" Soon he, Oakes and Alan Brien were all sharing an office. It was a tempestuous room. Alan was forever arguing some involved point..."

Bernard Levin A passionate and eclectic journalist with a legendary capacity for work, whose career made him a host of friends - and enemies

Quentin Crewe

Tuesday August 10 2004
The Guardian

Bernard Levin, who has died aged 75, after many years of Alzheimer's disease, was one of the most famous as well as one of the most controversial British journalists and broadcasters of the second half of the last century. His ever-restless pen provoked emotions that varied from rage, even hatred, to affection and admiration. Employed during the last three decades primarily on the Times and the Sunday Times, his career had also taken him to such publications as the Observer, the Manchester Guardian, the Spectator, the New Statesman, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express.

Bernard's mother was the daughter of Ukrainian Jewish emigrants. His father, of Lithuanian extraction, a St Pancras tailor, left her shortly after Bernard's birth in London. Bernard met him only once when he was at university. The family lived in Camden Town and Bernard was brought up, though not strictly, in the Jewish faith. His illiterate grandparents' stories about life in Russia must have instilled in him the passionate belief in the freedom of the individual that lasted his whole life. In return, as he grew older, he used to read to them. Bernard could not read Hebrew, but he could get by in Yiddish.

He was a bright child and won a London County Council scholarship to Christ's Hospital, the charity boarding school in Horsham, West Sussex, where he was to experience, for the first time, being mocked in the street and to encounter strong attacks on his opinions. Merely getting to the school was an ordeal, as the sight of a small boy in his uniform with its swirling cloak and tight stockings sometimes provoked jeers.

At the school he announced that he was a communist and set up on his desk a small collection of books from what was known as the Little Lenin Library. His fellow pupils, mostly from a very different kind of background, renamed them the Little Levin Library - eventually throwing them out of the window.

Another scholarship, in the late 1940s, took Bernard to the London School of Economics where he was much more at home in the pervading leftwing atmosphere. He was soon very active in the student union and politics generally. He also found he could give rein to his penchant for causing mischief and for teasing authority. His impersonation of the LSE's much revered professor of political science, Harold Laski, arguing with himself, knocking down his own propositions one by one, revealing the fallacies in each, was evidently a tour de force.

Briefly, after graduation in 1952, he worked as a guide on coach tours, doubtless providing the passengers with more diverse and arcane information than they had any right to expect. Soon, however, he got a job with the BBC North American Service. He had the rather menial task of having to read all the newspapers and weekly journals, cutting out pieces that might be useful to quote on the air.

In 1953, he came across an advertisement in Truth, a weekly edited by the liberal journalist George Scott, appealing for editorial staff. At the time, Truth had a very rightwing, even anti-semitic, reputation that Scott was anxious to get rid of. Bernard arrived at their offices and explained that he was applying for a job. When the secretary told Scott the name of the applicant he was delighted by the Jewish name and said: "Show him in, he's got a job."

Shortly afterwards, Philip Oakes arrived, also for a job interview, and passed Bernard on the stairs. He mistook him for the office boy. "He looked about 16, phenomenally clean with scrubbed nails and a coil of dark hair like a bedspring lunging from his forehead ... his suit was dark and well-cut, his handkerchief like an exploded white rose in his breast pocket. His shoes twinkled against the grubby carpet."

Bernard's first piece for Truth dealt with his disillusionment with the Labour party. Soon he, Oakes and Alan Brien were all sharing an office. It was a tempestuous room. Alan was forever arguing some involved point; Bernard, always capable of doing two things at once, would be contesting the point while correcting proofs. Philip, more likely than not would be laughing at them, while pondering on a poem he was writing.

Bernard was beginning to be noticed. During a long newspaper strike, when Truth, as one of the few publications available, enjoyed a surge in circulation, the quality of his contributions stood out. In 1954, the Spectator's then owner, Ian Gilmour, appointed Brian Inglis as the editor of the weekly. Inglis invited Bernard to be his deputy, together gradually building up a distinguished band of contributors, including Karl Miller as literary editor, Brien as theatre critic and arts editor, and Cyril Ray, the wine expert.

In 1957, Bernard started to write the column which was to set the seal on his fame. He called it Taper. The subject was the doings of Parliament. He invented comical names for politicians - thus did the then Conservative attorney general Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller became Sir Reginald Bullying Manner.

Apart from this column, which earned him the hatred of many MPs, he wrote separate articles commenting on the law - in particular what he saw as the folly of judges - civil servants and other public figures. These articles were frequently rash, giving one to wonder why he was never prosecuted. His ferocious attack on Lord Goddard, the vindictive Lord Chief Justice, a few days after his death in 1958 affronted many people's sense of good taste.

Many others confirm Bernard's extraordinary ability to do two or even three things at once; holding forth on Sir Oswald Mosley while typing his column, then switching without pause to an appreciation of the opera he had seen the night before. At the same time, his concentration on himself was on occasion perilous. He told Brien one morning that at dinner in a restaurant the night before, he had been so engrossed in the story he was telling that he did not notice that a man at the opposite table had had a stroke and died until ambulance men came to gather him up.

Bernard's capacity for mischief had by no means abated. He and Cyril Ray used to shout abuse at each other across the office, with such insults as "little Jewish runt". Brien recalled him going into Karl Miller's office and switching all the jackets of the books to be sent out for review so that Field Marshal Lord Montgomery was puzzled to receive not a book on military strategy, but one on the traditions of the Chinese circus.

Considering its impact, it is a surprise to realise that the Taper column ran for only two years. Disappointed by the result of the 1959 election, which saw Harold Macmillan's Conservatives register a third election victory in succession, with a majority of more than 100, Bernard came to dislike Macmillan more and more, believing that he should, and would be thrown out. When this did not happen, he decided to move on, at first going to the Daily Express as theatre critic, and from 1962 to 1965 working at the Daily Mail in the same capacity. He then became a Mail feature writer - and in 1969, What The Papers Say's columnist of the year. Bernard had become well aware of the fickle ways of Fleet Street and had become canny. His contract specified that he should have complete freedom and that no one should ever change anything he wrote, either for its opinion or its style, without his consent.

But in 1963 had come a move into television that was to make him a household name. He became an important figure on BBCs late Saturday-night satire show, That Was The Week That Was, and later on its less renowned successor, Not So Much A Programme More A Way Of Life.

His role on TW3 each week was to interview someone in the news. He did so in a way that was, then, a trifle shocking. He was one of the first TV interviewers to deploy rudeness as a technique. The result was that the public came to loathe him. In the Daily Express he even featured in a series, The Hate Makers, penned by a then prominent rightwing journalist, Robert Pitman.

Going into the theatre, people even spat at him. Some viewers were delighted one evening, when a man strode on to the set and punched Bernard, knocking him off his stool. It was Desmond Leslie, an expert on unidentified flying objects. Bernard had given a bad review to Leslie's wife, Agnes Bernelle. Years later, Leslie came into a Dublin restaurant where Bernard was dining. They chatted for a while. Neither of them referred to the incident.

Back at the Daily Mail, in the week of the 1970 general election, Bernard wrote on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday columns of impartial comments on the merits of both sides. For the polling day that Thursday he promised definite advice. On Wednesday evening he wrote his column saying, Vote Labour. The editor called him in and asked him to change it. He refused, reminding him of his contract.

Next, he was summoned by Vere Harmsworth, then the proprietor's son. Again he refused to change a word. He was threatened with dismissal, but stuck to his guns. He decided to resign, but was strangely apprehensive, fearing that he would never get another job. In the event, as soon as his resignation was announced he was inundated with offers. Characteristically, he turned down the Guardian on the grounds that he was too much in agreement with their views. He chose the Times, then edited by William Rees-Mogg, where he was to stay until the end of his life.

There were many contradictions in Bernard's character. He saw himself as a strong man, physically. When we went to the opera together and there was no possibility of my getting up the stairs, he would insist on carrying me in the way that more brawny friends would do. Once, in the office, he was boasting that he could pick up the journalist Jackie Gillott and whirl her round his head. Instead she threw him to the floor, which did not prevent their being friends.

For a man of such erudition who took so passionate an interest in literature and had so consuming a feeling for music, he had surprisingly little visual taste.

This lack of taste was most noticeable in his clothes. He loved dressing up in the evening, always wearing to the opera a swirling cloak lined with bright-coloured silk. He imposed this taste on to the women he took with him. When he arrived to pick them up, he brought with him a spray of flowers which they had to pin on their dress, or sometimes, even more embarrassing, a garland for their hair. So fussy was he that he once suggested Katherine Whitehorn go home to change because one of her stockings had a ladder.

Equally strange were his insecurities. He never learned to drive, and this could upset him. Being driven by a woman to Glyndebourne, he became convinced that other drivers were sneering at him. He asked her to stop, went into a chemist and bought a sling. He put it on, reasoning that people would now understand why he was not at the wheel.

His life in those times was very agreeable. He had an exceptionally wide circle of friends who, for some reason, he kept in separate compartments, a characteristic common perhaps to bachelors. No one was better at keeping his friendship in repair. He never lost or fell out with a friend. His generosity was exceptional, only with great reluctance allowing anyone else to pay for a meal with him. When Cyril Ray's house burnt down, Bernard offered to lend him a large sum to tide him over.

Bernard's romantic nature meant that he was usually in love, but wary of commitment. He had a succession of women friends whom he spoilt with lavish presents. In the bedroom he was enthusiastic, but excessively modest, always locking the bathroom door when having a bath, never letting a girl see him naked. In some moods, he never wanted to marry. He and I sat listening to a wife's tearful account of the wrenching break-up of her marriage. When she left us, Bernard said, "And then people ask me why I don't get married."

Towards the end of the 1970s, Bernard entered on a strange phase. He fell more in love than ever before with Arianna Stassinopoulos (now Arianna Huffington, and a political commentator in California). Through her he became involved in an organisation called Insight. Part of its ritual was to encourage each other to act out their fantasies. There were stories of Bernard's dressing up in a tutu that boggled the minds of his friends.

Thus did he invite some 80 members of his circle to an evening at the Cafe Royale, at which he encouraged us to enrol. It was a strange experience to hear this paragon of logic, sceptical of all humbug trotting out stories that normally he would have scoffed at. At the end of it my neighbour turned to me and said, "I feel I have lost a friend tonight."

This embracing of odd ideas led him on to writing articles in praise of the spurious guru Bagwan Rajneesh. It was part of a recurring pattern which led him to support figures he should have detested such as Richard Nixon and his vice-president Spiro Agnew.

There are those who believe that the edge of his writing was blunted thereafter. Against that, Alan Wood feels that Insight gave him a measure of confidence, so that he was no longer so vulnerable and no longer shuddered when strangers approached him in the street. A thread of self-doubt ran through the fabric of his life.

A quarter of a century ago, Arianna organised a 50th birthday party for him in the south of France. For once, all his disparate friends of all ages were gathered together for this lavish occasion. Wood recalls how many people told him that day that when they had been ill how Bernard had visited them in hospital. "He was the great visitor."

Bernard certainly wanted to marry Arianna. She agreed, but made conditions. Somehow, it never materialised. She went to America.

In some senses, he had mellowed. He enjoyed the best relations with successive editors of the Times. They liked and admired him for several qualities, loyalty being the most outstanding. His capacity for work was legendary: if he was going away for a few weeks, he would write 12 articles to be used in his absence. Difficulties could arise through his sensitivity about his work and his great reluctance to talk about any problems that he had in his writing, even though he was worried that he was stuck in a series of ruts and was specialising in about five subjects. Gradually, he came to write fewer vituperative articles and more ruminative ones on music (especially Wagner), literature and the arts, though never forsaking his pet hates - lawyers, especially judges, and home secretaries, nor his second love after music - food.

Bernard's books included collections of his columns for The Times - the column being his natural form. But there were others too, The Pendulum Years (1971) a history of the 1960s, Conducted Tour (1981), a survey of the music festivals of Europe, and in 1985 he undertook a walk across Spain and France which led to In Hannibal's Footsteps, an informative and entertaining account of his walk and the places he passed through. He followed this with The End Of The Rhine (1987), another excellent account of a walk down the length of the river. A Walk Up Fifth Avenue (1989) was not so successful. His last book, published in 1998, was Enough Said. He became a CBE in 1990.

A decade ago, Bernard mentioned to his friends that he was suffering from some unidentifiable illness. Indeed, it was plain to see. Five years passed before he revealed what many had suspected, that he had Alzheimer's disease. The fates could never have devised a more cruel torment for a man who prided himself on his memory, who could without fail dredge up the most apt quotation from his prodigious store of reading.

For his friends, it was unbearably painful to watch his struggle to retrieve even the simplest word. He was lovingly supported and encouraged by his devoted friend Elizabeth Anderson.

He is survived by his sister who lives with her family in America.

Henry Bernard Levin, journalist, born August 19, 1928; died August 7, 2004 Quentin Crewe died in 1998, and the above obituary has been revised.