Obituary; James Desmond Buxton, business journalist and foreign correspondent

James was born at Hoveton Hall in Norfolk in 1947, the youngest of six children. He had an idyllic childhood with a happy family life and, as a teenager, loved sailing on the Broads in his Norfolk Punt.

At the age of eight, he was sent to Eagle House prep school in Berkshire. This was shortly after the end of rationing, and he always said that the custard he was made to eat there was so disgusting that he could never eat custard again.

James went on to Eton, where his lifelong interest in journalism began. He then went to Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he wrote for Varsity and was also involved in editing it.

In those days, journalists had to serve a two-year apprenticeship in the provinces, so he joined the Hemel Hempstead Evening Echo in Hertfordshire. While there, he met Anna Collins, who was very into horses, and competed at the highest level. In those days James drove an ordinary Mini, while Anna drove a much sportier Mini Cooper. They were married in 1975.

Having worked briefly for the Daily Telegraph, he moved to the Financial Times Syndication Department, before joining the Middle East and Africa desk. He was based in London but travelled widely throughout the region.

Mark Meredith, a news editor from that time and later James’ predecessor as Scottish Correspondent, recalls that James would emerge from the nest of experts at the FT office with a story on Sudan or Somalia. In his gentle way, he would sell/nudge/push/promote it into the foreign pages. There was a daily struggle for space, and reducing the length of a thoughtful piece to get it into the overseas news was difficult. James knew his stuff and quietly and convincingly argued the case for his stories.

In November 1975, he joined a plane full of journalists who were supposed to fly south from Morocco to Spanish Sahara to cover the Green March. This was a mass demonstration of about 350,000 unarmed Moroccan civilians on 6 November 1975, organized by King Hassan II to pressure Spain into relinquishing control of Spanish Sahara. It ultimately led to the Madrid Accords and Morocco’s partial occupation of the territory.

Halfway through the flight, one of the other journalists looked out of the window and saw the Atlantic. He tapped the pilot on the shoulder, who admitted that he had taken a back bearing and was flying north instead of south. If the journalist had not intervened, then the plane would have run out of fuel over the Atlantic and everyone on board would have died.

In 1980, James became the Financial Times correspondent in Rome. By then, he and Anna had a young family, and their younger son was only six weeks old when they moved to Rome.

In 1981, he covered the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II. His time in Rome coincided with the so-called Years of Lead and he reported on terrorist attacks by the Red Brigades. Meanwhile, corruption was rife in Italian politics and in 1984 Bettino Craxi of the Italian Socialist Party became Prime Minister. He would later be sentenced, in absentia, to 27 years in prison.

Also in 1984, aged 37, James was diagnosed with MS, a disease he would battle with for over 40 years. Relatively little was known about it at the time, except that there was no cure.

Later, he wrote in the FT that it had taken him a year to get over the shock and sadness. He showed enormous fortitude and, for the rest of his life, never grumbled about his bad luck. The most obvious initial symptom was lameness, and he gradually progressed from one walking stick to two, and eventually into a wheelchair.

In 1986 James was offered the job of Scottish correspondent to the FT, and the family moved to Edinburgh. It was certainly a shock after sunny Italy. At least in those days, Edinburgh was a much more car-friendly city than Rome, so the posting suited him well.

In 1997, Tony Blair’s landslide election victory transformed Scottish politics. James reported on the successful devolution referendum in September 1997. He attended the first session of the new Scottish Parliament in May 1999. James came to know well Labour’s Donald Dewar, the first ever First Minister of Scotland. He also reported on Alex Salmond’s first term as leader of the SNP, from 1990 to 2000.

James retired from the FT due to MS in 2000, but he continued to work as a freelance business journalist. He wrote for magazines such as CA Magazine and Scottish Business Insider.

A lifelong Anglican, he became more involved with the Church of the Good Shepherd in Murrayfield, editing the Church newsletter and the magazine of Murrayfield Churches Together, the local ecumenical group. For many years he had an electric mobility scooter called the Bruno. It had a surprising turn of speed, and the rector of the Church of the Good Shepherd remembers being startled to see him whizzing past along the wide pavements of Ravelston Dykes.

He made good use of his membership of the New Club, where he especially enjoyed the lunches. Eventually he persuaded the club to make some adjustments for wheelchair users.

A keen genealogist, he built an extensive database of Buxton and Gurney relatives. He was very proud of his descent from Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton who, along with William Wilberforce, eventually succeeding in banning the slave trade in the British Empire.

To the end, James read The Times every day and remained very well informed about current affairs.

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