Michael Wynn-Jones was the deputy editor overseeing the Daily Mirror's newly launched colour magazine in 1969 when the title hired a young cookery correspondent named Delia Smith, the woman he would go on to marry. Wynn-Jones, a Welsh-born writer, editor and publisher, died at home in Suffolk on September 28, 2026, at the age of 85, after receiving care from the community nursing team at St Elizabeth Hospice in Ipswich.

According to Hello! Magazine, it was that job at the Mirror, taken on when Smith was hired as the magazine's cookery writer, that introduced her to the deputy editor who became her husband. The two married in 1971, and what began as a working relationship in a Fleet Street office grew into a decades-long professional partnership as well as a marriage. Wynn-Jones later served as deputy editor of The Spectator and worked across British magazine publishing before he and Smith founded New Crane Publishing together, the company behind Sainsbury's Magazine, which he went on to edit, and several of Smith's cookery books. Outside that partnership he wrote his own books on social history, among them a biography of the Georgian caricaturist George Cruikshank published to mark the centenary of the artist's death.

Football ran alongside publishing for most of his life. Wynn-Jones joined Norwich City's board in 1996, invited by then-chairman Geoffrey Watling to help steady the club through a period of financial uncertainty, and became joint majority shareholder with Smith in 1998. For close to three decades the couple were among the most recognisable figures at Carrow Road, seeing the club through promotions and relegations before stepping back from majority ownership in 2024, when a new ownership group took control and the club named both Wynn-Jones and Smith honorary life presidents in recognition of their years of stewardship, as reported by The Pink Un.

Announcing his death, Norwich City said in a statement that "everyone at Norwich City is deeply saddened by the passing of our honorary life president, Michael Wynn Jones," adding that "his family are grateful for the wonderful care provided by the community nursing team at St Elizabeth Hospice" and extending condolences "to Delia and Tom, and with all of Michael's family, friends and loved ones."

The record of Wynn-Jones's working life is unusually concrete for a man who spent much of it just out of the spotlight: a magazine, Sainsbury's Magazine, that he helped launch and edit; a publishing house he and his wife built between them and later sold; and a football club that weathered financial uncertainty and reached the Premier League more than once during his and Smith's near three decades in the boardroom. He was the young deputy editor who spotted a cookery writer in 1969, and he spent the rest of his working life turning that first professional partnership, in print and later at Carrow Road, into a marriage and a shared body of work that outlasted both.