‘Titan of Fleet Street’ Christopher Booker leaves Telegraph after six decades

The Sunday Telegraph columnist Christopher Booker has said goodbye to the newspaper following a 60-year run at the title and its sister daily.

In his final column for the paper, published yesterday, Booker, 81, said he was departing for “health reasons”.

In a leader column, The Telegraph has described him as “a titan of Fleet Street” whose journalism was “indispensable”.

Booker started work at the Daily Telegraph in 1959 reviewing jazz music and went on to become jazz critic at The Sunday Telegraph.

In 1972 he started a monthly column in the Saturday edition of the Daily Telegraph before becoming a Sunday Telegraph columnist in 1990.

Booker, the first Private Eye editor, has also written book reviews for The Sunday Telegraph and wrote the daily edition’s Way of the World column.

In his final Sunday Telegraph column, Booker wrote: “We are told we should try to leave the world in slightly better shape than we found it.

“But as I prepare to leave it, I have too long felt that I was no longer trying to change it and was only writing its epitaph.

“Nevertheless I cannot forget all the thousands of admirable people I have come across through my years writing for the Telegraph.

“To them and all my loyal readers I am profoundly grateful.”

The Telegraph’s leader column added: “Mr Booker is one of the great social critics of his generation, and one of the leading campaigning journalists of the post-war era. We are honoured to have published him.”

Booker has written several books, including The Neophiliacs – on the revolutions of the Fifties and Sixties – that was serialised by the Sunday Telegraph.

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Topics in this article : Telegraph Media Group