Jon Snow, the Channel 4 News presenter, said that BBC news correspondent Brian Barron, who died yesterday, was “the most tenacious, even ruthless, correspondent I have ever worked against” and the “ultimate, objective professional”.

“In learning of his death today from cancer, I feel one of my co-ordinates has gone. Barron’s excellent reporting was a yardstick to which one aspired,” Snow wrote on his blog.

Barron was in Saigon in 1975 when the last US helicopter left as the Vietnam war ended. He then ignored the BBC’s order to leave the danger zone and carried on reporting.