The JJ I knew

After we'd lunched - usually close to his office - Sir John Junor and I always went off in different directions. If I turned to glance back, he would be standing on the pavement watching me. Often he'd wave. I enjoyed our lunches, even though they became a kind of verbal sparring match with this most cunning of Fleet Street foxes. There was an undoubted aura about the man. He stooped but was taller than you might imagine. The word baleful could have been invented for his gaze. He rarely smiled, but if he did, it never reached those seen-it, done-it eyes of coldest blue.

Our lunches would begin with a phone call, usually a week before. When he was editor of the Sunday Express, we'd meet at an Italian restaurant just round the corner from his Fleet Street office. His was always the window table. He would watch me arrive and stand to attention, arms by his side, when I came in.

In the wings would be his hand-picked audience. Rarely did we have a lunch, even after he moved to The Mail on Sunday, without, it seemed, columnists Nigel Dempster and Peter McKay in close attendance. Newly arrived in London, I was aware of their fearsome reputations, but JJ made them sound like cub reporters in his employ.

Then came the questions, relentless as waves beating against a shore. We didn't have conversations. We had lunchtime inquisitions. JJ claimed to be unimpressed by television and the people who worked in the industry. But he was fascinated by both. Was it true that Sir Alastair Burnet kept a bottle of whisky in his filing cabinet? Did he drink in the commercial breaks during News at Ten?

Junor had a fascination with Burnet, a fellow Glaswegian, who'd become what JJ might have secretly aspired to, the then unrivalled doyen of TV anchors.

Sandy Gall, another Scot and an ITN newscaster colleague, also intrigued him. Had Sandy's wife thrown him out? What really happened to his golf clubs and fine wines? Did she throw them out, too? And after Sir Alastair retired: was I aware that Burnet had walked into a lamppost in Kensington High Street and been found wandering around dazed? No, I hadn't heard. It was all news to me.

In all the years we lunched together he absolutely refused to let me pay. I occasionally bought him small gifts to thank him and he treated them as if they were the Crown Jewels. His choice of menu was as unvarying and limited as his choice of restaurants. He would always begin with grapefruit followed by a small piece of fish. His doctor had told him this would prolong his life, and his heart specialist was one of the few men JJ believed implicitly. He invited him along on one occasion and welcomed the surgeon to our table more fulsomely than he would a belted earl.

But his streak of ruthlessness was never far below the surface. If he deserted a favoured restaurant it was for ever. Eric Sykes, a great friend, had apparently summoned up the energy to insist on paying for lunch one day. But when JJ caught sight of the bill he decided Eric had been overcharged and went ballistic. Finito restaurante.

He was as forthright with advice as he was with his opinions on the great and the good. The chairman of a high-profile merchant bank asked me to become involved in a charity. Should I do it? JJ's response was - what's in it for you? You do the work. He takes the credit. Turn it down.

His judgments were usually shrewd and his loyalties unswerving - unless, of course, he felt he'd been slighted. He was devoted to Margaret Thatcher until, oddly, just before her fall. Did he have an inkling that she was on the way out? A few years earlier, he had invited me to join him for lunch at The Boat Show. Guest of honour was Lady Thatcher - "Margaret" to JJ - and she was accompanied by her "brilliant chancellor", Nigel Lawson.

She was in sparkling form, and JJ looked on with an expression of rapt admiration. The chancellor's face remained impassive. He didn't disagree with what the PM said but his body language said it all. JJ adored powerful, idiosyncratic women and his antennae picked up Lawson's hostility. He immediately began to campaign tirelessly against him in his column.

There was also a period when his long-standing admiration for Princess Diana suffered a blip. He didn't explain why, but all was forgiven when she spotted him in traffic in Kensington High Street and leaned out of her car to say "hello". From then on no criticism or hint of it would be tolerated.

Despite the ups and downs of my own career he remained my resolute defender to the last. There was a ring-fence around our private lives. He told me nothing about his own. But occasionally he would ring me - "JJ here, I have just heard (the voice would lower conspiratorially) that such and such a tabloid is going to print that you ..., and I would laugh at the absurdity of the latest gossip, but still he'd go into battle on my behalf. Almost the last thing he wrote about me was after I joined Sky News. JJ reflected that watching me on the satellite channel was akin to seeing a duchess in a whorehouse.

Sometimes the intensity of his support backfired. He rang me one day to say he'd arranged for me do his column in The Mail on Sunday while he had one of his breaks in France. He thought it would be fun for me to do it in the style of JJ. He was thrilled at the way it turned out, and said he wished he'd thought of some of the lines I used. But, of course, many of those who read it believed he'd actually written the column for me. I'm not sure he did much to dissuade them.

When he went into hospital for a routine operation, he was more secretive than usual. To everybody's surprise he never came out. I wondered at his funeral if he'd contracted the MRSA bug, the thing he was most terrified of, but if he had, no one was saying. As friends and colleagues gathered at the graveside, I noticed a slim Katharine Hepburn-ish figure supported by his daughter, Penny. She turned out to be JJ's estranged wife, Pam. While most of us were moist-eyed she did not shed a tear.

Penny's brave and searing biography makes it clear why. Thankfully, I didn't know the JJ Penny writes about. But I believe he would have understood her need to tell it like she found it. I'm equally sure he'd have been so proud his journalist daughter had the guts to go public with her real-life exclusive.