Is Anything Happening?

by Lustig, Robin;

  I had worked in Rome for four years dreading the moment when the pope would die. Then, within a year of me leaving, two had died in quick succession. I am still not sure whether that means I was unusually lucky or unusually unlucky.

  The untimely death of Albino Luciani, known as the ‘Smiling Pope’, after just thirty-three days as pontiff, immediately gave rise to all sorts of conspiracy theories. The most popular was that he had been murdered by the Mafia, or someone close to the Mafia, or someone involved in the shady financial dealings that linked the Vatican’s bank to organised crime and extreme right-wing political groups. Nothing was ever proved and, having read far more of the conspiracy theories than is good for my health, I remain convinced that he died a perfectly natural death.

  In 1981, I was appointed The Observer’s news editor, a position that I held until 1985, and then again for a brief period in 1987–88. It was the decade of Thatcherism: deep recession, race riots, the Falklands War and the miners’ strike. Not a week went by without the Thatcher name figuring large on the news pages, never more so than when, in early 1984, The Observer ran a series of exclusive news reports detailing the shady business activities of the Prime Minister’s son, Mark. I had hired David Leigh of The Guardian, whom I had first met at Minehead Magistrates’ Court during the Thorpe trial, to join The Observer to lead an investigations team, modelled on the highly successful Insight team at the Sunday Times, but with a fraction of its resources. He was joined by Paul Lashmar, then a junior researcher at the paper, and they soon established themselves as a formidable, award-winning team. (Leigh won a total of seven national press awards during his 45-year career, including Granada TV’s investigative journalist of the year and the British press awards campaigning journalist of the year.)

  The Mark Thatcher stories, all of which bore the Leigh–Lashmar byline, revealed his involvement with a British construction company called Cementation that was bidding for a multi-million-pound construction project in Oman. On an official visit to the sultanate – the first ever by a British Prime Minister – his mother had lobbied hard on behalf of the company, for which Mark was working as a consultant. It looked like a clear case of corruption at the highest level of government: a Prime Minister lobbying for a contract in which her own son had a direct financial interest.

  There were two major problems with the stories: first, we had not a shred of documentary evidence to substantiate them; and second, none of the sources from whom our information came would be prepared to testify in court if Mark Thatcher had chosen to sue us. To his great credit, Donald Trelford agreed to run the stories nonetheless, and I can still hear the high-decibel harangues from Mrs Thatcher’s irascible spokesman, Bernard Ingham, who used to phone in to the editor’s office on a Saturday night as soon as he had seen the first edition of the following day’s paper.

  The original tip had come from a Labour MP, who had mentioned in passing to a senior Observer executive, Magnus Linklater, recently arrived from the Sunday Times, that the then British ambassador in Oman had been shocked and angered at the way the contract negotiations had been handled. Not a whisper of this had been heard publicly, of course, although twenty years later, David Leigh, who by then was back at The Guardian, gained access through a Freedom of Information Act request to internal government documents that confirmed the whole story. The ambassador, Ivor Lucas, had even cabled a confidential warning to Whitehall about the Cementation contract: ‘I believe Mark Thatcher is … associated with the firm … It is a little surprising that this decision should have been taken at such an early stage … and that Cementation should have scooped the jackpot … They were by no means the first in the field.’

  An official at the Department of Trade and Industry recorded on the ambassador’s letter: ‘The plot thickens.’49

  Further confirmation came in 2015, in Charles Moore’s authorised biography of Margaret Thatcher, which disclosed that Mark had turned up unexpectedly in Oman, much to the consternation of his mother’s officials, ‘who feared that he was there to advance his commercial interests via his mother.

  ‘The Observer story was not easy to shrug off because it came in part from the ranks of officialdom. Mark’s actions had ruffled many a feather in the British embassy in Oman…’50

  I was surprised – I still am – that the rest of Fleet Street seemed largely uninterested in following up The Observer’s disclosures. True, Margaret Thatcher had just won a second election victory after the successful British military campaign to regain possession of the Falkland Islands after they had been seized by Argentina in 1982. She was riding high politically and the conventional view in Fleet Street was that there was little to be gained in opposing her. It was only much later, when Mark pleaded guilty in a South African court to helping to finance a plot to overthrow the government of Equatorial Guinea in 2004, that the papers turned on him. There was now little room for doubt: Mark Thatcher was a wrong ’un. Perhaps The Observer simply suffered the journalistic misfortune of being too quick to spot his failings. (In 2003, after the death of his father, who had been given a highly unusual hereditary peerage in 1990, Mark became Sir Mark Thatcher, 2nd baronet. If ever there was an argument for the abolition of hereditary peerages…)

  Some weeks after we had started to reveal what Mark and his mother had been up to in Oman, I received a phone call from a man called David Boddy, whom I had got to know when he was one of Mrs Thatcher’s press team during the 1979 election campaign. Let’s meet for lunch, he suggested, and catch up. Only over coffee did it become clear why he had got back in touch, five years after the election: he wanted to know what it would take to get The Observer to stop publishing its unwelcome stories about Mark. I was left in no doubt – not that Bernard Ingham’s phone calls had left any room for doubt – that the Prime Minister was seriously displeased by our continued focus on her son’s business activities.

  I suggested that a full, on-the-record interview with Mark, in which he fully answered all our questions, might be a good way to clear the air. And, sure enough, he then gave an interview, his first since we had started our investigation, but it was to a rival newspaper, the Mail on Sunday, and not to us. In it, he announced that he was cutting his links with Cementation and intended to move to the United States. The Observer’s front-page headline summed it all up with admirable clarity: ‘Mark quits Cementation, Downing Street – and UK.’51

  Boddy has since confirmed that Mark was widely regarded by his mother’s advisers as a significant political embarrassment, and that his activities were considered to be damaging both to the Prime Minister and to the Conservative Party. But their problem was that The Observer seemed to know more about what Mark was up to than they did. ‘Mark was at best evasive with us and whenever a new revelation occurred, and he was challenged by us about it, he would apologise and say he had forgotten … Everyone thought Mark was a dangerous loose cannon and that the story had to be silenced.’52 Recalling the time when he had got lost in the Sahara desert for six days during a motor rally in 1982, the Thatcher team used to joke among themselves that perhaps it would have been better for all concerned if he had not been found.

  It takes a lot of courage to pursue – and publish – stories like the ones The Observer ran about Mark Thatcher. There is a constant threat of being sued for libel, and there is often intense pressure from politicians who will lose no opportunity to fulminate against the supposed iniquities of an ‘irresponsible and unaccountable’ press and the unfairness of ‘trial by newspapers’. Nick Davies of The Guardian, who uncovered the News of the World phone-hacking scandal in 2011, has graphically described what it can mean to be an investigative reporter faced by a barrage of denials about a story that has been painstakingly, and convincingly, corroborated, often over a period of several months.

  Like a malignant cell, a horrible thought silently formed itself – I had screwed up. I’d got the story wrong – a big story, that had gone round the world, that had had politicians and public figures standing
up on their back legs shouting for action. And it was wrong, or maybe it was wrong, or I couldn’t be sure, but if it was wrong – on that kind of scale – [Guardian editor Alan] Rusbridger and I really were in a deep pit of foul-smelling trouble.53

  The bravery of war correspondents is regularly recognised and garlanded in awards ceremonies; investigative reporters require just as much courage and strength of character, but without the benefit of body armour. They need to be insanely obsessive, never happier than when delving into shadowy recesses where they are not welcome, and they need to be angry, because without anger at injustice, dishonesty or political chicanery, they will never have the energy to keep digging until the truth emerges.

  I would never argue that newspapers are not sometimes guilty of over-stepping the mark, but I do believe that their occasional excesses are the price we need to be prepared to pay for a vigilant and robust media which, in the words of The Observer’s founder, are ‘unbiased by prejudice and uninfluenced by party’. As the American founding father Thomas Jefferson, principal author of the US Declaration of Independence, put it: ‘Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.’

  The 1980s was a decade during which if you heard the words ‘terrorist attack’, your first thought was always that Irish republicans must have been responsible. The ’70s had echoed to the sound of bomb outrages – Aldershot in 1972 (seven people killed), the M62 coach bombing (twelve killed), the Guildford, Woolwich and Birmingham pub bombings (twenty-six killed) in 1974, and the assassination of the leading Conservative MP Airey Neave in 1979. There was no let-up in the decade that followed: Chelsea Barracks (two killed) in 1981, Hyde Park and Regent’s Park (eleven killed) in 1982, Harrods (six killed) in 1983, and Deal Barracks (eleven killed) in 1989.

  But there were two days in particular during that grim period that entered the history books as moments when the British political establishment was shaken to its core. The first was 27 August 1979, when the IRA killed Lord Mountbatten, a senior member of the royal family and last viceroy of India, while he was out on a boat with his family in the Irish Republic. Also killed were his fourteen-year-old grandson, Nicholas, a fifteen-year-old crew member, Paul Maxwell, and his son-in-law’s 83-year-old mother, Lady Brabourne. The attack has since been described as the ‘most shocking single political assassination in Irish history’.54

  In a statement issued some weeks later, Gerry Adams, the vice-president of Sinn Féin, referred to Mountbatten’s murder as an ‘execution’ and said: ‘What the IRA did to him is what Mountbatten had been doing all his life to other people; and with his war record I don’t think he could have objected to dying in what was clearly a war situation.’ A known IRA bomb-maker, Thomas McMahon, who had been arrested two hours before the blast that killed Mountbatten, was later convicted of having planted the bomb. He was sentenced to life imprisonment but released in 1998 under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement that brought to an end the IRA’s ‘bombs and bullets’ campaign. (In 2015, Adams met Prince Charles in Dublin, the first such meeting between a senior Sinn Féin leader and a member of the British royal family, and said: ‘Both he and we expressed our regret for what happened from 1968 onwards … He and his family were hurt and suffered great loss by the actions of Irish republicans. I am very conscious of this … and I thank all involved, including Charles, for their forbearance.’)

  On the same day as the Mountbatten murder, the IRA also blew up a British military convoy at Warrenpoint, on the border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic, killing eighteen British soldiers, the deadliest attack on the British army during the entire IRA campaign. It was a bank holiday Monday, but even though it was six days before the next edition of The Observer would be published, it was obvious that the attacks would still be a huge story for the following Sunday. I was itching to get to the scene, but neither my fellow reporter George Brock nor I could track down our news editor. Mondays are usually sacrosanct for Sunday newspaper journalists, and bank holiday Mondays count double. So George and I took matters into our own hands: he would get himself to County Sligo, where Mountbatten had been killed, and I would head for Warrenpoint. We would explain what we had done when the news editor surfaced and hope that he would approve of our initiative. Fortunately for us, he did.

  By the following weekend, we were able to piece together many of the details of the attacks. From Warrenpoint, I reported that a 500-pound bomb had been concealed in a hay cart parked in a lay-by and detonated by radio signal from across the border as the army convoy passed.

  Six soldiers died in the blast; the rest dived for cover behind a stone gatehouse on the opposite side of the road … It was to prove a costly mistake. As they hurriedly set up what the Army calls an instant control point (ICP) and radioed for help, the terrorists were calmly waiting under cover to detonate their second bomb, which had been placed inside the very gatehouse which the stunned troops were using for shelter. When reinforcements arrived by helicopter, the second bomb went off, a full 25 minutes after the initial blast. Twelve more men were killed.55

  The other IRA attack that shook the political establishment took place on 12 October 1984, during the Conservative Party conference in Brighton. I was The Observer’s news editor by then and, in the small hours of the morning, my wife, Ruth, who was again listening to the BBC World Service, shook me awake.

  ‘There’s been a bomb attack in Brighton.’

  I am still ashamed of my reaction – but it makes some sense if you understand that for a news editor, even in the middle of the night, all that matters when a story breaks is (i) do I have someone on the spot?, and (ii) if I don’t, how soon can I get someone there?

  What I mumbled to Ruth was: ‘It’s OK. We’ve got someone there.’ And I went back to sleep.

  It was a Friday morning and by the end of the day, with the help of a team of eight reporters, I was able to start pulling together a lengthy account of how the IRA had somehow managed to hide a bomb in the Grand Hotel and very nearly blow up the entire British Cabinet. We thought we had managed to establish exactly where the bomb had been hidden, and we were confident enough of our information to make it our headline: ‘The Secret of Room 628.’ Only during the trial of the IRA bomber, Patrick Magee, nearly two years later did we learn that we were one room out: in fact, he had left the bomb under the bath in the adjoining room, Room 629. Journalism, as is often said, is only the first draft of history.

  To write that draft, in those far-off pre-computer days, was a matter of literally cutting and pasting the contributions from all the various reporters who had beavered away trying to find as many pieces of the jigsaw as they could. My task was to fit the pieces together so that they formed a recognisable picture, as I had become The Observer’s main rewrite man whenever a comprehensive pull-together of the week’s biggest story was required for the centre pages.

  My usual practice was to ask each reporter to type out all the information they had acquired, in as much detail as possible, stuff it all into my bag and go home late on a Friday evening for an all-night writing session. I would cut up their contributions into single paragraphs, and then roughly stick them together in an order that seemed to make some sort of sense. Only then would I sit at my typewriter and, surrounded by bits of paper of various shapes and sizes, laid out on the floor of my upstairs study, try to create an intelligible narrative. Black coffee helped, and I would try to be done by 4 a.m. I still think of those days – and nights – every time I use the ‘cut’ and ‘paste’ buttons on my computer.

  Now fast forward to March 1988. It is a Saturday afternoon, and we are putting the final touches to the stories destined for the front page.

  ‘Robin, Mary Holland is on the phone from Belfast. She says it’s urgent.’

  Mary’s voice is shaking and her words make my blood run cold.

  ‘I’ve just seen a man die in front of me.’
<
br />   Two off-duty British soldiers had driven by mistake into a crowd of republican mourners. It was a time of huge tension; two weeks earlier, three IRA members had been shot dead in Gibraltar by British army special forces. At their funeral, a loyalist gunman had opened fire and killed three people. It was the funeral procession of one of the cemetery victims into which the two British corporals had stumbled.

  I transferred Mary’s call to the copy-takers and she dictated her chilling account of what she had just witnessed:

  I saw one man with an iron bar jump on top of the car and start to batter it. A man was dragged out and hauled past us. He wore a thick emerald green sweater and his face was covered with blood…

  Shots rang out … The priest was kneeling beside the body of a man who was naked except for his underpants and shoes and socks. His head was covered with blood from gunshot wounds. At this stage he was still breathing.

  Father Reid, a priest who was giving him the last rites, asked me if I knew how to do mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, then asked me to try and telephone an ambulance. At this stage, there were just the two of us in the car park – and the dying man. A local bookmaker let me use the phone to call an ambulance. When I came out, there were two bodies and the Army and police had arrived…

  As I went towards the first body in the car park, a youth walking away from it said to me: ‘Short and sweet, anyway.’56

  A few days later, Mary wrote an anguished follow-up in the Irish Times:

  How did we let it happen? He passed within a few feet of myself and dozens of other journalists. He didn’t cry out, just looked at us with terrified eyes, as though we were all enemies in a foreign country who wouldn’t have understood what language he was speaking if he called out for help.57

  There was something peculiarly appropriate about the fact that on my last day on the staff of The Observer, in October 1989, the paper’s news columns were again dominated by an IRA-related story. The Guildford Four – three men and a woman who had been jailed in 1975 for bomb attacks on two pubs in Guildford in which five people were killed – had just been released after spending fifteen years in prison for crimes they had not committed. (Two of them were also falsely convicted of a bomb attack in Woolwich, south London, which killed two people.) Because I had established a close working relationship with their lawyer, Gareth Peirce, I was able to interview one of them, Paul Hill, the day after he was freed. The story was splashed across the top of the front page under the headline: ‘Hill’s strange taste of freedom’. Inside was my full-page report on the background to the case – one of the worst miscarriage of justice cases in English legal history – and an angry editorial (yes, I wrote that too) which drew attention to the fact that six more people, known as the Birmingham Six, were still in jail having been convicted of the murders of twenty-one people in two bomb attacks on pubs in Birmingham. As in the case of the Guildford Four, there were ample grounds for suspecting that the evidence against them had been fabricated.