Jean Rook

Jean Kathleen Rook (13 November 1931 – 5 September 1991) was an English journalist dubbed The First Lady of Fleet Street for her regular opinion column in the Daily Express. She was also, along with Lynda Lee-Potter, a model for the Glenda Slagg column in the satirical magazine Private Eye. Rook was the highest-paid woman on Fleet Street, London, then the centre of the British newspaper industry. She was educated at Malet Lambert High School in Hull and Bedford College, part of the University of London, where she became the first woman to edit the university's Sunday newspaper, Sennet. She read English, and graduated in 1954 with an upper second-class degree. Rook took an MA in 1956.

Even Rook's adoring readers sometimes found her unashamed vulgarity too much to bear, but despite this, after nearly two decades working for the Daily Express, she remained an institution. Rook interviewed scores of public figures, including Margaret Thatcher, Indira Gandhi, Elizabeth Taylor and Barry Humphries, applying her "down-to-earth" approach in every interview. She summed this up by saying, "You know why I'm popular with the readers? Because I'm as ordinary as they are".

Rook was an admirer of Thatcher's, later claiming to be the first journalist to have taken her seriously, and to predict she would be Britain's first female prime minister. Going against the line taken by the Daily Express, Rook backed Thatcher in the 1975 Conservative Party leadership contest. She interviewed Thatcher nine times from 1974 to 1989.

Personal life and death Rook married journalist Geoffrey Nash (1923–1988), whom she had met on the Sheffield Telegraph, on 3 July 1965. The couple had a son.

She died aged 59, on 5 September 1991, in the Nuffield Hospital, Royal Tunbridge Wells, Kent.