Chris Moncrieff
Political editor
BORN SEPTEMBER 9, 1931 – DIED NOVEMBER 22, 2019, AGED 88
CHRISTOPHER Wighton Moncrieff was feted by leaders of all parties who marvelled at his prodigious output of political stories while working for the Press Association.
Margaret Thatcher appointed him a CBE in 1989 and Tony Blair described him as a gateway to the nation. He was the undisputed master of the offbeat political story.
Moncrieff’s menagerie of backbench MPs, ready to respond to his call for
“a few of the well-chosen” on a topical issue, was a Westminster institution.
Lord Tebbit, Moncrieff’s own MP for Chingford, granted him an interview as he recovered in hospital following the IRA’s bombing of the Grand Hotel in Brighton in 1984.
The journalist worked from dawn to dusk, seven days a week at the Houses of Parliament and only took two weeks holiday a year at Hunstanton, Norfolk.
He spent a frustrating spell in a London solicitor’s office before landing his first job on a local paper in Harrogate.
After National Service in the Intelligence Corps, he worked on the Coventry Evening Telegraph and the Nottingham Evening Post.
He joined the PA Parliamentary staff in 1962 and a year later was sent to cover the Great Train Robbery. Such was his dedication to the story that when police appealed for information about anyone who had gone missing around the time of the heist, his name was proffered by a neighbour.
Moncrieff became a lobby reporter in 1973 and chief political correspondent (later political editor) in 1980. His late wife Margaret, with whom he had four children, coped with unending cheerfulness with his busy lifestyle and the stream of telephone calls.