In his memoir At War with Waugh, Deedes wrote that: 'Waugh like most good novelists drew on more than one person for each of his characters. It is widely believed that Waugh based his protagonist, William Boot, on Deedes, a junior reporter who arrived in Addis Ababa aged 22, with 'a quarter of a ton of baggage'. Before he died tragically, deranged and attended by nurses, Northcliffe was already exhibiting some of Copper's eccentricities-his megalomania, his habit of giving ridiculous orders to underlings'.

Taylor wrote, 'I have Evelyn Waugh's authority for stating that Lord Beaverbrook was not the original of Lord Copper.' Bill Deedes thought that the portrait of Copper exhibited the folie de grandeur of Rothermere and Beaverbrook and included 'the ghost of Rothermere's elder brother, Lord Northcliffe. Lord Copper's idea of the lowliest of his employees is a book reviewer. Lord Copper, the newspaper magnate, has been said to be an amalgam of Lord Northcliffe and Lord Beaverbrook: a character so fearsome that his obsequious foreign editor, Mr Salter, can never openly disagree with him, answering 'Definitely, Lord Copper' and 'Up to a point, Lord Copper' in place of 'yes' or 'no'. Waugh wrote up his travels more factually in Waugh in Abyssinia (1936), which complements Scoop. When he got a scoop on the invasion, he telegraphed the story back in Latin for secrecy but they discarded it. The novel is partly based on Waugh's experience of working for the Daily Mail, when he was sent to cover Benito Mussolini's expected invasion of Abyssinia, later known as the Second Italo-Abyssinian War (October 1935 to May 1936). When he returns, the credit goes to the other Boot and William is left to return to his bucolic pursuits, much to his relief. Despite his total ineptitude, Boot accidentally gets the journalistic 'scoop' of the title. Lord Copper believes it 'a very promising little war' and proposes 'to give it fullest publicity'. He is sent to Ishmaelia, a fictional state in East Africa, to report on the crisis there.

He is dragooned into becoming a foreign correspondent, when the editors mistake him for John Courteney Boot, a fashionable novelist and a remote cousin. William Boot, a young man who lives in genteel poverty, far from the iniquities of London, contributes nature notes to Lord Copper's Daily Beast, a national daily newspaper. It is a satire of sensationalist journalism and foreign correspondents. Scoop is a 1938 novel by the English writer Evelyn Waugh.

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