Chris Boffey. Picture: Shirley Boffey
Chris Boffey, head of news at four national newspapers and star reporter on both tabloids and broadsheets, has been described as a “great human being” and an inspiration to a generation of journalists, following his death at the age of 74.
His forty-year career on Fleet Street was notable as much for the kindness he showed and the friendships he made as his thoughtful reportage from war zones and disasters and the major stories that he famously broke in a fiercely competitive industry, friends and rivals said.
His advice was legendary, his support for nervous reporters immediate, encouraging young journalists to get out of the office and speak to people, preferably in a pub.
“Never go to lunch on an empty stomach,” he would counsel. “Never lie to the newsdesk as one day you may have to,” was another rule to live by.
Boffey appeared fearless, at times, according to those he worked alongside.
He was at the Milltown cemetery in Northern Ireland in 1988, pulled down behind a grave stone by a friend at the Press Association, when Michael Stone started shooting at an IRA funeral, killing three and injuring 60 of the others who did not get out of sight in time.
Whilst covering Northern Ireland the death threats from paramilitaries were serious enough for his wife, on Boffey’s receipt of a bottle of champagne from a satisfied news desk, to insist that it could be a bomb and that he put in a bucket of water in front of their Crouch End home.
Much later in his career, facing a different sort of threat, in an editorial conference at the Telegraph’s towering Canary Wharf offices, Boffey soberly informed his Sunday Telegraph editor, Dominic Lawson: “There are a thousand stories in this city – and we haven’t got any of them.”
After a pause, he told a perturbed looking Lawson: “But we will have by the end of the week.”
One editor, on taking a disliking to a gobby new recruit on day one, instructed Boffey to get rid of him. Boffey instead hid the gauche target, quite unaware of the peril, sometimes in the pub, often on the road, at times even in corners of the office, until the editor quite forgot his instruction.
Boffey was head of news at the Sunday Mirror, Sunday Telegraph, Daily Mirror and the Observer and ended his career on the news desk at the Guardian.
As a reporter he shone at the Daily Star and Today, the Sun and its former sister newspaper the News of the World, as well as the Daily Telegraph. He was Focus editor for a time at the Sunday Times and worked on the newsdesk at the Independent on Sunday,
Boffey was at the scene in the immediate aftermath of the Omagh bombing in 1998 and the Lockerbie air crash in 1988, despatched to cover both the Falklands and Gulf wars, and covered World Cups and Olympics with aplomb, prompting newsdesks to repeatedly headhunt him for lucrative new roles.
Chris Boffey in a cell in Spain that was being prepared to accommodate British hooligans ahead of the 1982 World Cup. Picture: Shirley Boffey
Smuggled criminal Ronnie Knight into the UK
He found a former nanny to the serial killers Fred and Rose West, who had told the police of being raped by the couple some two decades before the horrors at 25 Cromwell Street were uncovered. She later gave compelling testimony at trial that helped convict Rose when she was seeking to pin it all on her late husband.
He was the first journalist to expose the sexual offences of Paul Gadd, better known as Gary Glitter. Gadd was later given long jail sentences in the UK and Vietnam for offences against young girls.
When after more than a decade on the run Barbara Windsor’s former husband, the career criminal Ronnie Knight, agreed to fly back to the UK with The Sun, claiming he wanted to see his sick mother Nellie before she died, it was Boffey who joined him to talk a couple of splashes and spreads out of him before Knight took the plunge.
They spent a lot of time together over a few days. “Oi Chris, order me some pepper will ya?”, Knight asked of Boffey in a restaurant one evening. Bemused as Knight had lived in Spain for a long time, Boffey asked whether he really didn’t know the word for pepper. “Nah I don’t have any fawking Spanish,” Knight responded.
Nor did Knight have a passport and this was a potential problem when it came to returning him to the UK. Boffey sourced one belonging to someone with a passing resemblance to Knight.
As Knight went through passport control, Boffey dropped a bottle of wine, causing just enough of a fuss for the distracted border police to wave Knight through.
On returning to the UK, Knight was met by police and subsequently jailed for seven years after admitting handling £314,913 in robbery proceeds.
‘Just as good on a newsdesk as he was on the road’
In between newspapers, Boffey squeezed in a period outside Fleet Street after being persuaded by his friend Alastair Campbell, then director of communications to Tony Blair, to make the switch to Whitehall to be special adviser to the education secretary, Estelle Morris.
Campbell said: “The same qualities that made Chris a great journalist are what made him a great friend and a great human being. He was curious, intelligent, empathetic and funny, with a real zest for life.
“He was just as good on a tabloid as he was on a broadsheet; just as good on the newsdesk as he was on the road.
“And though I am not sure he thanked me for it he was also an effective government comms guy when I persuaded him to jump the fence and work for education secretary Estelle Morris. I have lost a good friend and journalism has lost an old school reporter with real values.”
Boffey, from Wythenshawe, Manchester, was the youngest of three children to Nora, a waitress at a hotel at Manchester airport, and Bill, a printer.
He met his wife, Shirley, after volunteering to look after disadvantaged children on what was known as a ‘colony holiday’ in Bray, Ireland.
She only discovered that Boffey, six foot four inches tall with dark almost black hair and blue eyes, was over two years her junior at 18, when he made a phone call to receive his A-level results.
It was a shock, she admitted, as were the A-level results.
Determined to be a reporter from the age of 11
Boffey’s love of print came as a result of his father working as a printer of comics at the DC Thomson works in Salford. After school Boffey made a bee-line for the local papers, as he explained in a speech in 2018.
He said: “During an English lesson in the early 60s I can clearly remember our class of 11-years-olds at Xaverian College, Manchester, being quizzed about who read a newspaper every day.
“A few of us put up our hands and I was asked which paper we had delivered at home. I replied, promoting a sceptical look from my teacher, ‘all of them’ and had to explain.
“My dad was a printer of comics for DC Thomson in Salford and my earliest memories were him bringing home every Friday a thick roll of his labours; the Dandy, the Beano, Topper, Beezer, Victor, Wizard, Hornet, Rover, Hotspur, Bunty and Judy and I devoured them all.
“The papers came every day because a pal of my dad’s who lived up the street worked for a newspaper wholesaler and dropped them off early morning and, as part of the deal, his children received a roll of comics at the weekend.
“I read the bylines on stories in the news and sports sections of the morning papers and they became the men I wanted to be. From the age of 11 I was determined to be a reporter who travelled the world.”
His first reporting role after school was as a cub reporter at the Winsford Guardian in mid-Cheshire. He then joined the Newcastle journal, initially as a sub-editor, and then as a reporter.
He was soon after offered the job of district man in the north east for the Daily Star at a time when the newspaper was a genuine competitor in a fierce circulation war with the Daily Mirror and the Sun.
In 1982, he was asked to relocate down to the Star’s Fleet Street offices. As his wife was moving in to a new house in London with two young children on her hip, he was sent to cover the Falklands from Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay.
It was not an arduous task. There was a regular Sunday lunch for the British press pack and one of the greatest concerns was quite how to secure mint sauce for the lamb.
Boffey’s performances on stories such as the crimes committed by Peter Sutcliffe, better known as the Yorkshire Ripper, caught the eye of The Sun who courted him for a move.
He was unsure about the culture of the newspaper and went instead to the Today newspaper, now defunct, and was only later convinced by a move to the country’s biggest selling daily.
Face contempt of court accusation covering Rose West trial
It was while there that he covered the Wests. On one day during Rose’s trial in October 1995, following Fred’s death by hanging in his cell, Boffey arrived at Winchester Crown court to be greeted by beaming colleagues waving toothbrushes at him.
Caroline Owens, a former nanny to the Wests, who Boffey had found and bought up for The Sun with £20,000, was up in court to give evidence.
Back in 1973, she had gone to the police accusing the couple of rape but they had been effectively let off with reduced charges of indecent assault and actual bodily harm, resulting in only a £50 fine each.
Owens’ evidence of what had actually happened – involving kidnap, rape and threats of murder – was pivotal to the case against Rose, who was claiming that it had all been Fred’s work.
The problem for Boffey, and the reason for his friends and rivals glee, was that the defence was accusing Owens of making it up to make money from The Sun.
The suggestion was that Boffey had acted in contempt of court, a imprisonable offence, and that he might have to take the stand.
As it was, Owens told the defence barrister that the Sun had tracked her down but that Boffey had insisted straightaway that she should go back to the police and tell her story truthfully, without addition or subtraction of a word. There was no need for a toothbrush.
Naked except for a gas mask covering Gulf War for News of the World
Soon after, Boffey was headhunted by the News of the World.
It was during his time there that he was assigned to HMS Cardiff to cover the Gulf War for the newspaper.
The big fear at the time was a chemical attack from the Iraqis and their weapons of mass destruction. Boffey was given a chemical suit and gas mask.
He was told to sleep in the bowels of the ship where it was swelteringly hot. He slept naked. A chemical alert blasted out at 3am and he panicked.
The first that many of the crew of HMS Cardiff saw of the News of the World man was him on the deck in his birthday suit wearing only a gas mask.
It broke the ice and he made good friends, solidified when he went up in a helicopter that was locked on by an Iraqi fighter jet and kept his nerve.
There were less ‘boys own’ assignments too. Sent at the last minute to cover a skiing trip being enjoyed by the then Prince Andrew and his new wife, Sarah, the Duchess of York, Boffey needed to source some underwear.
He found a swanky shop that seemed to fit the bill only for the Duchess of York to walk in. She immediately recognised him, not least because, unable to ski, he had landed himself with a black eye and had broken his unbreakable sunglasses on the first day after putting on his skis and falling over a pebble.
“Are you following me Chris?” asked the Duchess. “‘No maam” he responded holding up a pair of y-fronts. “I’m getting some new shreddies’”. To her credit, she smiled although evidently did not have a clue what he was on about.
Wise and kind (the latter being rare for a head of news)
Boffey’s first head of news job was at the Sunday Mirror.
Dennis Rice, later chief reporter at the Daily Express and investigations editor at the Mail on Sunday was one of those whose career he championed.
Boffey was, Rice said, a “brilliant journalist and an even better man”. “Desperately sad… as I never got around to thanking him for shaping my early career and that of lots of others,” he said.
Sean O’Brien, showbusiness editor at The People who was also a cub reporter at the Sunday Mirror, said: “Chris was wise and kind, the latter being an extremely rare attribute for that job but one that got the very best out of his team – you really wanted to get a result for Boffey”.
A change of editor at the Sunday Mirror made it a relatively brief spell. The new editor Bridget ‘death’ Rowe, so named because of her penchant for sacking people, had some “odd ideas”, Boffey recalled.
The nadir came when he was instructed to commission a team of reporters to surveil the then home secretary David Blunkett. Rowe had a theory that he “wasn’t really blind”.
Boffey was offered the job of deputy editor at The People but turned it down to be chief reporter at the Sunday Telegraph.
He covered both the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, from Paris and the 1998 World Cup, also in France. Boffey was in Marseille for the hooligan riots that marred the England versus Tunisa tie when his photographer took a bottle to the head. After checking on his well-being, Boffey put his mobile to his ear: “My monkey is broken. Send me a new one.”
After eighteen months, he was made head of news. He was thrilled when the newspaper beat its better-resourced rival, the Sunday Times to win newspaper of the year at the British Press Awards.
Lawson, who appointed Boffey as head of news as editor, said: “I adored working with him, as I am sure did the entire news desk of the Sunday Telegraph in those days. He was just so much fun, along with his sharpness and skill. He certainly taught me a lot.”
The newspaper’s then chief reporter, Andy Alderson said Boffey was “a truly lovely man and a Fleet Street legend” and that he “adored being in his company”.
Buried bad news by giving it to the FT
A brief sojourn in Whitehall followed but it started with a problem.
In late 2001, the department for education’s permanent secretary advised him that they had discovered massive fraud in a government policy called individual learning accounts, under which 2.5m learners hd received credits worth up to £200 towards courses. People were ripping off the government willy nilly via this flagship policy.
Boffey reasoned that this should be known by the public but that perhaps it was best told by the Financial Times in the first instance.
He leaked it to the pink paper and, as predicted, it was written in a complicated style that made it rather inaccessible to the rest of Fleet Street. It was also now an old story so not one likely to get much further traction.
Education secretary Estelle Morris later quit while Boffey was on holiday with his family claiming that she felt that she was not up to the job.
At the age of 52, he signed up at the job centre in Wood Green. “What was your last employment?” inquired the clerk. “Special adviser to the secretary of state for education,” he answered.
“Well we don’t get many of you in ere and I am pretty sure there are no equivalent jobs on offer,” she responded.
It was not a concern for long. He was recruited by the Daily Telegraph as senior reporter but the Daily Mirror came sniffing soon after with the offer to be head of news. He accepted but he was soon to discover that the tabloids new-found focus for celebrity gossip above all was not for him.
There was a stint at the Sunday Times as focus editor and on the newsdesk at the Independent on Sunday. But he found his true home in a head of news role at the Observer where he worked with Anushka Asthana, now Channel 4’s US editor.
She said: “If it wasn’t for Chris I wouldn’t have become a political journalist. He taught me so much about how to be a good reporter and was also just a wonderful boss and friend. He was just totally fearless, tenacious, saw a story instantly – as well as being extremely good fun, and making me laugh a lot.”
After a decision to further integrate the Observer and its daily sister paper, Boffey’s final role was to spread his time across the Observer and the newsdesk at the Guardian.
He overlapped at the Observer with his eldest son, Daniel, who had followed him into journalism and they shared front page bylines in October 2011.
At the Guardian, he was often sought to clean up the output of star writers whose copy did not quite match their reputations. “Send me the enigma machine,” he would say as the copy dropped.
Asked for a Who’s Who entry in 2009, Boffey was chuffed. In the recreations section he entered: “Walking, reading, travelling, exploring London pub architecture”.
He served two terms as chairman of the Journalists’ Charity. In a speech Boffey gave to the University of the Third Age in 2018, Boffey summed up his outlook.
“During my 40 years as a journalist I have been threatened, shot at, fire bombed, sued, asked to spy, investigated by Mi5 and taken the occasional drink,” he recalled. “It is a serious job that is best undertaken by serious people who preferably don’t take themselves seriously.”
Boffey is survived by his wife Shirley, a retired headteacher, and his sons Daniel, chief reporter at The Guardian, and Martin, a senior lawyer at the Financial Conduct Authority
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