Abstract
What duty does a journalist have towards a source? The issue arose both in the trial of Chris Huhne and Vicky Pryce and, more recently, in that of Andy Coulson and others from the News of the World. At what stage should a journalist be prepared to bring a toothbrush to court and declare that they would rather go to jail than allow the authorities to ferret out their mole?
The seventh commandment of the NUJ's Code of Conduct is clear on the subject. It states that a journalist “protects the identity of sources who supply information in confidence and material gathered in the course of her/his work”. But what if you, as a journalist, had fabricated – or just over-egged – a story on a sensitive subject and then been ordered by the authorities to identify your sources? This hypothetical question has been brought to mind by claims and counter-claims prompted by an old story.
It is more than 50 years since two Fleet Street journalists, Brendan Mulholland and Reg Foster, were jailed for contempt for refusing to reveal their sources for stories they had written about the sexual peccadillos of the convicted spy, John Vassall. The two have long been referred to as a benchmark for reporters protecting their sources, regardless of the consequences. Both men are dead, but their story has been revived as the result of the recent publication of three books.
Vassall, who was gay when homosexuality was still illegal in Britain, worked as a clerk at the British embassy in Moscow in the 1950s. Targeted by Soviet agents and photographed having sex with a number of men, he was blackmailed into agreeing to supply information when he continued his work as an admiralty clerical officer back in London. He was eventually caught in 1962 and charged with espionage. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 18 years.
His case received wide press coverage at the time. Mulholland, of the Daily Mail, and Foster, of the Daily Sketch, wrote in the wake of the conviction of how Vassall was known to buy women's clothes from West End stores and was called Auntie by colleagues. The Sketch wanted to know “why did the spy-catchers fail to notice Vassall who sometimes wore women's clothes on West End trips?”
At the subsequent tribunal in 1963, ordered by the then prime minister, Harold Macmillan, both men refused to divulge the sources for their stories. They were duly jailed for contempt – Foster for three months and Mulholland for six. A third reporter, Desmond Clough, also of the Sketch, faced prison too, but was cleared when an admiralty press officer came forward and identified himself as his source.
The jailed pair, known as the “silent men”, enjoyed support across Fleet Street and from the NUJ. All the daily newspapers supported the pair and they emerged from prison to resume their careers. There the case has rested for many years. Three books have reopened the tale. An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo, by the historian Richard Davenport-Hines, which dealt with the Profumo affair, was published last year. “They went to prison masquerading as martyrs in the sacred cause of press freedom,” he wrote of Mulholland and Foster. “But the truth is that they did not want to admit that they were liars who had invented their stories.”
The book was serialised in the Sunday Times and received excellent reviews, including one from Craig Brown in the Mail on Sunday, which found it “meticulous” and “fascinating”. But the reference to Mulholland provoked an angry response from the Daily Mail, which ran an article headlined: “Sex, lies and the smearing of a brave man: why is a historian blackening the name of this Mail reporter who went to jail rather than betray a source?” It quoted a friend and former colleague of Mulholland, Graham Lord, who was adamant that he had not invented his story.
The more recent book, When Reporters Cross the Line, by Stewart Purvis and Jeff Hulbert, re-examined the case in greater detail, noting that there were “whispers in Fleet Street” at the time that the stories were invented. Purvis and Hulbert write that the “veteran Fleet Street crime reporter, Rodney Hallworth, who later worked with Brendan Mulholland at a news agency in Devon, came to the view that the men had made up at least some of the facts”. (Hallworth also died some years ago.) And in The Remarkable Lives of Bill Deedes, published in 2009, Stephen Robinson takes the same view, writing that “Fleet Street puffed itself into a scandalised offence at this encroachment of the freedom of the press although most journalists privately thought that their overheated accounts of sex parties were largely, if not entirely, fictitious”.
When Foster, by all accounts a charming and entertaining character, died in 1999 at the age of 95, there were many affectionate tributes. Matthew Engel, in an addendum to The Guardian obituary, quoted Foster's recollections of old Fleet Street thus: “Someone might find a bloodstained garter in a ditch,” reminisced Foster, “marvellous story, but no relevance at all to the investigation … There was a certain amount of freedom of expression. I think I'd better leave it like that.” Engel continued: “This was the background that produced his reporting of the Vassall case, when he may have had a genuine scoop, or may just have used his freedom of expression. I think we had better leave it like that.”
Roy Greenslade also spoke to Foster not long before his death and says he remained adamant that the story was true. “Reg did stick to his guns,” says Greenslade. “He was, by the time I met him, rather infirm, but he regarded the jailing as the high point of his journalistic career. He had done something principled.”
There remain three possibilities – the reporters did indeed have reliable sources whom they gallantly protected; they invented their stories and went to prison rather than admit the fabrications; or they had some information from sources, whom they protected, but the stories were embellished, either in the writing or the editing process, as was not uncommon both then and now.
As for that hypothetical dilemma: would you confess to a fabrication and avoid jail or take your imaginative secret for a few months to a cell in HMP Ford? I know which I'd choose.