Lynda Lee-Potter; Guardian obit
Hyfler/Rosner
The Daily Mail's star columnist and interviewer for over 30
years
Brenda Maddox
Thursday October 21, 2004
The Guardian
The Daily Mail columnist and interviewer Lynda Lee-Potter,
who has died aged 69 after suffering from a brain tumour,
was Femail personified. Righteous, infuriating and readable
in equal measure, she preached the values of her newspaper.
She was both proud of being working-class and triumphant for
having risen out of it. What is snobbery but the
entrepreneurial spirit? Class difference, she believed,
will, and should, live forever - for without them, we would
lack social aspiration.
Like the Mail, she struggled to cope with social change over
the past three decades. There was little left on which to
pour scorn except furtive adultery, arrogance (especially
when manifested by New Labour's elitist hierarchy) and "the
scrounging classes" who languish on social security.
Her own aspiration, fortified with a catchy double-barrelled
name, propelled her to the top of Fleet Street. Born Lynda
Higginson into a mining family in Leigh, Lancashire, she was
a young drama school graduate when she married the son of
Air Marshal Sir Patrick Lee Potter. Such a double-barrelled
name, without a hyphen, would have been much smarter, as she
conceded in her highly autobiographical book Class Act: How
To Beat The British Class System (2000). Her own byline
carried the embarrassing punctuation mark only because it
had been inserted accidentally on the birth certificate of
her husband Jeremy.
In Class Act, she proudly described her humble origins. The
washing hung on a line before the fire, milk collected in
jugs from a van in the street and the outside lavatory with
cut-up squares of the News Chronicle on a peg for toilet
paper. Her grandfather "worked down the pit all his life"
and drank too much, but taught her to respect everybody, and
that she was "as good as the Queen".
Fortunately, only the first year of her own existence was
spent in her grandfather's terraced house; her father had a
painting and decorating business, and the family moved to a
new council house on the other side of town. Lee-Potter
ascribed her success to winning a place at the town's
grammar school and to help from a mother who, "like me", had
a "fundamentally ruthless streak". This maternal
ruthlessness extended to slipping a sedative into
grandfather's tea so that he would not embarrass the
Higginsons at the posh wedding where, in 1957, Lynda married
up into a family where the furniture and the silver were
inherited.
It was not a smooth transition: helping her new
mother-in-law to prepare lunch, she offered to put the
beetroot in vinegar. "In vinegar?" cried the scandalised
matron. A change of accent helped too: she claimed to have
lost her Lancashire accent on the train to London's
Guildhall School of Music and Drama. "The pronunciation of
upper-class names is a minefield," she announced from on
high. As for equality: "The only people who hanker after a
classless society are those who want what other people have
without working for it."
When her haematologist husband - later to enjoy a high media
profile himself as chairman of the British Medical
Association during the Conservative NHS reforms of the early
1990s - took an RAF posting in Aden, she started writing for
the Aden Chronicle. On their return to London, she became a
feature writer for the Daily Mail in 1967, and wrote her
column from 1972 until last May.
As anachronistic as her social values was her fear of
revealing her age. And if she had any advice to offer on the
Mail's perennial question - can a married woman both work
and raise a family? - from her own experience of a long,
happy marriage and the successful delivery of two daughters
and a son to the journalist's trade, she chose to keep it to
herself.
Roy Greenslade writes: Lynda Lee-Potter loved being a
journalist. For her, working on a newspaper was never simply
a job, but - as she often said - a privilege. Despite her
long career and her fame as a columnist, she retained the
kind of youthful enthusiasm that few, if any, veteran hacks
could match.
She became the Mail's star columnist after Jean Rook went to
the Daily Express, and managed to surpass her. Lee-Potter
was never able to match Rook's clever wordplay, but she
became the most widely read of female columnists because she
had a coherent outlook on the world that she was able to get
across to her many thousands of avid readers in a clear and
concise manner.
Though the Private Eye "Glenda Slagg" parody suggests that
women columnists write top-of-the-head pieces without a
semblance of belief, Lee-Potter rose above such hack writing
because she had a consistent viewpoint. She upset many
liberals, but her copy was convincing because she wrote from
the heart. Her candour often led to accusations that she was
bitchy, but she dismissed such criticism by saying, with her
trade mark wide smile: "I just write what I think."
She could wound, but she never did so without cause. No one
has ever been able to emulate the woman who was, deservedly,
regarded as the doyenne of her trade.
She did indeed see journalism as a trade: she laboured at
the task, enjoying a long career because, until her very
last column, she went on trying. She is irreplaceable.
· Lynda Lee-Potter, journalist, born May 2 1935; died
October 20 2004