John Junor

Sir John Donald Brown Junor (15 January 1919 – 3 May 1997) was a Scottish journalist and editor-in-chief of the Sunday Express between 1954 and 1986,[1] having previously worked as a columnist there.

Noted for his deliberately provocative views, Junor was described by the Conservative MP Julian Critchley as "possibly the best-known Scotsman in England" during the 1980s and as "an ill-natured populist with a taste for common-or-garden abuse.

"[3] Born in Glasgow into a "Scottish Presbyterian, respectable working class" family, Junor was raised in what he later described as "a red-stone tenement in Shannon Street in Maryhill... [in] a two roomed-flat without indoor sanitation", although by the time he was in his teens he was living with his parents and brothers in a more spacious flat with three rooms and a kitchen in Oban Drive.

[7] Shortly before graduation, Junor was recruited by the Liberal Party activist Lady Glen-Coats to accompany her on a fact-finding tour of the Third Reich; they reportedly only managed to escape Germany days before the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939.

[4] Ambitious for a parliamentary seat, in the 1945 General Election Junor contested Kincardine and Western Aberdeenshire in the Liberal interest, losing to the Conservative candidate by only 642 votes.

[4] His Sunday Express column (which he continued to write in his years as editor-in-chief) was noted for recurrent catchphrases, two of them being "pass the sick-bag, Alice" and "I don't know, but I think we should be told".