “Sack him, Charles!” A few minutes later the phone rang. It was Whitelaw. Moore was hastily summoned back. “Apparently, Charles, it was all the metropolitan commissioner’s fault. Let’s sack him!”

The truth was that Deedes was a far abler reporter than he was an editor. For those like me who worked alongside Deedes during the Indian summer of his career, his zest and professionalism were awe-inspiring. Having charmed everyone from Margaret Thatcher to Princess Diana, Deedes was undaunted by any assignment until a fall in his early nineties left him too disabled to travel.

As a leader writer Deedes was unsurpassed at divining even the most inarticulate editor’s instincts, often before the said editor knew them himself.

Even his successor, the opinionated Max Hastings, appreciated the older man’s ability to find a middle way between his own wet Toryism and the Thatcherite views of his younger lieutenants.

Behind the benign exterior, Deedes was hard to fathom. His wartime experience had left him psychologically scarred: he was awarded the Military Cross during a bungled action in which most of his comrades were killed, and he felt the survivor’s guilt of his generation. He adored and was adored by innumerable younger journalists, whom he helped selflessly, and despite the fact that many of them were female and beautiful he had nothing of the lecher about him. Rather he had grasped the simple truth that the way to keep old age at bay was to befriend the young.

Deedes was absurdly unassuming. He took the bus and train every day, and until immobility caught up with him as a nonagenarian, he refused a driver. He could have lunched at the Savoy Grill, but preferred to take his guests to an ordinary Italian trattoria, Paradiso e Inferno, where he was treated like royalty. He hated his title and never used it.

The job that he most relished in his life was running the Peterborough gossip column. Deedes even held onto this post during his time as a Tory MP, and his eagerness to get back to it may explain the brevity of his ministerial career. The titbits he garnered during his peregrinations from Fleet Street to Westminster were real stories, not the confections planted by publicists today.

Deedes left no political philosophy: ideology was alien to him and he detested doctrinal disputes. His legacy was a style, a way of life, an essential decency. He believed in the conversation of mankind. Not only by his millions of words in print, but also his example, Bill Deedes taught generations of journalists what a newspaper-man should be.

Explore UK News

• Crime News

• Education News

• Health News

• Scotland News

Times Recommends

• Dan Snow on his ideal dinner party
• Why women are such bad networkers
• Six of the best value Chilean wines