Bill Hagerty

Posted: December 30, 2025

FORMER Fleet Street editor and legendary Mirror executive, BILL HAGERTY, died on Boxing Day [2025], aged 86. There will be a requiem mass for Bill at Our Lady of Grace Church in Chiswick High Road on February 11, [2026] followed by a small invitation-only reception.

Bill Hagerty’s family would like you to know his memorial service will be at 11.30am on April 23, [2026] at St Bride’s Church, Fleet Street, London EC4Y 8AU, and they look forward to seeing his friends there.

Bill’s friend and colleague Julia Langdon, (political editor, Daily Mirror, 1984–1989), said: “Bill Hagerty was a brilliant journalist, a profoundly kind and decent man and a legend in his own lunchtime (cf his friend Keith Waterhouse, author of ‘The Theory and Practice of Lunch’). He was working in the business for an astonishing 70 years and there was nothing he didn’t know about it. He was an innate professional, always fun to be around and I was proud to call him my friend. We will all miss him because we will not see his like again.”

With thanks to the Daily Mirror: Bill interviewed some of the world’s most famous names and went on to great success as an editor and author during an impressive career, which started from humble beginnings at the Walthamstow Post when he was aged 16.

In 2023, Bill was named Journalist Laureate – an award honouring excellence in the industry. A citation at the London Press Club read: “Bill Hagerty truly is a man of The People – a newspaper he edited – and a worthy Journalist Laureate for 2023.”

Bill was born on St George’s Day, April 23, in Ilford, East London, just before the outbreak of war in 1939.

His headmaster at Beal Grammar School tried to put him off journalism but he ignored the advice.

He began his career with the Walthamstow Post, followed by Reynolds News, which in 1962 became the Sunday Citizen.

As showbusiness editor of the Daily Mirror, Bill travelled to Hollywood, New York and many film locations, where he met, among others, John Wayne, Richard Burton, Michael Caine, Roger Moore, Gene Kelly, Neil Diamond, Sammy Davis Jr and Joan Collins.

The Mirror’s renowned former editor, the late Lord [Hugh] Cudlipp, was a great supporter of Bill’s reporting skills.

Bill was twice an editor of Fleet Street newspapers – Sunday Today and The People – and was also for a period acting editor of the Daily Mirror.

He also edited all eight volumes of the diaries of former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s Downing Street press secretary Alastair Campbell, who worked with Bill at the Mirror group.

Bill wrote two books on the British media, including “Read All About It – 100 Sensational Years of the Daily Mirror”, and in 2007 was selected by The British Library to contribute his life story to its Oral History of the British Press.

Bill later edited the highly praised media quarterly British Journalism Review, of which he remained chairman emeritus.

Speaking at the London Press Club awards in 2023, Bill said: “I started out in this grand old trade covering, among other things, amateur football in East London.
“Sixty-something years later, having been around the block, and the globe, several times, I find my only regular gig is writing regular match reports on Brentford FC – Premier League admittedly, but football still.
“Funny old game, journalism.”
Paying tribute, Doug Wills, chair of the London Press Club, said: “Bill was a doyen of all things journalistic. We will miss him greatly.”
Mirror columnist Kevin Maguire said: “He was a shrewd, kindly and humorous bloke with an engagingly cantankerous side.” Royal author Robert Jobson said: “Very sad to learn that Bill Hagerty has died. Bill’s passion for journalism, press freedom and charity work was unmatched. A huge loss. RIP.”

Other tributes:

Michael Williams: “I am so sorry to hear this. He was a warm friend, a wonderful journalist and a fine human being.”

Colin Myler: “So very sorry to hear. It has been a tough journey for you all. Bill was everything that Michael said and more.”

John and Barbara Jackson: “Such sad news. A good friend and colleague.”

John Blake: “He was a lovely, clever, decent man. He made the world a better place.”

Jill Palmer: “Bill was a terrific colleague, a great friend, and a lovely man.”

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From The Times, Tuesday, December 30 2025: BILL HAGERTY was the Fleet Street editor who, in 1992, broke the story of David Mellor’s adulterous relationship with the actress Antonia de Sancha in the Sunday People. The Conservative arts minister had not endeared himself to the fourth estate and, despite the inevitable furore about intrusion, Hagerty was unapologetic. “[Mellor] was a pompous hypocrite. He’d used his family in his election address. He was the minister in charge of the press. He was the one who talked about [how the press were drinking in] the last chance saloon,” he told academics investigating the reporting of political scandal.

If he expected his handiwork to be appreciated by opposition politicians, he was disappointed. Shortly afterwards, he was at a party at Peter Mandelson’s flat with several of the shadow cabinet. “A couple of them really didn’t want to talk to me. They were polite but icy … It wasn’t that they disapproved of us kicking Mellor, but that there were skeletons rattling around in their, or more likely, their colleagues’ cupboards. If we could do it to Mellor, we could do it to them,” he said.

The Sunday People’s story published extensive quotes from Mellor from what appeared to be private conversations, including his admission that the relationship was interfering with his ministerial role. “You have absolutely exhausted me,” the so-called minister of fun told his lover. “I feel seriously knackered. I had a wonderful time with you last night … I’ve got two big speeches to do tomorrow, neither of which I have prepared.”

Hagerty was old-school Fleet Street, a proudly working-class journalist whose education was the “university of life” and a Pitman’s shorthand primer. He started in journalism at 16 and spent the next 70 years ploughing his inky furrow. Although briefly editor of the Sunday edition of Today newspaper, acting editor of the Daily Mirror and editor of The Sunday People, his greatest strength lay in writing rather than editing.

He was a handsome, nattily dressed schmoozer, once described as “the Michael Caine of Fleet Street”, who befriended many of the showbiz stars he interviewed. His journalistic dexterity embraced everything from jazz, film and theatre reviews to coverage of sport and politics. Later, he edited the eight volumes of Alastair Campbell’s diaries, which record the spin doctor’s role with Tony Blair and the Labour government. “He was so professional, he paid such attention to detail, I couldn’t have asked for anybody better,” Campbell once said.

While honing his craft as a journalist on “the Street of Adventure’’ (his nickname for Fleet Street), there were some memorable learning curves. On one occasion in the mid-1970s, while writing showbusiness stories for the Daily Mirror, he was having lunch with Alan Price, the singer-songwriter. The conversation turned to films and that morning’s story that a sequel to Caine’s Alfie was to be made. When he wondered aloud who was going to get the title role in Alfie Darling (1975), Price replied: “I am.” Hagerty laughed at what he thought was a joke, but a few days later, news broke that Price had indeed been cast, leaving a sheepish Hagerty to keep quiet about having missed an exclusive.

A decade later, he was on the news desk when the Mirror received a libel writ from John DeLorean, the corrupt motor-industry entrepreneur. Soon afterwards, a phone call from an apparent informant had Hagerty scampering to San Remo in Italy on the promise of evidence that would torpedo DeLorean’s case. “We met him at San Remo railway station, and he was utterly plausible. So much so that we parted with cash, ‘no cheques’ was part of the deal, on the promise of documentary proof,” he recalled, only to discover that he had fallen victim to a hoaxer.

Other scrapes provided fodder for his colourful prose. One day in 1976, he left a party in California to buy cigarette papers for the actor Robert Mitchum, but was stopped on the Santa Monica freeway for driving erratically. He had drunk “several glasses of wine with food [but] did not consider myself to be drunk”. The traffic officer thought otherwise, but a breath test suggested he was just under the limit. The following day, he was fined $25 for “illegally crossing lanes on the freeway”, and the experience of a nerve-racking night “in the company of the law-enforcement agencies of southern California” formed a half-page feature in the Daily Record.

William John Gell Hagerty was born in Ilford, Essex, on St George’s Day, 1939, the son of Steve Hagerty, a film projectionist, and his wife Doris (née Gell). He had two brothers: Tony, who predeceased him, and Michael, who survives him. He left Beal Grammar School at 16 to cover football for the Walthamstow Post in east London before undertaking National Service with the RAF.

By 1962, he was at Reynold’s News, a Labour-supporting Sunday paper, shortly before it became the Sunday Citizen. He reported on cricket, football, including the 1966 World Cup, and boxing, securing a ringside seat at three of Muhammad Ali’s fights. His next berth was on the features desk of the Daily Sketch while moonlighting as a Saturday football correspondent for the News of the World.

Meanwhile, in 1965, he married Lynda Beresford, who worked for a high-street bank. He is survived by their son, Will, associate editor of The Sun, and their daughter Faith, a teacher; another daughter, Laura, died of leukaemia in 1973, aged one. The marriage was dissolved, and in 1991 he married Liz Vercoe (née Latta), a fellow journalist. She also survives him with their son Adam, “proving that there was life in the middle-aged dog yet”, as he wrote in the Sunday Express. Adam makes television documentaries.

Hagerty joined the Daily Mirror in 1967 and over the next 25 years was involved in almost every aspect of the paper, so much so that he later wrote its history, Read All About It: 100 Sensational Years of the Daily Mirror (2003). One of his earliest reports was from the Isle of Lewis, where the council planned to withdraw the island from British Summer Time and put the clocks back an hour though, as he pointed out, there could be confusion surrounding the year of birth for any babies born in the last hour of 1968. He also travelled extensively in the US, acquiring the nickname Arnold Bigtime thanks to his showbusiness scoops that included interviews with John Wayne, Roger Moore and Richard Burton, as well as Groucho Marx, Mary Pickford and a young Bette Midler.

In January 1991, Hagerty was appointed editor of the Mirror’s sister title, the Sunday People, but involuntarily “vacated the editorship”, as the company put it, in November 1992. He spent that winter reading and learning to cook before reinventing himself as an on-the-night theatre reviewer for Today newspaper. He then spent a couple of months on Mohamed Al Fayed’s abortive Life on Sunday title before persuading the News of the World and later The Sun to take his punchy theatre reviews “on the grounds that even classical actors normally have a TV track record”.

Other doors opened. Having previously written Flash, Bang, Wallop! (1978) with the photojournalist Kent Gavin, he wrote for the Culture section of The Sunday Times, lectured on the press and privacy to passengers on the Queen Elizabeth 2 cruise ship and to law students at the University of Cambridge, and was paid by Sky Television and the BBC “to pontificate, with the questionable authority but uninhibited cheek of the ex-editor”. When all else failed, there was book reviewing, “the second-most fun you can have without getting out of bed”.

Hagerty could have retired, but instead dedicated himself to press freedom. He was chairman and trustee of the Journalists’ Charity, founded by Charles Dickens to help journalists who have fallen on hard times, a director of the London Press Club, and editor of the British Journalism Review, a quarterly journal devoted to the trade he loved so much. This gave him a platform from which to pronounce on Fleet Street’s ills, which he also did for The Guardian, The Independent and The New Statesman.

He lamented the loss of Fleet Street and its culture of excess and collaboration. “It was very much an ideas factory,” he told NBC News in 2005 when Reuters became the last large news organisation to close its offices there. “Everybody would drink together, and you would come away from having a drink with friends with an idea that would end up being an article or series in the newspaper.” He loved jazz and musicals, especially Guys and Dolls, attended Mass regularly and credited Keith Waterhouse with his fine appreciation of long lunches.

For many years, Hagerty lived in Chiswick, west London, where his final gig was covering football for the Chiswick Calendar website. “I started out in this grand old trade covering, among other things, amateur football in east London,” he said when named journalist laureate at the London Press Club Ball in 2023. “Sixty-something years later, having been around the block, and the globe, several times, I find my only regular gig is writing regular match reports on Brentford FC — Premier League, admittedly, but football still. Funny old game, journalism.”