Lockdown sailed past when I had the notion of writing my memoir Pressing My Luck about my 44-year career in Fleet Street. Now the 90,000-word book is published by Amazon I am undergoing a crash course in modern media of the genre which has passed me by hitherto.

My gorgeous daughters Cate and Georgia have got me tweeting, blogging and revealing my all on a website. My quiet life in the sleepy suburb of Ealing is all but over!

My old acquaintance Piers Morgan apparently loves the book and is planning to tweet about it. As he has 7.5 million followers – I have a dozen or so at present – this may create an explosion. The lovely Lorraine Kelly has also emailed me that she loved the book.

I was threatening to write a novel – to my wife Linda’s horror. She ends up having to google a million facts for me when I am in writing mode. However this new life on the net may be sufficient to keep me busy for months.

Being a little old-fashioned it is not natural or normal for me to blow my own trumpet. But if the wind section of the Mackenzie orchestra is currently deficient, here goes.

My Ronnie Biggs story was recently nominated as one of the ten best scoops of the 20th century, according to the UK Press Gazette, Fleet Street’s trade magazine. And all the background is in Pressing My Luck.

I interviewed Richard Nixon in London in 1966 after he had just lost the vote to be Governor of California. Within seven years I was covering the Watergate story in Washington which resulted two years later in President Nixon’s impeachment.

At end of 1985 I was able to marry my hobby and my job when I became one of the founder reporters on the new paper The Racing Post. By the end of 1988 I had returned to the Daily Mail to be their racing correspondent for the next 20 years.

I had a very lucky career. Even in retirement I have been able to make three acclaimed documentaries for television. And my luck as a racehorse owner has turned full circle with a small share in the wonderful flat horse Trueshan who won, under Hollie Doyle, the Champions Day Stayers title at Ascot in October.

Hope you all enjoy Pressing My Luck (£9.99 and £5.99 on kindle) as much as I enjoyed writing it.

The Queen, The Queen Mother, Thatcher, Elizabeth Taylor and Quentin Crisp.

The Queen, and The Queen Mother.

I had the great privilege, through my job as racing correspondent for the Daily Mail to rub shoulders with the Queen and the Queen Mother. My wife Linda and I had a ten minute chat with the Queen Mother in the dining room of the Ascot racecourse Trustees. She was 91 and yet very aware of everything. For example she blocked the entreaties of a Channel Four executive who was begging her to use her influence to ditch the BBC contract at Ascot in favour of his employers. No joy. She and discussed how expensive it is to have racehorses in training.

Mrs Thatcher.

I met Mrs Thatcher several times in late 1969 and early 1970 when she was Shadow Education Minister. She was full of energy and mastered her brief very quickly. She was ante comprehensive schools, having herself been educated at a selective Grammar school in Grantham, Lincs. She found me and my fellow education correspondents very left wing in our views. There was one exception – the Daily Mail’s Rod Tyler who formed a friendship which resulted in his writing an acclaimed biography of the Iron Lady.

Elizabeth & Richard.

I was fortunate to meet Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton a couple of times. On the first occasion they were playing Dr Faustus at the New Theatre, Oxford in 1966. My wife and I sat down at a post performance party in the Randolph hotel and Burton came to join us because his best friends from Wales were talking to us. We had a whole evening with him and he promised me an interview at their hotel the following morning. Burton was as good as his word, sat down in the Bear, Woodstock, with a bottle of vodka while I had a coffee and croissants. Two years later I was at the Tower of London when they moored a huge yacht beside Traitors’ Gate. They had chartered the yacht so that Elizabeth could bring her pet dogs with her – otherwise they would have had to be quarantined!

Quentin Crisp.

The Naked Civil Servant, aka Quentin Crisp, was a regular lunchtime visitor at our Battersea home on Sundays in the early 1980s. He would come over from Chelsea with his friend Peter York, the man who created the Sloane Ranger phenomenon. It was like inviting Oscar Wilde to your home. He was excruciatingly funny with put downs which had everyone in stitches of laughter. He would never use your first names – we were always Mr and Mrs Mackenzie. His principal advice was not to bother with a cleaner – “My dears,” he would say. “The dirt gets no worse after three years without one.”

When I heard that the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge are to send their children, George, Charlotte and Louis, to Lambrook School in Berkshire, I felt an involuntary and unwelcome shudder.

From a distance of several decades, I remember the establishment as a cold place of sadistic beatings, bullying, fear, cruelty and child sexual abuse.

I was just seven years old when my mother suddenly announced one Christmas that I was to be sent away to school…

Click here to read the full article on Daily Mail.