My Mentor: Quentin Letts on Peter Birkett
'He was actually a kind man. He tried his best to conceal that by shouting at us'
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Your support makes all the difference.Peter Birkett was a veteran reporter from the Daily Mail and The Daily Telegraph, one of the great old news hounds on Fleet Street. He'd washed up as editor of the Telegraph's Peterborough column in the mid-1980s, but he ran it as a news desk in exile rather than as a celebrity column. He also ran it brilliantly as an apprentice scheme.
I had just finished university in Dublin and Max Hastings (then editor of the Telegraph) gave me shifts on Peterborough. Four or five of us sat in a room with Birkett at the head of the room, smoking furiously. The diary column was very different to today's diaries. He really understood what the reader wanted.
He taught us how to write short sentences and crisp, clear intros. He was terribly patient. He could take a story I had written, which was perhaps 180 words, and boil it down into a 25-word italic, which would work much better.
He was quite a spiky character around the office but he was actually a kind man. He tried his best to conceal that by shouting at us. He was also a vigorous luncher and taught one how to lunch.
There were banned words on Peterborough. You could never describe a club as "exclusive"; you could never "reveal" anything - you had to "disclose". Jeffrey Archer was banned.
He also had a melancholic streak. Quite realistically he realised that journalistic careers often end in failure. After he edited Peterborough he became foreign editor of the Daily Mail before going back to being a writing journalist, which is what he always should have been.
He had two daughters and a wife and he would leave the office as early as he could to get home. He died last year, but he taught one that although journalism is a vocation, you can have another life as well.
Quentin Letts is a columnist for the Daily Mail
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