The View From Bankruptcy Hall

Geoffrey Seed is a writer, journalist and former TV producer. His new book, The Convenience of Lies, is a follow-up to his widely acclaimed debut novel, A Place of Strangers. Buy The Convenience of Lies in paperback on Amazon Buy The Convenience of Lies...

[geoffreyseed]

My new book, The Boy From Zion Street is now available in paperback on Amazon here -  https://www.amazon.co.uk/Boy-Zion-Street-Geoffrey-Seed/dp/1530890837/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1470299021&sr=8-3&keywords=geoffrey+seed

[geoffreyseed]

LIGHTS, CAMERA... CONFESSIONS

For me, Mavis Nicholson will always be the Miss Marple of TV interviewers. Who could possibly suspect her end game when those camera lights went on? No sneering, no intellectual snobbery, just gentle coaxing towards the confessional like a sympathetic granny leading a child to the dentist’s chair.

And when it was all over, the studio emptied of audience and crew, her interviewees felt a great warmth towards this wily, unthreatening woman who’d effortlessly got inside their heads and hearts like few others ever could.

Leslie Caron, Hollywood star of Gigi and An American in Paris, hadn’t wanted to be questioned about her mother - but suddenly changed her mind mid-way through her interview with Mavis.

“She’d realised she’d become all the things her mother had wanted to be… dancer, actress, film star,” Mavis said. “She said she wanted to talk to me, needed to,”

Many other celebrities unburdened themselves to Mavis - the venerated American author and civil rights activist, Maya Angelou, cult singers like David Bowie and Elvis Costello and the brilliant but complex comedian, Kenneth Williams.

Now, BBC Wales has commissioned an hour-long documentary about Mavis’s extraordinary life, talent-spotted at a dinner party in the early 1970s by Thames TV boss, Jeremy Isaacs, for her singular ability to get into people’s secret selves. With no previous TV experience, she began fronting afternoon shows with Mary Parkinson, wife of Michael, and the veteran presenter, Judith Chalmers.

Mavis and her late husband, the highly regarded journalist and author, Geoff, came to live near my wife and me in mid Wales in the 1980s and we became friends.

Her influence is evident in the planning of my new book, The Boy From Zion Street. When her own biography, Martha Jane and Me, was published, I asked how she could possibly remember so much detail about her impoverished 1930s childhood in the South Wales town of Briton Ferry.

“By interrogating memory,” Mavis said, “by forcing myself to recall everything I possibly could about everyone in my family and in the street where we lived.”

By this process, one recollection led to another as she summoned back the long dead - the way they spoke, their mannerisms and dress, how they thought.

I did the same with The Boy From Zion Street, robbing my own family story of its memorable characters, their tragedies, strengths and many weaknesses - but their humanity, too - and weaving this into a fictionalised political conspiracy.

I was once given the Mavis interview treatment for an article she was writing for the community newspaper she then edited. It was supposed to be about my debut novel, A Place of Strangers, a tale of murder and revenge based on real post-Holocaust events I’d researched across Europe, Israel and north America.

I thought she’d find plenty of red meat here. But with her tape recorder running and that beguiling agony aunt smile of hers, Mavis soon turned the questioning towards my early life. Where and from whom had I come, what influences made me the person I was, what was I hiding?

Fortunately, I’m a hack so ducking and diving and obfuscation come easy. I was able to make an excuse and leave… but only to prepare tea in the kitchen for the interview was taking place in my living room. In the end, I think I survived the encounter but if I ever decide to come clean, it’ll be to Mavis Nicholson.

Catch her documentary this autumn if you can. It’s a Parasol Media production presented by Carolyn Hitt and will portray Mavis, still pin-sharp, opinionated and questioning at 86, a true one-off and all the more treasured for that.

[geoffreyseed]

For what we are about to receive

My new book, The Boy From Zion Street, will be released to Kindle via Amazon on March 28.  It’s the story of a judge whose dysfunctional working class upbringing in 1950s Manchester comes back to haunt him when he is blackmailed by Whitehall’s backstairs plotters in a conspiracy during last year’s British general election. Here is a taster.

Prologue

The Lincolnshire coast, Monday 10th November 2014

The ageing judge stepped down from the causeway with care then into the wilderness of the marsh, through its pale bearded reeds and by the arteries of sly black water wherein a man might fall and never be seen again.   He made for where the soft earth gave out to the swelling sea and it was too perilous to go further. There he stood, leaning on his stick, a man like any other, rendered insignificant beneath a massing caul of gun-grey clouds. The collar of his long black ulster was turned up against a wind bending through the dying sedge around him. He took something from an inside pocket and stooped down by the ebbing waters of a narrow creek.     His chauffeur watched from the official Jaguar, bemused. This wasn’t a judge he had driven before. They’d been heading to Lincoln for a murder trial but he’d insisted on leaving their planned route to cut across the fens to this desolate place with no name. ‘Is there a particular reason, your Honour?’ The judge did not answer immediately. He stared at the treeless plough lands thereabouts then caught his driver’s eyes in the rear view mirror.   ‘I’ve some tidying up to do before I retire, matters I mustn’t forget to remember.’ ‘Personal matters, you mean?’ ‘Yes... personal matters.’ Watery sleet began sliding down the Jaguar’s windscreen. The chauffeur fetched an umbrella from the boot. The only landmark - a ruined building far out across the marsh - almost vanished in a whitened sky filled with the cries and calls of unseen birds. He found the judge amid clumps of sedge and rushes, his left arm oddly stiff by his side. But what he saw, he couldn’t readily explain. He was putting letters in the creek, maybe twenty of them, each with a blue stamp on the envelope showing the head of the wartime king and addressed in black ink or pencil to a person whose name was too small to read. They were not being discarded but placed almost reverentially, like an offering to the gods to spin and twist their way to the sea. The chauffeur knew better than to ask questions though he would have thought fire a more certain way to dispose of written evidence, not water.     ‘I hope you haven’t got too wet, Sir.’ ‘No, I’m all right, thank-you. But time is pressing so we must leave.’ The judge’s cheeks were pinched purple with cold and seemed damp as if the sleet had melted on whatever warmth came from within - either that or he’d been weeping.   ‘Don’t worry, your Honour, I’ll get you there. We can’t have justice delayed, can we?’ ‘Quite so. And my little pilgrimage... that can stay between ourselves, yes?’ They shook hands on this understanding and got back into the Jaguar. The matter need not be mentioned again. A few minutes into their resumed journey, the judge made a note in his diary. It’s done, the circle is finally being closed. For his chauffeur, the reverse was true. He had retrieved one of the judge’s letters without being noticed. Once a policeman, always a policeman - and what he’d just witnessed intrigued him.  

[geoffreyseed]

New book, old memories

My new political thriller, The Boy From Zion Street, opens with a penniless mother trying to sell two gilt-framed prints to an art dealer thinking they are originals. But he is a police informer and the pictures were stolen during a suspected murder while Hitler’s planes bombed Manchester 15 years earlier.

This desperate woman’s mistake triggers a cycle of vengeance and death and causes her gifted young son to hide his past when, many years later, he becomes a judge.

The action cuts between the secrets of the judge’s chaotic early life and the run-up to the 2015 British general election as chance and circumstance collide and Westminster’s backstairs plotters trap him in a deadly political conspiracy.

“More than a thriller, more than a memoir...his best book so far” - Game of Thrones star, Patrick Malahide.

As with my two previous novels, I expect to be asked where the idea for this one came. The answer is... very close to home.

*

Childhood is a credit bank for authors. Riches lie in its vault of half-remembered family secrets, within the silence around a scandal or the anguish on a face full of tears.

But the grown-ups of then are the dead of now. They cannot be questioned by our older, wiser selves. We have neither context nor corroboration for whatever we believe to be true about events and people all those years ago.

Thus innocence skewed our reality and can continue to deceive. Recollections from those formative times remain vivid and powerful, not least in later life.  

Would-be scribblers are always advised to write about what they know. My first two novels featured a hack caught up in a search for identity - and in the darker aspects of journalism, espionage and allied trades.

Long before they were published, I had attempted to fictionalise my beginnings in the bombed-out streets of post-war Manchester. But I hadn’t the wit then to think it through properly or get the plot and structure right. The project was a failure and I genuinely forgot about it.

Early last year, I accidentally found the manuscript in a drawer. Only then did I see how it could be brought up to date, made to live and breathe and bleed.

Before me once more was the repertory company of characters in what had been my extended family - a wounded Great War uncle, an eccentric Lesbian aunt who gambled and her sister, still grieving for the child she lost in the 1930s.

These and other memorable relatives I called back from the grave or bid the wind return their ashes to me. It will not be long before I am as old as they were then. Their hurts and hardships are no longer unknown to me.

And what of my parents? Were they not central to who I was and might become? Indeed they were. But here it got difficult, too close to the bone for comfort.

I found it painful to audit what I knew of their strengths and many weaknesses. Therein lay the reasons why they were condemned to lives they could never escape but which, through chance and circumstance, I managed to do.

These familial truths - albeit they were mine alone - had to be confronted if the characters they would inspire were to engage the reader. So...  

My mother was loving, generous, trusting and unworldly, a woman without a trace of guile to whom misfortune came as clouds before rain. I mourn her to this day.

My father was emotionally absent, an angry, unfulfilled man full of hopeless dreams and schemes, unable to understand why the system would always win and he would always lose. We were never close and this I regret.

But now I had my actors. We could all go back to the sooty terraced house where I first lived, to its remembered smells of Woodbines and coal smoke and where the talk was still of Hitler’s bombers and the glow in the night sky as Manchester burned.

This - and more - a child absorbs. And all these years later, my spectral cast can perform in a political drama of my imagining, bearing burdens even greater than those which troubled their real lives. But in the end and after so much soul-searching, it is only a story, an “entertainment” as Graham Greene called his brilliantly observed  books.

The American reviewer who generously suggested I was in the line of successors to John le Carré was much mistaken. All we have in common are weak and terminally selfish fathers. But at least we got novels out of their frailties - le Carré with A Perfect Spy and me - far more modestly - with The Boy From Zion Street.

Whatever misgivings I had about my old man, I must accept that had he worked in an office, played golf and could afford a mortgage, I would have struggled to find anything remotely intriguing in so mundane an upbringing.

I hope with all sincerity that readers will recognise his character is ultimately treated with compassion. His fictional son wanted only to love him, however hard that might be. It is a matter of consuming sadness for the boy that such sentiments were never expressed by either side.

But there’s art aping life again and that’s the pity of it all.

[geoffreyseed]

Legal Lows

The decision not to now prosecute former Labour politician, Lord Greville Janner, for the alleged sexual abuse of children - as he could have been in 1991, 2002 and 2007 - has had two primary consequences.

First, it appeared to support a widely held suspicion that the establishment covered up such crimes as they allegedly did for MPs like the ex-Tory Home Secretary, Leon Brittan, the influential Liberal, Cyril Smith, and other high ranking figures.

Second, it ironically denied Lord Janner a fair trial. Serious and defamatory claims now being made against him in the media by ex-police officers and alleged victims, have not been tested in court and probably never will.  

Alison Saunders, the Director of Public Prosecutions, said grounds for a court case existed but she would not proceed with one as the 86 year old noble lord had dementia and couldn’t defend himself.

Her justification - viewed as convenient by sceptics - might have been challenged more tellingly on BBC Newsnight but the show’s amiable new anchor, Evan Davis, is not the assassin that Jeremy Paxman was.  

As with Brittan and Smith, police investigations into Janner’s alleged indecent assault and buggery of boys either got nowhere or were sabotaged. But many well-placed people must have known about what his family now strenuously deny on his behalf.

Two prominent journalists have emailed me about their contacts with Janner in the 1980s. Leading Mirror feature writer, Anton Antonowicz, recalls being with the paper’s then owner, Robert Maxwell, at a function in London when Janner approached them.

‘Maxwell was rudely dismissive of him,’ Antonowicz said. ‘I asked Maxwell why he so obviously snubbed him (when) they’d been fellow post-war Nazi interrogators and fellow Labour MPs. Maxwell didn’t shrug, he physically shivered and said “...he’s a disgusting man who’ll be found out.”’

Television producer, Virginia Hill, remembers working a shift at the Daily Mail and being told to phone Janner - a barrister - after he’d been named in a child abuse court case.

‘He was very aggressive (and) I received a torrent of abuse and threats to sue me and the Daily Mail,’ she said.

Hill formed the impression that Janner’s activities were an open secret and asks ‘...if I had that feeling, how could those at the top (in this country) not know or not want to know?’

Good question. Was there an establishment conspiracy to protect those sexually predatory pillars of society like politicians, civil servants, diplomats and churchmen considered “one of us” or does what happened betray an official state of mind back then which held that accusers were almost invariably troubled young people so therefore, not reliable witnesses?

Both statements could be true. Consider this: in Operations Orchid and Circus (see my earlier blogs), Brittan and Smith were police targets. Yet these investigations were closed down prematurely by order from on high and all relevant paperwork taken away.

Who in authority gave those instructions? For what purpose or political leverage? Could it be argued that removing police notebooks, statements and other material, perverted the course of justice and was thereby a criminal act in itself?

New figures from Operation Hydrant - yet another historical child sexual abuse enquiry - show police have identified 1,433 suspects. Of these, 216 are now dead and 261 are people of “public prominence.” This latter figures breaks down into 135 individuals from television, film and radio, 76 politicians, 43 in the music business and 7 from sport.

The great majority of offenders were not “one of us” so why would the establishment protect them? And what of the many disturbing child sex cases involving men of largely Asian heritage? It would seem they escaped prosecution because of misplaced politically correctness within timid local authorities concerned about upsetting minorities. Vulnerable children in their care were often seen as complicit in their own abuse and written off.

I offer this story combing both the state-of-the-official mind and the “one of us” theories; a detective I know investigated a provincial city mayor caught sexually abusing a boy of 15. The offender’s political status became an issue and prosecutors refused to proceed, saying the boy was a willing participant. The cop, a veteran of the Met’s murder and flying squads, was appalled at this Catch-22 objection and argued that the boy was only “willing” because the mayor had groomed him for years. He steadfastly refused to accept that some paedophiles were more equal than others and fought to get his case to court - and to see the mayor convicted.  

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

I have resumed a friendship with Dr C.P. Lee, a polymathic survivor of the 1970s who is the musician, author, actor, director, broadcaster, ventriloquist and hat collector who fronted Alberto Y Lost Trios Paranoias - a Manchester punk band whose act involved much vomit and violence.

After playing a riotous gig in Israel, their luggage was searched by a squad of fearsome airport security officers before they boarded a plane. One delved deep into a bag - and pulled out a handgun. Immediately, many of the other waiting “passengers” pointed weapons at the Albertos because they were really undercover cops.

At this, Alberto Les Prior lost the power of speech and began gibbering - more so when another gun and then a grenade, were found in his case. At some point, it was explained that these were just stage props. The security officer made a final rummage... and held up a severed hand. Without a hint of a smile, she said: ‘At least it’s not armed.’

Tragically, Les later died from leukaemia and is buried near the poet, Sylvia Plath, in Heptonstall, West Yorkshire. He left £500 for his wake which was attended by a large crowd of fans, admirers and musicians, including Elvis Costello and Ian Drury.

Meanwhile, C.P. Lee is currently rehearsing a new ensemble - Vocal Harem. Go see them if you can. If nothing else, it’ll be great fun... just as it was before we all dyed our hair grey.  

[geoffreyseed]

Death in the jungle

Even in a world not lacking in barbarity, last night’s execution of eight alleged heroin traffickers on an “island of death” in Indonesia was especially grotesque.

Dressing these men in white gowns for the after life, tethering them in a jungle clearing then fixing black crosses over their hearts so the firing squad knew where to aim, was intended to send a deterrent message to would-be smugglers.

But it won’t. However globally-covered this legalised killing spree was, drug gangs will continue to sucker in mules from amongst the poor, the weak and the foolish. As a multi-million pound cocaine importer once told me: “...we’re still in big profit if only one in five gets through.”

Derrick Gregory was a Brit who didn’t. I co-produced a Channel 4 investigation into the pathetic life and times of this drifter who’d never been out of the UK until lured into becoming a courier.

Not surprisingly, he got lifted on his first mission. Malaysian police arrested him en route to Los Angeles with heroin in his boots and clothing. He was sentenced to death but his story was taken up by Andrew Drummond, a savvy ex-Fleet Street reporter freelancing in Asia.

Gregory’s only hope of a reprieve turned on proving mental incapacity. I knew Dr Colin Brewer, a London psychiatrist who sat on a committee helping medically mistreated Soviet dissidents. He agreed to fly to Malaysia to assess Gregory professionally.

Drummond managed to spirit the condemned man - and some guards - out of prison to a hospital where we filmed him undergoing a CT scan. Sure enough, images clearly showed physical brain damage dating from infancy - enough to impair judgement and explain failures in later life.

This irrefutable evidence, Dr Brewer’s expert opinion and Gregory’s confession naming everyone he knew in the drugs syndicate, would have mitigated his position in any country with a humane penal system.

But other games were being played. Derrick Gregory was as expendable to the Malaysian authorities as he had been to the criminals who promised him big bucks. I doubt he was ever competent to realise this. But having interviewed him and seen the fear in his eyes, he was all too aware of being a dead man walking.

Given the deaths and misery heroin addiction causes, I suspect social media message boards will display little sympathy for convicted smugglers being executed. But rarely, if ever, do big players get caught - only their cheaply hired hands.  

In Malaysia, there were rumours of well-heeled people getting off drug charges carrying capital punishment. In Indonesia, it’s already been claimed that had corrupt officials been offered larger bribes, some of those now lying in white wooden coffins might still be alive.

Derrick Gregory was hanged in Pudu Prison, Kuala Lumpur in July 1989, clutching a photograph of Tara, the seven year old daughter he’d not seen since she was a baby.    

Drug mules have since continued to criss-cross the globe, completely undeterred. And they will, regardless of how often a firing squad captain shouts “Execute! Execute!” at the stroke of midnight on some God-forsaken prison island off the coast of Java.      

[geoffreyseed]

Be careful of what you wish for

A few days before Muammar Gaddafi was flushed from a storm drain and put to death by those he’d oppressed, I chanced on a Libyan exile in a truly bizarre setting - by the faux Italianate village in North Wales where they filmed the cult TV drama, The Prisoner.

He and his wife and child were exploring the tidal estuary below the make-believe world of Portmeirion from which - on television at least - there could be no escape from its sinister overlords.

I had a passing interest in Libya, having once met Gaddafi’s spy masters in Tunis and Vienna while researching how the Provisional IRA secretly took delivery of his fraternal gifts of explosives and munitions and thus improved their kill rate.

My companion in Portmeirion was overjoyed. Britain and other Western powers had just toppled Gaddafi’s hated regime. There could now be peace and prosperity. Exiled Libyans would return to their homeland, just as he intended doing.

Three years on and I thought about him and his hopes for a democratic future while watching footage of those Egyptian Coptics, kidnapped in Libya by Islamic fundamentalists who now control large areas there. They were being led across a beach in the orange jump suits of the condemned and would soon redden the Mediterranean with their blood in this, the Arab Winter.

Current evidence suggests that the West has sown only dragon’s teeth in Libya - as it did in Iraq. Citizens there and elsewhere who’d rather not return to the seventh century, be they Jew, Muslim or Christian, risk summary execution by those who see expressions of humanity, science and reason as proof of apostasy. Enlightenment appears not to be imminent. These dangerous days won’t get any easier.

In such a war of ideas, the burden of making what are often life and death political decisions falls to ministers like William Hague, the Foreign Secretary when Gaddafi was overthrown and we rid ourselves of the devil we knew. He talked about such onerous responsibilities this week at a meeting in Montgomeryshire where he’ll live after quitting Parliament in May.  

But high office holds other perils, too. At a banquet given in his honour by the mayor of Hiroshima, Hague and his officials sat crossed-legged and tucked into the exotic-looking dishes on a low table before them. It was all smiles, the click of chop sticks and the tinkle of tea cups for Hague spoke no Japanese and the Mayor hadn’t a word of English.

Soon, the plain-speaking grammar school boy from Yorkshire who’d wowed Mrs Thatcher and the Tory Party Conference as a precocious teenage activist, polished off the last colourful offering and was replete. Only then did an interpreter lean over and whisper: ‘Mr Hague, I think you should know that you’ve just eaten the flower display.’      

[geoffreyseed]

Did Brittan waive the rules?

By a spooky coincidence, I was being investigated by Special Branch at the same time as the veteran Labour politician, Barbara Castle, was privately accusing the then Home Secretary, Leon Brittan, of wanting to run it “...like his own personal Gestapo” (see my previous blog).

Over the top as her language might have been, she had reason to feel aggrieved - just as I had. We were both simply doing our jobs.

I’d been commissioned by Channel 4 to research the true extent of domestic spying by MI5 whose leg work is done by Special Branch. Many sources helped but an ex-detective double crossed me. He talked candidly at first but then reported my approach to Special Branch. Despite Provisional IRA terrorism and other pressing security threats, manpower and resources were assigned to investigate me under the Official Secrets Act.

Background inquiries were made about my finances and - according to a loyal and reliable police contact - I was put under surveillance and my phones bugged.

However, I eventually got irrefutable testimony about the State’s monitoring and phone tapping of supposedly dissident citizens in CND and various trades unions. This came from an unimpeachable witness, Cathy Massiter - the first MI5 insider to go public with such concerns and risk prison in the process.

But her interview with me breached the OSA. As the Independent Broadcasting Authority’s charter forbade it from knowingly transmitting material which broke the law, they banned the programme - a technical but gutless decision which attracted world-wide publicly.

To counter MI5’s malicious whispering campaign aimed at undermining Massiter’s credibility in Westminster and Fleet Street, I sought allies among various MPs. As I left one meeting in the Commons, who should come along a corridor towards me but MI5’s political master, the Home Secretary himself - Leon Brittan.

By then, I’d appeared on BBC TV news, foreign stations and in the Press. But I didn’t think for a moment Brittan knew who I was. Yet immediately we had eye contact, he couldn’t have veered away from me more dramatically than if I’d been infected with plague.

Massiter and I were subsequently interviewed by the police. Everything she’d revealed was accurate. But coming as it did after two recent OSA cases against Sarah Tisdall and Clive Ponting - both public relations disasters - the authorities had little appetite for a third. No charges were to be brought against Massiter, me or anyone else involved in making the programme, though a more flagrant breach of the Act would be hard to imagine.

My investigation, MI5’s Official Secrets, therefore aired on March 8 1985. If nothing else, the experience taught me that when there’s political embarrassment in the offing, the law isn’t blind and on occasions, can be applied selectively - much to the relief of those on high with something to lose.

*

Puzzling as it might seem, one old spook who found no difficulty in resisting my hack’s advances was the late Anthony Cavendish, an engaging ex-MI6 man who could have walked straight from the pages of le Carré. 

I’d have liked to hear more about his life and times, not least the background to this cautionary tale which he and others in his trade were fond of recounting.

In the bone-cracking chill of a deep Russian winter, a peasant struggles towards his shack through a gale howling in from the steppe. He sees a small game bird on the ground, nearly dead from cold.

He picks it up and warms it. The bird slowly recovers and the peasant wonders what to do next. Just then, a passing cow drops a great dollop by his feet. 

The peasant thinks that if he puts the bird in it, it’ll stay warm till morning then be able to fly away. So this is what he does before trudging home through the gathering darkness.

But a second peasant walks by and hears the bird chirping happily in the steaming mess. He seizes the bird, breaks its neck and begins to look forward to a delicious supper.

This tale has three morals: (1) do not believe that everybody who drops you in the shit is your enemy (2) do not believe that everybody who gets you out of the shit is your friend and (3) whenever you are in the shit, keep quiet about it.

[geoffreyseed]

The Blackened Name Club - part 2

No one has yet adduced definitive smoking gun evidence to show former Conservative Home Secretary, Leon Brittan, was a VIP paedophile whose alleged crimes were covered up by the Establishment.

However, having interviewed two alleged victims, Labour MP and former defence minister, Tom Watson - “nonce-finder general” (c) Daily Mail - doesn’t doubt their sincerity, is agnostic on Lord Brittan’s guilt or innocence and says it’s up to police to investigate further.

Parallel to the devastating - but so far unproven - child sex abuse claims laid against him since his death last week, is a tantalising question: how did two files about paedophiles in Westminster disappear from public view when he was in office?

The first was assembled by fellow Tory MP, the late Geoffrey Dickens, and handed to him in November 1983. Questioned by journalists before he died, Lord Brittan was at first uncertain about receiving it then remembered passing it to his officials but hearing nothing more. It can’t now be found.

Around that same time, veteran Labour politician, Barbara Castle - then Euro MP for North Manchester - was preparing a similar dossier said to name 16 MPs, some well known.

She leaked it to a local paper, the Bury Messenger. Editor Don Hale began seeking comments from those accused. Almost immediately, he got two visits. The first was from Cyril Smith, Liberal MP for nearby Rochdale and whose child-abusing ways were but rumours and set to remain hidden for years to come.

Smith claimed Mrs Castle had “…got her knickers in a twist” and wanted the story killed. He was decidedly unhappy when Mr Hale didn’t cave in to his pressure. So an even heavier mob arrived - officers from Special Branch. They threatened Mr Hale with prison and seized the Castle material “…in the interests of national security.”

Writing since, he claimed Mrs Castle didn’t trust Leon Brittan and that as Home Secretary, he wanted to use Special Branch like “…his own personal Gestapo.”

Nine months, ago, I blogged about meetings I had in 1996 with a group of disgruntled ex-London detectives who became known as the Blackened Name Club. Rightly or wrongly, their careers had been ruined by the Met’s anti-corruption squad. They were enraged by the perceived unfairness of their treatment when those above them allegedly turned a blind eye to criminal behaviour and thereby perverted the course of justice.

To illustrate this, they told of two police investigations into alleged child sex abuse in the 1980s - Operation Orchid and Operation Circus - both shut down and files removed by the Met’s senior command because they were getting too “…sensitive.”

Cyril Smith was one of their targets. Significant though Smith was back then, I found it hard to understand why he should warrant such extraordinary protection. Then I heard who their second target was - Leon Brittan, a man of brilliance and great political acumen and often spoken of as a potential future Prime Minister.

However, the fact he was being investigated by police isn’t proof of anything, not then or now and it won’t be unless and until a credible witness is found, sworn and corroborated.

But meanwhile, it’ll not just be conspiracy theorists who’ll see a link between the missing Dickens / Castle documents and the two deliberately aborted investigations alleged by the defrocked cops.

If there is a pattern, and if there is a reason for it, we need to know more for that will explain much. Otherwise, to say it all stinks would be too crude; stercoraceous would probably be more fitting.

[geoffreyseed]

The reel truth - honest

The second series of ITV’s acclaimed child murder drama, Broadchurch, has taken an embarrassing PR hit over sloppy factual errors - and lost 1.5 million viewers along the way. These include lawyers offended by what one called the “twaddle” of having the victim’s parents lobbying for who should prosecute in a trial, witnesses listening in court before giving their own evidence and a judge wearing the wrong wig. When getting checkable facts wrong provides no discernible story-telling benefit over getting them right, it’s hard to understand why TV executives alienate audiences this way. I know ex-police who won’t watch the BBC’s Silent Witness because even allowing for dramatic effect, they don’t buy into improbable scenes where cops seem subordinate to dashing forensic scientists who then solve the most complex of crimes. But should authenticity matter in the fictional world of television drama? Well, it did thirty odd years ago. My wife, Ann de Stratford, was the researcher on Brideshead Revisited, Granada’s sumptuous £11m adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s book. Her brief was simple - to assemble period background information for every phase of the story. This ranged from significant political and cultural events affecting café society between the world wars to the type of cigarettes Oxford undergraduates would smoke, which posters would’ve been on walls and even what North African car number plates looked like. Her research was done pre-Internet so carried out in libraries or face-to-face with experts. One such was a priest who explained how Catholic converts would’ve been accepted into the church, ensuring when this element of the Brideshead narrative was filmed, it would be entirely accurate. The end result of all this meticulously accumulated detail was stunning - a languid, beautifully shot and acted depiction of the death of innocence in a world which was dying itself. Brideshead was television drama at its peak and lauded as such in all the countries where it aired, winning countless prestigious awards and making a superstar of its lead, Jeremy Irons. But that was then, this is now. Times change, standards slip and that’s a shame. * My friend, veteran scriptwriter John Stevenson, is mourning the death of the Coronation Street actress, Anne Kirkbride. John once wrote Anne’s character, Deirdre, into a disastrous affair with a fraudster. Viewers were outraged when she was wrongly jailed for his crimes. Even Tony Blair - tongue in cheek - called on the Home Secretary to intervene in what was obviously a terrible miscarriage of justice. “Anne couldn’t stop laughing,” John said. “It tickled her that the Prime Minister should concern himself with a fictional character in an imaginary prison for a crime that wasn’t committed in a place that doesn’t exist.” She jokingly asked if Blair knew it was only acting. “I told her he certainly did and that if he’d gone to RADA, with all his performing talents he would’ve won every gold medal going.” In another happy memory of Anne’s infectious sense of fun, Granada’s legendary show-biz producer, Johnnie Hamp, tells Facebook friends how she and fellow-Street star, Julie Goodyear, would serenade him with “Baby Love” and always beg to be booked as the Corrie Sisters on his hit Wheeltappers show. That would’ve been quite a gig. Johnnie wrote for many when he said: “Rest in peace, darling girl.”

[geoffreyseed]

Farewell to a friend

This is my obituary of my friend, Peter Bird, which appeared in edited form in The Times today. Peter and his late wife, Joan, were the inspirations for the characters, Francis and Bea, in my first novel, A Place of Strangers. Peter was also the dearest man I've ever met. * Group Captain Peter Drury Bird, who has died aged 94, was a former British defence attaché and one of the last surviving Lancaster pilots who bombed Nazi-occupied Europe. He flew some 2,700 operational and training hours and once famously attacked the Third Reich on his own. Bird, an effortlessly charming David Niven look-alike, was fond of classical music. Having taken off on a night raid, his crew tuned into a continental radio station for a concert to relieve the tedium before the ferocity of combat ahead. But as Bird recounted: “I noticed something a bit unexpected over the target. We were on our own... no British bombers, no German fighters.” Something was dangerously wrong. He released his bombs and escaped before he could be trapped like a moth in the searchlights and shot down. It would transpire that Bird and his comrades were enjoying orchestral music when the return to base signal was sent. “The Germans would’ve intercepted it so we weren’t expected and just about got away with it.” Bomber Command lost some 55,000 personnel. Crews had more chance of dying than infantrymen on the Western Front. Bird faced such odds by “...pretending to be brave, for the sake of my men.” He was born in Peterborough and joined the RAF reserve in 1937. He was a qualified pilot - and newly married - when war broke out. But instead of fighting in the Battle of Britain as he hoped, he was appointed an instructor to meet Britain’s desperate need for pilots. His wife, Joan - as beautiful as she was capricious - was one of three daughters of Gabriel Coury, a Liverpool cotton broker who won the Victoria Cross in World War 1. Despite Peter Bird’s impressively brave record, he didn’t receive the Distinguished Flying Cross. It’s unclear if he was black-balled in the post-war controversy over Bomber Command’s allegedly needless destruction of some German cities or because of a fight he had at RAF Spilsby when in charge of night operations early in 1945. By then, the Luftwaffe were unable to mount raids against Britain. Air strips could therefore keep lights on for damaged aircraft to land more safely. Realising this, German fighter bombers followed unseen behind planes returning to east coast bases and attacked. An officer more senior than Bird - one despised for his reluctance to fly - rushed into the control tower in a panic and turned off the landing lights. Bird, still only 24, knew this could cause great loss of life among the crews he led in 44 (Rhodesia) Squadron. He punched the older man to the floor and switched the lights back on. Bird could have been court martialled but wasn’t. It always rankled with him that he might have been the victim of revenge served spitefully cold. After the war, he flew jets like the Meteor, Canberra and Vampire, took part in the Berlin airlift, was appointed Bomber Command’s chief accident investigator and had roles at the Air Ministry, the RAF Staff College and Bomber Command HQ. Bird became Britain’s defence attaché in Scandinavia in 1961, helping to organise periodic over-flights of Soviet air space from northern Norway to test Moscow’s reaction times. These were Cold War cat-and-mouse days, each side probing for the other’s weaknesses. A joyful Norwegian intelligence officer rang Bird to say they’d trapped a “red” submarine in a fjord near one of Oslo’s most secret naval installations. Equally delighted, Bird transmitted a coded message to London and was ordered to await the arrival of a senior UK naval figure. “I said ‘wonderful news about the Soviet sub, Sir’ only for him to say, ‘Not really... it’s one of ours.’” It could have become a damaging diplomatic incident between allies but the affable Bird helped to calm the waters. For him, it was all part of the great game. This continued following his transfer to Israel after the Six Day War in 1967. In the pomp of his ceremonial uniform and with the glamorous Joan at his side, they were a cinematically captivating pair. But Joan could be engagingly scatty. Sitting by future president Chaim Herzog at a dinner, she heard his Irish accent and asked if he was enjoying his stay in Israel. “I certainly am,” said Herzog, smiling. “Especially now they’ve put me in charge of the Israel Defence Forces.’ Bird’s unstuffy style endeared him to Israel’s military and political elite. Moshe Dayan, David Ben Gurion and Ezer Weizman all held him in high regard. A less likely friendship developed between Bird and Rolf Friedemann Pauls, Germany’s first ambassador to Israel. These former enemies - Pauls was ADC to Rommel - knew reconciliation was the only way forward, though it incensed many Israelis to have an ex-Nazi accredited to their country. However, Bird admired Pauls for having been party to the plot to assassinate Hitler, only escaping arrest and execution thanks to the silence of others. Bird’s standing in Tel Aviv led to an invitation - before the Americans - to make an intelligence assessment of a state-of-the-art Soviet Mig 21. It’d been flown to Israel by a Syrian defector, courted by Mossad agents who then airlifted his entire extended family from a desert location to join him. That was audacious enough but the Mig was subsequently repainted in Egyptian Airforce colours to allow an Arabic-speaking Israeli pilot to land at key Egyptian bases and spy on their secrets in comparative safety. In retirement, Bird and his wife - who died three years ago - ran a camp in Surrey for displaced Ugandan Asians. He also worked for the Foreign Office, accompanying visiting heads of state like George Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev. At Bird’s emotional funeral, it was said that a man was a success who’d lived well, laughed often and loved much. As people filed out, a video showed him some months before he died, confined to a chair but doing arm and leg exercises in a “dance” to the unlikely music of Daft Punk. Those who’d wept at his passing could at least leave the ceremony smiling. He is survived by daughters, Susie Drori and Stephenie Noble and son, Simon Drury Bird. Group Captain Peter Drury Bird, born October 9 1920, died October 22 2014

[geoffreyseed]

Sue, grabbit and - oops

An old calumny about lawyers is that it’s the 99% who give the other 1% a bad name. As someone with good friends in that business, I know this isn’t true. But accusations in the Commons that two legal firms cost British taxpayers £31m on a needless inquiry into their Iraqi clients’ unfounded allegations of British soldiers torturing and murdering detainees, will do little for the profession’s image. Leigh Day & Co of London and Public Interest Lawyers of Birmingham, made millions in legal aid by mounting actions condemned by Defence Secretary, Michael Fallon, as shameful attempts to use the legal system to falsely impugn British armed forces. A judge-led inquiry into what happened after a battle in Iraq in 2004 found the most serious allegations put forward by these firms to be “totally without foundation.” They are now being investigated by their professional oversight body amid calls for them to face criminal charges. Leigh Day & Co and PIL deny any wrong-doing. I once had dealings with Leigh Day regarding claims that British soldiers raped some women while training in Africa. Based on the (limited) evidence available to me, I had doubts about the reliability of some witnesses and could not understand why the matter was being taken forward. But then, I was a hack, not a legally-aided lawyer. In other, slightly older, news... * Joy abounded when Hugh Grant and a film crew descended on the north Powys village of Llanrhaeadr-ym-Mochnant to shoot The Englishman Who Went Up A Hill But Came Down A Mountain. Children were hired as extras, businesses did well and the area became famous for more than just being near to where former daytime TV presenter, Mavis Nicholson, lived. All this excitement came around the time when regional money was being offered to modernise some local houses. This generosity was most welcome and thereafter, those who benefited often referred to their Huge Grants. Coincidentally, another famous film, TV and West End actor, Edwin Richfield (Interpol Calling, The Avengers, Bergerac and much else), ran a highly regarded theatre club for children in Llanrhaeadr with his wife, Gaynor. I was one of Edwin’s many friends and when he died, was asked to write his obituary for The Stage and the Independent. I rang people who’d worked with him and spoke to a BBC radio producer. “Terrific performer,” he said. “But I had a problem with dear old Edwin.” In radio dramas, members of the cast double up to play crowd scenes. So what was the producer’s difficulty with Edwin over this? “Well, irrespective of the production, its historical period or geographical setting, Edwin always used the same voice in any crowd scene.” And what voice was that? “That of a Kashmiri carpet seller,” the producer said. “But he was still a great actor.” * Continuing this insufferable name-dropping, I once used the downstairs loo in John le Carré’s London house. I should make it clear that I hadn’t just come in off the street and said “Hello, John. Would you mind if I gave the facilities the once-over?” He was helping me on a spook-related project and we’d had lunch. But to return to the loo; framed on the wall was a letter from his agent saying how much he was getting as an advance for his brilliant 1969 book, A Small Town In Germany. It was a very handsome £145. * With more revelations about officially covered up child-abuse cases - and even murders - allegedly involving political and establishment figures, my second book in a planned spy trilogy, The Convenience of Lies, starts to look less fictional by the day.

[geoffreyseed]

Supping with devils - now for the bill

A fifth column of rogue Special Branch cops in the Irish Republic colluded with the Provisional IRA’s murderous terror campaign - and so did some mainstream politicians and eminent figures in journalism and commerce. They provided safe houses for on-the-run terrorists, moved weapons and money and tipped off key PIRA leaders before they were to be arrested. Who says this? A man who should know - Kieran Conway, PIRA’s director of intelligence in the mid-1970s. He’s now a lawyer and author of a book about how he went from a privileged, upper middle class home to rioting in Belfast, intelligence gathering and organising bank raids in London. Some 140 people were killed in operations during Conway’s period in charge, including 21 civilians in the Birmingham pub bombing. PIRA knew the six Irishmen convicted of this crime were innocent yet let them suffer in prison for some greater, strategic purpose. His damning admission about some of Dublin’s establishment aiding and abetting PIRA confirm what Unionists in Northern Ireland always suspected. But will the Irish Government have the stomach to open up this cesspit as the British did in 1989? That was when Loyalist terrorists wanted to swing a wrecking ball at the ongoing London-Dublin peace talks. They deliberately revealed that sympathisers in the British security forces were secretly leaking inside information so the “right” republicans could be killed rather than innocent Catholics. For Westminster, this was a highly sensitive issue and quickly begat the John Stevens enquiry. He and fellow detectives from Cambridgeshire and others from Hampshire and the Met were tasked to find out how far the rot of State collusion in terrorism had set in. His team discovered that Brian Nelson, the Ulster Defence Association’s head of intelligence, was actually a pivotally important British army agent. His intelligence files were updated by handlers then passed to sundry psychopaths whose killings were the subject of three Panorama investigations I produced and which John Ware fronted. Stevens, later appointed Met Commissioner and now in the House of Lords, made serious enemies. His Northern Ireland headquarters were burnt down by persons unknown but clearly by ones who’d every reason to destroy the case he was assembling. His enquiry lasted years, cost untold millions and put people in court. But Stevens managed to direct a rare evidential light into the darker, deniable corners of this shoot-to-kill conflict - and our society is healthier for it. Many will now believe that Dublin’s stables would benefit from a similar cleansing less the stink of their collusion poisons the air north of the border any longer. “Southside Provisional: From Freedom Fighter to the Four Courts” by Kieran Conway, is published by Orpen Press. * A lawyer friend who lives in a largely Jewish neighbourhood in north Manchester reacted to my last blog about snorrers - the slick-talking, professional beggars who claim alms from fellow Jews almost as a right. One came to his house and was told: “I don’t give on the doorstep.” To this, the snorrer said: “That’s OK, I’ll come inside.” * Still in Manchester - and on the delicate subject of bias in the media - the apocryphal story is told of a chief sub editor on the Pink ‘Un, the now defunct Saturday football results paper. He was a lifelong City fan and loathed United. On this particular day, United were beaten 3-0 but City lost 5-1. No-one was surprised at the front page headline: “United thrashed, City in six goal thriller.”

[geoffreyseed]

Nil desperandum

November’s weather is as depressing as the news. So instead of the usual offerings about the no-goodniks who’ve taken to inhabiting this space, here’s something completely different - and a touch lighter - for it is written "...what is journalism if not to bring joy into the lives of others." * A newspaper in Dorset reported how a Mrs Rogers delighted a local flower-arranging group with a talk about the German prisoner of war assigned to tend her garden. He performed his duties diligently and Mrs Rogers was most impressed. “We all thought him a delightful young man,” she said. “But in January 1946 after he was repatriated, the crocuses he’d planted came up spelling the words ‘Heil Hitler’.” * Another south coast paper revealed how a girl who’d been swept out to sea on a giant inflatable lobster was rescued by a man on some giant inflatable false teeth. “There’s far too much of this sort of thing happening these days,” a Coast Guard spokesman said. * Comedian Tommy Cooper told of an Eskimo who got chilly paddling between two ice floes so lit a fire. He sank, of course, thus proving you can’t have your kayak and heat it. * Leo Rosten, brilliant chronicler of Jewish humour, folklore and Yiddish-isms, explains that a “shnorrer” was a beggar - but no fawning, whining mendicant he. A shnorrer considered himself a craftsman, a quick-witted professional who didn’t so much ask for alms but claim them from fellow Jews, culturally obliged to help the poor. Rosten recounts how a shnorrer came to one door. “I haven’t a penny in the house,” said the woman who answered. “Come back tomorrow.” The shnorrer considered her offer with a frown then said: “Lady, don’t let this happen again. I’ve lost a fortune extending credit.” * I once saw a wedding form in a local newspaper office where a bride-to-be set down details of her forthcoming marriage, including who would wear what. After describing the bridesmaids’ dresses, she said they would also be carrying bouquets of Friesians. * Interviewing the late Ray Powell, an old style South Wales Labour MP, for a Channel 4 investigation into MI5’s snooping on political dissidents, I asked who he thought had been tapping phones during the miners’ strike. “No doubt about it,” he said. “It’s that MFI.” We stopped the camera and I suggested that a leading furniture retailer was probably blameless in this matter. Ray nodded in total agreement. I asked the question a second time. “I’m certain of it,” he said. “It’s got to be that MFI.” Some unprofessional giggling could be heard from the crew as I tried to clear MFI’s good name once more but without putting words into the MP’s mouth. Take three came and went and still the accusing finger of guilt pointed down the High Street. At some stage, Ray got it right. But by then, we’d lost the will to live and nothing of his insightful contribution made the final edit. However, having been investigated under the Official Secrets Act three times, I have felt it wiser never set foot in MFI.

[geoffreyseed]

It's a jungle out there...

Edwina Currie, one-time squeeze of former Prime Minister, Sir John Major and currently starring in ITV’s jungle reality show, I’m A Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here, married a detective I knew well. John Jones - a veteran of a 100+ murder investigations - let me film a raid on a crack cocaine dealer’s house for Panorama. It was a potentially dangerous job so he drafted in support from the Met’s tactical firearms unit, SO19. Jones was a detective superintendent but known by all as “JJ”. He hadn’t carried a gun himself since parting the hair of a fleeing suspect during a Flying Squad operation. That life-or-death responsibility was something he never wanted to bear again. The unsmiling men in black who are trained for it can be a mite media-averse. Those who pitched up to JJ's pre-dawn briefing, weapons zipped into lumpy holdalls, saw cameraman, Mike Spooner, and me - and weren’t happy. “What the f*** are these f****** doing here?” one of them demanded to know. The tension in that drab south London police station was real and understandable. Any of these men could have been required to kill another human being in the coming hour... or get killed in the process. Our presence - and safety - were unwanted complications. JJ thought otherwise. And he was the boss. The target’s house was described - its location, layout, bedrooms, escape routes front and rear. A plan of attack emerged. We set off through the silent morning in a convoy of unmarked cars. An ambulance followed close behind but who might be lying in it later was anyone’s guess. The SO19 men ordered us to keep back as they moved like shadows under the orange glow of the street lighting. Suddenly, all was noise and action - a front door splintering, shouts of “armed police!” and a half-naked man being dragged into the road face down and handcuffed. So the cops had their result and we had our pictures. It was time for breakfast. For JJ, that meant coffee and opening yet another packet of fags. It was his 60-a-day, tobacco-burred voice which Edwina fell for after interviewing him on the phone for her radio show. Her first husband, an accountant, hated all the public attention which Edwina’s fame as a controversial politician and media personality inevitably attracted. But it didn’t spook JJ. “I’ve arrested far more important people than you,” he told her. It was Edwina who urged me to start writing fiction after an evening when the three of us shared stories about hacks, cops and the wickedness of the world. Few would doubt Edwina prefers backing into the limelight, not out of it. That makes her decision to endure the deprivations - and humiliations - of I’m A Celebrity in line with her appearances on other reality shows like Hell’s Kitchen and Strictly Come Dancing. No such defence is available to one of her fellow-contestants, Michael Buerk. He is a former Daily Mail colleague of mine and a distinguished - if increasingly pompous - ex-BBC foreign correspondent (described by his home-town paper, the Birmingham Mail, as the “Solihull news reader”) who’s derided such populist programmes in the past. Why has he changed his mind so dramatically? Maybe this is a question only Mrs Merton could ask were she ever a panellist on Buerk’s rigourously high-brow Radio 4 programme, the Moral Maze. Just imagine it “...well, Michael, we know you are incapable of hypocrisy and humbug so what attracted you to ITV’s offer of £150,000 if you went into the jungle for a few days, ate some cane toad droppings and generally made an arse of yourself?”

[geoffreyseed]

MPs telling it like it isn't - shock

It’s become fashionable to disparage politicians but the utterances of a few simply feed our distrust. Those of Norman Baker, newly resigned Home Office minister, are a depressing example.

His Lib Dem party website praises Baker’s skill at “…uncovering uncomfortable facts.” But that word - facts - needs treating with caution.

While he has a laudable reputation as one of Parliament’s awkward squad, he also subscribes to conspiracy theories. Remarkably, he suggests that two prominent people could have been murdered by the British State following positions they took over the UK’s controversial invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Yet during his time at the Home Office, which oversees MI5 and the police, Baker appears not to have used this enviable access to establish the truth - or otherwise - of these sensational allegations.

In Baker’s book about the death of Dr David Kelly, the government scientist who privately told BBC journalist, Andrew Gilligan, that the intelligence dossier on Iraq’s (non-existent) weapons of mass destruction had been “sexed up” to justify invading, he pursues his belief that some arm of the British security services probably killed him.

Dr Kelly was a man of courage and integrity with expert knowledge about WMD. He’d admittedly gone off piste with Gilligan to whisper truth to power - power which, in the almost Papally infallible hands of Prime Minister Tony Blair and his hectoring bully of a spin doctor, Alastair Campbell, many felt was being wielded with scant regard to public opinion or international law.

Soon after being named and professionally shamed as an unauthorised media source and ferociously questioned by a Parliamentary committee, Dr Kelly was found near his home in Oxfordshire with wounds to his left wrist.

Baker doesn’t accept this was the desperate suicide of an honourable man whose reputation had been traduced. He invites us to believe Dr Kelly co-operated with his murderers by swallowing 29 painkillers without protest then lay on the ground and made no attempt to defend himself when they slashed his wrist with a knife they’d conveniently stolen from his house earlier.

One of Dr Kelly’s friends was Tom Mangold, the BBC’s veteran investigative reporter from whom I learned much during my time at Panorama. If there had been the slightest hint of Dr Kelly’s tragic death being anything other than self-inflicted, it’d be safe to bet the farm that Mangold would not have rested till he’d unearthed the evidence.

With this in mind, how should we view Baker’s second inference of murder most foul? This concerns the death of Robin Cook, the Labour government’s highly regarded Foreign Secretary who defied Blair and resigned over the Iraq war.

Baker was quoted in his local paper in Lewes saying Cook was “…on Ministry of Defence land, I believe, when he died and certainly I have doubts over what happened.” In other words, Baker doesn’t buy the medical view that Cook died from a heart attack while out walking.

Having investigated secret de facto conspiracies to murder by the British army in Northern Ireland, I am fully aware of the sensitivities and dangers of planning such crimes in a liberal democracy.

Whoever has knowledge of these operations, signs them off, carries them out - each risks something going dreadfully wrong… a leak, an incriminating paper trail, someone wanting out of the loop and spilling the bloody beans. The potential consequences to all concerned are catastrophic, be they politician or assassin.

Only the skewed judgements of conspiracy theorists could see the pointless silence of Dr Kelly and Robin Cook providing sufficient motive to take this appalling gamble. But Norman Baker isn’t the only MP to board the wrong train and end up in Barking.

I was once commissioned to write a treatment for TV about the (then) unsolved murder of Hilda Murrell, an anti nuclear campaigner from Shropshire and aunt of a naval officer who allegedly had sensitive information on Britain’s sinking of the Argentine cruiser, General Belgrano, during the Falklands war.

Tam Dalyell, maverick Labour MP and rent-a-quote on the entire Belgrano-Murrell affair, told me he’d an official source who knew beyond doubt that agents of the State had killed Miss Murrell. I couldn’t meet this “Deep Throat” and would have to take Dalyell’s word on trust.

I didn’t, of course, because everything I researched pointed to a robbery gone wrong. This ultimately proved to be the case. All that previous coverage to the contrary in newspapers, books and on TV was debunked for what it was - conspiratorial piffle.

Tam Dalyell was Father of the House of Commons till he quit politics in 2005. He likes to compare himself to Cassandra, the prophet cursed by Apollo so that no-one believed her predictions. But MPs have a responsibility to speak the truth. Until they have established it, difficult though I know that process can be, they should keep quiet.

Some matters, like murder and suicide, are too serious for political kite-flying.

[geoffreyseed]

Life, death and the bits in between

The Fates have a way of messing with our emotions. Four days after joyously holding our first grandchild, her hands still warm from the womb, I had to deliver the eulogy at the funeral of an irreplaceable friend and war hero, Peter Bird.

His death at 94 was no less anticipated than the birth of Nico Mae to our daughter, Harriet. Yet the conjunction of these events was profoundly affecting and were reminders - if any were needed - of our seven ages and the brevity of existence itself.

Peter was one of the last surviving Lancaster bomber pilots of WW2 and had gambled his life on each of the 44 missions he flew over enemy territory. I’ve seen film footage taken from the belly of his plane during an attack on factories in Lower Saxony.

It shows an almost biblical vision of hell - a town levelled to rubble by high explosives and incendiaries, tarmac bubbling like molten larva through the streets below. And somewhere in this terrifying ruination will have been people burning to death. Such was the retributive whirlwind the Nazis sowed.

I once asked Peter how he’d coped with the very real threat of his own violent death on such nights in which some 60,000 other young men in Bomber Command had perished.

“By pretending to be brave,” he said. “I had to do that for the sake of my crew.”

But Peter’s chutzpah was real enough, not least on one mission which entered Bomber Command folklore. As group captain, he’d led a great wedge of bombers heading for northern Germany from a base in Lincolnshire.

“We crossed the North Sea and were soon over the target,” Peter said. “That’s when I noticed something a bit unusual… we were completely alone.”

He peered into the night sky but could see none of the bombers which had been behind him on take-off. And he couldn’t see any German fighters, either. So what did he do?

“Bombed the buggers, of course. Then scarpered pretty quick.”

As he did, the Luftwaffe sent up a Messerschmitt to try and shoot down the men who’d waged war against the might of Third Reich on their own. But Peter got them home safely and to the inevitable inquest into what’d gone wrong.

“The truth was that my crew and I were classical music fans,” he said. “As soon as we were over the North Sea, we tuned into Radio Leipzig or some such station for a concert. But the recall signal must have come while we were listening. All the other crews heard the recall and turned back and the Germans would’ve picked it up, too. That’s why we weren’t expected and just about got away with it.”

I cherish a photograph Peter gave me of himself with a regulation RAF ‘tash and looking like David Niven, sitting beneath a massive Lancaster with some 150 other airmen from 44 (Rhodesia) Squadron at RAF Spilsby a year before the war ended.

Afterwards, Peter became a test pilot flying jets. He was subsequently assigned to the Ministry of Defence then appointed military attaché in Scandinavia and involved in operations against the Soviets during the chilliest days of the Cold War before being posted to the Middle East in a similar role.

Peter remains the most generous, self-effacing and simply fascinating man I’ve ever had the privilege of knowing. It was an honour to be his friend. He readily let me plunder his intriguing life story for a character in my first novel, A Place of Strangers, and was ever patient and encouraging during my research.

In our very last conversation, Peter wanted to be assured about Harriet's well being and that of the baby she was about to have. In years to come, I shall tell Nico Mae about a man she never met, of the hero he was and the love he bequeathed to her.

In my eulogy, I quoted these abridged lines from Abba Kovner, the great Jewish poet who also fought the Nazis but on a different front.

to say good-bye to you even in one word whispered that you were no burden to us all your brothers our strength did not give out only the earth below gave out.