My friend Chris Ogden, who has died aged 77 after a fall, was one of the most distinguished American journalists of his generation. He reported frontline politics for more than two decades from London, Moscow and Washington DC, and became an acclaimed biographer. He had all of the most important attributes for success in journalism: he was whip-smart, his prose was as elegant as his manners, and he had a charm that could open doors anywhere in the world.
We met in 1985 under a palm tree outside the presidential palace in Cairo, where the then British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, was engaged in talks. Ogden had recently been appointed the London bureau chief of Time magazine, a post he held for the next four years and which would lead in 1990 to the publication of his authoritative biography, curated for an American readership, Maggie: An Intimate Portrait of a Woman in Power. The access he managed to secure as a foreign journalist to informative sources across Westminster and Whitehall was a considerable tribute to his professionalism.
