Memoirs of an Unfit Mother

Anne Robinson

288pp, Little, Brown, £16.99

I first heard about "Annie" Robinson through that most distorting of gossip networks, the Fleet Street grapevine. Even the incident in which she turned up naked in a pub when drunk wasn't good enough for the sneering hacks, who preferred to embellish their scuttlebutt. By the time the story reached me, she was supposed to have been swearing and screaming at her husband while dancing naked on his car outside the Swan With Two Necks in Manchester's Withy Grove.

Heavy drinkers are seemingly more eager to deride alcoholics than teetotallers because, in their twisted logic, the worst of crimes is not being able to "handle" drink. These were men, of course, and Robinson's problem with alcohol reinforced their prejudice about women's weakness as drinkers and, by implication, journalists.

So I got the message about Robinson. She was another of journalism's many victims; a down-and-out to be avoided and, possibly, pitied; a hopeless case who had blown her chance of "making it". When I next heard of her, some 10 years later, she was head of the features department at the Daily Mirror and my wife's boss. They became friends, and I got used to hearing of episodes in her extraordinary life and the candid way in which she related them. Robinson, by then abstemious, never tried to cover up her history, so I heard several of the anecdotes she tells in this most honest of autobiographies. Yet I had no idea of the perpetual pain she suffered due to losing custody of her daughter and no real understanding of the background that shaped her.

You didn't have to be in her company long before hearing a couple of her mother's many maxims and realising the key role she played in Robinson's life. In reeling off the slogans, she tended to make light of the hold her mother exercised over her. Now I see the dark side, too: the unrelenting pressure exerted by a strong mother, urging her daughter to achieve, but always on her terms.

She started out badly. Her first reporting job on a national paper, the Daily Mail, came to grief when she married the deputy news editor, Charlie Wilson, who saw nothing strange in firing her at his editor's request because of some daft rule which banned married couples from working together. Their relationship was disastrous, despite the birth of a much-loved daughter, Emma. Robinson, by now a reporter on the Sunday Times, turned to drink and rapidly became an alcoholic. They divorced and then fought a bitter court battle for custody which ended in victory for Wilson.

Robinson's harrowing account of the way in which Emma was raised, travelling from one parent to the other, is particularly moving. "The pinpricks, unnoticeable to anyone but me, went on multiplying through the years," she writes. There were many twists and turns in her attempts to give up drink, during which she lost her job, but she eventually succeeded and, once rehabilitated, joined the Daily Mirror . She was soon promoted to executive status, and became as obsessive about her career as she had once been about vodka. She can properly claim to be the first woman to edit a national daily paper regularly, though her efforts weren't appreciated.

During my brief period as Mirror editor I found Robinson one of the most straightforward people I have ever dealt with in my journalistic career, a quality which outshines any of her faults. She later moved her column from paper to paper - Today, the Sun, the Times - raising her public profile, which helped win her jobs as a TV presenter. After Points of View and Watchdog, she won the greatest prize of all: hosting the hugely successful game show The Weakest Link in Britain and the United States. Annie had finally fulfilled her mother's dreams.

Utterly unembarrassed about talking of her rewards, she revels in being wealthy. What also emerges from this well-written book is the richness of her relationship with her daughter and her lack of antipathy towards Wilson. There are wonderful asides to appreciate, too: on the way in which women promoted to top newspaper jobs are still expected to follow a male-dominated editorial agenda; and a much more truthful account of the toughness of Mirror agony aunt Marje Proops than anyone has dared tell before.

But woven into the central theme is a truly romantic thread. For, at heart, this is a love story between Robinson and John Penrose, a former Mirror journalist, who became her second husband. Annie loves Johnny and Johnny loves Annie; he has always been her strongest link, so there is no "goodbye".