Chris Boffey, head of news at four national newspapers and star reporter on both tabloids and broadsheets, has been described as a “great human being” and an inspiration to a generation of journalists, following his death at the age of 74.

His forty-year career on Fleet Street was notable as much for the kindness he showed and the friendships he made as his thoughtful reportage from war zones and disasters and the major stories that he famously broke in a fiercely competitive industry, friends and rivals said.

His advice was legendary, his support for nervous reporters immediate, encouraging young journalists to get out of the office and speak to people, preferably in a pub.

“Never go to lunch on an empty stomach,” he would counsel. “Never lie to the newsdesk as one day you may have to,” was another rule to live by.

Boffey appeared fearless, at times, according to those he worked alongside.

He was at the Milltown cemetery in Northern Ireland in 1988, pulled down behind a grave stone by a friend at the Press Association, when Michael Stone started shooting at an IRA funeral, killing three and injuring 60 of the others who did not get out of sight in time.

Whilst covering Northern Ireland the death threats from paramilitaries were serious enough for his wife, on Boffey’s receipt of a bottle of champagne from a satisfied news desk, to insist that it could be bomb and that he put in a bucket of water in front of their Crouch End home.

Much later in his career, facing a different sort of threat, in an editorial conference at the Telegraph’s towering Canary Wharf offices, Boffey soberly informed his Sunday Telegraph editor, Dominic Lawson: “There are a thousand stories in this city – and we haven’t got any of them.”

After a pause, he told a perturbed looking Lawson: “But we will have by the end of the week.”

One editor, on taking a disliking to a gobby new recruit on day one, instructed Boffey to get rid of him. Boffey instead hid the gauche target, quite unaware of the peril, sometimes in the pub, often on the road, at times even in corners of the office, until the editor quite forgot his instruction.

Source: Press Gazette