He covered the Cyprus troubles and got to know Archbishop Makarios well. Tomalin's elevation to editor of the Diary came as something of a surprise to him, but he soon found that he enjoyed the challenge. He always kept the Chelsea Flower Show as an assignment for himself, and was able to write not only about the people who visited the show, but about the flowers and gardens themselves. Tomalin had a keen eye for talent, bringing many future Fleet Street stars onto the column, from Mary Kenny and Paul Callan to Magnus Linklater and future Standard editor Max Hastings. The drawling "Old Boy" attitude that Donald Zec had observed thirty years earlier was still very much alive; Kenny recalls that when she arrived "not only was I the only girl on the column, I was [apart from Max Hastings] the only person who hadn't been to Eton." He was succeeded in 1965 by the debonair Roger Berthoud, who was already known to have a gift for extracting high-class gossip. In the summer of 1963, while reporting for the Standard from Paris, he discovered that General de Gaulle had been avidly following the Profumo affair in the British newspapers, turning to an Elysée aide to remark: "That will teach the English to try and behave like Frenchmen." Recent years Sarah Sands became the Diary's first female editor in the late 1980s. After Sands, Rory Knight Bruce, who had come from The Spectator, edited the Diary in the 1990s, giving a start to many of today's leading journalists and authors, including Peter Bradshaw, Sam Leith, James Hanning, Vincent Graff, Nick Bryant, Philip Kerr, Imogen Lycett Green and Robert Tewdr Moss. Knight Bruce broke many stories at a time when the Evening Standard was selling almost 700,000 copies a day, often changing the page in its entirety for the noon edition. He taught the team valuable lessons as Sam Leith discovered, when shifting on the column in his gap year. The first was 'the editor is always right'. "As he rewrote one of my stories, I pointed out a grammatical error he had introduced. Pause. 'Look, Leith,' he spat, 'if you want to be an academic, fuck off to Oxford. If you want to be a journalist shut up and do what I say.'" Knight Bruce was also at this time the joint master of a pack of foxhounds in Shropshire. His