My father, Michael Leapman, who has died aged 85, was a Fleet Street journalist whose 60-year career spanned war reporting, editing the diary column of the Times and writing about his Brixton allotment. His 18 books include biographies of Rupert Murdoch (Barefaced Cheek, 1983) and Neil Kinnock (Kinnock, 1987).
On 12 June 1968, ahead of an emergency House of Commons debate on the UK’s supply of arms to Nigeria for use in its civil war, the Sun – then a pre-Murdoch broadsheet – devoted its first three pages to a report by Michael and the photographer Ronald Burton from the rebel territory of Biafra. It revealed the tragedy of the “Biafran babies”, children dying of starvation due to the conflict. Michael won a National Press award for his reporting.
He was born in Hendon, north London, to Lya (nee Isaacs) and Nathan Leapman, founder of the cashmere retailer N Peal, and educated at Embley Park school in Hampshire. After national service in the navy (which ended with three days in military prison and a dishonourable discharge, after he refused an instruction to fetch a broom), he went into journalism with stints on English-language newspapers in Cyprus and Iran. He did not endear himself to the authorities in either country. He returned to the UK to work at the Scotsman, then the Sun as a diplomatic reporter.
From 1969 to 1981 he was with the Times. As diary editor, he planted news of his vegetable-growing successes and failures among the regular crop of society gossip. As New York correspondent he wrote a weekly “Leapman in America” column. In the 1980s he worked at the Daily Express and the Independent, then for more than 30 years he was a freelance and nonfiction author. Besides biographies, he wrote books about the BBC and the press; gardening history; and the Kindertransport evacuations; as well as guidebooks to London and New York. He interviewed PG Wodehouse; the Russian revolutionary leader Alexander Kerensky; and King Edward VIII, following his abdication. He reported from Muhammad Ali’s fights and Bob Marley’s funeral.
Michael had a passion for theatre, horseracing and cricket, and was a lifelong Labour party member. In 1965 he married Olga Mason, the daughter of a Yorkshire coalminer who went via grammar school to Oxford University. The couple enjoyed entertaining their wide circle of friends, many of them journalists, at their home in Stockwell, south London.
Olga died in 2019. Michael is survived by me and his grandchildren, Lara, Jacob and Zachary.
