The racing hack who found Ronnie Biggs and has never stopped hunting for winners

Every job has its lesser days and we all have to grin and bear it from time to time. There's the cancelled commuter train and the interminable meeting, the lockdown Zoom debacle and the annual appraisal – and then there's a job like Colin Mackenzie's.

Mackenzie was a 'hack' – an old-school journalist of the finest sort – but he was a hack of many different colours and if there was ever a dull moment in his career it must surely have been short and instantly forgettable amid the flurries of animation and excitement.

Even as an education correspondent he managed to tease a little other-worldly intrigue out of a role not known for piquing the interest of dinner party guests, principally on one bizarre trip to communist Romania (in those long-forgotten days when it was still known in these parts as Rumania) at the behest of none other than the soon-to-be-notorious Nicolae Ceausescu.