A Short Walk Down Fleet Street: From Beaverbrook to Boycott

'Fleet Street', shorthand for the British national newspaper industry, was the hub of the industry where most newspapers had not only their offices, but their printing presses as well. In the 1980s, with deregulation of the industry and the waning of the power of the print unions, this state of affairs collapsed and the national newspaper offices scattered. Yet to most people, Fleet Street will forever be identified with the newspaper industry. In over forty years of journalism, Alan Watkins has written political columns for many of Britain’s key newspapers. His proprietors have included some of the most legendary names in the field including Lord Beaverbrook and Tony O'Reilly. He has known most Prime Ministers from Harold Macmillan to Tony Blair. In A Short Walk Down Fleet Street he draws upon his great wealth of experience of politics and journalism to write in his own inimitable style about these and many other characters. But the true hero of the book, brought vividly back to life within these pages, is Old Fleet Street itself, which lasted until the 1980s and is now, as he puts it, as remote as the Byzantine Empire.