Jean Kathleen Rook (13 November 1931 – 5 September 1991)[1] was an English journalist dubbed The First Lady of Fleet Street for her regular opinion column in the Daily Express.
[1] Rook moved from The Sun to the Daily Sketch, and the circulation "soared" when she ran a 'Save our mini-skirt' campaign for the editor, David English, at a time when hemlines were falling.
[1] In an interview, Rook described how she had "clawed and scrambled" her way to become "the First Lady of Fleet Street ... Britain's bitchiest, best known, loved and loathed woman journalist".
Rook enjoyed her privileged position as a newspaper columnist, and dressed in extravagantly brassy style - clanking with chunky accessories - but she also had the opinions and language to match 'the look' and was proud of her success in what was a male-dominated industry.
The critic Clive James observed, having watched an appearance she made on the BBC2 programme Don't Quote Me in 1975: "Unusually prone to writing and talking in clichés, she nevertheless commands a sure sense of the proper time to trade in one set of bromides for another.
It bore out the Margo MacDonald/Anna Raeburn case [that the Press tended to put Woman in her Place], in all respects, but Rook was in no whit abashed.
'"[5] 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.
[citation needed] 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.
[1] According to a biographer, Rook "enjoyed living up to her tough, hard-bitten, and outrageous reputation, clanking with extravagant gold jewellery, and driving a Jaguar.