‍Remember those stories reporters were sometimes sent on, where you were expected to take part in the action, rather than just observing it?

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‍They were meant to be immersive, subjective, bringing the reader all the thrills first-hand from our man at the sharp end.

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‍“Right, get down to the fire station,” the news editor might say. “They’re holding tests for would-be firefighters and I’ve put your name down.”

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‍You would sigh and reach for your coat. Already you’d be having visions of climbing ladders, getting drenched by hoses or choked by smoke and carrying people around slung across your shoulders.

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‍And as you reached the door, the news editor was likely to call after you: “If you pass, you might want to think about staying there…”

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‍It was an early, usually harmless version of Hunter S Thompson’s “gonzo journalism”, in which you didn’t end up beaten to a pulp by Hell’s Angels. Call it Gonzo Lite.

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‍I didn’t do many such stories but the worst was the haggis-eating contest, staged every year in Corby on the morning of January 25, hours before the celebration of the life and work of Rabbie Burns, the Scottish Bard.

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‍Contestants had to shovel down as much haggis as they could in a certain time. (A minute? Two? I forget. Put it down to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.)

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‍Now, haggis can be a very tasty dish. It is lamb’s offal, with suet, oatmeal and spices encased in a piece of ox intestine. Really, it’s not as bad as it sounds. It is usually eaten with a nip of whisky poured over it and neeps and tatties – mashed swede and potato – on the side.

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‍But no “water of life”, no neeps, no tatties for the contestants; just the rather dry contents of the ox’s innards. The pinhead oats make it impossible to swallow at speed and there is much spluttering, gagging and worse.

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‍I didn’t win, not even close. But I had a jolly story to tell, even if I couldn’t face the Burns Night beano later in the day.

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‍All this is by way of introducing you to Olga Franklin (and might constitute the longest drop intro in history). Franklin, Oggi to her friends, was one of the first ladies of Fleet Street, to borrow a phrase from a long-ago deputy editor of the Daily Express, which he famously used to describe Jean Rook.

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‍Poor Oggi spent a good deal of her time on the Daily Mail as a stunt girl. A willing, uncomplaining patsy for the news editor, she could be sent out on Gonzo Lite assignments on a whim.

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‍And so she became, briefly, a waitress, an all-night lorry driver’s mate and a sewing lady in a royal couture house. If you look her up on the picture agency sites, you will find her joining a Pan Am cabin crew; struggling to retain her balance as she learnt to ski; and peering into the workings of a car engine as she took driving lessons.

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‍Oggi was a pathfinder for women who followed her into Fleet Street, such as Rook, Lynda Lee-Potter, Tessa Hilton and Amanda Platell. Born in 1912 in Birmingham into a funny, wise, quarrelsome Russian-Jewish family, she longed to be a journalist and, at 28, she thought she had realised her dream.

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‍A letter arrived from Reuters asking her to come in for an interview (she had written seeking a job 18 months earlier).

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‍Oggi writes in her book Steppes to Fleet Street: “The charming editor said no, he didn’t mind that I’d had no experience in journalism. No, he didn’t mind anything. All the men were being called up, you see.

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‍“They would have to wait and see what I could do. And for a start, could I make a big, hot pot of tea?”

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‍Like many before her and since, she found that being a journalist “didn’t mean having a fine prose style and good spelling”.

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‍Rather, it meant that “when the chief sub-editor was piecing together a splash story for the morning papers – using agency cables and eyewitness accounts telephoned from abroad about the bombing of Rotterdam, say – what he most needed was a girl who could run upstairs to the library, to get all the basic details about Rotterdam from books and maps and gazetteers and files, and race downstairs with it quick as quick; someone who could read his shorthand and type it all out, putting in the bits he might have forgotten, and race to the teleprinters with it. Journalisms then was just this: being in the right place at the right time, with the right information”.

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‍Oggi follows this with another perceptive remark: “Journalism, I was to learn much later, could never be done sitting down.”

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‍Then came the cock-up that got her fired. It made her famous, she writes. “One of the rules of the Street was that you must not make little mistakes, but a really great big boob that gives everyone a laugh and something to talk about was all right.”

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‍Reuters received a cable from Brazil, in cable-ese French that she thought suggested Mussolini’s eldest son was going to box in a match in Budapest. The Times liked the story and asked Reuters for more.

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‍But Oggi had mis-translated the cable. Her Russian was flawless but her French a little flaky. The agency sent out a correction and the boss sent for her. “Lovely story,” he said. “Wish it had been true.”

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‍The boss was a decent man and helped her to find a reporter’s job on the Oxford Mail. However, it was a quiet, orderly place and, as we all know, no news is bad news.

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‍So she moved to the Newcastle Evening Chronicle. “Here was plenty of crime,” she writes. “Even the chief constable himself was up on a charge in connection with some missing fire engines.”

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‍Eventually, she was sure she had met the condition Daily Express editor Arthur Christiansen had told her was essential for life in Fleet Street: “To be properly trained on a provincial newspaper, for preference somewhere in the north.”

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‍She landed a job on the Daily Sketch but for months was completely ignored by everyone. Then one day the news editor rushed in, despairing. “Christ, Warsaw’s been liberated and we haven’t got a thing on it,” he said. “Not a bloody line.”

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‍“I know Warsaw,” said Oggi. Her “I was there” piece in next day’s paper meant that the news editor “knew my name and that my legs were all right. I remembered just in time to keep them well stretched out, showing my last pair of good pre-war silk stockings.

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‍“Legs are something that every girl has got to have in the Street.”

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‍It is a lovely book (price 35 shillings) with a minimalist sketch on the cover by Haro, who could sum up a subject in a few strokes of the pen. It shows Oggi with her hair in a trademark bun, a long pointed nose, matronly figure and those shapely pins.

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‍Fleet Street, here she comes!

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‍*****

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‍As you sow, so shall you reap. Sunday Times columnist and farmer Jeremy Clarkson told Times Radio on Monday: “I don’t think there’s a farmer alive who’s Labour any more.”

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‍To be fair, there were very few to start with. My time in the shires taught me that young farmer = Young Conservative.

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‍But the Tories are not radical enough for them these days. So when Nigel Farage turns up in his Barbour, flat cap and tweed tie, he is treated as the Messiah.

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‍Clarkson, who farms 1,000 acres in Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire, said: “This Government is truly useless and is doing nothing for farming, in fact being actually damaging to farming.”

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‍Labour has always drawn its support from traditional industry in an urban landscape. Those who won their seats in the landslide of two years ago, instead of doing what’s right for the country, set out to force their ideology on us – and to settle scores.

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‍They did not like the way farmers were able to pass their farms down to the next generation, so they hit them with a spiteful inheritance tax.

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‍They wanted more benefits for their supporters so, according to the latest tranche of documents relating to Peter Mandelson, they made every conversation with Ministers about “who can be taxed to pay benefits”.

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‍No thought of what that would do to business or how the promised economic growth was to be achieved. Or how many young people they were throwing on the scrap heap because bosses faced with soaring costs would simply stop hiring.

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‍By next year, one in five young adults will be out of work. Labour isn’t working, the Saatchi and Saatchi ad of 1978 told us. It still isn’t.

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‍Well might the idiot Starmer slink out the back door of No. 10 to provide The Times with a memorable Page One picture yesterday.

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‍*****

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‍A fit of pique over his failure to bag the rights to the National Lottery has cost former Express proprietor Richard Desmond £40 million.

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‍His Northern & Shell company lost a two-year legal battle with the Gambling Commission. Now a High Court has ordered Desmond to hand over 75 per cent of the costs immediately.

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‍He was seeking £1.3 billion in damages, disputing the process by which his bid was scored a failure. He also claimed alleged modifications the commission made to the contract for the fourth National Lottery licence were unlawful.

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‍It is little wonder he was cross. A bid by Allwyn Entertainment won, with the deal valued at £70 billion over 10 years.

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‍The latest Rich List puts Desmond’s personal fortune at around £1.3 billion. But his £1 billion development on the Docklands site of the old Westferry printing plant now has the go-ahead and promises another mega payday for the man with the Midas touch.

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‍RICHARD DISMORE

‍3 June 2026