Mary Wakefield (journalist)
British journalist and fiction writer
Mary Elizabeth Lalage Wakefield (born 12 April 1975) is a British journalist, and a columnist and commissioning editor for The Spectator.
Early life
Wakefield is the daughter of the antique and architectural expert Sir Humphry Wakefield, 2nd Baronet and the Hon. Katherine Mary Alice, daughter of Evelyn Baring, 1st Baron Howick of Glendale, a colonial administrator in Africa, a younger son of Evelyn Baring, 1st Earl of Cromer. She has two brothers; Maximilian Wakefield (born 1967), an entrepreneur and racing car driver, and Jack Wakefield (born 1977), former director of the Firtash Foundation and an art critic who writes for The Spectator and other publications. A third brother, William Wakefield, was born in 1975 and died in infancy.
Wakefield was educated at the independent girls' boarding school Wycombe Abbey and at the University of Edinburgh (MA).
Career
Wakefield has worked at the weekly magazine The Spectator for twenty years, since Boris Johnson was editor, and was commissioning editor in 2017, assistant editor from 2001 and then deputy editor. She also writes for the magazine as a columnist, and has written for The Sun, Daily Mail, The Telegraph and The Times.
In 2015, following an online petition, Wakefield apologised and amended an article she had written for The Spectator in which she described an 18-year-old who had recently died in a moped crash as a "thuggish white lad".
Personal life
In December 2011, Wakefield married Dominic Cummings, a friend of her brother Jack Wakefield.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Mary Wakefield (journalist)” as british journalist and fiction writer. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the people & ideas register because the source frames it as british journalist and fiction writer. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Nov 3, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q75490076. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1975, 1967, 1977 and 2017.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mary Wakefield (journalist)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.