Christopher Booker, campaigning journalist who was the first editor of Private Eye and became a cherished Telegraph columnist over decades – obituary
Christopher Booker, who has died aged 81, was an influential figure in the “Swinging London” of the early 1960s, writing scripts for David Frost and the BBC late-night satirical reviews That Was The Week That Was and Not So Much a Programme More a Way of Life, and becoming founding editor of the satirical magazine Private Eye; he built a following of millions of loyal newspaper readers, particularly of The Sunday Telegraph, where he was a columnist for nearly three decades, as a sceptical, brave, wide-ranging and often funny campaigning journalist.
