This article was published in the May 2019 edition of the Royal Television Society magazine ‘Television’ .

In May 2018 the Government announced that later in that year it would publish a full White Paper ‘that will cover the full range of online harms’. In September 2018 with no publication date yet in sight the Financial Times reported that ministers were grappling with how to force technology companies to take more responsibility for online content. Government intervention was said to be part of an international trend, Germany had introduced fines for platforms that fail to remove hate speech within 24 hours, but the UK would be the first in Europe to go further. A joint letter, signed by the heads of the BBC, Sky, ITV, Channel 4, and BT, had argued for independent regulatory oversight of content posted on social media platforms. However the FT reported ‘Stewart Purvis, a former Ofcom official, said he has yet to see a workable proposal for increasing oversight of social media companies’. 

A year on we finally have the White Paper and I, for one, think the time has been well spent by DCMS and the Home Office on proposals that could indeed be workable. But the focus has moved to become whether their plan will have unintended consequences which will limit freedom of speech.

The 98 page White Paper ‘Online Harms’ goes further than any previous British administration has dared to tread. ‘This is a complex and novel area for public policy’ is an elegant understatement. Politicians who once seemed in awe of the tech companies now threaten to ‘disrupt the business activities of a non-compliant company’ even those based outside the UK. The global giants who I once witnessed showing open contempt for national governments could be fined or banned, their directors held criminally liable. The days when the tech giants said they were ‘mere conduits’ for the material they distributed seem long gone. 

The political momentum for change became unstoppable the month before publication after what the White Paper calls ‘a co-ordinated cross-platform effort to generate maximum reach of footage of the attack’ in mosques in New Zealand when the gunman live-streamed his shooting on Facebook Live.

The document is full of good reasons why something has to be done. No less than 23 ‘online harms in scope’ are listed, child exploitation and distributing terrorist content top the list. But many of the harms on the list are already illegal and no new offences are created. Specifically, as Paul Herbert of Goodman Derrick has pointed out, the Government has decided against creating any new offences for hosting illegal or harmful content which he says would have been a ’radical challenge’. No bloggers will go to jail unless it is for something that is already illegal. 

Instead the White Paper targets companies like Facebook, Snapchat and YouTube who allow users to share or discover user-generated content or interact with each other online. They would have a new statutory duty of care to take more responsibility for the safety of their users and tackle harm caused by content or activity on their services. A new independent regulator, mostly funded by industry, would enforce it. This approach has been generally welcomed. The tech companies are no longer pushing back against new legal obligations as forcefully as they used to, in public at least. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg told Congress in April that he would welcome regulation, but with the rider that it had to be the right regulation. 

The public debate about what is the right regulation for the UK has been mostly about the possibility of unintended consequences. Comparisons with North Korea-style censorship have been littered around rather carelessly but the Society of Editors correctly focused on the potential weak spot in the Government’s ideas; ‘Where the white paper moves into areas concerning the spread of misinformation – so called fake news – we should all be concerned. Who will decide what is fake news?’ 

In his reply the DCMS Secretary, Jeremy Wright, accepted that the breadth of the proposals means they will affect ‘organisations of all sizes including social media platforms, file hosting sites, public discussion forums, messaging services and search engines’. But seeking to reassure the older media he said ’Journalistic or editorial content will not be affected by the regulatory framework’. The proposed new independent regulator ‘will not be responsible for policing truth and accuracy online’. Where services are ‘already well regulated’ by bodies like the press self-regulators IPSO and IMPRESS Mr Wright says ‘we will not duplicate those efforts’.

In Whitehall’s mind the news world seems to divide between the ‘real journalism’ that comes from what we used to call Fleet Street and the ’fake journalism’ emanating from The Internet Research Agency of 55 Savushkina Street, Saint Petersburg. If only life was so simple.The world has moved on from the days when only journalists did journalism. In the White Paper there are moments when you wonder if the drafters understand how journalists and non-journalists alike use social media to distribute news and opinion, how comment sections on sites can be as important as the original ‘journalistic’ article.

For an example of the simplistic approach take paragraph 4 of the section of the White Paper headed ‘The Problem’: 

‘Social media platforms use algorithms which can lead to ‘echo chambers’ or ‘filter bubbles’, where a user is presented with only one type of content instead of seeing a range of voices and opinions.This can promote disinformation by ensuring that users do not see rebuttals or other sources that may disagree’ 

What about the thousands of single-minded and occasionally bloody-minded partisan voices offering independent commentary which are an essential part of the internet. They do not seek to offer a balanced view of the world and readers would not expect a right to reply. This paragraph almost sounds like an echo from last year’s recommendation from the otherwise well-informed Digital,Culture, Media and Sport Committee that the Government use the Ofcom rules on impartiality to set standards for online content.

To offset any concerns about possible Government restrictions on ‘freedom of expression online’ and ‘a free, open and secure internet’ there are reassurances in the White Paper that seek to go beyond fine words. The independent regulator – either Ofcom or a new body – will be told to focus on protecting users from the most harmful content ‘not judging what is true or not’. If the regulator is to be Ofcom we can be sure their experience in broadcasting will be valuable in making the expected ‘difficult judgement calls’.

Ian Murray of the Society of Editors said he welcomed the reassurance from DCMS ‘but we must always be ever vigilant of the laws of unintended consequences and what some politicians or a future government may do to use online harms legislation to restrict freedom of speech’.

There is now a consultation period until 1st July and vigilance will indeed be needed to ensure that when legislation is finally presented to parliament the unintended, the unanticipated and the unforeseen do not flow from what is otherwise a sensible, practical and important law.

The Cairncross Review was set up by the UK Government to consider ‘how to sustain the production and distribution of high-quality journalism in a changing market’. They invited those interested to submit evidence, so I did .This is my evidence:

I was a BBC News Trainee, an ITN producer who became the Editor and Chief Executive, a senior Ofcom executive who oversaw a review of the UK’s local media, a Professor of Journalism at City University who wrote a book on ethics and an adviser to the DCMS on the BBC Charter Review. I am currently a Non-Executive Director of Channel Four, an author and a football reporter for the Brentford Supporters Trust known as ‘Bees United’. I am submitting a short case study on my experiences at Brentford Football Club together with my thoughts on the wider implications, informed by my earlier career.

Brentford Football Club is in the top ten of the English Football League (EFL), the third biggest league in Europe as measured by attendance. The club is widely admired for its innovative approach and this season is considered a candidate for promotion to the Premier League. A new stadium is being built to help attract further support across the club’s catchment area which is the half a million people who live in the London Boroughs of Hounslow and Ealing. Yet when the club plays matches and holds its weekly press conference sometimes nobody from the local media turns up to report them. Together with two other season-ticket holders who are also former journalists, we decided that if the country’s big local media groups couldn’t be relied on to cover the Brentford story, then we would. As three unpaid volunteers we have now covered every match and media event so far this season posting text, stills, audio and video and building up our own following online and in social media.

This situation came about in the spring of 2018 when what was then called Trinity Mirror announced a series of redundancies and one of them was the reporter who covered every Brentford match and press conference for the Hounslow Chronicle and the GetWestLondon website. Instead another reporter was tasked with covering a number of clubs in West and East London, many of whom, of course, play at the same time on a Saturday. During the pre-season it became clear that the presence of Trinity Mirror (by now renamed Reach) was unpredictable, sometimes they would be present in some form but often not. If no local reporter turned up to question the club’s Head Coach a member of the in-house communications team would do it instead.

After the first Championship match of the season at Brentford, a former Fleet Street news editor wrote an article ‘Brentford’s local press coverage has become yesterday’s news’ on a fan website.https://beesotted.com/brentfords-local-press-coverage-has-become-yesterdays-news/ . Jim Levack wrote:  ‘For the first time in the club’s professional league existence there was no local media representation at the game…It’s a damning indictment of the lack of investment in local and regional media, but also a tragedy for the club and its fans at a time when the side’s potential has never been greater.”

Reach decided to reply to the criticism https://www.holdthefrontpage.co.uk/2018/news/publisher-defends-coverage-of-football-club-despite-claim-no-reporter-at-game/ It said it had provided four separate pieces of coverage on the match via its football news website http://www.football.london

What is significant is what Reach did not say, they did not say they had been present at the game. The industry website ‘Hold the Front Page’ reported that it had ‘asked for further clarification on whether a reporter was physically present at Griffin Park but Reach has yet to respond’. Perhaps reacting to this criticism, Reach has since been represented at some events in some form but rarely the same person from the same part of Reach, which now publishes  everything from local media in West London to the Daily Mirror and Daily Express.

It is technically possible for anybody to provide coverage of Brentford FC’s press conferences without ever attending by viewing the videos which the club posts on its website. It is technically possible to cover a match without attending by monitoring websites, social media or audio services. In many ways the digital world creates opportunities for accessing content without attending events. But from a reporter’s point of view it is absolutely not the same as being there.

We in the Bees United reporting team know that to be true because by attending we get to ask our own questions, some of which the club’s representatives have chosen not to ask, we get our own stories, we talk to our own sources and witness events for ourselves. And of course some of what we ask and report gets picked up and repeated by Reach on their website http://www.football.london

So, one might ask, if a group of volunteers step in and fill a gap left by traditional local media surely that is a success for ‘a new model’? In truth it is a fragile model, that depends on the commitment of volunteers, their availability and their ability to fund themselves.

Apply the lessons of this case study to coverage of local events which may be of less interest to the local public but of more truly public interest. Imagine a local council press conference where only the in-house communications team turn up with, at best, a local blogger alongside them.

Brentford Football Club have wondered whether it is worth putting their Head Coach up for questions if nobody from the local media turns up. The read across from this to local councils is why would the leader of a council put aside time to be available to an audience of potentially nobody when an easier alternative is to work out their own questions and answers with their own in-house communications team.

A physical presence at an event is not just a ‘nice to have’. It is an essential part of our local democracy. That is why when I was one of the advisers to DCMS on the BBC Charter Renewal I supported the principle of a publicly funded intervention to increase the number of reporters covering public bodies, which eventually became the BBC Local Partnership. However I have some doubts about the execution of this scheme.

These are:

1. The funding has overwhelmingly gone to legacy players in the local media e.g Reach, Johnston Press and Newsquest with little support going to innovative new models in news-gathering.
2. The legacy players have an incentive to use that funding to subsidise existing staff rather than appoint new staff.They also have an incentive to prevent funding going to new players who they see as competitors.
3. There appears to be no outside scrutiny of how the BBC and the NMA operate the scheme using licence-fee money.
4. Access to the content created under the scheme seems unreasonably limited to legacy media.

I therefore suggest:

1.The BBC should commission a thorough review and audit of the scheme by an outside body which should be published. In particular there should be detailed scrutiny of whether the 150 reporters are truly additional to the staffing of the news organisations within which they work or has the licence fee money been used to pay people those organisations already employed.

2. After that review is published, DCMS should ask Ofcom, the regulator of the BBC , to take specific oversight of the partnership scheme and to publish its own findings each year.

3. Given that companies such as Facebook have privately inquired (see Alan Rusbridger’s recent book) as to whether they can help provide funding to schemes which offset some of the impact of their success, thought needs to be given to how such private or philanthropic funding can be fed into public interventions such as the BBC Local Partnership scheme.

4.Once the review of the existing scheme has taken place, the oversight by Ofcom has been established and a mechanism for adding non licence-fee money has been found, this scheme has the potential to increase further the number of reporters on the ground asking the right questions on behalf of citizens and  sharing the content they create as widely as possible. Extra funding could be converted into extra coverage, extending the scheme to provide greater public access to reports of courts and inquests.

On 10th September 2018 the Media Society held an event in London titled ‘Alan Rusbridger in conversation with Stewart Purvis’. This is my blog about that conversation, the audio is available in a Media Society podcast at https://www.mixcloud.com/themediasociety/alan-rusbridger-discusses-his-new-book-with-stuart-purvis/

Alan Rusbridger has written a hell of a good book about journalism; ‘Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now’ based on the first two decades of digital disruption which coincided with his time as Editor of the Guardian. 

Don’t got to it looking for simple solutions for the problems he outlines. One reviewer, Peter Wilby in the New Statesman, counted no fewer than 554 question marks among the 442 pages of Rusbridger’s book.

And don’t expect any mention of the period after his departure from the Guardian when, in the words of the New York Times at the time; ‘ he was cast as a negligent manager who had saddled the paper with a slew of problems’. The invitation for him to return to the Guardian family as the Chairman of its owner, the Scott Trust, was withdrawn. Another reviewer of the book, Robert Kaiser in the Financial Times, says that Rusbridger’s ‘awkward farewell to the institution he joined in 1979 isn’t mentioned in Breaking News — an odd but certainly diplomatic omission’.

After ten or so interviews into his book promotion itinerary nobody, it seemed, had asked Alan about this period in his life. So when I found myself ‘In Conversation with Alan Rusbridger’ before a full house in the Soho Bar of the Groucho Club in London, I thought I would.

First we talked about his big moments in journalism – defeating Jonathan Aitken in a libel case by a piece of evidence discovered at the very last minute without which his career may have came to a sudden halt, supporting Nick Davies through his revelations about phone-hacking and how Rebekah Brooks had once predicted the saga would end ‘with Alan Rusbridger on his knees, begging for mercy’, how ‘everything about dealing with Julian Assange was difficult’ when working together on the Wikileaks release of American diplomatic cables and, perhaps the Pulitzer Prize winning climax, Edward Snowden’s story told to two Guardian journalists in a Hong Kong hotel room ‘cluttered with unwashed clothes and half-eaten hotel food’ and how two GCHQ technicians came to the Guardian to ensure the destruction of the London copy of Snowden’s electronic documents knowing full well that there was another copy in the States.

We talked too about what we wrote after his first encounter with the internet in 1994: ‘fascinating, intoxicating…it is also crowded out with bores, nutters, fanatics and middle managers from Minnesota who want the world to see their home page and CV’.

Which brought us, inevitably, to the chapter titled ‘The Money Question’, and the strategy of ‘reach before revenue’, building an audience not just in the UK but worldwide that would eventually produce advertising which would pay for the content. This meant being free,‘open’ is the word he prefers, and relying in the meantime  on ‘second-hand car sales’, the profits from Autotrader which funded the Scott Trust, the owners of the Guardian.

In 2014 the Guardian Media Group (GMG) sold its last remaining stake in Autotrader and the Guardian reported ‘the sale proceeds, coupled with GMG’s existing cash and investment fund…are expected to provide financial support for the Guardian, Observer and theguardian.com website for at least 30 years’. Alan Rusbridger himself wrote ‘Let’s call the eventual endowment approaching £1 billion in rough terms—give or take’. 

I took this up in our conversation;

SP At the time did you think a billion pounds would be enough?

AR ‘No idea…none of us had any idea, must be lots of people in this room who work in the media who still have no idea, it was impossible to say’.

In May 2015 he signed off as Editor of-in-Chief of the Guardian. He writes in his book ‘Vine (Kath Viner the new Editor) and Pemsel (David Pemsel the new Chief Executive of GMG) had the safety net of more money in the bank than any Guardian editor of business manager in history could have dreamed of’. 

It had been suggested that he should become the Chairman of the Scott Trust but it was agreed that  he would not take over as immediately. He would take up his post in Oxford at Lady Margaret Hall, which would allow Kath Viner a year to establish herself. He would then return as Chair of the Scott Trust in September 2016, supervising his successor.

By March 2016 Facebook and Google had completed eating the first course of everybody else’s lunch, Guardian Media Group (GMG) was burning cash at the rate of £72 million a year, and at that burn rate it was estimated that the endowment that was meant to last at least 30 years might last for five or six. 100 jobs were earmarked to be cut from the GMG editorial workforce and 150 from commercial.

The New York Times wrote of this period; ‘Support for Mr Rusbridger suddenly shifted as he was cast as a negligent manager who had saddled the paper with a slew of problems’.

I asked him ‘Was that fair?

‘Well I am sure it looked like that at the time. Where we are today, we had a strategy agreed by all the boards about five years ago, it is basically the same strategy today. It was to invest in journalism, to be international, to remain open, not to have a pay wall, and I had set up this membership  scheme which was the idea of trying to go to readers and ask them -on a kind of NPR model -in order to pay for this and keep it open…That strategy hasn’t changed. I read now that the Guardian is going to break even this year and there is still a billion pounds in the bank. So I think today that it doesn’t quite look like such a rubbish strategy but there was a frightening point I concede. The year I left I think they were anticipating a hundred million in digital revenues which we wouldn’t have got had we not had the foresight to invest in digital and that money fell short by 20 million, money just didn’t come in. So I can see that that was a frightening time’.

The great irony about this period is that during the phone-hacking saga there had been threats to Rusbridger from the tabloid media but the real damage to his reputation now came from leaks from inside his own old newspaper plus articles in places like the FT and from people like former Guardian contributor Michael Wollf, later of ‘Fire and Fury’ fame, who wrote- amongst other things- that his former Editor  had ‘no enthusiasm for Americans, all of whom you seemed to regard as either hopeless children or hapless vulgarians’.

Kath Viner who had not been Rusbridger’s preference for his successor as Editor-in-Chief, went to see him and asked him not to take up the the chair of the Scott Trust that autumn. Rusbridger would later announce he would not take up the post because “Kath and David (Pemsel) clearly believe they would like to plot a route into the future with a new chair and I understand their reasoning.’ But I put it to him that after Kath Viner asked him to stand down it took a long time for him to agree.

AR Well it was a curious period and I’ve spoken to people about it since, we’re all friends, as I say I can see that it seemed frightening. Kath and David were both new in their jobs and the thing that you mention about not being in charge of your successor, I completely get that, so I understand it. I  mean I haven’t even written about this in the book because life has moved on and it’s all fine .

SP I think one reviewer called it ‘a diplomatic omission’.

AR I didn’t set out to write that kind of memoir. Thinking about it today, as I said, the strategy has not changed, it’s the same strategy, everything is about to break even and there’s still a billion pounds in the bank so I hope people are generous enough to think that actually maybe in a world in which everything does go up and down and anybody who works in any kind of media company except for the BBC-that was a cheap dig but the BBC does have a reasonably stable funding model. But if you are reliant on the kind of funding models that anybody out there has to rely on, then you will have good years and bad years….In these reviews they all say he was a hopeless business manager but the important bit is that they all say that the Guardian was brilliant under his editorship and that to me is the most important thing.

During the Q and A with the audience Rusbridger was asked if there had ever been deep divisions inside the Guardian about whether or not to put up a pay wall. He said there hadn’t, there had never been any pressure from the board to do that. ‘It wasn’t that here was this pampered editor trying to do this hopelessly uncommercial thing’. He pointed out ‘now, don’t take my word for it, it is on the public record, the Guardian is saying ‘we can make the sums work’ so I think in this world you need a bit more patience’.

I then summed up:

SP It sounds as if these decisions may have been made in confusion and with an inability to predict the future but actually it sounds as if you feel vindicated by the way it has turned out?

AR ‘I do,yeah… By the way that’s not to decry the work that Katherine and David have done, they’ve taken some tough decisions and they have done sone restructuring. 

In his book Rusbridger writes that Viner had ‘a tough introduction to the life of editing’ and that ‘it was clear that severe belt-tightening was going to be needed -and was doubtless overdue’.

Two footnotes: 

The first concerns the footnotes to the book. Rusbridger uses these to put on record some points about David Pemsel’s time in the marketing and commercial departments before he became CEO which I can only decode as meaning ‘this was the man who made the digital advertising forecasts, this was the man who said we were ‘financially secure’.

The other concerns the Observer newspaper. On page 32 Rusbridger writes of the paper’s ‘distinguished history’ but that’s the only time in the book where he says anything remotely positive about the Observer. Much more common are references such as ‘a modest investment of £200,000 in digital was dwarfed by an additional £6 million cash injection into the Observer’ and ‘The Observer was losing £7 for every pound lost on the Guardian or its website’.

This article appears in the July/August edition of the Royal Television Society magazine ‘Television’.

A newly appointed boss is addressing journalists gathered in the newsroom. They only know him as an outspoken TV presenter with strong links to their government. He tells them: ‘the time of detached, unbiased journalism is over. Objectivity is a myth forced upon us. Editorial policy will be based on the love of our country’.

When a journalist in his audience tries to differentiate between ‘country’ and ‘government’, his new boss tells him with more than a hint of menace : ‘Let me give you some advice. If you are planning any subversive activities I can tell you now that goes right against my plan’.

Such is the state of the world that you can imagine this happening in many countries, including, extraordinarily, the USA. The least surprising explanation is that this scene was made in Moscow, shot by a journalist on his phone in 2013 and now part of a documentary ‘Our New President’ which had its UK premiere at the Sheffield Doc/Fest this year.

Dmitry Kiselyov took up his new role when Vladimir Putin merged the Kremlin’s news agency and radio station into a company called Rossiya Segodnya, which translates as ‘Russia Today’. Its sister news organisation is the other Russia Today, the TV news channel now known as ‘RT’, and they share an editor-in-chief, Margarita Simonyan.

So what does a British regulator make of a TV channel which transmits across the UK being openly owned by the same state that, according to the British Prime Minister, poisoned Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury. And how does ‘objectivity is a myth’ fit with the British requirement for ‘due impartiality and due accuracy’. The answers, based on the past few months, are that these are particularly difficult areas for Ofcom to navigate.

On 13th March when Theresa May gave Vladimir Putin until midnight to explain how the former spy was poisoned, Ofcom said ‘should the UK investigating authorities determine that there was an unlawful use of force by the Russian State against the UK, we would consider this relevant to our ongoing duty to be satisfied that RT is fit and proper’ to hold its Ofcom broadcasting licence. The UK Government did subsequently decide that there was ‘an unlawful use of force’ by Russia but a month later Ofcom had gone decidedly cool on linking a state’s actions with its ownership of an Ofcom licence .

‘It would be inappropriate for Ofcom always to place decisive weight’ on any act which a  state committed. It was ‘not possible or appropriate for us to seek to reach an independent determination on the events in Salisbury’. Instead Ofcom preferred to consider RT’s ‘broadcasting conduct’, was ‘intensively’ monitoring RT’s output and as it happened seven new investigations into due impartiality were ready to begin. ‘Since the events in Salisbury we have observed a significant increase in the number of programmes on the RT service that warrant investigation’, said Ofcom.  Another three investigations were started the next month, making a total of eleven standards cases if you include one started last year about the use on air of allegedly fake tweets. This case has been found too be a breach of Ofcom’s code.

What Ofcom has done about Salisbury is to get out of the row about who did what to whom and focus instead on what RT broadcast about it. The Ofcom statement had one particularly curious line about TV Novosti, the Russian Federation-owned company which holds RT’s licence; ‘Until recently, TV Novosti’s overall compliance record had not been materially out of line with other broadcasters’. My own examination of the available data on cases of due impartiality, due accuracy and related offences shows that RT had ten breaches recorded against it since 2010, more than twice as many as any other broadcaster. Quite why Ofcom would frame the comparison with other broadcasters on ‘overall compliance’, including adherence to non-editorial regulation such as advertising minutes, is unclear. Its own figures show that ‘the majority of the breaches, and both of the more serious breaches, were in programming relating to Russia’s foreign policy and related to the requirement for due impartiality. The breaches related to programmes about Libya (2011, 2012), Syria (2012, 2013 and 2014), Ukraine (2014), Turkey (2016) and NATO (2016)’.

The regulatory requirement goes back to the 1954 Television Act which set up ITV. Section 3 (c) tasked the then regulator, the ITA, with ensuring that ‘any news given in the programmes (in whatever form) is presented with due accuracy and impartiality’. When asked what due impartiality meant, the Government of the day replied that it was whatever the regulator deemed it to be. The rule was later extended to the BBC  and Channel Four. Downing Street papers released in 2016 show that back in 1990 the Prime Minister’s Political Secretary, John Whittingdale, told Margaret Thatcher that they had ‘consistently abused’ the impartiality requirements. 

As it has turned out the broadcasters who have found ‘due impartiality’ a useful wedge are those from outside the UK, such as Fox News and RT, bringing a very particular point of view into the country. 

The limitations and qualifications which Ofcom has to take into account when enforcing ‘due impartiality’ were listed by the Competition and Markets Authority in the context of its review of the proposed acquisition of Sky by 21st Century Fox. The CMA concluded that  ‘broadcasters are, to some extent, able to adapt their own approach to the presentation of news and current affairs more generally’.

The considerations which create this situation include recognising the importance of freedom of expression, taking account of the context of the broadcast and ‘the expectation of the audience’. As the Ofcom executive responsible for enforcing impartiality for two and a half years I was sometimes heard to mutter that ‘audience expectation’ was another way of saying  ‘what else would viewers expect from a right-wing American TV station or one owned by the Kremlin’.

Ofcom says it will make the outcome of its investigations public as soon as possible. The process which the RT cases are going through is carefully observed by Ofcom’s legal team, led by the redoubtable General Counsel, Polly Weitzman, who has been at Ofcom since its creation. If breaches are recorded against RT/Novosti the Ofcom lawyers will highlight the importance of precedent and past performance in determining if a sanction is appropriate and what that sanction should be. 

In 2012 Ofcom revoked the licence of the Iranian news channel Press TV which as a result was no longer able to broadcast in the UK. The state-funded broadcaster’s English language service had breached several rules over editorial control and had refused to pay a fine. It seemed that Tehran, which claimed “a clear example of censorship” by ‘the media arm of the Royal Family’, rather enjoyed the fight and continued distributing its output online. The broadcasting battles between Britain and Iran continue to this day with the BBC World recently deploring Tehran’s apparent “targeted attack” on BBC Persian staff by freezing their assets.

Could it just be that in 2018 that it might suit RT’s owners in Moscow to be able to accuse Britain of censorship and retaliate in some way against the BBC. Which brings us back to the sayings of Kremlin news boss Dmitry Kiselyov. When in 2016 the BBC’s Moscow Correspondent Steve Rosenberg asked Kiselyov if he was the Kremlin’s chief propagandist he replied ‘If I make propaganda, then you make it too. But if you’re not doing propaganda, if you’re just doing your job, that applies to me too. We’re doing the same thing, we’re colleagues’.

So if ‘tit-for-tat’ or ‘colleague for colleague’ would be the likely retaliation for any Ofcom sanction which directly impacts on RT’s transmissions, perhaps a large fine would be the most appropriate outcome in all the circumstances. 

Next month a documentary is to be shown in London about a little-known woman who deserves a much bigger place in espionage history. Quite simply she started the process that led to the creation of the ‘Cambridge Spies’ and tried to do the same with former Oxford students too. I’m particularly interested to see ‘Tracking Edith’ at the Barbican Cinema on 28th July because for the past two years I’ve been tracking Edith too, her story is the centrepiece of a guided walk I give each month called ‘The Hampstead Spies’.

Edith Tudor-Hart was her married name, she was born Edith Suschitzky in Austria in 1908. The documentary was made by Peter Stephan Jungk, and the billing says that as he ‘learns more about his aunt and her work, his film demands the question: why is she not recognised alongside Kim Philby and the Cambridge Five as one of the spies that changed the world?’. Good question.

The answer partly lies in the way the British security service  drip feeds its files into history. Each autumn  MI5 releases to the National Archives a few more of its previously secret files on ‘Soviet intelligence agents and suspected agents..and suspected communist and Russian sympathisers’. Some of the big books in the world of espionage literature were written long before MI5 released in 2015 their file into ‘Edith Tudor-Hart,aliases Suschitsky,White,Betty Grey,codename Edith’.

One by-product of each release is that I put a few more red stars on my map of the old Borough of Hampstead. Each star denotes an address which has appeared in an MI5 file. I developed this addictive hobby during my research for a biography of Guy Burgess which I wrote in 2015 with Jeff Hulbert. Burgess never lived in Hampstead-he was more of a West End chap himself- but it seemed from the MI5 and Foreign Office files that just about everybody else involved in his recruitment to the KGB did. One had lived in a house just across the road from where I’d once had a flat.

In the 1930s many political and religious refugees from Nazi Germany and Austria headed for North-West London, traditionally a home of left-wing emigres since Marx and Engels stayed there and Lenin and Stalin briefly visited. Hampstead had what one resident called ‘shabby genteel Victorian streets’ where, according to official records, ‘the alien population had increased to almost 24,000’ by 1941.The Communist Party members amongst them were often the ‘scruffy lot’, Saturday mornings would be spent selling the Daily Worker on a street corner, Sundays at the Cosmo restaurant in Finchley Road with other refugees from ‘Mitteleuropa’. 

The few amongst them who actively recruited for Soviet intelligence have a comparatively modest place in the literature of Soviet espionage in Britain, certainly compared to those they signed up, spies like Kim Philby who lived in Hampstead pre and post recruitment. But more details are becoming known about them, either by an MI5 release or by their families looking back into their own archives.

In 1930s and 1940s Hampstead there were two emigre communities -one German, one Austrian -who saw it as their duty to continue the fight against fascism and to link up with like-minded Britons. Those refugees who decided that helping Soviet intelligence was a necessary and justifiable tactic against fascism chose to work with separate parts of what later became known as the KGB. The German Communists in Hampstead worked mostly with the Soviet military’s foreign intelligence agency, the GRU. Their greatest success was recruiting a key spy within the Anglo-American-Canadian ‘Manhattan’ research into nuclear weapons. The Austrian Communists tended to sign up with Stalin’s enforcers, the NKVD. They helped set up the biggest known network inside the British establishment, the so-called Cambridge spies and also tried to create one  at Oxford.

More than half a century on we know more about the origins of this particular NKVD enterprise from research done for his film by Jungk, the son of the cousin of the woman at the heart of it. Using family sources Jungk has traced the starting point back to a bookshop in Vienna in the mid-1920s where the owner’s teenage daughter was helping out. A man walked in and asked for a book by the Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich whose views on sex were so controversial that this was one of the few shops to stock it. 17 year old shop assistant Edith Suschitzky was interested in the book and therefore in the kind of man who would ask for it. His name was Arnold Deutsch, Jewish like her but four years older, originally from Slovakia, strong in physique and thick in hair.

For both of them Communist politics were a natural fit with sexual liberation. According to the family sources he invited her to a lecture on sexual politics, they walked in the park, swam naked at night in the Alte Donau and Edith’s first love affair was underway. She told him ‘I have chosen you Arnold’ even though she knew he was promised to somebody else. 

Edith and Arnold’s relationship was a long-term but stop-start one punctuated by his doctoral thesis, his marriage to a fellow Comintern courier, his subsequent training in Moscow as an agent, and Edith’s own induction into Soviet intelligence. By 1934 they were both agents living in London but married to other people. Arnold’s cover was researching psychology at London University, Edith was a photographer with a studio in the Belsize Park area of Hampstead. By a remarkable coincidence or a piece of excellent NKVD organisation, her entry into Britain from Austria had been eased by her marriage to a British communist Alex Tudor-Hart to become Mrs Edith Tudor-Hart while another Austrian Jewish communist, Litzi Friedman, got entry after meeting and marrying in Vienna a British communist to become Mrs Kim Philby. To complete the symmetry  Edith and Litzi knew each other from Vienna and Alex and Kim were both Communist graduates from Cambridge who knew Maurice Dobb. He was the Cambridge don who set Philby on the road to Vienna in 1933 to see for himself the class war in action. The Austrian left were fighting on the streets to try to take power. The right, encouraged by the rise of fascism across Europe, wanted to destroy them.

Back in London after the struggle was lost the Tudor-Harts and the Philbys lived in different parts of the Borough of Hampstead and met socially. It was perhaps inevitable that Edith would soon have, in Philby’s words, ‘a proposition to make which might vitally affect my future’. They set off together from Hampstead so that Edith could introduce him to a man ‘of decisive importance’.  When they reached a bench by the boating pond in Regents Park a man who was waiting there stood up to welcome them. Edith said ‘Here we are, on the dot’ and left them to it.

Which is how Kim Philby met Edith’s fellow agent and by now former lover, Arnold Deutsch. The recruiter flattered Philby into Soviet intelligence and did the same to friends Philby introduced from his Cambridge University days such as future Foreign Office diplomats Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess. How much more exciting, Deutsch promised them, to join this exclusive club rather than be a mere Communist Party member. In fact Deutsch told them that joining the party was the very last thing they should think of doing.

Edith was also interested in somebody ‘more promising’ than Philby. She demanded ‘we must make haste’ with the recruitment of Anthony Blunt, although he later claimed they never actually met. Edith had built her reputation as a photographer documenting working-class life in Britain but by 1940 the studio business was in trouble, she was divorced from Alex, had a severely autistic son Tommy to bring up and, according to the latest family research, received no remuneration for her espionage. She pleaded for help to Jack Pritchard, creator of the nearby Isokon block of flats where the communal living spaces created an intellectual meeting-place in North London. Edith had photographed the opening of the building and it had been her recommendation that led to Arnold Deutsch and his wife moving in. She wrote to Pritchard : ‘I am now in a difficult situation and urgently need a job’. He was not encouraging.

Meanwhile her protege Kim Philby was moving up the ranks of British intelligence and saw updates on MI5’s activities, some of them about his old patch. The Security Service thought he might be interested to see a list of all suspected Austrian communists in London. He certainly would  because he could check if his own wife was on it. Amazingly she wasn’t.

When Burgess and Maclean defected to Moscow in 1950 it was the beginning of the end for Edith’s ring. Philby came under suspicion and he too made a run for the Soviet Union. MI5 had always been on Edith’s case, watching her home in the 1930s, getting her to admit in 1947 that ‘she  used to work for the Russian Intelligence in Austria and Italy in 1932-3’ but nothing that was a crime in the UK. With the collapse of the ‘Cambridge Five’ (Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross were questioned but never charged) MI5 were back again and it was in 1964 that Blunt told them ‘he had always believed it was Tudor-Hart who first recruited Kim Philby’ and that she was probably ‘the grand-mother of us all’. Edith had a nervous breakdown, tried her luck running an antiques business in Portobello Road and Brighton and died from cancer in 1973.

Details of the documentary ‘Tracking Edith’,including a trailer are here  and there’s more about The Hampstead Spies’ guided walk here . If it’s not me doing the walk it will be my colleague and co-author Jeff Hulbert. Hope to see you there sometime.

The battle between Comcast and Fox for control of Sky has turned into not just an auction between rival bidders for Sky shares but also what Reuters calls ‘a regulatory race for approval’.

For more than a year Rupert Murdoch’s Fox has been working its way through the British regulatory process -Ofcom and the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) – coming up with solutions to a problem which it believes does not actually exist, that the Murdoch Family Trust’s stakes in British broadcasting and newspapers would mean the Murdochs would hold too much media power in the UK. My own view on this blog has always been that regulatory approval would eventually be secured and Fox’s commitments to the future of Sky News would seem to have been the final pieces in that process.

However now Fox is faced with the possibility that Comcast, the owners of NBC and Universal, may make investors a higher offer for Sky shares and may not have to jump over as many regulatory hurdles as Fox has had to. As Comcast does not own any newspapers in the UK it is obvious that the issue of media plurality does not arise. But Fox wants regulators to put Comcast through the same scrutiny it has on issues such as commitment to broadcasting standards . It  has been keen to draw the media’s attention to this .

On 4th March 2018 the Guardian ran an article headlined ‘Sky bidder Comcast labelled “worst company in America” . They reported that in recent years, ‘Comcast has been fined more than $2m (£1.5m) by US regulators and was forced to relocate a rival news service nearer to its news channels on its TV guide, while one of its leading TV presenters was involved in a sex scandal. In November, NBC News host Matt Lauer, one of the best-paid TV presenters in the US, was fired after a complaint from a colleague about inappropriate sexual behaviour’.

This past weekend (9th March 2018) Reuters ran an update on the takeover battle that included: ‘In Britain, Comcast has been involved in some minor breaches of broadcasting rules for airing offensive language, breaking impartiality and advertising rules, and it was sanctioned and fined in 2012 for broadcasting soft porn during the day on a channel that could be watched by children. Fox has called on regulators to examine all these issues’ .

Comparing bad behaviour at the top of their American operations, Comcast’s cable business has a bad record on mistreatment of customers  resulting in a $2.3m fine after allegations it charged customers for items they didn’t order. But allegations of inappropriate sexual behaviour by one NBC presenter, even one as highly paid as Matt Lauer, does not compare in scale with the allegations made against former Fox News CEO Roger Ailes before he died last year plus the other lawsuits against the organisation.

Fox’s best case in the UK is that Comcast has more regulatory breaches  than they have. However Reuters quoted Howard Cartlidge, head of EU and Competition law at DWF, as saying that ‘a larger pattern of offences would need to be proved to force a longer EU investigation: “I don’t see there being significant regulatory hurdles.” Reuters also reported that competition lawyers say that the Comcast bid could gain clearance  relatively fast process.

Given the UK regulatory focus on the future of Sky News it is worth comparing the commitments the rival bidders have made:

Fox has committed to maintain a ‘Sky branded news service for at least ten years and to maintain the funding. It has also promised a ‘Sky News Board’ of ‘Independent Export Board members’ chaired by one  with ‘senior editorial/and or journalistic experience’.

Comcast’s current statement on the future of the channel doesn’t go so far:  “Comcast recognizes that Sky News is an invaluable part of the UK news landscape and the Company intends to maintain Sky News’ existing brand and culture, as well as its strong track record for high-quality impartial news and adherence to broadcasting standards.”

Comcast’s ‘promise’ is weaker than Fox’s because there is no commitment on funding only on ‘brand and culture’. That may be because there is no regulatory requirement on it to sustain Sky News, the future of the channel only arises as an issue in the case of the Fox takeover because of media plurality concerns about the combination of Sky News and News Corp papers in the UK. It seems to me that Comcast could deliver on Sky News’ ‘brand and culture’ but operate  the channel in a different way and at a lower cost than currently operated by Sky.

Which brings us to one other distinction between the rival bids. Having stopped Fox News’s transmissions to Europe, Fox currently doesn’t have a stake in a news channel in Europe other than Sky News. However Comcast does. In a little noticed deal  last year Comcast’s NBC news division acquired a 25% stake in the European news network Euronews based in Lyon,France. NBC paid $30 million for the shares.  The majority shareholder is an Egyptian businessman  Naguib Sawiris ,who owns 53% and chairs the supervisory board .

Announcing the deal the Chairman of NBC News Andy Lack said: ‘We plan to marry the power of the NBC News brand and the talent of our people with a formidable news asset in Europe in order to create an international offering that will strengthen our news organization and change the landscape of international news. This new venture will be called Euronews NBC. In short: We believe we’ve found a unique international partner at a pivotal time in global news’.

So ‘In short’, if the Comcast purchase of Sky goes through it will have a stake in two rival European-based news channels.  It is difficult to believe some consolidation won’t be considered.

One footnote on the CMA Fox-Sky process. During a CMA roundtable I raised the example of Sky News Australia and said it had ‘adopted the Fox model of the primetime commentary programme…where their version of Mr Hannity, Mr Paul Murray said of the Defence Minister, Mr Pyne, on 26 June, “This is the type of bloke who, to use the Aussie-ism, if you were on fire he wouldn’t piss on you. This is the bloke who, if he was at a social function and met you he’d be looking for someone more important than you. That’s the measure of this wanker”.

At a Media Society event I chaired at Westminster University last month a former executive of Sky News Australia pointed out that Paul Murray’s programme existed before News Corp took complete control of the channel. I have checked the schedules and Paul Murray’s programme was increased from one hour each weeknight to two hours when News Corp took control. Supporters of News Channel Australia have also pointed out that Mr Murray is equally rude to politicians whether they be conservatives such as Mr Pyne or Labour.

Update on footnote: Since the CMA roundtable one of the other participants, David Elstein has been in correspondence with me challenging what I said about Sky News Australia.

After this blog appeared David posted a comment (see comments section). He argues that I am wrong to link the extension of the Paul Murray programme to News Corp:

‘As Angelos Frangopoulos, the CEO of Sky News Australia since its inception, told me when I asked him about this, his top sports presenter was poached by Channel 9, and the obvious way to fill the gap was to extend Murray’s show, as it is the most successful programme on the satellite service that carries Sky News Australia: nothing to do with News Corp, just as all the other commentary material (including Paul Murray, on air since 2010) had nothing to do with News Corp. The CMA report covered this topic exhaustively!

My response to David is two fold:

1. It is a fact that the extension of the Murray programme happened after News Corp took control. I never said that the decision was made by News Corp.
2. The CMA studied the Sky News Australia schedules in great detail and concluded; Our analysis of the TV scheduling indicates that there has been an increase in the number of hours of opinion led programming/right-wing personalities broadcast on Sky News Australia since the acquisition. However, we note that News Corp’s analysis of their TV schedules shows suggests that the increase was more significant between 2015 and 2016, ie before the acquisition by News Corp. As discussed later, other evidence suggests that this change in strategy had already started to take place before the acquisition in December 2016.

I am happy to accept the CMA’s view on this.

It was just a line noticed last summer on one page of the hundreds of thousands of documents in the National Archives. It became Page One of the Sunday Times (25th February 2018) not to mention pages two, seven and twenty.
The months in between are testament to the scholarship and commitment of historian Jeff Hulbert as well as the importance of the Freedom of Information (FoI) laws which survived a brief encounter with the Cameron Government anxious to dilute them.
The exclusive itself is best summed up in the opening paragraph of the Sunday Times front page;
‘A former British diplomat who became the communist affairs ­correspondent of The Daily Telegraph is today revealed to have escaped prosecution in the 1950s after he confessed to spying for the Soviet Union. The Foreign Office covered up the scandal. David Floyd, who was described on his death in 1997 as “one of Fleet Street’s most knowledgable Kremlinologists”, admitted having passed information to Russian intelligence agents while based in Moscow at the end of the Second World War’.
The origins of this exclusive lie in one man’s search for the truth about what happened more than half a century ago inside the British Foreign Office. Jeff Hulbert worked in local government before focusing on his passion; the history of where politics meets media and espionage. I first met him when I was CEO of ITN and Jeff was brought in for his other expertise-how to digitise film and video archives. He found valuable film clips in the ITN archive that we didn’t know existed and when I left and became a Visiting Professor at Oxford I asked Jeff to help with the archive research. That collaboration later led to two books ‘When Reporters Cross The Line’ and ‘Guy Burgess,The Spy Who Knew Everyone’.
During the Burgess research Jeff submitted many FoI requests including two that produced archive gold. One was on the FBI to release an audio tape of Burgess telling of a 1938 meeting with Churchill, thought at the time to be the only recording of his voice. This was somewhat superseded when, in conjunction with the Canadian broadcaster CBC, we released to BBC Newsnight a TV interview CBC had done with Burgess in Moscow, never seen since its one-off 1959 transmission. Jeff’s other five star FoI was on the Foreign Office to release their internal inquiry into the defection to Moscow in 1951 of diplomats Burgess and Donald Maclean. The so-called ‘Cadogan Report’ was named after the Foreign Office mandarin who had both hired Burgess from the BBC and then inquired into how and why Burgess had been hired. We gave this exclusive to Michael Crick of Channel Four News.
Our Burgess book was published after weeks of intensive research, drafting and re-writing that followed the release to the National Archjves of the MI5 and Foreign Office files on Burgess and Maclean. We then took a break from each other and followed our own slightly separate interests. I created ‘The Hampstead Spies’ a monthly guided walk from London Walks and Jeff went back into hibernation at the National Archives looking for more exclusives. But we stayed in touch, Jeff deputises for me on the walk and if I find something in my own research that’s useful to him I pass it on.
Which is how last summer Jeff told me he was onto something completely new. He’d been helping me research one of my Hampstead spies and while on the high-speed train from Kent he downloaded from the National Archives an MI5 file in which he spotted a passing reference to somebody in the Foreign Office confessing to spying for the Soviet Union in 1951. It was a name which had never appeared in any spy book or file before, but it was a vaguely familiar one, that of David Floyd, once known as the Telegraph’s expert on the Soviet Union and a regular BBC pundit on the Kremlin. He’d died in 1997.
Jeff submitted an FoI to the Foreign Office to discover more about Floyd’s time in the FO. In November they responded saying they did have material about Floyd but would have to consider the public interest and national security. They needed more time .The same reply came in December and January as they met each 20-day deadline for responding to FoIs.
Then last Tuesday (20th February 2018) more than 300 pages of Foreign Office documents arrived in the post at Jeff’s home. Some had been heavily edited because in the FO’s view on public interest and national security there are still some things from half a century ago that we cannot know. The whole of Floyd’s signed confession had been withheld, possibly because of other people he may have named.
I suggested to Jeff that the Sunday Times would be a good place for the story to surface .I had placed an exclusive there before and it had been well handled. I sent them a pitch and underlined the need for speed:
‘We need to move very quickly, the documents released to Jeff look as if they have been handled at the National Archives which could mean that the Foreign Office is planning a release. They would not normally do a spoiler on an FOI release but you can never be sure’.
The Sunday Times came back immediately and reporters Nicholas Hellen and Tony Allen-Mills met up with Jeff and got to work. Credit to all three of them, in a very short time the details were all checked out, more background added and Floyd’s son, a senior judge, given the news for the first time. “It is very shocking for me to hear this’ he said.
For this long-standing broadcast journalist it was a timely reminder of the surviving and impressive power of print.

It is not often that a journalist is asked to ‘expose’ his own boss. On a summer Saturday in July 1969 I was working at a provincial news agency in Exeter when I took a call from the news desk of the Observer newspaper.
‘Have you heard of a man called Rodney Hallworth?’
‘Yes’.
‘We want you to expose him”.
I took down the details of the commission and set to work. The first person I called was the aforementioned Mr Hallworth, who as the owner of the news agency was my boss, a fact the Observer was clearly not aware of.
‘Rodney, I’ve just got an order from the Observer’. Pausing only briefly for effect, I went on; ‘they want me to expose you’. I then explained that the Observer had received a tip off that the rival Sunday Times was about to publish a sensational story about a solo yachtsman, Donald Crowhurst, who had disappeared from his boat in mid-Atlantic when poised to win the paper’s round-the-world race. The new development I reported to Hallworth did not come as a surprise to him. In his other role as the publicist for Crowhurst it was he who -with Sunday Times reporters- had retrieved a logbook from the abandoned trimaran when it was taken into harbour in the Caribbean.
This log revealed a very different story from the one which Crowhurst and Hallworth had been telling for the previous few months. Rather than follow the race’s course down the Atlantic to the Cape of Good Hope, east across the southern oceans and round Cape Horn back into the Atlantic, Crowhurst had never left the Atlantic. He had lingered there with his radio turned off for weeks pretending to follow the race course before re-emerging on the home straight back to Britain. Only then did he discover that with other contenders dropping out he, this weekend sailor with no track record of long distance sailing success, was going to be the winner of the £5,000 prize. The assumption to this day is that Crowhurst took his own life at sea rather than face the inevitable inquests into his unlikely success. It fell to Rodney Hallworth to answer for Crowhurst’s deception and sad demise. My job as one of two reporters in his agency was to try to provide impartial coverage of the story in which he was a central figure.
Released this month (February 2018) the movie ‘The Mercy’, starring Colin Firth and Rachel Weisz, tells the story of ‘the last voyage of Donald Crowhurst’ which began 50 years ago this summer. It is not the first film on the subject, the BBC made a TV documentary at the time and my former ITN colleague Louise Osmond directed a feature-length documentary ‘Deep Water’ for Film Four in 2006. To tie in with this new movie, the late Nicholas Tomalin’s excellent book ‘The Strange Last Journey of Donald Crowhurst’, written with Sunday Times colleague Ron Hall, is being re-published in paperback.
I’ve seen a preview of the film and it is, in the words of the Radio Times reviewer, ‘a compelling story told with care and compassion’. Both lead parts are well played but the scene-stealer is David Thewlis as Rodney Hallworth. Whereas the documentaries relied mostly on archive clips of Hallworth in relatively low-key mode after Crowhurst’s death, Thewlis is able to give it ‘full Rodney’ throughout the story.  Endlessly optimistic and verbally extravagant, his spectacles always just about to fall off the end of his nose, a proud son of Stockport demanding to be the centre of attention, only Thewlis’s girth fails to capture the real thing. Hallworth always flaunted an enormous paunch, the result of years in investment in ‘light and bitter’.
There is no character called Stewart Purvis in the film, but by coincidence, a young journalist called Wheeler, played by Jonathan Bailey, captures the same awe that I felt in the company of this legendary former Fleet Street crime reporter (more of that later), the same scepticism about his techniques and the same reluctance to challenge them.
Half a century on it seems the right time to confess my bit part in the Crowhurst saga and tell a yarn or two about Rodney or ‘Rod’ or ‘Rodders’ as we called him in the newsroom of his freelance agency, the ‘Devon News Service’.
For me the summer of ’69 was a gap between graduating from Exeter University and taking up a post at the BBC as one of their first news trainees. I’d first come across ‘Devon News’ while editing the student newspaper. A reporter would turn up each week looking for stories in our paper that they might be able to sell to regional broadcasters or national newspapers. Soon I was doing Friday shifts for them, phoning over copy for the Sunday papers that paid the best. ‘Is there much more of this?’ was the inevitable refrain from the copy-takers. I also combed Devon’s weekly local papers looking for more stories which we could sell on. After a year of Friday shifts while still a student I became a full time summer relief reporter during the start and, a year later, the finish of the Crowhurst story.
In the movie version, the Crowhursts lived in the Devon seaside resort of Teignmouth and thus his boat was called ‘Teignmouth Electron’. The real story is more revealing about the relationship between Crowhurst and Hallworth. When I first started working at Devon News it was explained that the business was multi-dimensional, though still small enough to fit into a two storey house near Exeter Central Station. There was the news agency selling words and pictures, a favourite combination was inventing stories about animals which apparently thought they were other animals, it being impossible for the animal to deny the story. The news photographers could double as wedding photographers. I remember when one was diverted from a church to the higher priority of a multi-car crash on the Exeter by-pass, the disappointed couple were invited to re-stage the ceremony for photographs to be taken in the office. In a new  appendage Rodney announced that his next venture would be in rissoles which were to be the future of pub food. But the ancillary business which excited him as much as news was public relations and that was to be where the bear traps lay ahead.
It was Hallworth, not Crowhurst, who lived in Teignmouth, actually in Shaldon just across the water, and he had got himself appointed as the public relations officer for the town. As reporters we were under orders to get the word Teignmouth into as many stories as possible even if they had no connection whatsoever. Larger and more significant Devon towns would be described in copy as being ‘near Teignmouth’. I remember that after a comparatively modest flood Rodney took it upon himself to declare that Teignmouth was officially ‘a disaster area’. When the hotel keepers complained this would frighten away visitors, he responded that far from it they would come in droves to see the damage.
Donald Crowhurst actually lived in Bridgwater in Somerset where he ran a business called ‘Electron Utilisation’ and the reason that his trimaran was called ‘Teignmouth Electron’ and set off from Teignmouth was because Rodney  persuaded him to. In return the town provided some funding, I never discovered how much but I do know that the BBC got the TV rights very cheaply. I don’t think Crowhurst had ever been to Teignmouth before. The Donald Crowhurst I met  in those days before he set off was the way he appears in the news clips: shy, nervous, rightly daunted by what lay ahead. His wife Clare even more so.
Once at sea he would call in via Portishead radio and give his position. None of us in the office, including Rodney, knew anything about sailing and we would pass on these positions each week to the race organisers at the Sunday Times. Once he stopped calling in (I only discovered after his death that he did this deliberately because using his radio would give away his real position) we were faced with the dilemma of responding to the Sunday Times’s regular requests for updates. So without any knowledge or understanding of the prevailing winds or other influences on his position we would send in what I can only call our own estimates. Those Sunday Times readers with more nautical experience began to find the details of these somewhat surprising.
I have reflected many times on Rodney Hallworth’s own behaviour during this period and I am convinced he did not know then what Crowhurst was up to. I certainly didn’t. The tragedy was that when Crowhurst re-emerged from his silence and began reporting genuine positions on the final stages of his journey, Hallworth’s excitement created extra stress that probably helped to tip Crowhurst over the top. It wasn’t the main cause, that was the terrible deal Crowhurst had done with a Somerset businessman in which the Crowhurst family home would be mortgaged if the boat was lost, or he gave up the race. But undoubtedly it was an enormous pressure on him having Rodney on the radio telling him of the big welcome he would receive and the enormous interest there would be in finding out exactly how he had won the race against the odds.
From the moment the full story of Crowhurst’s demise broke Rodney never attempted to edit the copy I filed on the story. There were no more conflicts of interest. I remember phoning over to the national news agency, Press Association, a story which listed all the questions that the saga raised and being very excited a few hours later when it appeared in the Exeter Express and Echo and other evening papers around the country. But I’m not sure that anything I filed ever amounted to the ‘exposure’ of my boss that the Observer commissioned.
Rodney Hallworth died in 1985 of heart problems. A number of Devon News alumni returned for the funeral and we walked behind the coffin across the Teignmouth-Shaldon bridge as a jazz trumpeter played ‘Bye Bye Blackbird’. Rodney had put money behind the pub bar for the drinks at the wake. Researching his life-story I discovered that nothing he ever said about his past was exaggerated, if anything it was understated. His primetime was 1950s and 60s Fleet Street, ‘Rumpole of the Bailey’ territory where reporters,  detectives and lawyers would swap gossip on the real life equivalents of the ‘Penge Bungalow Murders’. Another chronicler of the period, Victor Davis, wrote of ‘the great crime men of the day’ who possessed ‘the ability to ingest enormous quantities of alcohol and still be able to duck and dive and file copy in time for the first edition’. Among those he listed was the ‘genial and rotund’ Rodney Hallworth of the Daily Mail and later of the Daily Express.
In the Mail’s digital archive I found Hallworth exclusives about Ruth Ellis, the last woman to hang for murder. He told friends he accompanied her to the gallows in 1955 which sounds unlikely but knowing him is possible. In 1956 he was one of the first reporters to spot the significance of a police inquiry into an Eastbourne GP whose patients share a predilection for dying and leaving money to him in their will. Over a decade 132 patients of Dr John Bodkin Adams fell into this category. Arriving for what became known as ‘the Eastbourne Job’ at the height of the holiday season Hallworth was told by the manager of the Grand Hotel that ‘all I can offer you is the Bridal Suite’. So that became his base for weeks as he reported ‘the most sensational investigation of the country’s criminal history’.
When Dr Adams went for trial at the Old Bailey Hallworth was in the press box each day alongside Mail legend Vincent Mulchrone writing jointly by-lined court reports. Mulchrone was always more of a wordsmith than Hallworth. Together they planned major pieces to run in the Mail once Adams was convicted. Then came a small hitch – Dr Adams was found not guilty, the jury accepting what he told Hallworth and others ‘all I ever did was to make my patients as comfortable as possible towards the end’.
In 1960 the Daily Express poached Hallworth from the Mail and soon he was at the front line of a story that combined crime and politics. In the Express archive is an extraordinary front page from March 25th 1963 ‘CHRISTINE -AT LAST’. Hallworth and fellow Expressman Frank Howitt had tracked down Scotland Yard’s most sought after woman and reported that ‘Christine Keeler swing her high-booted legs over a swish chair in a Madrid flat tonight and said ‘Suddenly I feel a load has been lifted from my mind’. She was now safe in the hands of Hallworth and the Express. When Conservative Minister John Profumo finally resigned over their affair Hallworth again made the front page with exclusive quotes from Keeler about ‘Our Secret Dates’. Hallworth was also an Express ‘minder’ to Keeler’s friend Mandy Rice-Davies and they were often photographed together.
But there was a sting in the tale during Hallworth’s time at the Express . The undoubted doyen of the crime corps  was Expressman Percy Hoskins, Hallworth’s bitter rival, who had outmanoeuvred him in the Bodkin Adams case by keeping open the possibility that Adams would get off and getting an exclusive with the acquitted doctor who apparently had merely  ‘eased the passing’ of his elderly patients.
In the British Journalism Review in 2004  Victor Davis wrote  ‘I was an admirer of Rodney Hallworth at the Mail…who foolishly allowed himself to be bought up by the Express. He thought that by joining the staff he would inherit Percy’s mantle. What the paper actually did was to leave Rodney to wither on the vine so that Percy could carry on into old age without a serious rival’.
After a brief return to the Mail, Hallworth walked out of Fleet Street and set up in Devon as ‘Hallworth of Exeter’. Fleet Street loved to think that they had the country staked out by such colourful freelance characters as Hallworth and Lino ‘Dan’ Ferrari, father of broadcaster Nick Ferrari, whose manor covered Kent and South-East London. By the time I first met Rodney in 1968 the walls of his office in Exeter were already covered with front page photographs of the Aberfan disaster in 1966. A tip off from the Devon police that something big was happening across the Bristol Channel led him to put a photographer on a light aircraft to get the first aerials. He had the most extraordinary relationship with the Devon and Cornwall police, after a night’s drinking with detectives they would provide a patrol car to get him home safely. When I returned to Devon in 1976 to lead ITN’s investigations into the Jeremy Thorpe-Norman Scott saga, those old contacts held good and a senior detective tipped me off that the the Liberal Party had ‘good reason to be fearful’ of their inquiries.
So I don’t regret my time at Devon News Service. I learned a few of the black arts of tabloid journalism but most importantly I realised this was not for me. I could never write the intros built around a pun and never master getting into a jail to get quotes from a prisoner. I was never happy inventing quotes from somebody who didn’t exist despite Rodney’s advice to give them an address in a very long road -Stockport Road,Manchester was his favourite- because nobody would ever walk that far to check.
When in much later life I was a Visiting Professor at Oxford University researching the concept of ‘crossing the line’ in journalism I dedicated my first lecture to Rodney. He had inadvertently taught me not to cross that line.

UPDATE

This blog prompted other journalists’ memories of Hallworth in particular and their own time in local agencies.  Tom Mangold of the Daily Express and later the BBC remembers:

‘Rodney,Frank Howitt and I did Keeler/Ward for two years solid. Rodney was the archetypal tabloid reporter, a bit too grand for foot in door stuff (he left that to me and Frank) and an arch plotter and schemer and a man to whom we L plate hacks gravitated naturally. I’m certain that when Mandy Rice-Davies asked him what she should say in court if Lord Astor denied sleeping with her it was ‘Rodders’ who suggested the now iconic reply ‘Well he would,wouldn’t he’.

Paul Potts, who worked on the Daily Express before becoming Chief Executive of the Press Association said the blog evoked  ‘echoes of a bygone age when expenses were paid and the bridal suite an acceptable upgrade. He saw a parallel between Devon News’s lack of nautical knowledge and his own episode ‘with the weather off the coast of North West Spain, an abandoned Greek oil tanker and vulnerable shellfish beds’. His  bad luck was that ‘the night editor was a keen yachtsman and weather bore’.

Turning to the world of local agencies, broadcaster Nick Ferrari confirmed that his father was ‘Ferrari of Dartford’ who started what is now the 2nd longest running press agency in the land although there is no longer any family involvement. He explained that the oldest is Cassidy and Leigh out of Surrey.

Nick Pollard, former Head of Sky News and currently Chairman of the Ofcom Content Board, recalls ‘Blyth of West Lancs’. He says Roger Blyth ‘relished his reputation (as I suspect did most agency proprietors) as ‘that bloke who sends little boys up chimneys’. Nick’s particular chimney was ‘to drive from my parents’ house in Birkenhead to East Lancashire (quite a long way actually!) to do an early shift on Radio Blackburn from 0600 to 1400 and then drive to Liverpool to do the Radio Merseyside late shift from 1500 to whenever the work was finished – usually after midnight. And of course, like all good agency hacks, I was required to provide newspaper copy from every story I came across on the radio shifts’

Blyth became best known from his time as a reporter/presenter on Granada TV in  the North-West where he was married to Judy Finnigan for a time. He had also taken over Liverpool’s Mercury Press Agency from founder Terry Smith who’d gone to become MD of Liverpool’s first commercial radio station Radio City where Roger Blyth and Nick Pollard also worked for a time.

Nick’s abiding  image of Roger is ‘him dictating copy  in the late morning on one phone with another tucked in to his neck already dialling, a cup of coffee with four sugars in front of him (probably his tenth of the day), grazing from a plastic tray of fish and chips and lighting the next Players Untipped from the stub of the previous one’. Like Rodney Hallworth who died at 56, Roger Blyth didn’t make it past his fifties. Nick says: ‘I’m amazed he made it into his thirties, let alone any further!’

‘echoes of a bygone but rather wonderful age when expenses were plentiful and the bridal suite an acceptable upgrade!’ and  ‘smiled at your prevailing winds copy.I had a similar problem with the weather off the coast of NW Spain – Corunna – with an abandoned Greek oil tanker and vulnerable shellfish beds!

Main problem was the night editor was a keen yachtsman and weather bore.Just my luck’.

Newly released Security Service files from the 1960s show that MI5 officers suspected that two senior executives in the ITV network had been secret supporters of the Communist Party with links to Soviet Intelligence. Previously secret documents now in the National Archives show their inquiries into possible Communist connections inside ITV ended with no conclusive evidence of a KGB link and the suicide of one of the men.

The investigations had started in the wake of the defections to Moscow of three Cambridge graduates Kim Philby, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean. MI5 were trying to find out if there had been an equivalent recruiting network at Oxford University in the 1930s. Bernard Floud, son of a leading civil servant Sir Francis Floud, came under suspicion partly because of his friendship with one of the Cambridge recruiters, James Klugman. ‘The case for suspecting that Floud may have worked for the Russians as a talent-spotter rest on his early association with James Klugman. It seems highly possible that what Klugman was doing at Cambridge was echoed by Floud at Oxford’. Floud and Klugman had both been at school with Donald Maclean and had travelled to China in 1938 to meet leading Communist Chou En-Lai. MI5 tracked this visit and because of Floud’s Communist activities at Oxford monitored his subsequent career in the wartime Intelligence Corps and Ministry of Information and post-war Board of Trade. In 1951 when he was an Assistant Secretary MI5 got a report that ‘he is a fanatical Communist. It must be assumed he is still a Communist partisan, the more dangerous because of his concealment’

Despite this shadow over his civil service career Floud was progressing up the ranks when suddenly in 1951 he resigned to become a farmer. In an equally sudden career shift five years later he became one of the first employees of Granada Television, which had won the ITV franchise for the North of England. Floud was put in charge of personnel and he represented Granada at network meetings becoming the chair of the Labour Relations Committee, in effect the ITV employers’ lead negotiator with the TV  unions. From 1959-1964 he was also Granada’s man on the board of Independent Television News (ITN) and unusually for a director of ITN he once reported on air. In 1967 Floud happened to be in Northern Nigeria, where Granada had a stake in a TV station, when the regional Premier and his wife were shot by rebel troops.His eye-witness report is still in the ITN Archive.

MI5’s interest in Floud was rekindled when they learned that while at Oxford he ‘had been concerned in recruiting CP members of the University for long-term undercover penetration of the Civil Service. In one known case, that of Jenifer Fischer-Williams, later Hart, he nurtured the student’s development as a Communist at Oxford, advised her to join a department of the Civil Service from which information of value could be made available to the CPGB and gave her guidance on the question of concealing her Party membership’.

MI5 wanted to know what exactly Floud was doing at Granada and wrote to I.R.D. the secret anti-Communist propaganda arm of the Foreign Office which often paid professional journalists to work for them. The letter said ‘I am in need of a reliable contact in Granada Television network in London to whom I could entrust a somewhat delicate enquiry. I wonder whether by any chance you can suggest anyone suitable for this purpose’. They linked their enquiries into Floud with the name of the man at the very top of the ITV company: ‘It is worth remembering that Sidney Bernstein, the head of Granada, has an extremely interesting file which you may like to consult. It may not be fortuitous that Floud obtained a position with this firm’.

In a later file MI5 officers put on record that Bernstein ‘has been considered, by reason of his great wealth and influential positions’, a potential source of support for the Communist powers, both financially and in the sphere of propaganda’. While conceding that they had no hard proof Bernstein had ever been a formal party member they recorded that ‘two independent sources who are believed to be reliable reported-in 1936 and again in 1955 – that he was a secret member of the Party’. Bernstein was, they noted, a friend of Ivor Montagu, a film-maker and Communist activist and a referee for Cedric Belfrage, who would later be revealed as an important Soviet agent.

Bernard Floud’s career had taken a further twist when this civil servant turned farmer turned TV executive started a fourth career and it was one which he developed simultaneously with his TV work. In 1964, at his third attempt he was elected as a Labour MP, representing Acton in London. Two years later MI5 noted ‘It may be postulated that as a member of parliament, although as yet only a backbencher, Floud has potential as an agent of influence. His value to the Russians as an executive of Granada Television and a director of Independent Television News is more immediately apparent. Proof or disproof of these suspicions is yet wanting’. MI5 officers, prominent among them Peter Wright who wrote in ‘Spycatcher’ about the Floud case, set about finding out more. Floud told them he ‘got into television through an introduction from an MP who was a friend of Sidney Bernstein. And he had been there ever since.’

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The search for evidence against him became particularly relevant when it became known that the Prime Minister Harold Wilson was considering promoting Floud to Ministerial rank. With the agreement of the Home Secretary Roy Jenkins, Floud was interviewed by MI5 on five occasions between August 1966 and March 1967. In the MI5 files the notes by Peter Wright and his team on the Floud interrogation make fascinating reading. There are accounts of how Floud ‘prevaricated’, was ‘less than candid’ admitting ‘conspiratorial Communist activity’ but denying any knowledge of Russian Intelligence connections.
After the final interrogation in March 1967 Wright wrote; ‘At the end I could only conclude that Floud has been less than frank with me, since under pressure he has shifted his ground on many issues’. The typed document ends ‘I felt that I had been dealing with a dedicated Communist’. Wright seems to have had second thoughts about that line because he crossed out the words ‘a dedicated’ and in his own handwriting changed it to ‘dealing with someone who was using the techniques of a Communist’.
Another entry in the file says ‘we have not so far been able to break this case by interview, partly because we have had to handle Floud with care as an MP’. MI5 never did ‘break the case’ but by the end of it Floud was a broken man. He had a long-term depressive illness and  his wife, to whom he had been devoted, had died during the interrogation process. Wilson never did make him a minister, he went back to work at the Commons and at Granada but told colleagues he was ‘unable to go on’. He committed suicide in his home in October 1967 by a combination of alcohol, barbiturates and coal gas.
In the official history of MI5, Professor Christopher Andrew concluded that ‘There was – and is – no evidence that he had any Communist contacts after 1952. His pre-war contacts with Soviet intelligence are also unlikely to have been of great significance’. As for Sidney Bernstein MI5 concluded ‘there is no firm evidence to show where Bernstein’s political loyalties now lie’ and he was never questioned or challenged by MI5 during his illustrious career in television.

(The story of Bernstein’s later encounters with the UK’s TV regulators is told in ‘When Reporters Cross the Line’,written with Jeff Hulbert)

On 28th November the Security Service MI5 released a few more of their files to the National Archives. I have prepared this joint blog post with Jeff Hulbert, my co-author on ‘Guy Burgess, the Spy Who Knew Everyone’. Here’s what we make of just one of the released files.

Nowadays he’d be called a ‘national treasure’, a broadcaster with a special gift for using his hands-on experience in diplomacy, politics and journalism to communicate with listeners. Sir Harold George Nicolson KCVO CMG (1886-1968) had earned respect opposing appeasement at a time when his views and those of others like Winston Churchill were censored by the BBC and cinema newsreels. He had a celebrity wife, the writer Vita Sackville-West, but like some national treasures of more recent times he also had a private sex life that broke the law of the land at the time, in his case the law on homosexuality.
Among his friends and probably his lovers was the Cambridge spy Guy Burgess. When Nicolson was a BBC Governor he went as far as recommending that Burgess would make ‘an ideal parliamentary correspondent’. The two men were so close throughout their lives up to and including their regular correspondence when Burgess ended up in Moscow that in our book ‘Guy Burgess, the spy who knew everyone’ we wondered why it was that MI5 showed so little interest in him. We pointed to gaps in the files where we thought Nicolson’s name would and should have appeared.
Now one file of documents on Nicolson has finally arrived in the National Archives, and if anything the release confirms our suspicions. From the moment in 1951 when the British establishment realised that within their midst had been two KGB spies, Burgess and Donald Maclean, MI5 pursued anybody who might have been in their ring. However, the files confirm that MI5 didn’t do much about Nicolson, other than intercept his correspondence with Burgess which may have been more of a by-product of opening Burgess’s post than his. At a time when people like Anthony Blunt were having their phones tapped, post opened and facing interrogation, Nicolson seems to have been left well alone.
Could it be yet another case of what Burgess himself called ‘class blinkers’, judging somebody solely by their family, their education and their intellect? Nicolson scored highly on all counts: the son of a diplomat, the 1st Baron Carnock, school at Wellington then Balliol College Oxford, a prolific biographer of literary greats and King George V.
What the files reveal is that nearly 25 years after the defection somebody in MI5 thought that one document in particular was worth a second look. In our book on Burgess we highlighted a 1951 file revealing that the writer John Lehmann had tried to pass on information about him to the authorities. He chose to do it ‘through Harold Nicolson, who found himself unable to assist owing to a heavy list of engagements’. We commented ‘there is no record of whether MI5 followed this up by asking Nicolson himself what he meant by this extraordinary statement’.
What we can tell from the newly released file is two things: firstly that indeed there was no follow up in 1951 and secondly that somebody in MI5 finally put pen to paper in 1974 – 6 years after Nicolson’s death. 1974 is also near the end of Peter Wright’s investigation into possible moles in MI5, the so-called Fluency process. Hand written annotations on the original 1951 file reveal that Nicolson’s curious inability to pass on information to the authorities involved details not just about Burgess but also about Donald Maclean. The extract in Nicolson’s file was taken from Lehmann’s 1951 MI5 interrogation. The Burgess element was when John Lehmann recounted his sister Rosamond’s story of how she had been told in the 1930s that Burgess was a communist agent. That had first come to light when in June 1951 the Daily Express had published a leaked letter by Lehmann repeating his sister’s story. The 1974 annotator adds ‘Nicolson had suggested that he might speak to Sir William Strang to introduce Rosamond Lehmann’s story to him but eventually found himself unable to help’. But John Lehmann also told Nicolson about Donald Maclean recounting ‘secondhand information…the story of how Maclean defending Alger Hiss in a brawl with Philip Toynbee’. The newly released file confirms that MI5 never seems to have got around to asking Nicolson why he had been too busy to pass on Lehmann’s story, even though by that time his friend Guy had already disappeared.
According to Nicolson’s unpublished diary John Lehmann went to see him about the story on 13 June. Nicolson wrote ‘I tell him to get her up to see me first…’, which suggests that Nicolson wanted to check out her version of the story before acting. Within days Lehmann’s letter had been leaked to the Daily Express and events had presumably overtaken Nicolson.
Apart from class blinkers, MI5 ’s failure to follow up with Nicolson may have parallels with the members of the Foreign Office committee of inquiry into the Burgess and Maclean affair who especially noted that it would be ‘distasteful’ for members of the Service to be expected to have to watch colleagues and, ‘in school parlance, to “blab” about them to the “Head”. A clue to Nicolson’s attitudes is revealed by an unpublished diary observation, written in 1940 while he was Parliamentary Secretary at the Ministry of Information. He described MI5 as a ‘silly and hen-minded Gestapo’ who that holding left-wing views made people a security risk. He opined: ‘this is the sort of thing which I can smash.’
Nicolson’s file covers the years 1929 to 1963 and contains letters exchanged between him and Burgess, additional to those already released in Burgess’s MI5 file. Occasional references show that the two men were well aware that MI5 was probably reading their letters, but carried on regardless, sometimes using risqué expressions that must have shocked their uninvited audience. In one letter, for instance, Nicolson, then aged 75, confided to Burgess that although he was still fit and healthy, ‘I hope that I die clasping a naked body to by [sic] chest. That is the way to die, like Felix Faure.’
Some letters concern Burgess’s desire to return to Britain for a visit. He was curious about what information the British government had on him, more so in 1962 after arrest warrants for him and Maclean had been issued at Bow Street. Coming from someone as sophisticated and as ruthless as Burgess it is unlikely to have been just an innocent enquiry. Nicolson, was cautious however, saying he was unable to help: ‘I wish I could tell you something strong and reliable about what evidence the authorities have against you. It is no good my asking anyone – one might as well ask an oyster to give one a sex kiss.’
In 1949 Burgess apparently suffered a serious injury, but concrete details have always been elusive. Nicolson’s file now gives us something more concrete. The story is that Burgess and his FO colleague and friend, Fred Warner, had a drunken argument and Burgess was pushed down a flight of stairs. Earlier this year, while working with George Carey on the film Toffs, Queers and Traitors, Jeff asked the Foreign and Commonwealth Office if it still had any Burgess papers that would prove that Burgess had received a bad enough injury to keep him off work. The FCO confirmed that nothing about it was on file. Letters in Nicolson’s file now show that in February 1949 he wrote to Burgess about the head and brow wounds that he had sustained, together with a painful broken elbow. In addition, Nicolson’s secretary, Elvira Niggemann, asked Burgess if he would like to borrow a special book rest, useful for ‘those who hurl themselves down stairs’ and are confined to bed.
There is also a letter that confirms that Burgess’s use of drugs was known to friends. In March 1944 – the day on which Burgess resigned from the BBC to accept a job at the FO, Nicolson advised Burgess: ‘Meanwhile, for God’s sake, stick either to stimulants or narcotics – & don’t mix the two. In any case keep up your optimism and don’t give way to dark misgivings.’
Nicolson’s file also reveals him willingly helping to make openings in influential circles for Burgess, including trying to get him into Pratt’s club, where many up-and-coming Tory politicians were members. He was unsuccessful, but happy to keep trying if Burgess wished.
In 1945, Burgess was worried about his ‘temp’ status in the FO. Nicolson’s file confirms that Burgess had been talking to people such as Nicolson and his future boss, Hector McNeil MP. Nicolson offered a word of advice: be patient and stop banging on about it: ‘received a very strong hint from the top storey that any future prospect would be prejudiced by any suggestions or gossip’.
If we were asked what strikes us most about Nicolson’s file it has to be that, after having established a clear and close connection between Burgess and Nicolson, including the intimate secrets and gossip that they shared in their letters, MI5 didn’t seem to think that Nicolson was a person of sufficient interest to receive closer attention. It is clear from the file – and Nicolson’s unpublished diaries – that he was never formally questioned or approached by MI5. According to this file the organisation never placed a telephone tap or a postal intercept on him or his addresses, never collected statements about Nicolson’s associations or connections, never followed up Nicolson’s involvements with other people in whom MI5 were interested. Was it cock-up, a lack of resources, or that Nicolson was untouchable because he was just too well connected? MI5’s files show that other politicians and illustrious figures were not immune from investigation. The question from our point of view has to be why Harold Nicolson was left alone.