The most important characteristic in the makeup of the complex personality of the journalist Joe Haines, who has died aged 97, was loyalty. He was loyal to his family and a few carefully chosen friends; he never forgot the poverty and the culture of his working-class childhood and was thus always loyal to the journalistic trade that had enabled his escape from it.
He demonstrated unwavering personal devotion while employed by the two men, the politician Harold Wilson and the publisher Robert Maxwell, who dominated the significant years of his working life. Yet superseding all of these, and perhaps also explaining some of his enigmatic career decisions, was his loyalty to the Labour party.
