Mark Edmonds obituary: mischievous Sunday Times journalist (2024)

“Ah, gay Paree — truly the most genteel of cities,” said Mark Edmonds in 2016 in a spoof “Day in the Life” article written by colleagues to mark his departure from The Sunday Times, where he was deputy editor of the magazine. “Although I’ve been advised by HR not to call it ‘gay’ any more.”

There were several other fictional HR run-ins in the article, though since Edmonds delighted in being politically incorrect there was probably more than an inch of truth to them. He was not allowed, for instance, to call his colleague, the journalist Eleanor Mills, “Bombs” (he did this regularly) or to use the word “c***” (he did this regularly, too). He told his daughters, who the spoof article claimed were J-Lo fans, that popular culture had died along with John Lennon in 1980 — and he was always the first to laugh uproariously at his own jokes.

“Introducing him to new people was the equivalent of pulling the pin on a hand grenade and throwing it into a crowded room,” said his friend, Joel. “He had a weird ability to call someone a c*** and make them feel happily accepted.”

Edmonds was a typical Fleet Street hack in other ways, too, referring to himself as “a well-lubricated journalist with a passion for expansive lunches with ‘contacts’”. Such passion was not dimmed when he was summoned to his managing editor’s office for a chat about expenses. “Chaps,” said Jeremy Deedes, “we’ve really got to cut back. It’s fine to take a black cab to the pub but you can’t just leave them outside with the meter running any more.”

Newspapers — the gossip and the friends, the pints and cigarettes, the ink-stained fingers — were his life, and his mischievousness belied a seriousness about the craft and an earnest belief in the power of good journalism. Between 2013 and 2015 he spearheaded The Sunday Times Magazine’s human trafficking campaign, which helped to shape Britain’s first anti-slavery legislation since the 19th century.

He wrote hard-nosed investigative features — including in 2021 a report on the illegal puppy trade in Ireland for the Daily Mail and in April a 3,000-word report for The Times on the legal battle over Amy Winehouse’s estate — as well as soft-boiled interviews with celebrities such as Sir Ranulph Fiennes, Gary Lineker and Jane Birkin, which crackled with warmth and wit.

He had a particular interest in anything related to Ian Fleming or the Beatles, and in 2008 interviewed Paul McCartney, his hero, after five months of “sporadic” conversations. “McCartney is still the man your mum would want to meet,” he observed. “But when he is not parading before his public, he is on guard, and he politely ignores questions he deems uncomfortable.”

Edmonds had an eagle-eyed attention to copy and was a forensic editor. “You could chuck him crap copy and he’d turn a pig’s ear into a golden purse,” said Mills, aka Bombs. His standards were viciously high and his praise was hard won — “but when it came,” said Camilla Long of The Sunday Times, “it was delivered in brilliant, Mark-ish style, as if to say, ‘now, don’t get ahead of yourself, don’t be a diva.’”

He could nevertheless be short-tempered and he encouraged “the young ’uns” by giving them short shrift. One, Sophie Haydock, recalled being sent an email with the subject line: “Bollocking”. The text read: “Can you pop down please?” He was so proud of it that he had it framed and put in his downstairs loo, along with the “Day in the Life” article about all the fictional HR run-ins.

He told colleagues when their copy was “shit”, especially the famous ones he edited such as Jeremy Clarkson or AA Gill, who called Edmonds “the cab driver” on account of his modest background. Edmonds ended his Sunday Times obituary for Gill, who died in 2016, with a story in which Gill had taken him to “his” table at the Wolseley in Piccadilly, where he knew all the staff. “‘I’ll have the lobster and caviar omelette again — in other words, my usual,’ said Gill, in that slightly camp voice in which you could detect he had slight issues with the pronunciation of the letter R,” Edmonds wrote. “And then to me: ‘And you are paying, of course.’”

He was born David Mark Edmonds — he preferred his middle name — in 1961 in Ealing, west London, to Alan, a civil servant with the Home Office, and Mary, a PA to the medical officers who worked on the foundations of the NHS. Her favourite saying was: “Champagne ideas, lemonade money.”

In 1968, when he was seven, Edmonds was in a car crash while on holiday with his mother, younger brother, Ian, and father, the last of whom died. When his uncle came to visit, he told Edmonds that he was now “the head of the family”. His mother never again spoke of his father and their relationship was fractious. Further tragedy came when Ian was killed by a train — Edmonds believed he had killed himself — in 1986.

Edmonds was brought up in Hillingdon in what he liked to call “metroland” and he yearned for the city lights, spending most weekends in London. He was more interested in rock music, girls and parties than getting good grades, though he was clever. A job sweeping the floors after school led to a lifelong aversion to housework.

At the grammar school he attended, which based itself on a public school — all black gowns, mortar boards and beatings — he was something of a Che Guevara figure, though with his large, fluffy hair he modelled himself more closely on Jim Morrison. Disapproving teachers called him a “barrack-room lawyer” on account of his uncompromising opinions, and when the local paper published a letter he had sent in, in which he complained that his school had wasted money on building a new conservatory, the headmaster made his displeasure felt.

Like Gill and Clarkson, Edmonds didn’t go to university — he liked to say that they went to the university of life. He joined the Uxbridge Labour Party as a press officer and after working for the unemployment exchange he got his first job in journalism on the Hampstead and Highgate Express, after training at the London College of Printing.

Restaurant reviews kindled a passion for food — he considered cooking a combat sport and when he went to dinner at friends’ he would score them out of ten — and a job at She magazine as a feature writer kindled a love of Soho, and not just the pubs and the Groucho Club, of which he was a member. In 1988 he published an insider’s guide, Inside Soho, and later wrote and presented a three-part podcast called Who Killed the Prince of Soho? about the mysterious death of the Groucho Club manager during the Britpop era, Bernie Katz.

He worked his way from She magazine and Observer supplements to executive positions on the Daily Telegraph (he was property editor between 1997 and 1999) and executive editor of the Financial Times weekend magazine, The Business, quitting after less than two months to join the Daily Mail as assistant features editor. “I think he probably found it slightly arcane working here,” said Julia Cuthbertson, editor of The Business. “He is a very forthright personality and it had taken people a bit of time to acclimatise to that.” In 2004 he became associate editor and later deputy of The Sunday Times Magazine, where he stayed until 2016.

Edmonds had a shock of white hair — a “lustrous silver bouffe”, as he put it — and a deep, sonorous voice “with a laugh like Sid James when Babs Windsor pops her bra”, said the journalist John Sweeney. “He was forever rubbishing people — me, especially. ‘Low-rent’ was a favourite barb. He could play the misanthropic pub bore to a tee.” Edmonds also tried his hand courageously, if not successfully, at stand-up comedy, usually dressed in a tuxedo and bow tie and in front of colleagues, who generally found him funnier on the desk. At one venue in Paris he asked the audience: “So why isn’t there a Place de la Collaboration?”

He is survived by two daughters, Immie, who works in communications at the Royal Geographical Society, and Ellie, who works in marketing in craft beer, as well as two stepchildren, Rebecca and Alex, and his beloved King Charles spaniel, Roxy.

Edmonds digested the news that he would die of liver and pancreatic cancer, what AA Gill had called the “full English breakfast”, with the sort of phlegmatism typical of an old hack — “by having a decent lunch every day till Christmas”.

Mark Edmonds, journalist, was born on April 6, 1961. He died of cancer on September 9, 2024, aged 63