Alexander Chancellor honoured for services to journalism

Alexander Chancellor, former Reuters correspondent and editor, has been awarded a CBE for services to journalism. CBE is Commander, Order of the British Empire, one rank below knighthood, to which his father Sir Christopher Chancellor, a correspondent who served as general manager of Reuters from 1944 to 1959, was elevated in the year of Reuters’ centenary, 1951.

Chancellor, 72, a former editor of the conservative magazine Spectator, now writes columns for various publications. In 1993 he spent a year in America working as an editor at The New Yorker where he supervised the Talk of the Town section, providing material for a memoir, Some Times in America.

Journalism was not always in his cards. When he went up to Cambridge University half a century ago “my sense of liberation after imprisonment in boarding school was so intoxicating that I spent most of my first year intoxicated,” he recalled. “This was a mistake. But it meant that I was spared what would have been another mistake: I did so badly in my exams that I was precluded from joining the diplomatic service, as I had vaguely hoped to, and entered journalism instead, a rougher trade to which I was much better suited.” ■