From the 1960s to the 90s, Ann Leslie, who has died aged 82, was among the last of the great “firemen” – foreign correspondents dispatched by Fleet Street tabloids to cover revolutions, elections and breaking news stories all over the world. Seemingly fearless, she wrote about what she saw and uncovered in an accessible, first-person manner, her prose elegant and thoughtful, and underpinned by research.
The majority of her career, which began in the Manchester office of the Daily Express in 1962, was spent working for the Daily Mail, where she was cherished and promoted as its star special correspondent. She particularly thrived under the 20-year editorship of Sir David English, who gave her the freedom to be herself.
But in order to undertake the tough assignments (where she usually travelled solo), and the long reads she aspired to, Leslie opted to work as a freelance after 1968, striking out from what she saw as a trap of writing show business interviews and columns. She covered the failed coup against Mikhail Gorbachev, the fall of the Berlin Wall, Nelson Mandela’s long walk to freedom, China’s one-child policy and its dying rooms, the starvation and suffering of North Koreans, and conflict in former Yugoslavia. From Azerbaijan in 1998 she filed a 3,000-word report on the environmental disaster of oil-rich Baku.
She was different from most other prominent female journalists of her day, including the older, self-styled First Lady of Fleet Street, Jean Rook, of the Daily Express – there was mutual antipathy from their first meeting, as reporters covering Harrogate toy fair – and the Daily Mail’s Lynda Lee-Potter, commentators who wrote columns largely from the safety of their office chairs. A fellow journalist, Michael Leapman, described her as “in the tradition of James Cameron [News Chronicle], Donald Wise [Mirror] and Sefton Delmer [Express]”.
At the annual British Journalism Review awards, which she attended when she was somewhat incapacitated by ill health, she came across as a remarkable talent. Her confidence, strong opinions, throaty voice and dark eyes were mesmerising, bringing to mind the Ancient Mariner.
She seemed formidable, and could adopt a domineering stance worthy of Lady Bracknell to achieve her aim, but was always happy to talk. These qualities, combined with strong opinions (not always conservative), knowledge and experience, made her increasingly sought-after by broadcasters.
The gladiatorial atmosphere of Question Time or Any Questions held no fears. She had the toughness and self-confidence that came from the combination of a privileged background and determination to beat the bullying by men that she had encountered as a young journalist. She also turned being a woman to her advantage. A devoted user of heavy black mascara and a glamorous dresser, she wore a fur coat to go to the Falklands war. She tended to hide key documents in her bra.
Daughter of Theodora (nee McDonald) and Norman Leslie, she was born in Rawalpindi, in pre-partition India, now in Pakistan. Her father, like her grandfather, was an oil executive, posted in India and Pakistan. At nine Ann was sent to Presentation Convent boarding school, Matlock, Derbyshire, then to the Convent of the Holy Child Jesus in Mayfield, East Sussex.
She studied English at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, and, after graduating in 1961, took a £20-a-week job on a whim in the Manchester office of the Daily Express, then owned by Lord Beaverbrook. This was the swaggering heyday of the newspaper, and of the old Fleet Street model of the national press, when the newsroom tolerated drunken characters and huge expenses.
There were 700 journalists in Manchester alone, and they competed furiously, with underhand tactics, to scupper their rivals’ stories.
Leslie described the experience in her autobiography, Killing My Own Snakes (2008). “I had never felt so foreign as I did in Manchester,” she wrote. The real education in the first year was to “see off assorted sexist bullying men”, while learning how to drink. She loved the television series Mad Men in later life, because it absolutely described the sexism she encountered in the 60s.
In Manchester she rented a house with the actor Janet Suzman. After a year, aged 22, and identified as a “young meteor”, she was transferred to London by her editor, Bob Edwards, to write a column.
During a 40-year career, she won nine British Press awards, two lifetime achievements awards, and the 1999 James Cameron award for international reporting. She was appointed DBE in 2007 for services to journalism. David Randall’s 2005 book The Great Reporters called her “the most versatile of them all”.
Leslie was never easy to pigeonhole. She was a member of the National Union of Journalists and a passionate believer in the free press. Journalism, she said, “has never been an ego trip for me”. She described her work as “the most exhilarating, exhausting, absorbing career that life can offer”, but managed to combine it with a stable marriage to Michael Fletcher, whom she met at Oxford, and married in 1969, listing family life as her sole recreation in Who’s Who.
She ended her autobiography by saying that one of the duties of journalism was to shine a torch into dark areas, “face the glacier in the cupboard, expose its coldness and cruelty to the bright, clear and humanising light of day”. This she did, unflinchingly.
Leslie is survived by her husband, her daughter, Katharine, and two grandchildren, Joseph and Martha.
• Ann Elizabeth Mary Leslie, journalist, born 28 January 1941; died 25 June 2023
