Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 2001, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a journalist and politician. It's a combination which has

allowed him to have a front seat at many of the great events of 20th century history.

He reported the Abyssinian War in 1935 and became the model for Evelyn Wars comic hero in Scoop.

He was there when Neville Chamberlain declared peace in our time.

He questioned John Profumo on the Christine Keelila affair and he accompanied the Princess of Wales on her famous expedition to Bosnia.

During the course of all of this he was a Conservative MP for nearly 25 years, a Cabinet minister, and he was the editor of the Daily Telegraph.

Now 88, he's still writing and reporting, his energy and achievements gently disguised beneath disarming self-deprecation.

It's really rather alarming, he observes, to live in a world where someone with my truly

modest accomplishments and intellect can be so successful. It bothers me. He is

Baron Deeds of Aldington a title rarely used by the man everyone knows as

Bill. You have, Bill if I may, witnessed an unbelievable amount of the 20th century. Do you feel like a

piece of walking history? Not at all, really. I'd be very lucky. That's the word I use about my life. I've been lucky to have a front seat,

all expensive paid too, at several different events. Journalists have that privilege, but they don't always have it for 70 years.

But it's journalism, not the politics really that's the first love, obviously, isn't it?

I was very happy as a constituency MP. I was never blissfully happy as a minister. There were

too many disciplines attached to it. Journalists are very, they're always in spirit,

rather freelance people and it's a totally different discipline

from being a minister of the crown, so yes, you're right.

I...

It's the independence that you like.

...