From William Horsley, AEJ UK chair
The AEJ UK mourns the passing of Kevin D’Arcy, our former long-term Secretary and participant in many international AEJ meetings, who died in hospital on January 23, five months after his 90th birthday.
Kevin was a journalist, a passionate advocate of the European integration project, and the author of several books.
He was widely known as the founder and long-time editor and publisher of The Spokesman, a quarterly review of media and policy matters. He was also familiar to members of the London journalistic community and government officials as the Secretary of the UK Section of the Association of European Journalists, a position he held for some twenty years during two separate periods between the 1980s and 2010. As a freelance journalist he worked in the newsrooms of a number of tabloid and broadsheet newspaper titles, and sometimes for the BBC and other broadcasters. He was always full of stories about his adventures in the media.
From his home in east London’s Bow district during his later years, Kevin wrote and self-published several books, including The Voice of the Brain of Britain: A Portrait of Radio 4 (2011); London’s 2nd City: Creating Canary Wharf (Rajah Books, 2012), about the transformation of London’s Docklands into a world-class financial centre; and Adventures in the Gardens of Democracy (2017), which Kevin’s friend and political blogger Jonathan Fryer described as “engaging” and “a pot-pourri of journalistic memories and political musings”. Even in the past year he was exploring the idea of another book.
Kevin’s sustained dedication to managing the UK Section, including monthly meetings with public figures, was matched by his evangelistic zeal for the European Union and the idea of ever-closer union. His role at the AEJ, a voluntary association of journalists organised through national sections across Europe, provided him with an outlet for his commitment, especially during the 1980s period of maximum British enthusiasm for the European project. He was proud of his part in organising the international AEJ Congress held in London in 1992, at a time when the Thatcher government was enthusiastically promoting the benefits of the European single market, and the European Commission was helpful in granting material support to journalists reporting on EEC affairs.
Kevin established the AEJ’s formal Observer status at the Council of Europe, enabling the association to participate in the Council’s important standard-setting work related to the protection of media freedom, independence and pluralism, based on the European Convention on Human Rights and case law of the European Court of Human Rights.
He was a keen contributor to debates at AEJ International Congresses and AEJ UK meetings, although he suffered from limited mobility in his final years.
In his local borough of Tower Hamlets he served as a school governor and was most proud in his role as a local citizenship official in 2012 at an official ceremony to invest his wife Gaziza as a British citizen. He is survived by Gaziza, his second wife Mona, his daughter Coco and two sons Rajah and Vijay, as well as the friends and colleagues around Europe and the UK with whom he liked whenever possible to organise gatherings to swap stories and reminiscences.
In August 2025, his AEJ colleagues and friends marked Kevin’s 90th birthday with a celebratory dinner.
Longtime AEJ member and former UK events director David Lennon notes that Kevin was:
“A pillar of the AEJ from the day he recruited me as a member back in the late 1980s Kevin was always there, promoting the AEJ and persuading the recalcitrant to step forward and take on leadership roles.
It was a marvel to see him year after year finding prominent speakers and persuading them to share their thoughts with us.
I felt he loved the ding-dong battles that characterised the meetings of the international AEJ and the laissez faire attitudes of many of our international colleagues towards rules and regulations. Hard to say goodbye and not just ‘see you’. So, it’s Farewell Kevin’ and thank you for being so persistent in helping to keep the AEJ alive.”
Arber Hitaj, president of the AEJ International, says: “I am deeply saddened to hear about the passing of our colleague Kevin. My sincere condolences to his family and friends in UK. Rest in peace.”
And Carmelo Occhino, former president of AEJ Italy, writes: ” Je suis triste d’apprendre le décès de Kevin. Je me souviens de lui non seulement comme secrétaire de la section britannique, mais aussi comme directeur d’un magazine consacré aux problèmes européens et internationaux en général. Il a apporté une contribution remarquable en participant au congrès de Sanremo et à un comité directeur international à Sorrento. Je présente mes condoléances à sa famille et à vous tous. Un caro saluto,Carmelo.”
We welcome remembrances and recollections of Kevin.
