The award-winning investigative journalist David Hencke, who has died from liver cancer aged 79, had his byline on many of the most important scoops carried by the Guardian during his 33-year career on the paper.
An ebullient and unfailingly genial figure, he was one of those whose exposure of the cash-for-questions scandal in 1994 led to the downfall of the Tory ministers Neil Hamilton and Tim Smith, and in 1998 he was the first to publish the home loan scandal that caused the first of Peter Mandelson’s resignations as a minister.
