In memory of Richard West, 1930-2015

Dick West, a foreign correspondent and longtime contributor to The Spectator, has died. Here’s a profile we ran about him in 1989. 

One side of Richard West’s character is his contrariness. At a time when others fear salmonella he refuses to have his breakfast eggs kept in the refrigerator. At the height of the Band Aid fundraising success, Bob Geldof was added to his list of pet hates. More recently he has criticised the blandness of the Independent (‘for Guardian readers with money’) and praised the Sun (‘a fine newspaper’).

His resistance to received opinions lends originality to his writing. He is by no means a simple apologist for the Right. Poland grants him entry visas, but not South Africa. A letter from Graham Greene in 1979 is revealing: ‘I must thank Mr Richard West for his understanding notice of The Quiet American. No critic before, that I can remember, has thus pinpointed my abhorrence of the American liberal conscience whose results I have seen at work in Mexico, Vietnam, Haiti and Chile.’