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THREE

Of Drugs and Spooks

I DID NOT SEE HIM AT FIRST, it was so dark. The seventh Earl of Longford sat in one of the little cubicles that lined the walls of the New Horizon Youth Centre in London’s Soho. It was early May 1970, in a dingy room in which it was impossible to tell the staff from the young drug addicts who had dropped by. But even in a room full of odd people, Frank Longford stood out, with his erect rim of wiry hair around his famously bald, bright, but eccentric head.

Recovering from the ashes of my enforced Liverpool departure, I had sought another overseas volunteering experience, but no one would have me because of my student past. So I set about trying to do something like VSO inside Britain. I had heard through the grapevine that Lord Longford was looking for a new director for his drop-in centre for homeless teenagers in London’s West End. The previous incumbent had suffered a nervous breakdown. His main qualification for the job, in Longford’s eyes, seemed to have been that he had been thrown out of Hornsey College of Art following a riot. Longford had intended to run the centre himself following his resignation from Harold Wilson’s Cabinet over the government’s failure to raise the school leaving age to sixteen in 1967, but unfortunately his combination of age and eccentricity had rendered him the daily victim of robbery and battery at the hands of those he sought to aid.

‘Lord Longford,’ I said, ‘it’s me. I’m here about the job.’

‘Ah, yes,’ he said. ‘I think your father must have taught me at Eton.’

Even in this godforsaken place the old class connection chimed.

‘Yes, that’s probably true,’ I said half-heartedly. Here was I, I teased myself, gone to the very barricades for the black majority in South Africa, and yet still apparently trying to secure a job in the scruffiest of day centres simply by dint of birth.

But it was as if old Longford could read my mind. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘I’m going to hire you anyway. Your predecessor was a success, so I’m going to appoint you. Your expulsion alone ensures you’ll be a success here. You’ll just have to see a couple of other members of the management committee first.’ It was agreed that I would return in a week to meet them. I was off the scrapheap.

The two men were waiting in a nearby Soho coffee bar. Both wore trilby hats, large greatcoats and suede shoes. Sir Matthew Slattery, tall and bespectacled, was chairman of BOAC, forerunner of British Airways. He was rather direct, and I was afraid he’d find me wanting, but I survived his scrutiny. He clearly saw my expulsion from Liverpool as very much a disqualification, only ameliorated by my social class, which was probably the same as his.

He clearly didn’t like my politics, and neither did the other man. Slattery didn’t introduce his colleague, who seemed vaguely familiar, seriously dapper and precise. He proved to be John Profumo, the disgraced ex-Minister for War, now working out his redemption at a settlement in London’s East End. ‘Hello, Jon,’ said Profumo. ‘Do call me Jack.’

I felt an immediate affinity with him, for I too intended to purge my sins and work my redemptive passage. It was only seven years since Profumo’s fall, but he manifested such humility, and yet such confidence. He was a considerable contrast from the wretched wreck that I had presumed a man who had suffered such public humiliation would have become. Lying to the House of Commons about an affair with a woman who had slept with a Russian spy may have shocked the nation, but it had also resulted in Profumo’s coming to work for New Horizon. And work he did, ceaselessly, to get the funding and profile that the centre needed to survive. But the British Establishment had been so bruised, and was so far up its own class-consciousness, that to this day it has remained incapable of recognising the far more important role that he now occupied. Profumo seemed almost to have walked out of my ‘A’ level English text, Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara. Like the fictional arms dealer Andrew Undershaft before him, John Profumo, Minister for War, had determined to move from armaments to working with the poor.

Domestic Britain was still in transition from the unquestioning post-war, post-imperial order to something more multicultural, more egalitarian. Slattery, Profumo, even Longford were all of the old order. The new was still formulating. It was going to be a struggle, and New Horizon wouldn’t be a bad place from which to observe it. What I was to see was the harshest evidence of the consequences of upheaval and neglect.

The steps down to the underground station at Piccadilly Circus were wet, and stank of urine. Bodies slumped on the lower steps. The cubicles in the lavatories were littered with discarded needles. Blood was spattered on the dirty white wall-tiles. This was the epicentre of Britain’s burgeoning heroin crisis, a stone’s throw from St Anne’s church in Soho, where New Horizon occupied the ground floor. We were open to anyone under twenty-one.

Hard drugs played a role in most of the problems we dealt with. The NHS drug clinics had just started dishing out legal heroin in an attempt to see off the Chinese Triad gangs that were taking hold around London’s West End. The black market was rife, and we caught glimpses of it all the time in the day centre. Fifteen-year-olds would come in having injected Ajax scouring powder that had been sold as heroin. Teenagers already dependent upon the drug were cranking up barbiturates intravenously to blunt their withdrawal symptoms. The casualties were on a huge scale, too many for us to deal with. There was also nowhere for us to house them. What hostels there were wouldn’t take anyone with a drug record, and without improving their living circumstances there wasn’t much we could do about their habits.

In the first year Longford, Slattery and Profumo managed to raise enough money to expand and move the centre to Covent Garden. A caretaker’s flat went with the place, and I was unwise enough to move into it. From the three staff I’d inherited, we grew to fifteen. We opened a hostel of our own in north London, together with an emergency night shelter.

In some senses I felt I was reconnecting with something that had lain beneath the surface of my time in Uganda: the consequence of great poverty. Forty per cent of the kids at New Horizon came from local authority care schemes. The word ‘care’ was a pretty gross misnomer. Many had passed through a dozen or more foster homes or institutions; almost none of them had any educational qualifications. The state had nurtured them for the refuse tip, or at least for jail, where I spent increasing amounts of time visiting our clients. Many of the other young people we saw had come from abusive or broken homes.

It was through working at the centre that I met Madeleine Colvin. She came in one afternoon, a stunning curly-haired lawyer in a summer dress who abandoned her white Fiat 500 at the door. She would come once a week to give voluntary legal advice. We started going out almost immediately, but it would be years before we settled into any kind of partnership.

Living ‘above the shop’ in the caretaker’s flat became increasingly problematic. I well remember escaping with Madeleine one night, and driving off to a party in Oxford. At the party there was a particularly seductive-looking strawberry flan, and we all devoured it. Not long after, I began to feel queasy. Driving home along the M40 with five of us in my Mini, I began to hallucinate that the car was too big to fit beneath the bridges. The white lines became aggressive. Someone had spiked the flan with acid. I was tripping out. Only one of the five of us in the car had not eaten of the flan, and she took over and drove us home. Once Madeleine and I were back in the flat, the acid trip crowded in on us and we swigged orange juice to try to assuage it. But every time the Jacques Loussier disc on the record player stopped, we tripped out again. I supposed I had become party to the so-called ‘drugs revolution’. The next morning I staggered down to the day centre and blearily took up my usual position with the register at the door. The room swam before my eyes as familiar figures swayed into view. Had I joined them? Was this the beginning of my end? It took me a few days to recover, and while the experience did not put me off cannabis, it made me very wary of anything stronger.

In a world with no experts, I soon became a ‘drug expert’. I was even invited to appear on a television programme called The Frost Debate which involved David Frost debating the big issues of the day. On this occasion drugs were the issue, and I remember a heated argument with the great man. It was the first time I had ever appeared on television.

Some of the young people at New Horizon were virtually beyond hope. Jimmy King was just sixteen. He’d so mashed his veins that one day I found him unconscious on the loo, having been trying to fix barbiturates into the veins of his penis. Others had suffered gangrene and amputations. It was hell. But from it emerged Chris Finzi, who gave me hope that it was all worthwhile. He was almost as far gone as Jimmy, but he had one glorious talent: he was an artist of considerable ability, a brilliant cartoonist. ‘I have no sense of who my parents were,’ he told me. ‘I was in homes and fostered, and then I hit sixteen and no one would have me any more.’

I agreed to give him a home on the floor of my flat. There were many moments of failure, even a spell on remand in the secure young offenders’ prison in Ashford. But after more than a year, Chris made it. We at the centre housed him and trained him; but perhaps more critically than anything, he fell in love. He never relapsed.

Kevin was another engaging boy, with tousled blond hair. My chequebook was too much temptation. He stole it with my bank cards, and ran up bills of thousands of pounds. He left my flat for jail.

As soon as one went, another would come calling. Graham was a drug-free male prostitute of sixteen, who looked about twelve. He sat on the chair in my office telling me, in floods of tears, of the abuse he suffered on the streets. He named MPs, a minister and a priest as being among his clients. I had no reason to doubt him, he identified them so clearly.

And then there were the young women. Jan was a regular, sixteen years old, addicted to heroin and barbiturates, and pregnant. The state could not cope with her, and she went to Holloway prison for a stretch. Then she came back to us. We got her housed in Hackney, but neither the council nor we could provide the support she desperately needed. She would come by the flat late at night, throwing milk bottles at the wall to get my attention. Eventually she was admitted to University College Hospital for the birth. I went to visit her, and for the first time in my knowledge of her young life she looked radiant, with the baby, who was miraculously unaddicted, in her arms.

But within a day or two my telephone rang at two in the morning. ‘Ishhatt you, Jon?’ The slurred voice was unmistakably Jan’s.

‘Where are you? Where’s the baby?’ I asked urgently. There was no answer. I ran down to my Mini and headed for Hackney. I had never been to the flat where she lived, but we kept her rent book, which had the address. I found the place in twenty minutes. It was in a tall block, the stairway stinking of urine. There was a human form slumped on the second-floor stairs. I could hear the baby crying when I was three floors below Jan’s flat. I peered through the letterbox. No Jan, just the baby crying. I took a run at the door, and the lock gave. Inside, the baby was filthy, so I washed him. There was a tin of powdered milk, and I mixed a bit up with water. I think it was milk, anyway – I was pretty vague about what to do with babies. I fed him chaotically and swaddled him in a blanket, then ran with him to the car, reflecting that I was now, almost certainly, officially a baby snatcher.

Wondering ‘What the hell do I do now?’, I headed for the only place I’d seen the baby really cared for, the UCH maternity ward where he had come into the world in the first place. Arriving at the night nurse’s table, I pleaded for help.

‘Sorry, but there really is only one way babies come in here,’ she smiled, ‘and I’m afraid this isn’t it.’

‘Where do I go, then?’ I asked.

‘Well, where did you find him?’

‘Hackney.’

‘Phone the emergency service for social services.’

So I did.

‘Sorry,’ said the voice. ‘If the baby’s no longer in Hackney, it’s not our responsibility. If you’re at UCH, you’re in Camden. You’ll have to phone them.’

By the time the emergency social worker in Camden finally agreed to meet me, it was six in the morning and the baby was in distress. I wondered what would become of him. Would he too go into care and grow up like his mother? Poor little mite – how badly we were serving him.

Jan was found dead of barbiturate poisoning three days later in a filthy squat in King’s Cross. There were only two of us at her pauper’s burial at the East Finchley cemetery, and I never discovered who the other person was. I cried as the scratched recording of ‘Jerusalem’ echoed in the empty chapel. I wasn’t cut out for this, I reflected. As I sat there, I felt that at least I’d had the privilege of meeting and knowing people at the far edge. I determined that if I did nothing else in life, I would try to keep my lifeline with New Horizon open for as long as I possibly could.

In retrospect, this was a critical moment in the evolving welfare state. The state was clumsily finding out that there were areas in which it was incapable of offering caring resource. The voluntary sector, places like New Horizon, was better at it. In the long run the state would start to provide us with significant funding to do the job ourselves. But that would take several decades. In the meantime our day centre was a very hard place to be.

However bad things got at New Horizon, the presence of Lord Longford guaranteed that there would always be bouts of light relief. From the beginning, he and I would have lunch about once a month. We were to go on doing so until he died at the age of ninety-five three decades later. Ostensibly the purpose of these lunches was to talk about New Horizon, but in reality we gossiped about current politics and about history. Though Longford was ribbed mercilessly in the media for his eccentricities, I learned a vast amount from him – about the rise of fascism in the thirties, about Ireland, about the war, about Catholicism, about the British Establishment and, more than anything, about politics and government. Here was a man who’d served as Minister for Germany under Clement Attlee in the 1940s, and Leader of the House of Lords in Harold Wilson’s Cabinet in the 1960s. There was almost no one in public life he did not know. He was determined that I would go into politics.

Longford was also, perhaps inevitably, the inadvertent author of a cascade of bizarre events. One Sunday in the spring of 1972, Bobby Moore, the captain of England’s winning 1966 World Cup football team, for some reason offered us a fund-raising charity match at West Ham’s ground, Upton Park in East London. His team was going to play a celebrity side that included some Playboy bunny girls.

‘Lord Longford,’ I ventured, ‘I don’t think you should play.’

‘Why ever not?’ he retorted. ‘I was pretty good at Oxford.’

‘It isn’t a question of how good you were, nor even the fact that you are in your mid-sixties. It’s the fact that you are running an anti-pornography crusade, and the Playboy bunny girls are playing.’

‘Oh dear,’ he said, rather crestfallen.

Frank Longford was really pretty broad-minded, despite his reputation, and seemed to me to have been hijacked by some early neo-conservatives. He was insistent that he should attend the game, so on the day I picked him up from Charing Cross station and headed for Upton Park. Halfway there, Longford rolled up his trousers to reveal the hem of some elderly cream football knickerbockers.

‘Oh my God! You are going to play!’ I exclaimed.

‘I may,’ he said, somewhat sheepishly.

‘Well,’ I thought, ‘he’s a grown man, I’ve warned him about both his age and the girls. What more can I do?’

At the ground, my worst fears were rapidly realised. The cotton-tailed bunnies did what they do, and ‘Lord Porn’, as he was by then tagged, was in their midst. The press had a field day. I don’t remember much about who won, or indeed how much money we raised. But I can still see those blue-white legs adorned in half-mast grey socks, protruding from the cream 1920s football shorts flanked by bunny bottoms.

One day I was sitting in the day centre when the phone rang. ‘Mr Snow?’ asked a posh voice on the end of the line.

‘Yes.’

‘This is Squadron Leader David Checketts, Equerry to the Prince of Wales. His Royal Highness would like to invite you to meet him at Buckingham Palace. Would this be possible?’

Although bemused and instinctively suspicious of anything to do with the royal family, I was intrigued, and agreed. It is one of the strange and inexplicable things about evolving Britain that the royal family still has such pull.

At the appointed time, wearing rare jacket and tie, I set off down the Mall on my pushbike, my usual means of transport, then as now. Ushered through the great iron gates on the right-hand side of Buckingham Palace, I did as I was instructed and leant the bike against the end of the palace. The red-carpeted entrance was surprisingly dowdy and run-down. I was escorted upstairs to what I think was called the White Morning Room. It was certainly white, and sun came pouring in through the windows. There were two others waiting to see Prince Charles with me; they too seemed to work in what we called the voluntary sector. A ludicrous butler wafted in with a silver salver of biscuits, tea and coffee. Suddenly the Squadron Leader arrived with his master. We all stood up. ‘Good morning, sir,’ was the order of day, despite the fact that the Prince was virtually the same age as me. He was stiff, and even then fiddled with his index finger and the links on his cuffs. When he talked, he sounded like a forty-five-year-old.

‘I need your advice,’ he said. ‘I want to do something productive with my life, and I gather that you three are engaged in the kind of projects I think might make a difference.’ He’d been well briefed, and seemed to have an understanding of urban poverty. He’d obviously visited a number of projects. I suppose we were with him for a couple of hours. He was interested in setting up a foundation that would fund projects and people working in the poorer echelons of society. Prince Charles now says that that meeting was the moment of inception for the Prince’s Trust, which to this day is one of the biggest and most successful welfare funding movements ever established in Britain. All this was long before Diana, scandal and absurdity.

For more than a year, one of the most regular visitors to New Horizon was nineteen-year-old Christine. Beautiful, with long straight blonde hair, she was partially sighted and very slightly built. She was intelligent, but had serious communication problems, and it required much patience to win her trust. I was one of the few people she did appear to want to talk to. As so often, she had come from a broken family and had experienced abuse in care. She suffered in many ways, but never took drugs. Even so, she was hard to accommodate and impossible to gain employment for.

One night the police called at my flat. Would I come up to St Pancras? The officers were worried about reports from a squat not far from the back of the station. The place could barely have been termed a house. The windows were missing, much of the roof had fallen in, but there were sheltered spaces within. The detritus and filth between what passed for the door and these spaces was unspeakable. In the gloom, there she was, a hunched pile covered in a coat and an old blanket. I burst into tears. Christine had died utterly alone, unloved and in complete animal squalor. I had known her for 10 per cent of her entire life. The policewoman with us led me out. We all felt completely defeated.

I had originally intended to stay at New Horizon for six months and then, having only been rusticated for a year, to return to Liverpool to complete my degree. I eventually stayed three years, and have no degree to this day. I was so frustrated by Christine’s pointless death that I wrote a piece for the Guardian. ‘Christine is Dead’ was published on 8 June 1973, and it was my first piece of proper journalism. I was emotionally drained, exhausted, and most definitely better at writing about the work than doing it. This traumatic insight into the country in which I had grown up transformed my outlook on life, as Uganda had before. But I had to move on.

There were builders everywhere, carpenters putting up partitions, electricians laying cables. It was hard to find where my interview was supposed to take place. I was standing in the bowels of the building in Gough Square, off Fleet Street, where Britain’s first commercial radio station, the London Broadcasting Company (LBC), was to start broadcasting in eight weeks’ time. It’s an incredible thought these days, but as late as 1973 there was no legal radio alternative to the BBC. Radio Luxembourg had beamed in from across the Channel for years, and there were a number of illicit ‘pirate’ stations like Radio Caroline with seasick operatives broadcasting from outside territorial waters, but otherwise there was only the Beeb. A year earlier, Prime Minister Ted Heath finally changed the law, breaking the BBC’s monopoly and allowing the development of commercial radio. Now the race was on between LBC and Capital Radio as to who would be on air first. LBC was looking for a hundred or more journalists to run a twenty-four-hour news station.

I suspect that I secured an interview purely on the basis that Peter Snow, by now established as a correspondent at ITN, was my cousin. They were also looking for someone who had some sort of handle on social issues. Rather riskily, LBC was going to pioneer late-night ‘phone-ins’. Experience in America had revealed that a lot of people with serious problems phoned in, and any responsible programme would have to have someone available to deal with them. In the event I seemed to fit the bill, and was hired for a salary of £2650, double what I had been earning at New Horizon. Better still, I was veering towards a career in journalism. Maybe this would prove to be the route back to Uganda.

Two days before we went on air, the station had failed to appoint any newsreaders. Given that there was to be a news bulletin every half-hour, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, this was a bit of an omission. The managers had a problem. Very few people from the BBC had applied to work at LBC. Most BBC staff seemed to think that our commercial venture would be short-lived, and they preferred the safety of where they were. Hence a good number of Canadian and Australian voices had been hired, but very few Brits. The existing employees were all summoned for voice trials, and somehow I got the job. The welfare back-up for the phone-ins was abandoned, and I was scheduled to make my first broadcast on the first day of transmission.

Six a.m. on 8 October 1973 was an electric moment. The station hit the air running. At 10 a.m., with embarrassingly upper-class vowels, I delivered the news. ‘Israeli tanks are heading for the Golan Heights …’ We had come on air at a real instant of history, amid the Yom Kippur war, the last Middle East war in which it was possible to imagine that Israel’s very existence was at stake.

The whole style of LBC was fresh, the journalism was keen, and we were constantly running rings round staid old Aunty. But it couldn’t last, and within a few months of opening the station ran out of money. Advertisers were cautious about whether commercial radio would ever catch on. People had to be sacked, and the management went for the most expensive first. I survived, but the new editor Marshall Stewart, who’d been poached after successfully reinvigorating the BBC’s Today programme, called me into his office. ‘You can go on reading the news until you drop,’ he said, ‘but if you want to make a difference in life, you’ve got to get out onto the road.’

The road in 1974 was becoming increasingly cratered. The IRA had already started its bombing campaign on mainland Britain, and for what was almost my first reporting adventure I was sent to Northern Ireland. I arrived in Catholic West Belfast on 17 May 1974, during the Protestant workers’ strike that was to bring the attempt to allow Northern Ireland to govern itself to an end. I was stunned by what I saw. I had had absolutely no prior sense of the scale of the deprivation and discrimination suffered by the Catholic population. But the poverty proved undiscriminating: the squalor and sense of hopelessness on the Catholic Falls Road were matched on the working-class Protestant streets around the Shankill Road. I’d never seen so many Union flags. Those who wished to remain British had a sense of Queen and country that I couldn’t even begin to identify with. ‘Pig’ armoured cars careered around the streets, and groups of British squaddies patrolled with automatic rifles at the ready.

As the strike ended on 29 May, I remember standing outside the Harland & Wolff shipyard watching the exclusively Protestant workforce returning to their jobs. Not only had they destroyed a courageous attempt to share governing power between the two religions, but they passed through the factory gates as if nothing in their lives would ever have to change to accommodate the 40 per cent of the population who were not of their faith and not of their workforce. I could not believe that my own country had sustained and encouraged such a grossly unjust state of affairs.

I had always used a bicycle in London, and now my reporting life began to depend upon one. There were no mobile phones in those days, but we had clunky Motorola radios, which within five miles of the office could transmit a just-about viable signal. So when on 17 June 1974 an IRA bomb went off in the confines of the Houses of Parliament, while other reporters were clogged in the back-up of traffic caused by the emergency I was able to hurtle through on my bike, sometimes broadcasting as I pedalled. I could dash under the police tapes that closed off roads, and be in mid-broadcast by the time the police caught up with me. This meant that throughout this year of mainland bombings LBC was almost invariably first on the secne, and developed a kind of ‘must-listen’ quality that radio in the UK had never enjoyed before. The bomb in question had gone off against the thousand-year-old wall of Westminster Hall – you can see the scorch marks to this day; the stonework remains a discoloured pink. Eleven people had been injured in the blast.

The IRA clearly wasn’t going to go away. Resolving how to reach an accommodation with people the state regarded as terrorists was to be another feature of the unfolding story. The low point of the IRA’s wholesale killings of civilians came later that year, with the bombing of pubs in Guildford and Birmingham, in which twenty-six people were killed. The state responded by jailing the wrong people for both bombings.

Among all the bombings, two general elections were held in 1974, one in February followed by another in October. Amazingly, I found myself co-anchoring the second. Only one year in journalism, and I was already interviewing politicians from both front benches. It was an intense and ‘on the job’ introduction to journalism. Neither then nor at any time later did I ever receive a single day’s training. I swotted up on the constituencies, the names and faces of the politicians, and the swings needed to take each seat. Harold Wilson’s Labour Party scraped in in the first election, although they failed to win a majority of seats in the House of Commons until the second election, eight months later. There were suddenly people in government that I had worked with at New Horizon. David Ennals was Secretary of State for Health and Social Security: he and I had been trustees on the Campaign for the Single Homeless, a grouping that brought all the projects working with single homeless people under one umbrella and which survives to this day, renamed Homeless Link. My contacts were growing, and rather against my will I found myself creeping onto a lowly rung of the British Establishment.

In between those two elections I was dispatched to northern Portugal. Revolution had taken hold, a revolution that was going to have a huge effect in Africa. One of the seeds of the ‘new world disorder’ was being sown before my very eyes. Yet at that moment I could see no downside. Liberation it was, and heady was it to be there. I arrived on the morning of 5 April, hours after the fifty-year dictatorship of Salazar and his successor Caetano had been overthrown. All planes to Lisbon were full, but there was one seat left on a flight to the northern Portuguese town of Porto, so by mid-afternoon I found myself in the northern town of Braga. An industrialised concrete place, it proved to be an excellent vantage point from which to observe this most noisy and joyous of revolutions. I had hoped to grab a sandwich and then go looking for the revolution, but revolution was all around me. The streets were heaving with people; women pushed carnations into the barrels of soldiers’ guns. At one moment there was an enormous explosion, and I said to my translator, ‘Here comes the killing spree.’

‘No,’ he said, ‘it’s just a gas canister exploding in one of the celebration bonfires.’

A day and night of intoxicating freedom followed. The death of empire in Britain had never witnessed scenes like this – but then, despite empire, we had at least been spared dictatorship.

The overthrow of half a century of dictatorship in Portugal was completely bloodless. Which could not be said of what happened next in Portugal’s colonies. Angry Portuguese settlers in Mozambique and Angola drove their tractors into ravines, smashed key capital equipment and ruined their factories and homes. Nevertheless, their return from the African colonies to their homeland would represent little short of a modern miracle – a small European state reabsorbing the equivalent of 10 per cent of its population without serious consequence. But while Portugal seeped back into being a comfortable corner of Europe, Angola and Mozambique erupted into two of the bleeding sores that would define Africa’s emerging disorder in the 1980s and 1990s.

When I returned, Britain was in the throes of the build-up to the referendum on whether or not to remain a member of the European Community. In a sense a kind of revolution was taking place here too. The Tories under Ted Heath had taken Britain into Europe a couple of years earlier, and Labour had promised a vote as a means to resolve their own ambivalence and division on the issue. Many saw the referendum as a post-imperial struggle for the soul of Britain. Should we slide off into the transatlantic alliance and take up our position as Uncle Sam’s fifty-first state, or embrace the heart of Europe and become part of the European continent? Truth to tell, I had decided to vote ‘no’, on the basis that I saw Europe as a rich man’s club that was bound to end up screwing the Third World.

I was more involved than I pretended. My friend Ed Boyle, the political editor of LBC and one of the most gifted journalists I ever worked with, had agreed to put together some radio ads for the ‘no’ campaign. I guess he did it more to make trouble and to even out what he regarded as an unbalanced campaign than out of any very strong belief. He was a real original, mad as a hatter and the creator of brilliant, funny and informative journalism. His trouble was that he was too brilliant, too funny, too bright for his editors; he was therefore denied the profile and standing he richly deserved. Knowing that I was pretty strongly against EC membership at the time, he asked me to help out on the ads.

The fifty-first state argument held no sway for me. It was the love of Uganda and an awareness of how the North intersected with and affected the South that combined to convince me that Europe would thrive to the detriment of the emerging markets and nations of the South. I wanted out of this kind of a Europe with a passion. Michael Foot, at that time Secretary of State for Employment, was my comfortable leader in the cause, and the ‘no’ campaign enabled me to meet him for the first time, in what was to become a friendship that still endures. My uncomfortable leader was Enoch Powell, who was further right even than Michael was left, and against whom I had demonstrated at university. But he and Michael shared a love of Parliament and sovereignty, one of the causes which bound them both to the ‘no’ campaign.

The campaign itself was a complete shambles. We started with a substantial lead in the opinion polls, which we then proceeded to fritter away. Ed and I were so unpoliced that our radio ads only featured the ‘no’ views that reflected our own – references to the Third World and other ways of arranging a new Europe predominated. But the referendum itself, which took place on 6 June 1975, was nevertheless a defining moment in the emergence of post-imperial Britain. In voting to remain in Europe, which the British people did by a margin of two to one, many of us thought we had at least buried the Little Englander vote for all time – how wrong we proved to be.

Alas, we never actually embraced the Europe for which we had voted. Nor were we entirely to shake off our status as America’s fifty-first state. We wanted to be for Europe, but not of it. And that condition dogs us to this day. My own position was to evolve gently from outright hostility then, to an ardent desire now to be much more a part of Europe than any British referendum has ever dared contemplate. But it has taken me three decades to travel so complex a journey.

It was only a month after the referendum, in July 1975, that my foreign news editor at LBC bellowed across the newsroom, ‘Anyone ever been to Uganda?’ One hand went up, and it was mine. ‘We’ve got a free seat on Callaghan’s plane,’ he said. ‘Get your bag and go.’

It seemed that the Foreign Secretary, Jim Callaghan, had been involved in some madcap dialogue with the by-now leader of Uganda Idi Amin over a white British lecturer, Denis Hills, who’d published unflattering references to the Ugandan dictator in a book called The White Pumpkin. Among other things, he’d called him a village tyrant’. Tyrant he had indeed become, aided and abetted by the British government. Amin had seized power in a military coup on 25 January 1971, while the democratically elected President Milton Obote was in Singapore attending a Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference. Obote’s use of secret police and informers, and his intimidation and worse of his political opponents, had rendered him unpopular both inside and outside Uganda. Above all, Britain was concerned at the rise of ‘African socialism’, as espoused by Obote and by Tanzania’s Julius Nyrere and Zambia’s Kenneth Kaunda.

The arrival, albeit by military coup, of the seemingly more pliant, British-trained erstwhile Sergeant Major Idi Amin was greeted as something of a relief. Amin can perhaps be seen as an early volunteer for Western-supported regime change’, with all its harrowing consequences. Within a year of the coup he’d appointed himself Field Marshal and ‘President for Life’, expelled sixty thousand Asians, and started killing his opponents. The Utopian Uganda of my late adolescence was fast evaporating. Amin soon took on more self-styled epithets, including ‘Big Daddy’ and ‘Conqueror of the British Empire’.

Idi Amin was already renowned for humiliating the few whites still in Uganda. Denis Hills was languishing in Luzira prison, the notorious block in which Amin, and Obote before him, both kept and disposed of their opponents. Amin had had Hills sentenced to death for sedition, and had announced that unless the Queen apologised for his behaviour and Jim Callaghan came personally to rescue him, Hills would be summarily executed.

Looking back today, the idea that only three decades ago some African dictator could summon the Foreign Minister from one of the G8 nations to rescue a solitary eccentric from the hangman’s noose beggars belief. Even then the trip had a distinct whiff of the absurd about it. Only a few months earlier Amin had had some of the remaining whites in Uganda carry him in a great sedan chair through the centre of Kampala.

The trip was inevitably to provoke in me a strong wave of nostalgia. On 10 July 1975 the RAF VC10 touched down at Entebbe, on an airfield looking only slightly more decayed than it had on my first landing. From the aircraft I could see that the grass was still long and unkempt, but that there were many more troops and guns about. The old terminal building had shed its last remnants of whitewash. The heavenly aroma of Africa wafted into the plane as the door opened. Here I was, back in my beloved Uganda, almost eight years to the day after I had left her. There really did seem to be some divine pattern to it all. Chance had delivered me ‘home’, even if only for a matter of hours.

There was no Amin at the airport. Instead we were hustled onto a bus at gunpoint by sweaty young soldiers and driven at speed to Kampala. We passed the gorgeous bougainvillea and mown lawns of State House, where President Obote had lived during my time here. Our destination was Amin’s official residence in the capital, the ‘Command Post’.

By the time we reached the bustling suburbs of Kampala it was noon, the sun was high and the light outside was fierce to our unaccustomed English eyes. The Asian shops had become less tidy, less well-stocked African outlets. Amin’s wholesale ejection of the Asians three years earlier had taken its commercial toll. The smell, the sweaty greenness, the puddles, the red-brown murum roads told me that this was unmistakably Africa, unmistakably Uganda. The jacarandas were in full blue bloom, bananas dangled in ripe bunches, everywhere was lusciously productive.

There were perhaps twenty journalists aboard our bus, not one of whom apart from me had ever set foot in the country before. Suddenly, as we neared the end of the road leading to the Command Post, I caught sight of a dishevelled white man being marched along by two guards. It was obviously Denis Hills. He was dressed in the fly-buttonless, stained remnant of the tropical suit he must have been taken to jail in. I told the bus driver I needed a pee and would walk from there. He stopped and let me out. I ran across to Hills and immediately started interviewing him, using the heavy reel-to-reel Uher tape recorder slung over my shoulder.

‘How does it feel to be free, Mr Hills?’ I asked.

‘Better than being dead,’ he replied, ‘which I should have been at eight o’clock this morning if Mr Callaghan hadn’t come for me.’ He seemed to have some teeth missing, but despite his run-down appearance was apparently in one piece.

‘What’s happening now?’ I asked.

‘I’m being taken to be handed over.’

Amin’s Command Post was ostensibly a simple, square-built 1930s-style suburban house with spectacular views over Kampala. The white stucco walls sporting a green mould here and there were assaulted by vivid splashes of red, pink and purple bougainvillea. But when we got closer there was a distinct air of menace about the place, radio aerials protruding out of windows, wires hanging about, and sandbagged gun emplacements peering from the flat roof. Although there were guns everywhere, and paranoid figures looking at us suspiciously, there was no formal security cordon. I was able to approach cautiously and to enter, rejoining the other reporters. Callaghan and Amin were out on the lawn at the back. No sign yet of Hills, but Amin was already thanking the Foreign Secretary for coming, booming his words of satisfaction. I recorded the lot.

For almost the only time in my reporting life, my cousin Peter was one of the other correspondents on the trip, reporting for ITN. I took him to one side. ‘Peter, I’ve got everything, interviewed Hills, done the lot.’

‘But Hills hasn’t appeared yet,’ he said.

‘Oh yes he has, and I’ve got his first interview as a free man. Trouble is, Callaghan’s people want us straight back on the bus and off to Entebbe and the take-off. But I know where the international telephone exchange is here, and I could phone this stuff through to London and get a scoop on everyone else – including you.’

‘Go on,’ said Peter, ‘take a risk. They may leave without you, but we won’t be able even to phone until we get to the departure lounge at Entebbe, so you’ll be at least an hour or even two ahead of anyone.’

I ran back out on to the road, flashed some pound notes and got a lift to the exchange half a mile away. This was the self-same building from which whilst on VSO I had been able to phone home. Somehow I managed to cajole them into giving me a line to London. I got everything fed from my Uher, using crude crocodile clips to connect the tape machine directly to the phone line. I also recorded a description of Hills’s release. Twenty minutes later I was out on the street trying to get a taxi back to the Command Post, but no one dared go anywhere near the place, especially with a muzungu, a white man.

I decided the best solution was to head for Entebbe Airport directly in a service taxi, in the hope of reaching the plane before the bus did, or at least before take-off. So with a clutch of breastfeeding mothers, two goats, and at least five or six live chickens flapping about with tied feet, I set off in battered old Peugeot 606 station wagon. The trouble was that our journey was constantly interrupted by the need to disgorge a mother, a goat, a chicken, or sometimes all three at once. Then another lot of human and animal cargo would board the taxi to inflict further stops on us.

As bits of Uganda flashed past, I considered the place’s weird predicament. Here was a country that Britain had had charge of until just over a decade before. Yet Uganda had been prepared in no way for independence. What cynicism could deliver a thuggish, paranoid Sergeant Major to lead its armed forces? The colonisers had believed in an imported white officer class until almost the day of handover. The country’s institutions were remorselessly British in their make-up, and took no account of sophisticated local practice. Britain effectively prepared Uganda for failure. It’s a telling insight into the British way of doing things, which was to be repeated in every corner of Africa that was ever pink.

After what seemed like hours we turned into the airport road. Proceeding in the opposite direction was our empty bus, returning to Kampala. I had nowhere near enough money to buy a ticket to London, I had no visa, the British High Commission had taken our passports upon landing, and I suddenly had visions of taking up Denis Hills’s vacated death cell at Luzira prison. For sure, honest Jim Callaghan would not make a second rescue flight.

We swung round the high pampas grasses on to the airfield, and there was the plane, still on the ground. My cousin Peter was gesticulating wildly from halfway up the steps. ‘Come on, we’re going in seconds!’ he shouted above the engine roar. Inside the cabin, there was Callaghan, in his tropical hat, looking red and impatient. Hills was separated off, crumpled up in a seat well back, and then came the journalists. They looked grim-faced and angry with me.

I asked Peter what the problem was. ‘Bloody phones are down to Kampala,’ he said. ‘No one got to file a sodding thing. You’ve got yourself an epic’

What a start, I thought. One year a journalist, and I’ve got a scoop of mythic proportions: ‘British Foreign Secretary Saves White Man’s Life in Africa!’ I settled complacently into my seat. Our ten-hour flight, with a stop-off in phoneless Tripoli, should keep me well ahead of the game, I thought.

Fortunately the lines from Brize Norton, the Oxfordshire military air base where we landed, were working. ‘Well?’ I asked the foreign editor when my turn for the phonebox came and I got through.

‘Well what?’

‘My scoop.’

‘What scoop?’

‘Haven’t you run my Denis Hills story?’ I shouted.

‘No.’

‘Why ever not?’

‘Yours was the only source. We knew UPI, AP and Reuters were all on the flight with you, so we waited for them, and when they failed to file we decided you’d got it wrong.’

‘You idiot!’ I screamed. ‘I had the tape of Hills saying he was free, I had bloody Callaghan saying he was thankful, Amin booming away, what else did you want?’

‘A second source, Jon. Now if you don’t mind, I can see the first Reuters snap coming through, so I can let your stuff run.’ With that he rang off.

‘What’s the trouble?’ asked Peter as I came out of the phonebox.

‘They didn’t run it,’ I said mournfully. ‘They couldn’t get a second source to confirm it.’

‘Are they running it now?’ he asked.

‘Oh yes’.

‘Well, don’t worry, you’ve still got a beat.’

And sure enough, LBC and my report were used as the source for that afternoon’s Evening Standard front page. It was an early tutorial in the ways of journalism.

It was a much bigger tutorial on the true condition of Great Britain. Amin, the jumped-up non-commissioned officer, had succeeded in humiliating the Foreign Secretary of his erstwhile imperial rulers. Britain was still finding her post-colonial feet, still unsure whether a Foreign Secretary should do this sort of thing. She had played an unwitting role in bringing Amin to power and keeping him there. The coup against Milton Obote had been seen as a benign and potentially beneficial development. The wholesale deportation of tens of thousands of people because of their Asian ethnicity was simply accepted. It might be argued that the office of the British Foreign Secretary seemed to have put more effort into saving one eccentric white man from execution than into preventing the abuse meted out to sixty thousand Ugandan Asians. Despite the furious immigration debate in Britain, those Asians were to prove Uganda’s crippling loss and Britain’s huge economic gain.

That autumn of 1975, imperial Britain’s home-grown crisis was taking serious hold on both sides of the Irish Sea. On 3 October a Dutch businessman, Dr Tiede Herrema, was kidnapped by the IRA as he drove his Mercedes to work at Ferenka Ltd, the huge tyre factory in Limerick of which he was managing director. The kidnappers threatened to kill him unless Republican prisoners were released from jails in the Republic of Ireland. Ireland was in the throes of trying to leave her nineteenth-century backwardness and become a fully paid-up member of Europe, and the kidnap was a body blow, particularly as Ferenka’s parent company was the hugely influential Dutch multinational Akzo.

For nearly three weeks no trace was found of the missing Dutchman. The kidnap made the Republic of Ireland appear a place of refuge for the hard men of Republicanism. Then on 21 October Herrema was located in a council house on the edge of Monasterevin in County Kildare, forty miles south-west of Dublin. He was being held by two IRA members, Eddie Gallagher and Marian Coyle. The discovery triggered an immediate siege. LBC dispatched me from London with almost no money and virtually no other resources.

The house stood at the back of a working-class, 1950s-built redbrick estate that gave onto farmland. From the far side of one of the fields it was possible to get a view of the back and side of the house. The Irish police, the Gardai, were everywhere, and the press were kept well back. Gallagher loosed off a couple of gunshots soon after I arrived, as if to support the police in their endeavour to control the media.

LBC’s appetite was voracious. At peak times they wanted a piece on the hour, every hour. Initially I was able to persuade the ITN correspondent and future bestselling novelist Gerald Seymour to let me use the back of his car as a base. The one motel in Monasterevin was already full, and was anyway too far from the siege house. Seymour was a star reporter, and I felt honoured to be allowed to use his car. That first night he slept in the front, I in the back. I remember his socks to this day. With the Irish mist hanging in the dawn light, I could just pick out the shapes of policemen wandering around the garden fence of the siege house. We were in for a long haul.

By midday, trucks had begun lugging caravans into position at the top of the field. A temporary press encampment was taking shape. Gerry Seymour upgraded himself to a four-berth mobile home, and I took over the whole of his car. At the vantage point we constructed a large brazier and filled it with peat briquettes. I must be one of the few reporters who has ever put in a charge for peat briquettes on his expenses claim form.

Although I spent more hours than most at the vantage point, there were times when I would retreat to the car to sleep. The problem was that the car was at least two hundred yards from the point from which you could see the house. So I went into town and bought a great length of bell wire, a buzzer, a bell-push and a battery. The buzzer was draped through the car window, while the bell-push lay near the brazier two hundred yards away. From time to time, once they’d checked I was asleep, one of the photographers down at the brazier would sound the buzzer just for the hell of seeing this half-naked hack falling out of a car pulling on his trousers in his haste to witness the end of it all.

There were very few real developments during the Herrema siege, but somehow it built up into a compelling twenty-four-hour news radio event. Eddie Gallagher, the IRA man whose hare-brained scheme the kidnapping had been, turned out to be in conflict with the IRA leadership. Indeed, this may well have been one of the early signals of division in the IRA between the political and the mayhem wings of the Army Council. Gallagher’s girlfriend was not Marian Coyle, with whom he was now holed up in the siege house, but Rose Dugdale, who was later to marry Gallagher and bear him a child. Dr Dugdale was an English aristocrat and a graduate of the London School of Economics who was serving time for conspiracy to smuggle arms and explosives to Northern Ireland, and was one of the IRA convicts in return for whose freedom Herrema was being held hostage. She was also suspected of having seized a helicopter in 1974 and dropped two explosives-filled milk churns on a police barracks, where they failed to explode. Gallagher had been imprisoned after that episode, but had escaped four days after being sentenced. Technically, despite his stationary position in our sights, he was on the run.

It was not just the divisions within the IRA that the siege exposed. We also saw, writ large, a preparedness on the part of both Irish and British governments to countenance an eventual deal with the Republicans. No one was prepared to go in with all guns blazing. But then, early one morning about a week into the siege, the Gardai grew impatient with Gallagher and decided to mount a surprise attack. I was at the vantage point. I buzzed the buzzer and a motley crew of my colleagues came running down the path from their encampment, led by the man from the Sun. Les Hinton was not only an excellent journalist, but good company. If I had been asked then to identify which of our band would one day become Rupert Murdoch’s British supremo at News International, I’m not sure I’d have spotted him. It’s an extraordinary journey from Monasterevin to the Murdoch summit in Wapping.

We were all flabbergasted by the crudity of the Garda assault. An old ladder was leant against the bathroom window at the back of the house, and a detective scaled it and tried to open the window. BANG! A terrific shot rang out, followed by a yelp, and the detective tumbled down the ladder. Gallagher had blown the man’s index finger off.

The next day I received a hand-delivered note from the editor of ITN, Nigel Ryan. He had approached me earlier in the year about moving to television news, and I’d refused. This time his note said that if I accepted, the job as a reporter for ITN was mine. I decided to talk to my own editor when I returned home.

The siege dragged on for seventeen days. Eventually Herrema walked out unharmed, and Gallagher and Coyle gave themselves up. The brazier camaraderie came to a rapid end and we all went our separate ways. What we didn’t know was that five of the twenty-five or so of us who had been the core of the siege-watchers had contracted a pretty grim lurgy that would strike a short time after we returned home.

Nigel Ryan was a highly regarded, patrician, Reuters-trained editor. He’d seen action in the Congo, but was also at ease in the British Establishment. I sat in his office on the second floor facing him. My editor at LBC had strongly advised me to cross to ITN while the going was good.

‘So, which college did you go to?’ Ryan asked.

‘Ah,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t at Oxbridge. I read law at Liverpool.’

He was rather startled, and I got the impression that if I did secure a place on the reporters’ bench I’d be breaking with the Oxbridge norm. Fortunately he never asked me what degree I got, so I didn’t have to cover up the rather serious matter of having been rusticated. To this day I often wonder whether he’d have employed me if he’d known. But the job was mine, and with three months’ notice to LBC I would start in March 1976.

Two days later I woke up feeling utterly dreadful, listless and sick. I phoned a doctor friend to ask what he’d recommend for a ‘pick-me-up’. ‘Have a glass of sherry,’ he advised. I did, and immediately vomited. Looking in the mirror, I saw that I was a noxious shade of bright yellow. I phoned my GP, and by the evening I had been admitted to Coppetts Wood isolation hospital in north London.

‘Are you a homosexual?’ The man in the white coat at my bedside wafted in and out of my consciousness. ‘Have you had oral sex with another man?’

‘Crumbs!’ I thought. ‘Is that the only way to get whatever I’ve got?’

‘You’ve got Hepatitis A,’ the doctor said through his facemask. ‘It’s highly contagious.’

‘No, I’m not a homosexual,’ I said eventually.

‘Well, how did you get this?’ he asked. ‘Where have you been?’

‘The Irish Republic – covering the Herrema siege,’ I said. ‘There was a cow trough with a tap in the field where we camped. I drank some of the water.’

‘That’s almost certainly it,’ he said.

Soon it was confirmed that five of us had exactly the same complaint from the same source, and I’d had sexual relations with none of them. ‘No alcohol for six months, and complete bed rest,’ the doctor said, and left.

I was sharing a flat in Primrose Hill with Nick Browne, whom I had met at university. To this day, a truer friend I could not wish for. He had taken the route I’d been expected to and actually become a barrister. The day after I was admitted to hospital he came to my bedside with the mail. ‘I couldn’t help spotting this one,’ he said.

‘On Her Majesty’s Service’, it said in black print. ‘Confidential, Personal’ was typed in red. I pulled out the contents. No wonder Nick was looking curious. He knew exactly what it was, and so did I.

It read:

MINISTRY OF DEFENCE, Room 055, Old War Office Buildings,

Whitehall.

5 January 1976

Dear Mr Snow

1. I think it just possible that you might be able to assist me with some confidential work I have in hand. I therefore should be most grateful for an opportunity to have a talk.

2. If you are agreeable perhaps you would be kind enough to telephone me and we can discuss when it would be convenient for you to call. You should, incidentally, come to the side entrance of Old War Office Buildings in Whitehall Place and say you have an appointment in Room 055.

3. I will naturally reimburse you for any reasonable expenses. Please do not hesitate to take a taxi if you are pressed for time.

4. I should be grateful if you would treat this letter as confidential and not discuss it with anyone else; furthermore please bring the letter with you as a means of identification.

5. I very much regret that I cannot go into further explanations in a letter or on the telephone, but would naturally do so if we meet.

Yours sincerely,

D. Stilbury

Ten days later I was at the side entrance of Old War Office Buildings, a grey, uninviting building opposite Horse Guards Parade. I had called Stilbury and made an appointment. I figured that I should at least check the thing out. I mean, how often do you get an invitation to the epicentre of Britain’s spy network?

I had decided to eschew the taxi in favour of my trusted bicycle. On my way I stopped off at the main concourse of Waterloo station to photocopy the letter. I was well aware that it was both my passport to, and my proof of approach from, Her Majesty’s intelligence services. As I fed it into the plywood-boxed, freestanding photocopier in the middle of the station, the machine jammed. So paranoid was I that I had avoided photocopying the letter at LBC for fear that some stray copy would blow my cover. Now the even more public British Rail machine had the effrontery to jam. I tried again, and this time a copy spewed out onto the station floor.

As I had anticipated, the man at the Old War Office reception desk took the original letter from me, never to return it. A large woman in blue Civil Service rig sailed ahead of me along a labyrinth of corridors, up a few steps, down a few more. Grey stone, blue curtains, grey stone, blue curtains; everything was the same. She showed me into a bare and austere room. And there was Stilbury. He stood up from behind his desk, which was arranged across a corner. The only other pieces of furniture in the room were two low-slung modern tubular-framed armchairs in front of the desk. He pointed to one of them. He was tall, rather pale, public-school-looking, nondescript.

‘Do sit down,’ he said. I sat and was immediately reduced by the low-slung armchair to a height considerably below that of the now seated Stilbury. I was already at a disadvantage. ‘I’m Douglas Stilbury, and I work for SIS,’ he said. I doubted that he was who he said he was, but I had no doubt he worked for whom he said he worked for. ‘Do you know what SIS is?’

‘Not exactly,’ I replied.

‘We are the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6. We are responsible for external, foreign intelligence.’

We started to talk. He had a considerable file on his desk which appeared to contain a very great deal about me. From women friends to politics, they had done their work.

‘We’d like you to work with us,’ he finally said.

‘Full time?’ I asked.

‘Oh no, we’d like you to pursue your chosen career and do bits and pieces for us along the way.’

‘What sort of thing?’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘there could be someone we are interested in, a Communist, who is meeting people – we might want you to get to know them.’

‘Sounds a bit domestic to me,’ I said. ‘But what really worries me, Mr Stilbury, is that I’m not sure you and I are on the same side.’

‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘We are accountable to the British Cabinet. As much to Mr Wedgwood Benn as we are to Mr Wilson.’ Tony Benn was the Cabinet’s unguided lefty at the time.

I think Stilbury could sense that I was thinking of saying no. ‘No hasty decisions,’ he said. ‘We haven’t talked pay. You would be paid direct into your bank account, no questions asked by the Inland Revenue, and the sum would be equivalent to your current basic salary, tax-free.’ ITN was about to pay me around £6000 a year at the time, the equivalent of £20,000 these days. ‘Now, if you want to know more about us, I suggest you read the report by Lord Justice Denning into the Profumo Affair. It gives the most coherent picture yet published.’

‘This isn’t for me,’ I said. ‘Any of my friends will tell you, I can’t keep a secret. I’m about to become a television journalist. Rather a public job for such private activity, don’t you think?’

‘I’m not taking any answer from you this time,’ he said. ‘I want you to go away and think about it, then come back and tell me your decision.’

I stepped out into the sunlight, got on my bike and pedalled off down Whitehall, looking over my shoulder.

To this day, I have never read the Denning Report. Instead I bought a copy of the great MI6 Cold War double agent Kim Philby’s book, My Secret War.

As I was still recovering from hepatitis, I decided on the spur of the moment to go skiing in the Spanish Pyrenees. I read Philby’s book on the sun-splashed deck outside my hotel-room window in Formigal. It was clear from the book that to be a good spy – and I would have wanted to be a very good spy – you’d have to be a double agent of some kind, and that it would then completely consume your life and ultimately destroy you. I was pretty certain I’d never do it anyway, not least because Stilbury and his ilk seemed to represent the element of the British Establishment that I felt most uncomfortable with. And to be honest, I really wasn’t sure they were on my side. I wanted change, meritocracy, progress. I suspected Stilbury didn’t.

But how had this approach come about? MI6 clearly felt I was a good prospect – a chap with radical beginnings who had seen the error of his ways, and was moving up the Establishment – perfect! And how was it that I was being approached now, in mid-transition from LBC to ITN? Did ITN have some kind of ‘controller’ in its midst? In which case, how many of my new colleagues were up to it?

‘How was Spain?’ Stilbury asked. I had never told him I was going.

‘I’m not going to work for you, Mr Stilbury,’ I replied, pretty shaken by how much he knew about me and my movements.

Stilbury became brusque and unfriendly. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘I’m naturally disappointed. I think you are making a big mistake, but that’s it then. You are never to contact us, and we shall never contact you again.’

For the last time, I left Old War Office Buildings by the side entrance and, rather frightened, beetled off on my bike, checking occasionally to see if anyone was following me.