My old London Telegraph colleague Bill Deedes died yesterday at the age of 94. I say “old colleague”, but I lasted barely a decade at the paper, which must have seemed like a passing summer internship to a fellow who’d been there over 70 years – well, except for his distinguished wartime service and a not entirely happy interregnum as a Minister of the Crown. His final column, just a few days ago, was about Darfur, which is, give or take a few hundred miles, pretty much where he first entered public consciousness: He covered Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssynia, where he ran into Evelyn Waugh, who made him the model for the central character of Scoop, the best of all novels about journalism. He had seen a lot:

When we were debating the approaching Millennium Dome at the Telegraph’s leader writers’ conference one day, I remembered that Bill would have been to the Festival of Britain, 50 years earlier. I asked what it had been like. “It was pretty good,” he said, “but not half as good as the Wembley Empire Exhibition of 1924.” If he had claimed to have been at the Great Exhibition of 1851, we would probably have believed him.

My editor at the Telegraph once told me that she thought the greatest example of dedication to deadline was when my wife’s contractions kicked in, we went off to the maternity ward and, in between perfunctory New-Mannish encouragement re breathing exercises, I heartlessly rattled off a column from a perch at the foot of the bed. A few months later, she told me I’d lost my title: a couple of days earlier, the nonagenarian Deedes had flown on assignment to India, been felled by a stroke upon arrival, but nevertheless managed to dictate his column from his hospital bed a few hours later.