“The spirit of Fleet Street is still as ineradicably masculine as the old-style men’s club,” she noted in 1966. “The solid core remains untouched by the vague ambi-sexuality that has crept over other publishing media… It stays as solidly male as beer and sawdust and battered sheepskin jackets.

“Above all, what at first appears to be one of the most democratic, flexible institutions possible, has yet to be conquered by ambitious womanhood… Women are basically honoured guests in a masculine fortress. All the standards have been set by men, all the power ultimately rests with them.”

Not that Ann Leslie disapproved of this state of affairs herself – “personally, I am happy it should remain that way” – and this was just as well, as it would be another 21 years before the appointment of Fleet Street’s first woman editor. By the 1990s, when she was at her most successful, she maintained that view, believing that the virtual impossibility of combining a career in a national daily with bringing up children meant that men would always dominate.

“I didn’t want to become like other Fleet Street women,” she wrote, “the ones who began as ordinary human beings but then became as drunk and foul-mouthed as the men and lost their looks early. There has always been a double standard. It’s entertaining if a man reels in from El Vino’s, falls over and crumples his car, but not a woman.”

But once Fleet Street had retreated to the sober purlieus of Wapping, Farringdon and Canary Wharf, she remained nostalgic for the bad old days she had described 30 years before. “I miss the shambolic creatures, the warthogs I found so repulsive. Young journalists, especially in America, are much more earnest. Computers have done something very peculiar to them. They’re all super-efficient and terribly boring.”

One of the highlights of her career was the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990, when she witnessed his appearance at the prison gate after 27 years of captivity. “Suddenly I was swept forward in a maelstrom of flailing limbs and sweat, dust and screams. A huge ANC banner pole tore through my hair, my shoes had been ripped from my feet, and I felt my blood warm and sticky on the hot tarmac. For a terrible moment I thought that this was what it must feel like to if you’re about to die. Of course I would have been just another innocent bystander victim in a war which has claimed so many since the man before me first lost his freedom.”

A child of the Raj, Ann Elizabeth Mary Leslie was born on January 28 1941 in Rawalpindi, then in pre-Partition India, now Pakistan. Her father, Norman Leslie, was an executive with the Burmah Shell oil company, her mother, Theodora, an Irish Catholic who brought Ann up in an upper-middle class colonial milieu, surrounded by servants.

Educated at St Hilda’s School for Girls at Ootacamund in the Nilgiri mountains, she moved to Britain when she was nine and attended Presentation Convent at Matlock, Derbyshire, and the Convent of the Holy Child at Mayfield, Sussex, before winning a scholarship to Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, where she took a degree in English. It was in an Oxford pub that an admirer offered her an entree into journalism by arranging a job interview with the Daily Express.

She endured a fiery journalistic baptism, being sent north to the paper’s Manchester office where she lodged in a seedy pub and was regarded in the office as a grave liability on account of her being southern, an Oxford graduate and, worst of all, a woman. 

The crapulous news editor and his deputy tried to break her by dispatching her on the most difficult and thankless assignments, but she persevered to the point where her stories aimed at teenage readers under the heading “Youthquake” caught the eye of the paper’s editor in London, Bob Edwards, who invited her to Fleet Street and gave Ann Leslie her own column, introducing it with the heading “A Provocative New Name – and She’s 22!”