Dunblane Remembered

THIS Sunday is the 20^th anniversary of the most horrendous human atrocity I have ever been close to.

What follows forms Chapter 12 of my forthcoming book: Assume The Position – an autobiography.

It is simply a personal memory of that day:

 WEDNESDAY, 13 March 1996 will stay etched in my memory for every day of my life.

It was a typically dreich spring day in Edinburgh as I settled down to a diary of interviews and enquiries in my job as an investigative reporter at The Scotsman – at the time Scotland’s most pre-eminent broadsheet newspaper, with a daily circulation of about 90,000.

Back home in Perth – some 33 miles north of my office – I had left my partner to go shoe shopping for our two young daughters Rhia and Shannon. Over a rushed slice of toast she planned to browse a couple of shops in our fair city and maybe venture out to Dunblane or Stirling later in the day.

Here at The Scotsman I looked out over the grey North Bridge towards Princes Street, checked my diary and clocked a quick coffee before a long-awaited telephone interview with Scottish born actor Tom Conti.

Tom was a champion of the London based organisation Justice, which campaigned on behalf of those imprisoned as a result of miscarriages of justice by the Scottish and English courts.

At the time I was running a newspaper campaign on behalf of a young man named Craig MacKenzie, who had – in my opinion and the facts I had obtained – been wrongly convicted of murder of a fellow Edinburgh teenager David Edwards. My campaign had been running over three months with little movement from the Scottish legal system to intervene.

I saw the interview with Tom Conti as a key move to add weight to the campaign.

The newsroom was quiet and I sipped my coffee. Outside the morning remained grey.

The phone rang at the arranged time and the unmistakable burr of Mr Conti’s voice greeted me at the other end.

The star of Shirley Valentine and The Norman Conquests was relaxed as we shared notes on the weather in Edinburgh and London. It was like meeting an old friend for a coffee in town as we progressed to discuss our work and recent challenges.

Eventually after what seemed 20 minutes we began to discuss the Craig MacKenzie case. Tom was up to speed with the case and agreed with me that MacKenzie’s conviction was probably unsafe.

We began to discuss the case in earnest when suddenly the Press Association (PA) updates on my monitor began to flicker an instantly disturbing piece of news: “Six children believed shot in Dunblane”.

I reported the news immediately to Tom, just as a clamour of noise erupted around me in the newsroom. And with it came a further update from the PA wires: “Ten children shot”.

I quickly relayed the information to Tom as a familiar voice from the newsdesk was shouting in my direction.

Tom and I politely suggested to each other that we leave the interview for another day. As he rushed to his TV to watch the rolling news, I glanced once more at my monitor to see the horror of Dunblane unfolding before my eyes.

Ian Stewart, the news editor ordered my friend Stephen and fellow colleagues Jenny and Lynn to get to Dunblane as quickly as they could.

“And be safe,” he added, as they scurried out of the newsroom, notebooks in hand. He turned to me and asked me to stay at my desk and collate information as it came in and try to make some sense of it all.

But my mind was in panic.

Which children had been killed and exactly where in Dunblane? And selfishly where was my partner and my two gorgeous daughters?

This was 1996 and very few people had the luxury of mobile phones, least of all newspaper journalists and their families.

I tried our home phone vainly for an answer.

Had she gone to Dunblane already?

My heart was racing.

Then PA reported the shooting was confined to the town’s primary school, but there was no word as to whether the gunman had gone on a rampage elsewhere.

Within an hour, the death toll had risen again before my partner telephoned me to ask if I had heard the news about Dunblane.

I think my barked reply was something akin to: “Of-course I fucking have, where the hell have you been?”

She calmly told me she had heard the news on a radio in a shoe shop in Perth!

Back in fray by mid-afternoon it was clear the gunman was also dead.

The day had become a blur of adrenalin

By early evening a couple of my colleagues had returned visibly shell-shocked from Dunblane and I had pieced together information about the shootings from many different sources:

After gaining entry to Dunblane Primary School, 43-year-old former shopkeeper Thomas Hamilton made his way to the gymnasium and opened fire on a Primary One class of five and six-year-olds, killing or wounding all but one. Fifteen children died together with their class teacher, Gwen Mayor, who was killed trying to protect them.

Hamilton then left the gym through the emergency exit. In the playground outside he began shooting into a mobile classroom. A teacher in a mobile classroom realised that something was seriously wrong and told the children to hide under the tables.

Most of the bullets became embedded in books and equipment, though one passed through a chair which seconds before had been used by a child. He also fired at a group of children walking in a corridor, injuring one teacher.

It later transpired that Hamilton returned to the gym and with one of his two revolvers fired one shot pointing upwards into his mouth, killing himself instantly.

A further eleven children and three adults were rushed to hospital as soon as the emergency services arrived. One further child was pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital.

Along with my colleagues I worked until 9pm that evening and turned in a 12 hour shift the following day, trying to keep a clear head and report calmly the events which had transpired on that fateful Wednesday.

Sleep on the Wednesday and Thursday nights was impossible as my mind ran overtime. It was like being on speed in something akin to the movie Jacob’s Ladder.

Friday morning dawned and I grabbed my toast, kissed my sleeping daughters adieu and again drove the 33 miles to Edinburgh.

Ensconced at my desk I managed to look and marvel at the Thursday and Friday editions of our paper side-by-side. Those papers still fill me with pride at what my editor, news editor, page designers and reporting colleagues had achieved.

One of the finest pieces ever written by our commentator, the late Ian Bell was published that Friday.

He concluded his heartfelt yet analytical piece with: “For what it’s worth, I can tell you that this one small nation, dressing its children for school, preparing for another hard day, and suddenly afraid for everything it cares about, directs all the hopeless love it has towards a small town in Perthshire. The defective species, eloquent beyond its own understanding, calls that humanity.” While the families and friends of the bereaved were going through their own personal hell, the Friday at work was all about investigating what had gone on at Dunblane, how Hamilton had acquired such an arsenal of guns and, I suppose, who else was to blame?

We needed some clear lines of enquiry for our Saturday edition.

I had to keep my clear head engaged and soon stories of police complicity and masonic cover-up began to emerge. A story for another book maybe?

The singular focus worked, and when the news editor said we could all go home at 5.30pm I felt I had at last finished my shift.

I got into my car and drove through the rush hour blur towards the Forth Road Bridge and the journey home.

The car radio was tuned to BBC Radio 4 and I was half listening to live feed from the House of Commons.

The voice on air was instantly recognisable at the Ulster Unionist MP Ian Paisley. Politically I detested the man, but his words at that moment rang clear and true: “And I say, suffer little children to come unto me, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven”.

Just as I drove my car up to the toll booth at the southern end of the bridge I broke down. Tears flowed uncontrollably as I choked for breath and fumbled my change into the hand of the booth attendant.

To this day I still don’t remember the rest of the drive home, just a blur of trying to focus on the road until I pulled up outside our house.

That evening I sat with my young children and partner and drank too much red wine while talking incoherently about the events of those three days.

Early the next morning we agreed to make the short drive to Dunblane and lay flowers at what was becoming an international shrine to the carnage.

The scene that greeted us is also still with me…. flowers and cards lining the road up the school for more than 200 yards, with red-eyed police officers standing sentry duty barely able to meet the eyes of the mourners and parents surrounding them.

We held our children close that day and forever afterwards.

• I never did finish the interview with Tom Conti. Craig MacKenzie was eventually released from prison in 2005 after winning a partial appeal. He was sadly found murdered in his Edinburgh flat in 2013, aged just 40.

 

Paris, Isis, Syria and The Bankruptcy of the Fourth Estate

SINCE the atrocities in Paris three weeks ago, the British press has been on overdrive to give us every twist, turn and snippet on who is to blame and what we “must do” to “protect our freedoms”.

Freedoms, which the same press tell us must be supported by restrictions, MI5 eavesdropping, tightened border controls and censorship once only dreamed of by George Orwell.

As a newspaper journalist for almost 30 years I have grieved deeply at the unbridled spin, sensationalism and political propaganda of the news reporting since Friday 13 November.

The ink is barely dry on the reports of Wednesday’s 10 hour debate in the House of Commons and the decision to bomb Syria, but already the pencils are being sharpened and the keyboards warmed to lead us to the next pre-ordained national conclusions.

I believe we are slowly witnessing a bankruptcy of freedom within our Fourth Estate.

For the uninitiated, the Fourth Estate commonly refers to the news media, especially print journalism or “the press”.

Thomas Carlyle attributed the origin of the term to Edmund Burke, who used it in a parliamentary debate in 1787 on the opening up of press reporting of the House of Commons. In 1841 Carlyle wrote: “Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters’ Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all.”

He described the journalists’ role in representing the interests of “the people” in relation to the business and political elites who claim to be doing things in our names.

The intellectuals of the 18th and 19th centuries who gave us the conception of the Fourth Estate as a civil watchdog to keep an eye on those in power, also provided the philosophical argument for defining the public citizenry and the nation-state as two separate entities with differing interests.

But my belief is that position has been hi-jacked by corrupt big business ownership of our media.

If we accept the premise of the Fourth Estate, we also have to ask ourselves if the “national” and the “public” interest are the same thing. It might be easy to think that they are, but it would be a mistake.

They exist as ideas, but in reality the nation and the public are not homogeneous.

In a capitalist world both are divided along class lines. In this context, the national interest is about state secrecy and keeping things from us. On the other hand, the public interest is about disclosure and our right to know.

But if we look at who trained and funded the ISIS terrorists and which countries now sustain them to carry out attacks, such as those on Paris and Beirut, the press has not been forthcoming in its reporting. Instead it focuses on Muslims, refugees, border controls, divisions within the Labour Party and the “need” to bomb Syria.

Governments that claim to act in the public interest must face closer scrutiny of their actions. They must be called to account when overstepping the bounds of what citizens will support, or when taking actions that are clearly not in our interests. According to national polls, most British citizens were against bombing Syria, yet that fact was overtaken by another politically led agenda.

The news media – as the tribune of “the people” – must be constantly on guard and alert to actions of the state, particularly when those actions may harm the interests of citizens.

Have they really done that in their reporting about Middle East terrorism, ISIS and the need to bomb Syria? I don’t believe they have.

This separation between the people and the state becomes more important when the economic interests of the powerful so frequently dominate society.

But today, the state is the executive branch of the ruling class and its big business paymasters.

Almost 78 per cent of our press is owned by a handful of mostly foreign-based billionaires.

Our newspapers like to paint their own role as heroic – they are the brave defenders of democracy who hold our elected representatives to account.

Watergate is the archetype of this kind of journalism and it does occur now and again in the UK, but it is rare – perhaps the Telegraph’s revelations over MPs’ expenses in 2009 is one of those rare examples.

But too often, far from protecting our democracy, our papers subvert it.

In his Inquiry, Lord Leveson quoted some lines from Tom Stoppard’s Night and Day – Milne: “No matter how imperfect things are, if you’ve got a free press everything is correctable, and without it everything is concealable.” Ruth: “I’m with you on the free press. It’s the newspapers I can’t stand.”

In a free press, the nature of the newspapers matter very much.

The nature of a paper is set by its owner. Press barons wield far more power and influence than all but a very few MPs and have, unsurprisingly, used it to further their own interests.

Since 2010, the barons have pushed the highly contentious argument that there is no alternative to Austerity and have largely ignored the stories of the widening social divisions and the swelling numbers at food banks – the 21st century’s soup kitchens.

Newspapers exercise power and influence in many ways. And one of their most powerful forms of influence is the ability to effectively set the political agenda for the other media and more widely, in parliament, the workplace, the home and the pub.

Newspapers put great store by the concept of editorial independence. Sometimes, it is a reality. The Lebedevs, for example, own papers – the Independent and the Evening Standard – which take markedly different political stances.

Too often, however, editorial independence is a sham. Proprietors choose editors who they know share their views.

In my own experience I witnessed this at first hand when Margaret Thatcher’s close friends the Barclay Brothers bought The Scotsman in 1997. Within a few months, the new owners had their own right wing editors, the odious Andrew Neil and his Fleet Street bulldog Martin Clarke installed in the editors’ chairs. It took this vile pair less than a year to transform a newspaper, once the bastion of Scottish broadsheet journalism, into a pale imitation of the Daily Mail.

Rupert Murdoch’s candour at the Leveson Inquiry was revealing. He said that if someone wanted to know his opinion on a subject they should just read the leader in the Sun.

That most newspaper owners should seek to define the political stance taken by their publications is not especially surprising. Newspapers are rarely profitable and it is therefore difficult to avoid the conclusion that ‘the press barons are in newspapers for power, influence and easy access to the establishment’.

Likewise, the mechanisms through which owners can, and do, interfere with or shape content to promote particular viewpoints are not difficult to identify; they range from directly dictating the line a newspaper should follow on particular issues, to appointing senior staff with a shared political outlook, as well as forms of indirect influence over the ethos of the organisation which may prompt journalists to engage in ‘self-censorship’.

The Sun’s infamous claim following the 1992 general election that ‘It’s the Sun Wot Won it’ is widely known. Yet, in almost half of all general elections since 1918 ‘one newspaper or another has claimed to have swung the result’.

The Fourth Estate is now more powerful than ever, but it is no longer the once heralded “civil watchdog to keep an eye on those in power”.

It is shaped by two dominating principles – sensationalism and simplification, the consequence of “hyper commercialisation”.

It has led to ever fiercer ratings and circulation wars, which inevitably leads to what is called “dumbing down”. To succeed, the media industry tries to appeal to the lower instincts of people.

Of course it is one thing to pander to lower instincts. But they have to be there in the first place, and so has the willingness to be pandered to. In the end, people have a choice.

One has to face an unpalatable reality: Rupert Murdoch’s media outlets are giving the people what they want – fun, games and entertainment – which in some ways is more “democratic” than the cultural elites, who tried imposing their values and standards on the masses.

In the “democratic age” news and information have been transformed. The way politics is covered has changed radically.

Papers don’t report news, they present it according to their preferences and prejudices.

The growth of columnists has led to the birth of a Commentariat. It contains a few excellent and analytical minds, but all too often reasonable, balanced voices are drowned out by journalists who seem untainted by facts or deeper knowledge but replace this with gleefully presented prejudices. Look no further than Katie Hopkins or Jan Moir for examples of this type.

A lot of modern political journalism ignores context and complexity, presenting everything in black and white, while the nature of politics most of the time is a balancing act between contradictory interests and demands.

News has thus become more superficial and sensational. The need for images and pictures is greater than ever. Note how the single photograph of a dead Syrian child on a Mediterranean beach in September this year shaped the Western view. For a short time our newspapers referred to the hapless refugees by the correct terms rather than the “swarms of migrants” favoured by David Cameron and Nigel Farage.

But that didn’t last and following the Paris attacks these self-same Syrian refugees were being labelled migrants and potential terrorists by our press.

Sensationalism and oversimplification are affecting the output of all media. There is less room for a balanced approach, for analysis instead of going for the crass headline or extraordinary story. The merciless hunt for weaknesses and inconsistencies of politicians and other public figures has become prevalent.

All this has contributed to change democratic politics for the worse. The electorate has become hostile and distrustful of the media and politicians alike.

Trust has broken down threefold, between people and politicians, media and people, journalists and politicians, with the latter now observing each other with deep distrust and mutual antipathy. A vicious circle has established itself.

The chances of the public receiving the information they need to participate in democracy is declining even more.

Democracy and civil society need informed citizens, otherwise they will have difficulties in surviving. Without a free Fourth Estate, aware of its own power and responsibility, an informed citizenship cannot be sustained.

What our democracies have got today is an electorate which is highly informed about entertainment, consumer goods and celebrities, while being uninterested in and deeply cynical about politics, equipped with short attention spans and a growing tendency to demand instant gratification.

If this trend cannot be reversed the political arena might become even emptier than it is now.

 

I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now

TODAY is my last day as a bona fide journalist.

It is a day when I close the pages on a 28 year career in magazine and newspapers with tears in my eyes but real excitement inside.

I have cleared my desk, handed back my company car and door fobs and now sit here in my study overlooking our beautiful market town contemplating the future. A town currently weathering under grey clouds and cold winter rain.

Journalism has been the largest and most consistent part of my life since I stumbled into it by accident way back in the spring of 1985.

At the time, I was in a sort of limbo land between careers, but I was a young man willing to explore possibilities.

I had just bought my first home computer – a BBC Acorn Electron – and began offering reviews and solutions to text adventure games for a couple of glossy computer magazines in Manchester.

As Elvis Costello once wrote: “Accidents will happen”, and soon I had accidentally accepted the offer of a regular column for one of the magazines. Then more reviews and columns came my way, and within two years I was appointed assistant editor of yet another monthly mag.

The rest as they say is history and since those early years I have worked as chief investigative reporter for two Scottish dailies and a North East Sunday tabloid, and edited five weekly newspapers in places as diverse as Argyll, Galloway, Peterhead and Denbighshire.

It has often been hard work – with long unsocial hours as standard – and it has sometimes been gruelling, harrowing and frightening… but it has also been immense fun.

The low points include working on the Dunblane Massacre in 1996, attending some horrific road traffic accidents and fatal accident inquiries, and being ordered to make staff redundant, refusing to do so, and resigning my own job instead.

The high points, however, are almost too many to list, and will save for other blog postings.

I guess it is the stories which have driven me along… especially so when so many of them were breaking exclusives, exposing corruption or unmasking state duplicity.

The other drivers in my career were the awards I acquired as a writer and as an editor and the boost they give to keep on keeping on.

The singular most memorable moment was in 1994 when I was given a special judges award for my year-long investigations into the link between the firing of Depleted Uranium tank shells at a MoD testing range in South West Scotland and local clusters of childhood cancer. It was a link later replicated in the aftermath of the first Gulf War with Iraqi children and Gulf War Syndrome among allied service personnel.

I remember with renewed tears as I walked back to our table at the press awards ceremony in Edinburgh to be greeted by my father and his words; “I am proud of you”.

I think it was the first time in my life I had ever heard him say that.

Since dad’s death in 2008 that memory often revisits me.
Around the same time in the spring of 1994, I was deeply honoured by an Early Day Motion in the House of Commons – signed by 41 MPs – praising my journalism http://www.parliament.uk/business/publications/business-papers/commons/early-day-motions/edm-detail1/?session=1993-94&edmnumber=1143&orderby=Party&orderdirection=Asc

The fact that the main sponsor of the motion was Alan Simpson MP and a co-signatories were Dennis Skinner and Ken Livingstone, who were all political heroes of mine, made it very special indeed.

But I guess if I had to condense my time in journalism, it is not about the stories or the headlines or even the awards, it is about the people I was lucky enough to work with and for.

With the exception of my first sociopathic editors – the first would not speak to anyone for days on end and the second would relieve his stress in the gents’ urinals by banging his head against the wall – I have been privileged to work for some amazing people.

I owe a huge debt to Tom Davison, editor at the Galloway Gazette, who, for two whole years, gave me the freedom and guidance to become the investigative journalist I had sought to be. I haven’t seen or spoken with Tom in more than 17 years. I hope one day he may read this and accept my gratitude.

Then there was Jim Seaton at The Scotsman, a true gentleman and newsman to the core, who was savagely treated when the paper was sold to the infamous Barclay Brothers in 1996. Quite simply, Jim, you were the best.

I was also blessed to work for design guru Andrew Jaspan who reinvented how daily and Sunday newspapers should look and feel; the hard-nosed Derek Tucker (who insisted on being simply called The Editor) at the Press and Journal and the mercurial Chris Rushton at the Sunday Sun. You guys were all immense editors.

And finally, Graham Breeze, an editor who lived for his patch and was still turning in breaking stories – often by phone calls at inappropriate hours – after 38 years at this game. Thanks Graham for your support as my boss and as a friend.

But above all, it is my colleagues in the newsroom who I will always remember.

Recently I was humbled beyond belief by the friendship of some of these amazing people.

Shortly after my nervous breakdown in June this year, I received 18 individual testimonials and references from reporters, photographers and trainees who have worked for me over the years.

Those statements are more valuable to me than any reference from a former employer and they arrived at a critical moment in my life.

To repeat their words now would invoke such emotion that I would not be able to finish this posting. I have thanked you all personally for your words and now I do it publicly… you all know who you are!

And there are many others who I count now as life-long friends.

One of my photographers has been my closest friend and support for 21 years now.

One of my earliest editors and I fell out big time in 1992, but when the going got tough we realized the truth of our friendship and remain good friends to this day.

In 1998 I witnessed the wedding of an amazing colleague in a very personal service at a ruined Scottish monastery. We were there for each other when both our separate relationships failed two years later. She emigrated to the USA in 2000, but we remain in touch and our friendship endures.

Another fellow journalist became a regular house visitor when she went through a traumatic marriage break-up. The friendship also endures and I was lucky enough to spend a wonderful week in her holiday cottage in North East Scotland – renovated by her and her new husband – two summers ago.

Much more recently two colleagues were the first people to give help when I was the victim of an unprovoked assault in 2007, an assault which almost took my life. Their unconditional assistance remains truly remarkable.

And to close this incredible list of friendships, I must name check more recent additions: Natalie, Hannah, Lia, Sophie, Rachel, Angela and Craig who I also class as very special friends indeed.

Without a career in journalism, none of you would have been part of my life and that would have been a tragedy.

So thank you for the memories and the friendships.

Now it is time to move on…

My Back Pages

I AM about to close the pages on a 28 year career in magazine and newspaper journalism with more than just a tinge of sadness and nostalgia.

During those years I have worked on weekly and daily newspapers, glossy magazines, sports publications, county council journals, in-house buzz feeds and too many supplements to list.

But now it is all change and I view the future with an excitement I have not felt since I was 12 years old.

I am writing a more considered piece on my time in journalism for later publication, but turn my head now to headlines and howlers that accompanied me along the way.

I am proud of creating a few great headlines – along with far too many crap ones – over those years and remember five of them with particular fondness.

The first was during my tenure as editor of the Argyllshire Advertiser way back in 1991. We landed a genuine exclusive that Strathclyde Police detectives were investigating allegations of potential property development fraud within the local council.

The story was massive and it called out for a full page headline FRAUD SQUAD MOVE IN ON COUNCIL.

Two memorable headlines were gifts while I edited the Galloway Gazette in 1998.

The first of these involved some brilliant investigative and painstaking journalism by one of my reporters to identify that seven county councillors were claiming expenses and allowances which would have puts the MPs’ expenses scandal to shame. None of them could properly justify why they had claimed so much from the public purse.

My answer was simple… to line up seven pictures of these councillors across the top of our broadsheet front pages under a banner headline: THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN.

The second of the Gazette pair was a simple piece of amusement. It involved the world famous artist and sculptor Hideo Furuta working with local school children to create circular murals for the town’s church clock – which was away being repaired.

So it had to be: HIDEO THRILLED THE RADIAL STARS.

The final two headline memories are more recent and come from my tenure as editor of The Denbighshire Free Press (2006-2013).

For the first I have to thank my former chief reporter Adele Forrest for her help. In early 2009 she investigated and wrote a truly gobsmacking front page exposing the county council as it struggled to turn round a failing education department. Adele discovered that in their battle to improve matters the council had employed a new education director who lived in Lanzarote and commuted weekly by plane to her job in Ruthin in North Wales, while being put up at tax payers’ expense in a local hotel.

The headline took some work, but we never regretted: PLANE POTTY TO COMMUTE FROM LANZAROTE.

And I close this section with a headline from just a few months ago.

In the wake of the recent horsemeat scandal, my reporter Kirstie Dolphin undertook a blind steak tasting test comparing horse, beef, zebra, and others meats. She voted horse as the tastiest of all the steaks tested, but that didn’t matter because we had a readymade headline: DOLPHIN EATS HORSE SHOCK.

But my headlines were amateurish compared with the real pros.

I worked for a short time in the early 1990s with former national tabloid sub the late Ged Phelan. His penchant for witty and eye-catching headlines was unsurpassed. For one story regarding Sotheby’s valuation of an old Stradivarius violin discovered in the cupboard of a local church vestry, his wording was timeless: MILLION POUND FIDDLE AND NO STRINGS ATTACHED.

Another great colleague and headline writer was The Scotsman’s former deputy features editor Clare Flowers. She excelled in simplicity. On a feature about the release of long lost out-takes by The Beatles, she titled it THE QUALITY OF MERSEY.

And for one of my own pieces about pesticide poisoning of a large area of Kent countryside she scribed the brilliant:  GREEN UNPLEASANT LAND.

But my favourite headline of all time was written by a sports sub at the same paper and related to former Middlesbrough football star Emerson arriving back late from South America. At the time he was linked in transfer talks with Italian club Parma. So the headline had to be: EMERSON LATE AND LINKED WITH PARMA.

Headlines and stories are the bread and butter of newspapers. But real unexpected howlers keep us going.

The most famous I can recall was from a High Court divorce hearing in the mid 1980s, when a wife cited that her husband was often away seeing Bruce Springsteen. In innocent pomposity the judge asked: “And this Mr Springsteen, is he a friend of the family?”

But one howler cost a colleague his job in 1992. At the time I was Editor of the Argyllshire Advertiser and Campbeltown Courier in which this public notice advertisement appeared: “Southend Church, Campbeltown, service times for Sunday: 8.30am Early morning service, 11am Family Service, 2pm Sunday School, 6.30pm Evensong followed by anti-christ barbeque on the beach.”

The final line should have read: “followed by readings in the ante-room”. Unfortunately for the ad man responsible, not only was his error deliberate, but the church in question was regularly attended by the commercial director’s mother.”

My own worst nightmare was reporting from Colwyn Bay magistrates court 24 years ago, when the 19-year-old son of the Chief Constable was up for motoring offences. Throughout my entire court copy for the next day’s paper I put the father’s Christian name instead of the son’s. To make matters worse the son still lived at home with his parents, so the two shared the same address. The copy passed through news desk, subs and editor unnoticed.

Thankfully my career was saved by a sharp-eyed stone sub, just as the plate was being winged away to the press.

And that, as they say, is the news.

I’m closing the book on the pages and the text

MY meeting and dinner with the late and great author Iain Banks is wholly memorable for so many reasons.

And it was totally unexpected.

I had long been an admirer of the Fife born author since I picked up The Wasp Factory at my local branch of WH Smiths in the late 1980s. It was a book I read in one sitting and returned to again and again.

Following that ground-breaking novel I began to consume almost everything Banks wrote. The Bridge and Espedair Street were similarly devoured in one go. Crow Road took a little longer and remains my favourite Iain Banks novel.

Well-thumbed copies of Complicity, Whit and a Song of Stone all sat on my bookshelves by the time I actually met the great man.

And the meeting was a complete and wonderful surprise.

It was early 1997, I was working as Chief Investigative Reporter at the Scottish broadsheet daily The Scotsman. I had been working closely with award-winning TV producer Sara Brown on revealing the dark and murky history of Scotland’s Dounreay experimental nuclear reactors. We had come close to proving that the plant almost suffered a Chernobyl type meltdown in the mid 1960s… but that is a story for another day.

After one particularly long day of research with Sara, she suggested I might like to have dinner with one of her old friends, who shared my passion in investigations and writing. I almost fell through the floor when she told me her old friend was Iain Banks.

And so it was a few evenings later we gathered at a small restaurant at North Queensferry (just over the Firth of Forth from Edinburgh) to share a wonderful meal.

I cannot remember what we ate, but do remember the wine flowed freely as Iain took centre stage. Star-struck, I just sat and held onto almost every word.

He waxed lyrical about the wine, the food and his passion for fast cars and boats. He talked about how his writing had helped fund one boat he kept moored on the west coast of Scotland.

He asked me in detail about my job at The Scotsman and talked about how his own enquiring mind sparked his journey into writing best-selling thrillers and science fiction novels.

As the meal and wine flowed I mentioned Iain’s amazing 1993 murder novel Complicity, which was clearly set at The Scotsman – named The Caledonian for the sake of his book – and which I had already read three times. He smiled and said it was his new Wasp Factory. Sara suddenly chipped in and suggested that the hero of the novel Cameron Colley was actually me! That was hardly likely as I was not even working at The Scotsman when Iain wrote the book. Iain seemed amused and asked for more details about my job. I filled in a few and he laughed out loud.

“Sounds like Cammy to me,” he quipped.

It was only when I watched the movie of the book, starring Jonny Lee Miller, some four years later, that I realised just how close the character of Cameron Colley was to my own at The Scotsman. There was also a sad irony that the trigger for the murders in Complicity stemmed from child sexual abuse.

Anyway, the meal and chatter lasted for more than two hours before we drifted off home.

Iain as the true bon viveur insisted on paying for everything.

I hoped to meet him again sometime soon. But life events meant that I moved away from Edinburgh later that year and the brilliant Sara emigrated to the USA a couple of years later. The link was lost and three respective lives moved on.

I was deeply saddened when Iain succumbed to terminal pancreatic cancer in June this year. The world has lost an amazing author.

As I proof this blog posting I sit with a copy of his 2002 book Dead Air next to me and a few tears in my eyes. I have some re-reading to do tonight.

• More details about Iain Banks’ work can be found here: http://www.iain-banks.net

 

The Shadowy One Who Fires the Gun

THERE are only a few things in life I really hate, and one of them is the Daily Mail.

It is a poisonous rag which cloaks itself in the clothes of middle class decency while demeaning everything which is good.

And, as a journalist, I find its pretense at factual reporting frightening. Its so-called news reeks of innuendo and loaded propaganda.

And its agenda is unwavering: preserve Conservative Britain from the rabid threat of Marxism, the Labour Party, trade unions and working people.

So the savaging of Daily Mail deputy editor Jon Steafel by Alistair Campbell on BBC 2’s Newsnight over the paper’s scurrilous article about Ed Miliband’s late father Ralph, was an unexpected delight.

Particularly pleasing was the bright light Mr Campbell shone on the paper’s shadowy editor Paul Dacre.

My own dealings with the Mail as a journalist were rather more obscure.

I would like to take you back to 1997.

I was at the pinnacle of my career working as the Chief Investigative Reporter for the Scotsman.

A whole world away from the Daily Mail.

In three years, I had broken a series of major exclusive investigations. Among the highlights were the dumping of millions of tons of munitions in the Irish Sea, the deadly legacy of the Dounreay experimental nuclear plant in Northern Scotland and a probable link between pesticides and BSE.

I had also been honoured with two back-to-back awards as Scottish Journalist of the Year and was in line for a third.

I loved my job and the collegiate atmosphere I worked in. I honestly believed I would spend the rest of my working life at North Bridge, with no aspirations other than to continue in my role.

But all that changed when in December 1996, our newspaper was surprisingly bought out by property billionaires, the Barclay Brothers.

With the new owners came a new Editor in Chief, the infamous Andrew Neil.

There was a corporate intake of breath as we all wondered for the future.

That intake turned into something approaching choking when our much loved editor, Jim Seaton, was placed on ‘gardening leave’ awaiting early retirement and a new editor Martin Clarke was announced.

We all winced… Clarke had trained under Paul Dacre and he was well known as a Rottweiler in the newsroom.

Clarke’s editorial demeanour attracted a range of tributes from former colleagues: “vile”, “offensive”, “appalling”, “obsessive”, “childlike” and “foul-mouthed” being among the less flattering.

Like Dacre, whose briefings were called “the vagina monologues” for their reliance on one particular expletive, Clarke went one better.

“He would start by saying, ‘You’re all a fucking disgrace and one of you is going to be fucking sacked this week,” and the terrible thing was, one of us usually was,” said Alexandra Blair, The Times educational correspondent, who worked for him for a year and a half at The Scotsman.

Another reporter who worked under Clarke said: “He once said to me: ‘You’ve got to go and shout at the bastards or they won’t respect you.'”

My stay under Clarke’s editorship was brief… just six months.

I moved on after being told to follow his own loaded agenda, which included one weird instruction to prove that wild deer being pursued by hounds are “no more stressed than a cow in a slaughterhouse”!

The final straw came in a bleak week, which began by Clarke blanking me at a press awards lunch after I had been highly commended as reporter of the year and finished by him standing over me at 10pm on a fourth rewrite of a story, berating my journalism as “fucking bollocks”.

I introduce a clipping of a piece written by Rob Brown in June 1997.

“Senior writers and sub-editors now find themselves being showered with expletives by their new editor Martin Clarke, whose lexicon of abuse is fairly extensive.

“Several executives have resigned in disgust. They included the picture editor Paul Dodds, who quit after being ordered to get better pictures from his “f***in’ monkeys”.

“Also out is associate editor Lesley Riddoch, who suddenly found her articles being repeatedly spiked.

“One of the journalists who has quit in disgust said: “I have worked for some brutal editors in my time, but Martin Clarke behaves like a feudal squire and treats his staff like serfs. Change was certainly needed at The Scotsman, but not this. He is running amok, creating a totally demoralised and demotivated staff.”

“But, put it to Clarke that he is pursuing a monstrous form of macho management and he professes his innocence with almost schoolboyish sense of hurt.

“Clarke, 32, says the complaints are emanating from only a couple of “malcontents”. Some people, he says, are driven by “personal pique because they never got a job they wanted”. Nic Outterside, head of the paper’s investigative unit, left last week. Clarke says the unit was disbanded because it was “a crock of shit”.

“Others, according to Clarke, have become “malcontents” simply because they cannot stand the new pace in the newsroom.

“I demand a greater level of working than perhaps some people are used to here and I can be robust at times, like all editors,” he says.

“Clarke confirms that he drew up a five-and-a-half page document a few weeks after he took charge recommending that a number of senior Scotsman staffers should be removed from their posts. This “operation review” leaked from the editor’s office into the newsroom, where it was seen as a sinister hit list. Clarke admits to some regrets about that.

“Of course it was bloody unfortunate, but you don’t expect to work in a place where such illegal activities take place. It was stolen from my computer. I’ve worked in some pretty rough newspapers, but nowhere where people are that underhand.”

At the time of writing this blog, Clarke and Steafel are both tipped to succeed Paul Dacre as the next editor of the Daily Mail.

The art of being underhand is surely what the Mail is all about.