More seriously, he was carpeted reporting that the Americans were sweeping into Rome unopposed because the British and the Poles were rolling back the Germans in the Apennines.Cudlipp was now entering his thirties He had come a long way fast. Macmillan asked him whether he could produce a Forces newspaper to match the American Stars and Stripes. Cudlipp said he could and it must obviously be named Union Jack.The operation demanded all Cudlipp’s organising skills and buccaneering boldness in laying hands on newsprint and ink. Towards the end of the war there were five editions under Colonel Cudlipp’s direction, plus the weekly magazine Crusader.A natural rebel, Cudlipp found it hard to be the voice of authority.

Occasionally he kicked over the traces and was in trouble with the military authorities for publishing a story about the bizarre sex life of an officer as revealed in the Divorce Court; or for suggesting that the soldiers in Italy should get more pay so that they could buy a drink for the younger sisters of the Italian girls the Americans were taking out to dinner. The Mirror papers attacked Chamberlain and demanded that Churchill be brought into the government. Guided by King, Cudlipp wrote what he called “a bellicose and flag- waving column”. He commissioned articles by Churchill and Lloyd George, Britain’s foremost writers on warfare It was the beginning of Cudlipp’s political education. During the next 30 years, he was to become personally acquainted with every leading politician in Britain.In 1940, after Churchill had formed the National Government, he complained that the highly charged articles Cudlipp was writing on Sundays, and Cassandra throughout the week, to ginger up the war effort, appeared to him to be scurrilous and subversive. In times of military adversity they might even lead to defeatism.The time had come for Cudlipp to leave journalism and go to war “What are you?” asked a sergeant “A newspaper editor,” answered the recruit.

“Get into that effing truck,” the sergeant said.A subaltern in the Royal Sussex Regiment involved in the battle of Alamein, Cudlipp was ordered to report to Harold Macmillan, Britain’s resident minister at Tripoli. King had the political sophistication of an Oxford history scholar. Cudlipp had simply the swift political instincts of a South Walian. “The man who put the words on paper was Cudlipp.”They were the odd couple of Fleet Street. King was withdrawn and taciturn with a platform manner that was the despair of his speech writers Cudlipp was an extrovert, a non-stop talker, a born orator King knew all about the Top People, his own class Cudlipp knew only about the rest of mankind. King’s radicalism was based on his sympathy for the underdog, as he put it. Cudlipp had actually been an underdog and had deftly slipped out from under and vaulted to the top.The year was 1938, year of appeasement, year of Munich.

Above all, he recognised his debt to Cecil King, who picked him out for promotion when he was 24, inspired him, guided him, educated him and sent him round the world “He was my tutor,” Cudlipp would say About his own role, King could be modest He himself merely supplied the ballast, he once said. At 24, he was Editor of the Sunday Pictorial (renamed the Sunday Mirror) and before he was 40 he was editorial supremo of the whole organisation.Cudlipp always gave full credit to Guy Bartholomew, no friend of his, the man who revolutionised the style and policy of the Mirror with the help of a dozen men and women, brilliant pioneers of the new journalism. On the top open deck of a Salford tram, he gave us an impression of Pastor Jeffreys, the Welsh revivalist preacher, winning souls in his Big Tent Mission at Cardiff. There was more admiration than mockery in his act.Years later, the Mirror was to be Hugh’s Big Tent, an editor’s chair his pulpit.His mission was to enlarge the knowledge, freedom and welfare of ordinary people.