The Spike: Henry Deedes’s Waspish Wit

From the Archive

In our series on lobby journalists, Benjamin Goodwin meets the Daily Mail’s latest Boz .

I am intrigued to meet the parliamentary sketch writer who accounted for Boris’s blond mop of a new fringe by imagining his girlfriend Carrie Symonds placing a bowl over the PM’s head and attacking it with “a pair of secateurs’”. Henry Deedes is a waspish wit and can be placed in the Auberon Waugh school of political writing. On the page, he may be withering, scathing and Swiftian, but in real life he is surprisingly polite and self-effacing: he arrives at The Ivy on Kensington High Street in his gym kit, for which he apologises twice during our meeting. Deedes is in his early 40s and is a relative newcomer to the lobby. He joined in February 2019, having written the Daily Mail’s City diary for several years. Taking over from Quentin Letts as the paper’s sketch writer, he had some reputation to follow. He has stepped up well. It was said of Oscar Wilde that he was a great listener before he was a great talker. Deedes clearly enjoys politics – whether it’s TV debates or election husting...

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