Alexander Chancellor, who died last week, was a wonderfully laid-back editor of the Spectator, the Oldie – and many things in between: a masterchef whose recipes didn’t always work, but fizzed with Michelin brilliance when they did.
Is that enough for his obituarists, though? Of course not. Cue, from the Times, this evocation of “an engaging and occasionally dissipated bohemian … a journalist of the old school who would run up huge expenses, take taxis everywhere and, when asked whether he wanted red or white wine with his lunch, would say: ‘Both, of course’.”
Which prompts me to add, on behalf of Fleet Street’s “old school”, that in 20 years editing the Guardian, hundreds of journalists passing through, I encountered no more than three individual cases where booze was a problem – and, mercifully, little in the way of astronomic expenses. Of course, the news from Soho didn’t always chime when Jeffrey Bernard was unwell and Keith Waterhouse was in his pomp: but these were exceptions, not stereotypes. To be sure, “booze problems” then and now may be a movable hiccup. But Alexander Chancellor always got whatever magazine he was editing out on a nail-biting deadline. You can’t say better than that.