David Leigh chief investigative reporter of the Observer, received the British Press Awards Special Prize in 1980. He is the author of The Frontiers of Secrecy: Closed Government in Britain and co-author, with Simon Hogart, of Michael Foot: A Portrait, and of The Thorpe Committal, with Peter Chippendale.
Glancing through the list of 131 named MI6 officers, past and present, who are ‘exposed’ in the first of these books, I noticed with mild interest that I was slightly acquainted with the wife of one of them, a certain Hubert O’Bryan Tear. The next time we met, I mentioned this fact and she laughed merrily. ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘Everybody knows that – at least since he retired. In fact, I used to work for them myself.’–
‘Are we all bare-faced liars?’ The question came from Jonathan Aitken, Minister of State for Defence Procurement, in January 1994. It was put to the then editor of the Guardian, Peter...
Betty Boothroyd has called on the media to provide ‘fairer and better balanced coverage’ of the House of Commons. ‘Above all,’ she has warned, they ‘should not use...
Many years ago, I was one of many journalists who set sail with high hopes in search of an undiscovered country called Wilsonia. It beckoned from afar across mighty oceans of investigations and...
Has Labour ever had a decent leader? Has not the conjunction of circumstance always ensured that the right man in the right place at the right time was, ineluctably, the wrong man? Or has there,...
Tudor times apart, together with the brief dictatorship of Cromwell, the British interest in secret intelligence has been a comparatively recent development. And, to be entirely objective, the...
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