The journalist Chapman Pincher, who has died aged 100, became famous for his pursuit of traitors and supposed traitors in the British secret service. His motives were apparently those of a firmly self-proclaimed patriot, pathologically attached to the British soil. His reaction to immigration was that he could feel no kinship with "people so different from me and mine". As a Daily Express man often sent abroad on handsome expenses, he always flew home as soon as he could and wangled it so that he spent an average three or four days a week at his home in the countryside.
His hard-edged clarity about where he stood in the British order, politically and socially, sat awkwardly beside the ambiguities of the secret world that became his stock in trade. But Pincher had a unique flair for the big scoop to be gained from top contacts in the worlds of science, defence and espionage. Sometimes these came from lunches at a French restaurant in Jermyn Street, in St James's, and he had a love of field sports shooting and fishing that he genuinely shared with those on whom he depended for hints and information.
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