My life in crime
DUNCAN CAMPBELL is a former crime reporter on the Guardian who left in the summer. He tells how he got into his lifelong work with the police
THE INSPECTOR called. So did the sergeant and some detective constables. The great thing about working in the newsroom at Time Out magazine in London in the 1970s was that the action, and rather too often the police, were right on the doorstep.
First there was our reporter, Mark Hosenball, an American, being deported as a threat to the security of the state because of his investigative work. Then there was our reporter, Crispin Aubrey, and my namesake, Duncan Campbell, a young freelance, being sought by the Old Bill for their attempts to shine the light on the country’s secret intelligence-gathering operations. Then there was the US ambassador denouncing the magazine on the TV news after we published the names of CIA agents in London.
Mark Hosenball and the late ex-CIA agent Philip Agee, who had helped with the investigations, lost their long battles against deportation authorised by a nervous and deferential Labour government — sounds familiar? Crispin Aubrey, Duncan Campbell and their source, John Berry, were arrested as a result and prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act after MI5 tapped the telephones of the Time Out office, and were relieved to walk from the Old Bailey with conditional discharges after a long anti-secrecy campaign, loyally supported by the NUJ.
The brushes with the law continued. Then, hitting on the smart idea of illustrating how realistic replica firearms were, we set up a photo-shoot on the roof of the TO building with weapons we had hired for the purpose. The two journalists with the weapons had barely got into position for the photographer when there was a whir-whir-whirring noise in the sky. “Drop — your — weapons — now!” came an otherworldly voice from above. It was either God or someone from the Met police’s specialist firearms unit and, whoever it was, he was not happy. Beneath us, armed police in flak jackets raced past a startled TO receptionist. The road was closed to traffic. Suspicious-looking souls were being frisked on the street. We had forgotten that Amnesty International was housed in the office below us. Seeing armed men on the roof, they had called the police.
We were taken to Bow Street police station, where we were appropriately contrite. The operation, we were told, had cost £25,000. Fortunately the photographer had kept his nerve and we had our story, headlined “Police Hit the Roof”.
So it was that I came into crime reporting through the side door. Thirty years later much has changed, and I watched the changes as the Guardian’s crime correspondent in the 1990s.
The sort of coverage given to such major trials at the Old Bailey has largely faded: the PA had seven reporters at the Old Bailey then; now there are just two — and the papers are relying more and more on that service.
Covering court cases takes time and care and means a reporter is out of the office for days. Easier to take stuff off the wires. And outside London the papers have suffered job cuts and can no longer provide the court coverage that was once a staple.
The police have become more savvy in dealing with the press. They are more proactive, realising that when there is a vacuum of information they might as well fill it.
Press officers vary from the smart and helpful to the dour and obstructive — though the best information, as ever, will still come unofficially from the inside.
Some things have changed for the better. Compare the way the deaths of Blair Peach in Southall in 1979 and that of Ian Tomlinson during the G20 demonstrations in April this year were covered.
In 1979, there was no chance of a member of the public contacting the Guardian with mobile phone footage of police actions as happened after the G20 events.
But the days when crime was king of the newsroom, I fear, have gone. I’ve tried to reflect some those changes in a novel, If It Bleeds, (from that old newsdesk motto, “if it bleeds, it leads”) that follows the wobbling career of a dodgy crime reporter and how life has changed for the breed.
- If It Bleeds by Duncan Campbell is published by Headline, £7.99