Although he spent most of his career working for tabloid gossip columns, Tory often insisted that he was not a “proper journalist” at all; and certainly he did not conform to the stereotype.
Tory always gave the impression that he had an extensive hinterland; that the job was not an end in itself but more an opportunity to have fun. Urbane, witty and charming in person, in print he had a way with words that few could match. He once memorably described the ambitious Arianna Stassinopoulos (now Arianna Huffington) as “the most upwardly-mobile Greek since Icarus”.
He wrote columns for The Daily and Sunday Express, Daily Mirror and Daily Star, bringing a delightful sense of the surreal to the febrile world of gossip columns — a world in which he moved easily without ever taking it at all seriously. Unlike some gossip hacks, he never succumbed to the temptation to be spiteful or snide.
Tory’s particular talent was to conjure up a story out of nothing. On one occasion, while covering Royal Ascot, he inquired of a colleague what he had noted from the day’s events so far. His associate winced, and – hardly daring to voice such a trivial observation — confided: “Well, Peter, I’m afraid not much. The only thing I noticed was a bug crawling up the Duke of Edinburgh’s collar.”
Tory reflected for a moment, then said: “Right — that’s our lead!” And it was. Only he could have dreamt up such a story, tracing the insect’s progress up the Duke’s collar and recording the Royal consort’s expressions as it was happening.
One of his finest flights of fancy came when he was editing the William Hickey column on The Daily Express. News that Basingstoke had acquired a ring road, causing locals to feel themselves cut off from the outside world, gave him the idea of leading an expedition to “discover” this town in darkest Hampshire.
A camel (a racing dromedary borrowed from the Marquess of Bath at Longleat) provided transport, and a team drawn from Daily Express staff was assembled, among them a bearer (a black employee from the accounts department who agreed to strip to the waist and carry Tory’s air rifle). Pith helmets were distributed. Tory, protected from the sun by a parasol, rode, Lawrence-like, on the camel.
A television crew recorded events as the expedition arrived at Basingstoke. Police held back the crowds, children perched on their fathers’ shoulders. Tory dismounted in the town centre and shook hands with the mayor. The Daily Express ran the picture across two pages under the headline “BASINGSTOKE, I PRESUME”.
The Daily Mail’s Nigel Dempster, the most celebrated diarist of his day, christened Tory “The Captain” and once asked: “Does anyone understand Tory’s column?” Peter McKay, a long-standing friend and former colleague of Tory, certainly did, describing Tory’s page in the Daily Star as “like a cello being played in a Rastafarian jug band”.
Peter Geofroy Holt Tory was born on October 3 1939, the son of Sir Geofroy Tory (whose obituary appears above), ambassador to the Republic of Ireland and High Commissioner in Malaya, and was educated at Malvern, where he showed promise as an actor and was a successful long-distance runner. He then went to Rada, where his contemporaries included Susannah York and Tom Courtenay. After a spell in repertory, he joined the Royal Shakespeare Company, touring the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe as a spear-carrier and enjoying a love affair with Julie Christie.
At one stage Tory seriously considered a career in the Fleet Air Arm, but a part in an East German film was offered when he was just weeks away from the age limit for signing on as a pilot. He agonised over the decision and finally took the acting job — the part of a communist recruit in the Spanish Civil War.
As with most of his misfortunes in life, Tory turned the subsequent disaster into a successful anecdote. The prize-winning director who had offered him the part dropped dead before the film began shooting, and a hilariously incompetent producer took over; the result was so bad that it was shown only on late night East German television.
Tory more or less drifted into Fleet Street, being hired as a casual reporter by John Junor, editor of The Sunday Express, and moving from there to the William Hickey column on The Daily Express. As an ex-actor, he felt at home with gossip columnists, whom he described as, for the most part, a group of renegade public schoolboys who bore the sulphurous whiff of Kipling’s “Gentlemen Rankers”. Lunchtimes were spent in El Vino, where Tory’s ability to sink formidable amounts of whisky while remaining upright and articulate owed as much to his stage training as to his genetic make-up.
His next berth was at The Daily Mirror, under Mike Molloy, where his taste for the fantastic was given full rein. Tory was a qualified pilot, and frequently sported an old leather flying helmet when aloft in his beloved biplane, leading colleagues at the Mirror to call him “Biggles”. The paper’s owner, Robert Maxwell, had never heard of the fictional flying ace and, mishearing the nickname, always referred to Tory as “Boggles”.
When the Ethiopian government told Maxwell that they needed light aircraft for famine relief the Mirror boss instructed Tory to lead a squadron to Africa. Tory enlisted some pilots from his earlier days as a stunt flier, but Maxwell lost interest when he discovered he would have to pay for the aeroplanes’ maintenance and fuel.
Tory subsequently moved to The Daily Star and then back to the Express, where he began the “Peter Tory” page. After the death in 1997 of his wife Gwen, however, he slowly succumbed to clinical depression, a condition that he had successfully concealed over the years. To the astonishment of his colleagues, he decided to leave journalism, confessing that writing a column was agony, and the thought of having to do it again made him physically ill.
Tory ghosted the autobiography of the cartoonist Carl Giles, and was a doggedly persistent — if indifferent — golfer. He was a fine pistol shot, and a collector of rifles and shotguns.
In 2010 he appeared in a documentary film, Tabloid, about Joyce McKinney, a former Miss Wyoming who in 1977 was accused of abducting and raping an American Mormon missionary; the so-called “Manacled Mormon” claimed that he had been chained for three days to a bed in a cottage in Devon . McKinney denied the charges, and in 1979 jumped bail and fled back to America. Tory followed, reporting on her activities for The Daily Express.
For some years after retiring Peter Tory divided his time between Bermuda and the United States, before returning to England, where he met Jacqueline Govier, a talented painter and art teacher. They lived together at Tetbury, Gloucestershire, where he found a peace and contentment that had eluded him for many years. She survives him.
Peter Tory, born October 3 1939, died October 9 2012
