David Wynne-Morgan, who has died aged 95, was a royal correspondent and society gossip columnist who became a leading international PR figure for decades. He was “fixer”, confidant, ghostwriter and friend to a colourful cast of presidents, billionaires, royalty, business figures, gamblers, racing characters and club owners in a career spanning 75 years.
Notably, he was a close friend and family consigliere to bothMarkand Robin Birley for over 50 years, helping to launch Annabel’s night club in 1963 and Mark’s Club in the 1970s, and assisting Robin Birley with the creation of 5 Hertford Street private members’ club; he was chairman there from 2014 to 2025, as well as being its Racing Chairman and in charge of its racing syndicate.
“He absolutely loved our clubs,” said Robin Birley. “That was his life. He was a pure Birley club man and was in his element putting on our jewellery and fashion weeks. He was put on this earth to be clubbable. He loved having lunches and dinners. He liked a cigar. He liked to drink. He liked to gamble. He liked the company of beautiful women. He was a brilliant sportsman and very much a night owl. He was one of those larger-than-life London figures from the 1960s to 1990s who embodied the spirit of the age. You don’t see so many of those people around any more.”
David Wynne-Morgan was born on February 22 1931, the son of John Wynne-Morgan, a portrait painter, and Marjorie Wynne, who refused to give up her surname on marriage. Evacuated from London during the war, he attended Bryanston School in Dorset and was offered a place at Cambridge, but wanted to be a journalist so turned down the place to work on a local Watford paper.
He worked for eight years in Fleet Street in the 1950s, which he described as “halycon days” that included working at the Daily Express – where he was a member of the cricket team captained by Lord Beaverbook – and being a royal correspondent for the Daily Mail.
“Fleet Street was not just a job. It was a way of life,” Wynne-Morgan wrote. “I don’t think many of us were good husbands or even good fathers. We were too consumed by the excitement and the extraordinary mixture of intense competitiveness, on the one hand, and wonderful camaraderie on the other.”
Such a gung-ho approach resulted in several scrapes that nearly lost him his job. On one occasion, he was sent to cover Princess Margaret’s romance with Peter Townsend, who was competing in an equestrian event. When Wynne-Morgan discovered that Townsend had been to Holy Communion that morning, he tracked down the priest and asked if he was aware that Townsend was a divorcee. When the priest said he was not aware, Wynne-Morgan made this his story, only to receive a sharp cable back from the news desk saying that it was a “gross intrusion of privacy”, and he should not do it again.
He was suspended, but his society scoops had been noticed, and he was soon was offered another job, at the Daily Express, on £15 a week. He went on to edit the William Hickey gossip column. “It was in Fleet Street that I developed the confidence to take on anything,” he recalled. “As a journalist I felt I had the God-given right to go up to anybody and say, ‘I am David-Wynne Morgan from the Daily Express’ – and ask any questions I wanted.”
Aged 26, he got his first lucky break after interviewing the oil tycoon John Paul Getty, then one of the world’s richest men. Getty had been impressed by the young reporter’s worldly charisma and his knowledge of the press, and invited him to set up his own public relations agency with Getty as his first client.
“My father didn’t know what PR was, as the industry was in its infancy,” said his son Jamie-Wynne-Morgan. “But he thought it was too good an offer to turn down.” Getty backed him with a £10,000 check, and Wynne-Morgan worked for him for six years.
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He founded PR Partners in 1957 and was a key figure in the transformation of the PR world in the 1970s and 1980s into a global, and professional, business. He went on to become chief executive at Hill & Knowlton in the 1980s, as well as chairman of the worldwide management committee. He was later chairman of WMC Communications, which merged with Pelham Public Relations and later become part of Bell-Pottinger before the agency collapsed in political scandal.
Much of Wynne-Morgan’s career was spent working in a personal capacity for larger-than life tycoons such as the Canadian mining billionairePeter Munk, founder of Barrick Gold, for whom Wynne-Morgan worked for decades. He was constantly globetrotting and on planes and on 9/11 witnessed the first Twin Tower imploding from the window seat of a plane flying into La Guardia airport in the midst of the terrorist attacks on New York.
After being grounded in New York, sitting for four hours in a café watching the news, he got a call from his boss,Peter Munk, saying that his presence was urgently needed in Toronto for an important boardroom lunch. With all flights cancelled, he had to rely on his journalistic initiative of old and managed to persuade a New York cab driver to drive him to Toronto – for $1,250 in cash. He made the meeting.
He also ghosted the autobiographies of President Nasser of Egypt, the ballerina Margot Fonteyn,Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation painter Pietro Annigoni, and Norma Levy, the British call girl who almost toppled the government,Profumo-style, in theLord Lambtonaffair in 1973 when the peer resigned from the government after a tabloid had caught him in bed with two prostitutes.
Another aspect of Wynne-Morgan’s colourful career was working as manager to the speed king Donald Campbell, raising the sponsorship – some £250,000 – for his last successful attempts on the world land and water speed records in his Bluebird car and speed-boat.
The partnership ended acrimoniously after Campbell broke the speed record but refused to pay the 20 per cent commission agreed, saying he had already made enough money. They parted company, and Wynne-Morgan engaged lawyers while Campbell set about trying to break the world water-speed record on a lake near Perth, Western Australia.
When he finally broke the record on December 31 1964, Wynne-Morgan sent him a cable saying: “Congratulations. You are now not only the biggest but also fastest bastard on earth.” After Campbell’s death on Lake Coniston, however, Wynne-Morgan dropped the legal case, declaring that he was not going to try to take money off his widow, and remembering his old friend with “affection and pride”.
He had a special skill with people and played an important diplomatic role within the Birley family when Mark and Robin Birley fell out and the Birley clubs were sold to Richard Caring for £100 million. Despite the family dispute, Wynne-Morgan was so liked that he kept in with both father and son. As Sir Nicholas Coleridge said: “His ability as a PR, who knew so many people, was so adept. He never sought the limelight. He was always flying just below the radar, a fixer and an enabler.”
David Wynne-Morgan was married three times and had four sons. His first wife was Romaine Ferguson, with whom he had two sons. His second wife was the Sixties model Sandra Paul, who later went on to marry the one-time Conservative leader Michael Howard. He is survived by his third wife, Karen, to whom he was married for more than 50 years. They had two sons.
David Wynne-Morgan, born February 22 1931, died April 4 2026
David Wynne-Morgan, who has died aged 95, was a royal correspondent and society gossip columnist who became a leading international PR ...
