CAROL BARNES, the former ITN newsreader described by colleagues as one of the warmest people on the screen, lost her battle for life yesterday, a week after suffering a stroke. She died in hospital aged 63.

Sir Trevor McDonald, a former colleague, said she was someone who never showed “airs and graces”. He added: “She was one of these people who was never overpowered by any sense of being a television star.”

Friends believe that Barnes, a newscaster for 20 years, had never overcome the grief of losing her daughter Clare in a skydiving accident in Australia and was dreading the anniversary later this month.

Clare, 24, the daughter from Barnes’s relationship with Denis MacShane, later a Labour MP and Foreign Office minister, plunged 14,000ft to her death when her parachute failed to open during a jump near Melbourne in March 2004.

Barnes said the death left her “horribly depressed”. She later recalled how she “ran around the house crying, screaming and banging walls” when she heard the news. She turned Clare’s bedroom into a shrine, with photographs and treasured mementos placed alongside a casket containing her ashes in her flat overlooking Brighton marina.

Six months after the tragedy Barnes was stopped for speeding in her Audi TT and failed a breath test. She was banned from driving for a year and dismissed as a magistrate. She went back to work for the now defunct 24-hour ITN News Channel to help cope with her grief. One of her last jobs was a documentary for ITV on how Ed Mitchell, a former ITN colleague, had succumbed to alcoholism and was living rough in Brighton.

She suffered the stroke last Saturday as she was preparing to leave next day for a safari and golfing holiday in South Africa.

MacShane said yesterday: “She was felled this time last week and went out like a light. Her heart and lungs kept going but it was a haemorrhagic stroke.

“She was highly respected as one of the most accomplished and professional broadcast journalists of her generation. She was able to be a great newscaster but also a very fine reporter. She wasn’t just an Autocue reader.”

MacShane added: “She was the youngest 63-year-old in the business and had tons of energy. There was no indication: her health was good, she kept fit through her golf and skiing and then out of the blue she is taken away. That is all I can say.”

Her son James, 24, who has just finished a master’s degree, described her as “a beautiful, kind and delicate person”. He is the son of her marriage to Nigel Thomson, an ITN cameraman who was 11 years her junior.

Barnes left school at 16 to train as a fashion buyer at Harrods but went back into education and qualified as a teacher, before switching to journalism. She joined ITN as a reporter in 1976, aged 32, and covered the 1981 Brixton riots while seven months pregnant with Clare.

Her reputation for being unflappable was confirmed when she anchored ITN’s coverage of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. “This was the most memorable story I ever worked on,” she recalled. “We were on air for 16 hours.”

Last night tributes poured in to a woman known to colleagues as “Barnesy” and described as one of the warmest people on the television screen.

McDonald said: “I remember someone coming up to me on the street recently and saying Carol was her favourite news presenter. . . I think that says it all.”

Alastair Stewart, the ITV news presenter, said: “Barnesy was a rare creature – as capable on location as she was in the studio. Her public face was that of the polished professional. Privately she was just a lovely, generous and delightful person.”

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