Auberon Waugh's death on January 16th at the age of 61 is more sad than surprising. His immediate heredity wasn't promising - his father died at 62, his mother at 57 - and he suffered from ill health all his life. That may, in part, have accounted for the acidic personality which made him the most verbally brutal journalist of his age.
Apart from health, his background shaped his career in one other respect. He spent much of his life trying to escape from the shadow of his father, the greatest English novelist of his age.
He was the second child and first son of Evelyn and Laura Waugh. Auberon Alexander - always Bron to those who knew him - was born just as the second World War broke out.
Although he was often described as reactionary or rightwing, this missed the point about him personally as well as ideologically. If he was a Tory, he was a Tory anarchist, whose upbringing was a series of rebellions. He detested Downside, a Benedictine public school, claiming that the headmaster had "set himself up in opposition to me".
He then loathed his national service training, and never ceased to rail at the stupidity and brutality he had encountered at the guards depot at Pirbright. He was, nevertheless, commissioned into the Royal Horse Guards and sent to Cyprus. There one day he became annoyed by a fault in the Browning machine-gun of his armoured car, seized it by the muzzle and shook it, until it had fired several rounds through his chest at point blank range. He was very lucky to survive.
While recuperating in Italy, he began his first novel. The Foxglove Saga (1960) was promising, and was undoubtedly helped by the name Waugh. It sold 14,000 in hardback, setting a mark for later disappointment. He then went briefly to Christ Church, Oxford, to which he had won an exhibition in English but left after a year having failed to pass an exam, and taken a dislike to the academic authorities. After an unsuccessful attempt to join the Foreign Office, he turned the obvious way.
His early career in Fleet Street was chequered, working briefly for the Peterborough column on the Daily Telegraph, then joining the Daily Mirror. The highlight of his career for the Daily Mirror was in 1967. During the Six Day war, he flew to Israel, where Mandy Rice-Davies was said to have gone to the front as a nurse. In fact, she was pursuing her usual honest trade as a Tel Aviv nightclub hostess but, in the best scoop tradition, Auberon Waugh had her don a nurse's uniform for a photograph.
In 1967, he was made political columnist of the Spectator, an enterprising choice on the part of the then editor, Nigel Lawson. Auberon Waugh took his duties seriously enough, though attendance at Westminster only increased his aversion to politics and politicians.
In 1970, he abruptly left the Spectator. He had been seeing the week's issue through the press, and on a whim changed George Gale's name to "Lunchtime O'Gale" in the contributors' list. When Lawson sacked him, he sued for wrongful dismissal. He surprisingly won damages of £600.
Despite this, Lawson magnanimously re-employed him as a novel reviewer, where he honed his talent for vituperation, which he later and even more brilliantly practised in the obscure magazine Books & Bookmen.
In 1970, he found a natural billet at Private Eye. The "Diary" he wrote for it over the next 16 years was unique, a combination of polemic, causerie, parody and fantasy. Those who liked it thought it very funny indeed, though its technique was partly pure abuse.
Harold Wilson was an "old crook" (and a sometimes suggested Soviet agent) with his "revoltingly ugly" colleague Barbara Castle. Not that Auberon Waugh was politically partisan. Edward Heath was a buffoonish ninny, and Churchill a "war criminal".
By now he had finally given up fiction after publishing five novels. He had also an increasingly detached attitude to Catholicism. Gradually he stopped going to church, later ceasing to be a practising Catholic.
In 1976, the new editor of the Spectator, Alexander Chancellor, hired him to write a weekly column. This decade, his own 30s, was perhaps the best of his writing life. His political as well as literary opinions were unpredictable. He abhorred capital punishment and opposed the Falklands, Gulf and Kosovo campaigns.
He had, in 1961, married Lady Teresa Onslow, daughter of the Earl of Onslow, and lived with his family in the country, first in Berkshire and then at his father's old house, Combe Florey, in Somerset. After raising her family of two sons and two daughters, his wife took a degree and made her own notable career as translator and novelist.
By the 1980s, Auberon Waugh showed signs of restlessness. When Ian Hislop became editor of Private Eye in 1986, he left haughtily and abusively to take up the editorship of the monthly Literary Review.
These later years were puzzling. He devoted much energy to his beloved magazine, bullying all his friends to write for tiny fees. And yet the truth was that the Literary Review was not so much bad as pointless. Equally, though Auberon Waugh was more prolific than ever, the columns he wrote for the Sunday Telegraph from 1980 and the Daily Telegraph from 1990 never quite matched the dash and bite of his best work for the Spectator or Private Eye.
Some of the more impassioned attacks on him appeared in the Guardian. Alexander Chancellor responded to one. He wasn't a disinterested witness: he had been a friend of Auberon Waugh for many years before their children, Alexander Waugh and Liza Chancellor, married. Nevertheless, when he wrote that Auberon Waugh was "brave, generous, funny and an extremely skilful writer", it may not have been the whole story, but it was a large part of it.
Auberon Waugh is survived by his wife, two sons and two daughters.
Auberon Alexander Waugh: born 1939; died, January 2001