Noel Botham: 'Fleet Street at its most deadly, seductive and
crazy'  Noel Botham was laid to rest last week. He was the
undisputed master of a school of journalism which would have
given Lord Justice Leveson the vapours.  He practiced those
traditional reporting arts of buying champagne by the
bucketload, displaying an ever-open chequebook, paying bribes
and extravagant tip-off money, making secret tape recordings and
pursuing other old fashioned virtues which allowed him to age
the way he liked, as a living legend infamous for serious
mischief-making.     He was also 100 per cent accurate in his
fact-finding if not always his theories.  Among many tabloid
contemporaries, he was a heroic figure. At one point he was
possibly the best paid journalist in the land.   Apart from his
early days, Botham never knowingly used a press spokesman or
official channels or even a proper office, preferring to work
out of some of the highest of hotels and the lowest of clubs and
pubs, dens and dives, as comfortable with pimps