My father, Mike Steele, who has died aged 88, was a lobby correspondent and worked in the Houses of Parliament over a period of five decades.
An Australian by birth, he joined the lobby in 1962, eight years after arriving in the UK. He began as a correspondent in the Commons for the Northcliffe group of provincial newspapers and then, after an interlude working in the Liberal party’s communications team, returned to report on parliamentary matters as a freelance for the Newspoint organisation, supplying stories for HTV Wales, the Leicester Mercury and Ulster Television.
He also presented the BBC’s Politics West studio discussion and news interviews, and contributed diary items to the Evening Standard, Guardian, Telegraph and Times newspapers.
Born in Adelaide, Mike was the son of William, a clerk, and Shirley (nee Morris), a barrister, but was raised in Perth, where he went to Guildford grammar school. He came by ship to the UK in 1954 to study history and politics at the newly founded Keele University in Staffordshire. In his third year there, the Suez crisis led to the resignation of the UK prime minister Anthony Eden, and at the subsequent 1955 general election Mike recruited some fellow students to go to Eden’s Warwick and Leamington constituency to do a little survey, which he wrote up for the Birmingham Post as his first published article.
It was after a spell on the Evening Sentinel in Stoke-on-Trent that he moved to London to begin working as a lobby correspondent, for Northcliffe. In 1966 he left that role to become the Liberal party’s chief press officer, but found the party’s leader, Jeremy Thorpe, a difficult boss and by 1972 was back in the lobby, becoming treasurer of the Parliamentary Press Gallery for a time and a non-tugging captain of its tug of war team. He finally retired in 2010.
Mike did not return to Australia until a holiday there in 1979, after which he immediately became a born-again Australian, going back nine times thereafter.
A big fan of Australian Rules football, he also became a keen runner after watching the first London Marathon in 1981, subsequently completing the race 11 times and crafting a role for himself as the event’s “man at Westminster”, helping to cajole MPs and peers into taking part.
He was an investor in all sorts of dubious schemes – from the leaky barge he bought in 1963 to timeshares – but did make some good calls, including a decision to become my business partner in our little publishing company, Deptford Forum Publishing, which has been running successfully since 1992.
He is survived by his second wife, Sonia (nee Herelle), whom he married in 1992, two daughters, Yvette and me, from his first marriage to Emily (nee Gregson), which ended in divorce, by Sonia’s daughter from a previous marriage, Dionne, his grandchildren Danny, Connor, Eve and Sullivan, and a great-grandson, Liam.
