Tom Stacey, globe-trotting reporter, publisher, author and generous host at his Kensington house – obituary

Tom Stacey, who has died aged 92, was a foreign correspondent, novelist, publisher, penal reform campaigner and an intimate of Idi Amin.

After an outstanding career as a reporter, he became well-known later in life for his novel Deadline (1988), about a legendary foreign correspondent fallen out of favour and living in self-imposed exile in the Persian Gulf. Stacey adapted the book as a BBC television film, with John Hurt giving a superb performance as Granville Jones, the washed-up anti-hero in quest of a final scoop.

The author was not happy with the director’s interpretation of his script, however, and when the book was reissued in 2008 he retitled it The Man Who Knew Everything, to disassociate it from the film.

“Gran” Jones owed much – including his pet parrot – to the veteran newsman Ralph Izzard. Stacey’s lifelong friend Sir Peregrine Worsthorne also detected traces of the author in the character, noting that Stacey “is the very embodiment of that genre of wild card journalist – at once archaic and conventional; subversive and patriotic; seedy and stylish – which he captures so memorably in … this tale, worthy of Conrad or Buchan.”

Stacey certainly had many contradictory aspects to his personality, and found it hard to reconcile his worldly and artistic ambitions. He stood unsuccessfully as a Conservative candidate in the 1964 and 1966 general elections, but although re-selected to contest Dover after increasing the Tory vote, he subsequently resigned his candidacy, having found that “public life conflicts with creative will”.

Instead he combined writing fiction with the launching, in 1970, of Tom Stacey Ltd, a publishing company intended as “a vehicle for active political thinking within the context of a robust and courageous Conservativism”.

His greatest success was his edition of the immigration speeches of Enoch Powell, but otherwise the venture was financially disastrous. He later founded another imprint, Stacey International, that specialised in handsomely illustrated books on the Middle East, and thrived.

To the surprise of many of his Conservative friends, Stacey also became a leading advocate for penal reform, campaigning to find more humane alternatives to imprisonment.

His interest in the subject had begun in India in 1965, when he tricked his way into securing an interview with his old friend Sheikh Abdullah, the “Lion of Kashmir”, who at the time was a political prisoner under house arrest. Discovered at Abdullah’s home, Stacey was imprisoned in Coimbatore Central Jail for several weeks.

Finding himself rapidly losing his grip on his sanity in solitary confinement, Stacey told the prison doctor he would commit suicide unless moved to a communal cell. After the efforts of the British High Commissioner, John Freeman, secured his release, Stacey became a regular prison visitor back in England and took up the cause of reform with the zeal of one who knew how it felt to hear the cell door bang shut from the inside.

In 1982 he founded The Offender’s Tag Association, with the aim of introducing electronic tagging to the UK. Right-wingers denounced the “Tags on Lags” scheme as a soft alternative to prison, while groups such as Liberty and the Howard League saw tagging as an Orwellian infringement of human rights.

Stacey’s campaign was boosted, however, when the sympathetic Douglas Hurd – with whom he had co-edited the Eton College Chronicle as a schoolboy – became Home Secretary in 1985.

Stacey rejoiced that tagging eventually became standard practice in the UK, and insisted in the face of “well-intended but uninformed” critics that the tagging of juvenile offenders had saved thousands from graduating to a life of perpetual crime: “The critical effect of the tag is that of building up the self-esteem of a young offender by letting him prove to himself that he is capable of self-control.”

Tom Stacey was born at Bletchingley, Surrey, on January 11 1930. His great-great-grandfather was the Victorian railway builder Thomas Brassey, of whom he published a biography in 2005.

Tom was educated at Wellesley House in Broadstairs and then at Eton, where he was a solo chorister, before joining the Scots Guards. He was commissioned as a 2nd Lieutenant and saw action with the 2nd Battalion in the Malayan jungle.

On leave, he journeyed in search of the last survivors of the Temiar, an aboriginal people then on the brink of extinction and faced with the dilemma of remaining in the jungle at the mercy of the Chinese Communists or adopting some kind of alien urban existence. Stacey later wrote up his trip as his first book, The Hostile Sun, which won him the 1954 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize.

In 1950 he went up to Worcester College, Oxford, but left after a year to work as a staff writer at Lilliput magazine and then as a foreign correspondent for Picture Post.

He lived in Canada for a time and then became a roving correspondent for the Daily Express, familiarising himself with the Middle East, Latin America and Africa, while finding time to serve as choirmaster at a church in Sussex.

In 1960 he was appointed chief foreign correspondent of The Sunday Times, reporting from some 120 countries and interviewing Chiang Kai-shek, Indira Gandhi and Salvador Allende.

In 1963 he and his proprietor, Lord Thomson of Fleet, were on a visit to Moscow when Thomson was unexpectedly invited to meet Khrushchev. Stacey accompanied him and led the two-hour conversation, which he secretly recorded on a machine controlled through his wristwatch – resulting in an unprecedented in-depth interview for his paper and useful detail for the Foreign Office.

In 1961 Stacey was named Granada Foreign Correspondent of the Year and in the same year published his first novel, The Brothers M, which drew on an expedition he had made in 1955 through the largely uncharted territory of the Ruwenzori Mountains (aka the Mountains of the Moon) in Uganda. The novel contained an affectionate portrait of his guide, Isaya Mukirane, a young native of the Bakonzo tribe.

In 1963 Stacey was approached in London by the Ugandan High Commissioner with an extraordinary mission. Isaya, now head of the tribe, was revolting against the dominance of the lowland Batooro tribe and was threatening a bloody conflict; he had retreated to the mountains and Stacey was reckoned to be the only man, white or black, whom Isaya’s followers would allow to reach him and negotiate a settlement.

Reluctantly taking on the job – “I am seldom good at saying no” – he took leave of absence from the Sunday Times and embarked on months of long and often hazardous journeys as intermediary between Isaya and the Prime Minister, Milton Obote, in Entebbe. He ultimately averted bloodshed, at the expense of his friendship with Isaya.

Stacey came to be regarded as a mzee, or elder, of the Bakonzo people, and in 2003 he published Tribe, a widely praised account of half a century’s travels in the Ruwenzori. He went there regularly until 2016 – and would have continued had he not made himself persona non grata in Uganda by his public criticisms of President Museveni. (“I think that if I go back, someone will murder me.”)

It was in the Ruwenzori in 1963 that Stacey first got to know Idi Amin, then a senior officer in the Ugandan army. They met again in 1982 when Amin was living in exile in Saudi Arabia, and Stacey visited him often over the following decade.

Amin cut a forlorn figure, wondering if Stacey could nudge the Queen to reply to his unanswered letter commiserating with her over the marital difficulties of her children, and still hoping to be forgiven and welcomed back to Uganda. Asked to account for the atrocities carried out by his government, he declared: “I could not go to each ministry and box them!”

Stacey acknowledged that Amin was up to his elbows in blood, but admitted to finding him charismatic and devout; at Amin’s request, he smuggled a Bible to him at his Muslim refuge in Jeddah.

In the second half of the 1960s Stacey reported for the Daily and Sunday Telegraph titles and found a final berth as a columnist at the Evening Standard before turning to publishing. He continued to write novels, the last of which, A Dark and Stormy Night (2018), won high praise from AN Wilson and Rowan Williams. On his website he published short stories – latterly recording them as podcasts – and articles until the end of his life.

He lived in a large house in Kensington Church Street, where among many other guests he put up a number of young Africans studying in London; a companionable figure, he gave parties in the extensive garden at the back. Lucian Freud’s ex-wife Kitty Epstein had owned the house before him; Freud himself breakfasted daily at Clarke’s Restaurant next door, and to Stacey’s dismay routinely expressed his loathing of his former wife by spitting on the windows.

As the governor of a comprehensive school in Islington, Stacey was sceptical of Tony Blair’s proposals for the West to fund education in Africa, noting that even the Bakonzo children living remotely in the mountains were better educated than the British. Last year he wrote to the Telegraph to observe that critics of Priti Patel’s scheme to send migrants to Rwanda were ignorant of how peaceful and well-run the country has become.

He was a cherished member of White’s, where, he observed, it was possible to gain a reputation as a conversationalist by the judicious use of three phrases: “What fun”, “Rather fun” and “Bad luck”.

Tom Stacey was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1977. He married, in 1952, Caroline Clay, a sculptor, with whom he had a son and four daughters.

Tom Stacey, born January 11 1930, died December 24 2022