My father, Michael Leapman, who has died aged 85, was a Fleet Street journalist whose 60-year career spanned war reporting, editing the diary column of the Times and writing about his Brixton allotment. His 18 books include biographies of Rupert Murdoch (Barefaced Cheek, 1983) and Neil Kinnock (Kinnock, 1987).
On 12 June 1968, ahead of an emergency House of Commons debate on the UK’s supply of arms to Nigeria for use in its civil war, the Sun – then a pre-Murdoch broadsheet – devoted its first three pages to a report by Michael and the photographer Ronald Burton from the rebel territory of Biafra. It revealed the tragedy of the “Biafran babies”, children dying of starvation due to the conflict. Michael won a National Press award for his reporting.
