Jonathan Moyle

[Magda Hassan]

David Leigh

Excavating for truth

A review of Investigative reporting: a study in technique, by David Spark (Focal Press paperback, £16.99).
British Journalism Review
Vol. 11, No. 1, 2000

This is an unassuming book, and once or twice, too unassuming for its own good. I was astonished to be told that a tabloid journalist “solved the murder” of magazine writer Jonathan Moyle, who turned up hanged in a Chilean hotel wardrobe. Moyle was assassinated to prevent him finding out about illegal arms deals, writes one Mr Wensley Clarkson in a sensational work put out by downmarket publisher John Blake. He quotes a confession supposedly made to a third party by an executive of a Chilean arms company (now dead). And so The Valkyrie Operation, as this author tells wannabe investigative reporters, “shows a journalist achieving what official agencies failed to achieve: the probable explanation of a murder” Well, excuse me. It shows no such thing. Nobody murdered Jonathan Moyle at all. As it happens, World in Action spent a lot of time and money researching this particular conspiracy theory during the 90s, at a time when I was there as a producer (before that distinguished investigative series was closed down by ITV in pursuit of something more lucrative to put on their screens).
WIA obtained Chilean police photographs of Moyle’s corpse and traced the Home Office pathologist who had examined the evidence for the British inquest. It rapidly transpired that Moyle had in fact been practising “auto-erotic asphyxiation— a sexual game with a high fatality rate. Murderers do not pad their nooses to make their victims more comfortable while they kill them. But Moyle had done so. Simple as that.
In the pages of David Spark’s book, the highly artificial “investigations” of the Roger Cook style of TV exposure also appear uncritically, although these programmes’ commercial appeal can depend less on the public interest than on the entertainment value of targeting populist hate figures — cowboy builders; Spanish fishermen; or small-time drug dealers. If a show of this type can’t end with a stagy confrontation between the heroic presenter and the villains, then it does not get made. Just as a News of the World investigation that does not end up visibly skewering some wretched cocaine-snorter simply doesn’t get written. Self-respecting investigative journalists ought to be encouraged to carry a moral compass as part of their equipment, along with their hatchet (for the hatchet jobs) and a box of matches (for inflammatory writing).
I don’t make these points in order to denigrate Spark’s work. These are only a couple of minor blemishes in a sensible and well-researched handbook which breaks new ground and pretty well covers the waterfront. He consults — and uses case-studies from — most of that cantankerous group who have practised investigative journalism in Britain in the last 30 years: Tom Bower, scourge of Maxwell; Bruce Page, who with Phil Knightley broke the Philby case; Ray Fitzwalter, whose tenure at World in Action saw the exposure of corrupt architect John Poulson and the exoneration of the imprisoned Birmingham Six; Mark Hollingsworth [books editor of the BJR] who wrote devastating biographies of Mark Thatcher and Tim Bell; Paul Lashmar, with his years spent exhuming the British Government’s secret propaganda operations; Paul Foot, hero of the Carl Bridgwater miscarriage and many other campaigns; and Paul Greengrass, who winkled the story of MI5’s post-war follies out of that addled old Spycatcher Peter Wright. Spark rightly notices Andrew Jennings too for his pursuit of Antonio de Samaranch, head of the tarnished international Olympics movement.
Spark ranges up and down the scale, including studies from regional and local paper investigators as well — he rightly grasps that investigative journalism is a state of mind, not a question of the size of the target. Indeed, for The Guardian’s Nick Davies, the author takes wing and abandons his usual quite pedestrian style to declare: “Davies… has done for the poor of 1990s Leeds what Guy de Maupassant, in his short stories, did for the middle class of 19th-century France.” (Is Nick Davies going to be pleased about this since De Maupassant was a writer of fiction).
The only substantial figure missing from Spark’s galère is perhaps Duncan Campbell, the electronics and intelligence specialist. His absence makes the chapter on intelligence agencies sketchier than it should be. In many ways Campbell’s has been a classically instructive — and bumpy — investigative career. He was involved in first exposing the very existence of GCHQ, an enormous British eavesdropping agency protected by the full panoply of Official Secrets legislation; and more recently, he revealed British plans to put up their own Zircon spy satellite. His work has been of genuine historical value. He is grouchy; driven; unusually technically literate; preoccupied by detail; confrontational, unafraid (he must be one of the most prosecuted, sued and injunction-bound journalists still working in Britain), and too awkward to fit easily into any institution.
There’s a quick and eclectic canter, in this book, around the topics that tend to interest UK investigative reporters — arms deals, killer doctors, police corruption, faulty washing-machines, political cover-ups. There is, too, a sound enough review of those three great enemies of democratic journalism — the British laws of libel, confidence, and official secrets. But none of it goes very deep. Much of the book is pitched at the level of handy hints: “Don’t be content with spokesmen's comments... Speak to as many relevant people as possible”. Perhaps this is better than a highfalutin’ approach. But I can’t help feeling that youngsters on journalism courses need something a touch more inspirational if they are to set out on a pilgrimage which will never make them much money or celebrity, but will subject them to all kinds of brickbats.
At ITV’s This Week (another investigative programme since closed down), I watched Julian Manyon’s documentary Death on the Rock crawled over by an inquiry brought about by pressure from a vengeful Thatcher government. They didn’t break Julian’s career because his work was impeccable. But what if the result had gone wrong? I shan’t easily forget the strain and misery that Peter Preston, when editor of The Guardian, went through as he pursued corrupt ministers like Neil Hamilton. (A baying mob of Tories who hauled Preston up before the privileges committee called him “the whore from hell”). And indeed, as Spark recounts, I was called plenty of names myself for making the film which provoked Jonathan Aitken to sue. I and my colleagues were, Aitken famously declaimed, “a small element which is spreading a cancer in society today... the cancer of bent and twisted journalism.”
It’s not a story we ever published, but I well remember what happened a couple of weeks into the subsequent big libel trial, after two years of prolonged and bitter legal warfare. The judge took away our right to a jury at Aitken’s request, and Aitken perjured his way smoothly through a week of cross-examination. Finally, Granada’s insurers, at a tense meeting in the chambers of our QC, George Carman, said they’d had enough. They wanted to surrender. Carman persuaded them to delay the decision for a day or two. In the small hours of that morning, my nerve went somewhat. I shook my wife awake and said, “Look, you’d better know. We’re going to lose. I’ll never work again. I’ll be the man who cost his employers million by defaming a cabinet minister. You’ll have to earn the family living from now on.”
Then gloriously, at the 11th hour, we were saved. It was entirely thanks to Owen Bowcott, a Guardian reporter who persuaded Swiss accountants (of all people!) to let him rummage through the basement files of a bankrupt Alpine hotel. There he found the crucial documents which saved the day, rescued us all, exposed the truth and ultimately put Aitken in jail. Sometimes, investigative journalism is actually about heroes.
http://www.bjr.org.uk/data/2000/no1_leigh