'People saw this successful, ambitious man, but inside I was just falling apart'

David Yelland appeared to have it all.

Having proved himself in a stint on the New York Post, at 35 he became one of the youngest editors of a national newspaper, arriving back in Britain to take the helm of the Sun. With his wife Tania having just given birth to their first child, life seemed to have worked out well for Harrogate-born David, who had been given up for adoption as a baby and who lost his hair to alopecia at the age of 10.

However, had anyone chosen to scratch beneath the surface, they would have found a man who was struggling to fit in at the helm of Rupert Murdoch's best-selling daily tabloid newspaper amid the Page Three Girls and celebrity gossip, a man whose wife was battling cancer and a man who was becoming increasingly reliant on alcohol.

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Socialising was part of the job, but the evening parties were

sandwiched between a glass or two of wine in the afternoon and a couple more bottles when everyone else had gone home to bed. Most evenings David crashed out on his sofa and when he awoke he often couldn't remember what was in that day's paper. However, like all good alcoholics, he was also a master of deception.

"When I told old colleagues that I was alcoholic, many of them struggled to believe me," he says. "The truth was that on nights out they probably drank as much as me, but what they didn't know was that when I went home I didn't go to sleep, I drank even more.

"I was drunk almost every night for nearly 24 years. People looked at me and saw this successful, ambitious man, but inside I was falling apart."

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David left the Sun after five years and shortly afterwards split from his wife Tania. It was then his drinking really began in earnest. While he managed to remain sober on the weekends he looked after his son, Max, the rest of the time he saw the world through a blur.

While he was working at Harvard Business School, Tania's cancer returned. As her health deteriorated, David finally confronted the toll his drinking was having on his own body. On July 19, 2005, he picked up the phone and called the Promis rehab centre in Kent and at 4am the following morning he checked in. He hasn't had a drink since.

"I was led through double doors into the blinding glow of institutional strip-lights," he says. "It reminded me of the York Adoption Centre in which I had begun life and which I had visited at a later age. I felt like I was beginning life over again.

"Shown into a room, I asked why the cupboards were so small. I was told so that patients could not hide inside. That first night passed slowly, but the next day I began to recover. I realised that I had spent my life trying to prove something to other people, but in the process I had forgotten how to make myself happy."

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When Tania died the following year, David became even more resolved never to drink again. To do so would be to let her down and his son who needed a full-time father. With the alcohol erased from his life, he also found he had time to indulge forgotten passions.

As a child, David had spent much of his spare time writing stories and as his new sober self emerged, he was once again inspired to put pen to paper. The result, The Truth About Leo, is a children's book about a boy who feels like an outsider, whose mother has died and whose father, an apparently good middle-class doctor, is also a drunk.

The father of the tale is not, he says, him, rather the man he so nearly became and as well being a book children with alcoholic parents can identify with, he also hopes it's a good read.

"I didn't set out to write a children's book, I just sat down and this is what came out," he says. "Children have an appetite for the truth. As adults there's a temptation to cover things up with the aim of protecting them, but it doesn't work like that.

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"Even from the youngest age, children are incredibly aware of what's going around them and to not speak about something or to pretend something awful isn't happening only adds to their misery.

"What I wanted to say was that it's okay to tell people that you have a problem and in my own way break down the misconceptions which surround alcoholism. People have an image of drunks as being homeless down and outs. It's easier than admitting the truth – alcoholism doesn't respect backgrounds and having spent all my life working in a creative industry I know how rife it is among people who on paper are incredibly high achievers.

"In America, going into rehab is something people talk about openly, recovery is seen as something to be proud of, but the attitude is still very different over here. The fact is that clinics which costs hundreds, thousands of pounds a day to stay in wouldn't exist if there weren't successful people with money who needed help.

"I hope my book is an honest portrayal of what living with an alcoholic is like, but I don't want people to think it's just about a dad with a drink problem. It's also about the ambition which sometimes that can destroy people and the possibility that people can change. It's not meant to be depressing, it's meant to be hopeful.

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"When a child wakes up in the morning, it sees the world as a wonderful place. As you get older, you lose that sense of wonder and after all those years drunk I wanted to recapture that."

While notionally set in Suffolk, the book is in large part inspired by David's memories of holidays at his grandparents' hotel on the Bridlington sea front. Even when the sun refused to shine, those summers were some of the happiest days he can remember and as he wrote about the beach and the special kind of light reflected in the waves, he also realised that his upbringing was what saved him from going any deeper into despair.

"I had a wonderful childhood, idyllic even," he says. "My parents, who hardly ever drank, brought me up to be kind, thoughtful and to know right from wrong. I went to London as a honest Yorkshireman and I think it was why I was unhappy at the Sun.

"I was obsessed by politics, I loved art and literature, but instead I ended up running some pretty nasty stories, some about people I had never even met.

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"Somewhere along the line, the waters became muddied and for a while I forgot who I was. However, underneath everything, the boy my parents had brought up was still there and I have no doubt that it was the morality they passed on to me that in the end was my saviour."

David now has a new partner and close relationship with his son. He has a day job at Brunswick Group LLP, a financial public relations company, and while he still works hard, since giving up drink his priorities have changed. "I think I always knew what was important in life and that's people, not work," he says. "Of course, everyone enjoys being successful, but if you're not happy in yourself, the trappings which come with it mean nothing at all.

"All the money in the world won't make those empty feelings go away. Life now couldn't be better. I'm happy, Max is happy, we play football in the garden in our pyjamas and we talk a lot about everything.

"However, he doesn't take me or the book very seriously at all, which is just as he should be."

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n The Truth About Leo by David Yelland is published by Penguin, priced 6.99. To order a copy from the Yorkshire Post Bookshop, call 0800 0153232 or online at www.yorkshirepostbookshop.co.uk. Postage and packing is 2.75.

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