BARRY ASKEW, who has died aged 75, was editor of the News of the World for just eight months in 1981; his career with the paper was cut short after he suggested to the Queen that if the Princess of Wales felt harassed by press photographers she should send a servant out to shop for her.
Derek Jameson, who succeeded Askew as editor, recalled in his memoirs that Askew was one of several editors invited to Buckingham Palace after the Princess had been photographed popping out of Highgrove to buy some wine gums. The Queen told the editors that she thought it rather sad that her daughter-in-law, still serving her royal apprenticeship, was unable to go to the village shop without being pursued by photographers.
“She [Diana] was simply drawing attention to herself,” Askew remarked. “Why doesn’t she send a servant to do her shopping?” The Queen gave him a withering look, Jameson claimed, and told Askew: “I think that’s one of the most pompous things I have ever heard.”
Askew had arrived in Fleet Street from Preston, where he had been a successful editor of the Lancashire Evening Post, winning an award for campaigning journalism after exposing a corrupt chief constable. His habit of nightclubbing in the West End, however, soon propelled him into the “Street Of Shame” column in Private Eye, which dubbed him “The Beast Of Bouverie Street”.
In a history of the News of the World published in 1993, Askew was said to have had “a virtual obsession” with Sonia Sutcliffe, wife of Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, and to have made payments to her behind the scenes (these were later rescinded by the paper’s owner, Rupert Murdoch).
Despite the fact that the paper’s circulation had increased by more than half a million during his time as editor — largely on account of his successful launch of its colour magazine, Sunday — eight months after his appointment Askew was back in Lancashire, adding to his CV one of the shortest national newspaper editorships in history. He never again held a staff job.
In an article in 2006, Askew reflected that he would have been better off working for a different sort of national newspaper, “where my own strengths of investigative journalism might have had a better arena in which to be tested”. After leaving the News of the World, he spent most of the remainder of his career in short-term posts in the provinces.
Barry Reginald William Askew was born in Preston on December 13 1936 and educated at the Lady Manners Grammar School in Bakewell. He was a good footballer and, aged 16, got an offer from Stoke City, then in the First Division, but the idea was vetoed by his parents and headmaster. Instead he joined the Derbyshire Times as a trainee reporter in 1952. By the age of 21 he was editor of the Matlock Mercury. He went on to work with the Sheffield Morning Telegraph and, briefly, the Sheffield Star before, embarking on a 13year editorship of the Lancashire Evening Post in Preston at the age of 32.
During his time at the Lancashire Evening Post, Askew was Campaigning Journalist of the Year (1971), Journalist of the Year in the British Press Awards (1977) and, in the same year, Crime Reporter of the Year. In 1971 he won the IPC National Press Awards Campaigning Journalist award for exposing the ill-treatment of mental patients at Withington Hospital, Manchester. While editor of the Post he also worked in broadcasting, presenting on BBC North West and Granada’s What the Papers Say.
Barry Askew married first, in 1958 (dissolved 1978), June Roberts, with whom he had a son and a daughter. He married secondly, in 1980 (dissolved 1989), Deborah Parker. Barry Askew, born December 13 1936, died April 16 2012