CHAPTER 11

The Dirty Digger storms Fleet Street

Until 1968, the name Rupert was associated by much of Britain with a talking bear in a Daily Express comic strip. As a child, I hated comics featuring anthropomorphic characters, and Rupert to me became a weird and unlikeable name. Rupert Bear was a mild, eager-to-please fellow, nothing like the real-life version who was about to descend on Britain. But the bear’s friends did appear to foretell some details of the life ahead for his namesake — there was Tigerlily, the mischievous Chinese girl, and the Fox boys, who were always causing trouble.

Rupert Murdoch was a stranger to Fleet Street. When word spread that I knew him, senior editors started paying attention to me. I played up my acquaintance to keep their interest, but he had only addressed me by name once or twice.

When Rupert’s father, Sir Keith, died in 1952, a long and admiring obituary in The Times — headlined ‘Northcliffe of Australia’ — merely mentioned that among those surviving him was a son. Sir Keith had built a large Australian newspaper group, but in the complicated unwinding of his interests, Rupert was left to manage only a remnant of it.

It was not until May 1960 that Britain got a sniff of Rupert’s ambitions. A seven-line brief in The Times — ‘Sydney Newspapers Change Hands’ — reported that ‘Mr K. R. [Rupert] Murdoch … has entered the daily newspaper field in Sydney by buying a controlling interest’ in the city’s Daily Mirror and Sunday Mirror. Newspaper accounts of Rupert would become less benign over the years.

Perhaps the first recorded British insult thrown at him was in January 1969 after he outwitted Robert Maxwell, the millionaire Labour MP, in a bitter battle to gain control of the News of the World. ‘Mr Maxwell called me a moth-eaten kangaroo,’ Rupert said at the time, with the wide, gap-toothed grin we all knew when he was young, before the cosmetic dentistry.

The News of the World was Rupert’s first foothold in Britain. The Carr family had controlled it since 1891, but the chairman in the 1960s, Sir William Carr, did not have a reputation as an attentive manager. The family owned a third of the shares and lived well off the proceeds of a flourishing newspaper.

For a while, Carr was an admirer of Rupert. He saw him as the white knight to keep Robert Maxwell at bay. Maxwell’s dodgy business practices were attracting attention even then, 22 years before he pillaged the pension fund of the Mirror Group and toppled mysteriously off his yacht into the Atlantic Ocean.

In persuading News of the World shareholders to support Rupert’s bid, Carr talked warmly of his new Australian friend: ‘You’ll not only like him, but he’ll prove to you he has much to offer us.’ When the deal was done, Carr remained chairman of the company, and Rupert became managing director. He immediately swept through the company, driving for change. Within six months, Carr had resigned and Rupert was in the chair. He was 38.

Rupert moved into his London headquarters at the News of the World offices in Bouverie Street. With a printing plant in the heart of London that operated only one day a week, he was now sitting on a valuable, under-used asset. He started looking for another newspaper. A mile away in Covent Garden, a daily was dying.

The experiment to position The Sun as a broadsheet for the up-and-coming ‘middle-class’ had failed. It was selling around 800,000 and sinking fast. Its owners, the International Publishing Corporation, had decided they were fighting a lost cause. The company chairman was the legendary tabloid editor, Hugh Cudlipp, whose books I had read and re-read as a boy. He agreed to sell The Sun to Rupert.

Before the deal was closed, Robert Maxwell emerged again to fight Rupert. He tried wooing journalists from the paper by inviting us for drinks and snacks to hear what a great owner he would be. He didn’t make a good impression — we had no control in the matter anyway — and Rupert prevailed once more.

After the sale was complete in November 1969 — Rupert paid £800,000 — Cudlipp was dismissive: ‘I wish him well in his bold venture. If he succeeds, as well he may, I will be the first to applaud.’ There is no record of Cudlipp’s applause nine years later when The Sun became Britain’s number one newspaper. His beloved Daily Mirror was selling around 5 million at the time of the sale, and Cudlipp had thought it invincible.

Rupert adapted quickly to the role of a Fleet Street mogul, cruising London in a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce. But he never slipped into some of his competitors’ easy-going ways. Not many proprietors could be spotted stalking the streets, rearranging newsstands to give their newspapers the best display.

Murdoch’s new edition of The Sun copied the Mirror unashamedly, right down to adopting the paper’s old front-page battle cry to the workers — ‘Forward with the People’ — and spoofing the great Mirror columnist Cassandra by running a daily column that was displayed in exactly the same style and called ‘Son of Cassandra’. Its author was Robert Connor, son of the real Cassandra, William Connor.

But no British newspaper had been so graphic, in words or pictures, on the subject of sex. The Times gave the new arrival a frowning review in an editorial on 18 November, the day after the tabloid’s debut: ‘The formula is a simple one … sex, sport and sensation,’ it said.

This is an old way to create a new newspaper. Sex and sensation … were a normal plot for Daniel Defoe, the first begetter of almost every striking invention in British journalism. Sport as an aid to circulation came in with the Victorians.

It will be interesting to see whether the new Sun is a commercial success. It very well could be. Mr Murdoch has not invented sex but he does show a remarkable enthusiasm for its benefits to circulation, such as a tired old Fleet Street has not seen in recent years.

—

While Rupert was plotting to buy The Sun in 1969, I was getting to understand British tabloids. I worked five days a week for the broadsheet version of The Sun, but earned extra working Saturday shifts on Sunday newspapers.

My induction into the raw culture of the Fleet Street popular press came on the night of Saturday 9 August 1969, while working a shift on the News of the World. The News of the World was a broadsheet then, but had the style of today’s redtop tabloids.

Charlie Markus was the squat, bullet-headed news editor. He bellowed a lot, and no one argued with him except, occasionally, his deputy, Robert Warren, whose courtly, soft-spoken manner seemed misplaced in the hectic newsroom.

That night, a two-line news agency snap dropped on Markus’ corner desk in the room he shared with his reporters. Sharon Tate, the beautiful 26-year-old wife of the film director Roman Polanski, had been found murdered in her Bel Air home. It was a good story for the newspaper, given added spice by the fact Polanski was famous for dark horror films such as Rosemary’s Baby.

But as more details emerged, a fever gripped the News of the World. Four others had also been killed: two bodies were on the lawn outside; one was in a car; and another in the house. A white nylon rope was tied around Tate’s neck, looped over a ceiling beam, and attached to another victim with a hood over his head. Tate had been eight months pregnant. She was wearing a bra and knickers. Her front door was daubed with blood. An American flag was mysteriously draped over a couch in the living room.

Markus was in such a state of excitement I thought he might levitate. For him, this story had it all. Beauty, riches, stardom, Hollywood, and an abundance of hideous detail. All this, before it became known the killers were members of Charles Manson’s helter-skelter cult.

If an IBM mainframe computer of the day had been asked to assemble the entire history of homicide and conjure up the ultimate late-breaking story for the News of the World, this would have been it. Long-distance calls were made to Los Angeles, appointing every available freelancer to the job. Every known acquaintance of Roman Polanski and his murdered wife — colleagues, neighbours, rivals, old lovers — were sought for comment. Library clippings were scoured for similarities with Polanski’s grisly films. I was instructed to prepare a list of the twentieth century’s foulest mass murders.

As well as urgency that night, there was a mood of muted appreciation. The News of the World wasn’t enjoying what had happened; there was no ghoulish delight. With the exception of Markus’ near delirium, there was mostly a cold and practical understanding of the task. For their readers, it was a shocking story, and irresistible reading; this was the kind of event they expected their Sunday newspaper to cover in every detail. For journalists doing their jobs, serving their customers, this reduced an awful crime to a commodity, to be packaged and delivered as perfectly as possible.

Saturday shifts on other newspapers gave me first-hand lessons in the differing personalities of Fleet Street, but nothing compared with the atmosphere at the News of the World when it was rising to the occasion of a celebrity mass-murder. I did regular work at The Sunday Telegraph. No newspaper was less like the News of the World, but its reporters were not sombre; they would take me to a pub in Ludgate Circus, where we peered over our pints at women dancing topless.

Editors at the Telegraph liked copy to be straight, just as I had written it at British United Press. Stories ran longer, but we were encouraged to keep adjectives to a minimum. We were permitted to write long first paragraphs, with multiple commas, even occasional semicolons — intros that would have guaranteed a blast from Charlie Markus.

Broadsheet sub-editors believed it was their duty only to trim and tidy a reporter’s work while inspecting it for errors. Most of the time, original work appeared on the page with few changes. The subs’ desks of popular newspapers were mincing machines, and teams of editors would routinely re-write a reporter’s copy beyond recognition. It was infuriating how much better it often was when they’d finished.

When Rupert took over The Sun, I did not stay. I wanted to take Mary, my new wife, to Australia to meet my family and friends, and to show her the country. I was offered a job or a payoff, and the redundancy was enough for a down payment on a house. I was 24 and Mary 23, and we decided to quit our jobs and wander. I took the money, put it in the bank, and we sailed away.

I met Mary in September 1966, one Saturday night at the flat of an Australian dentist in Earl’s Court. I didn’t know the dentist and hadn’t been invited to the party. A few of us heard about it in a local pub and turned up at the door armed with Party Fours, which were usually enough to gain entry to a regular Australian Earl’s Court party. These were four-pint cans of beer that were ubiquitous in the 1960s, but inexplicably went out of fashion sometime in the 1980s.

We went to the party after being thrown out of the pub. I had emptied a pint of beer over the head of an annoying friend, which distressed the landlady.

Mary was standing across from me in a room full of jostling people. I think The Kinks were playing on the stereo. She was with a redhead who was also beautiful. But Mary had a perfect face, with a square Celtic jaw, and gentle eyes. She was wearing a knitted hat.

She said later that the first thing I ever said to her was: ‘Your thin and faintly curling lips look most attractive.’ I do not actually remember saying this because it had been a long and tiring evening, but it was a good description. I do remember that, in spite of my untidy condition, Mary tolerated my company and before she left agreed to give me her telephone number. I have never forgotten it — 953-6564.

I called her the next day and we agreed to meet at seven o’clock that evening at the Earl’s Court tube station. Mary arrived very late — she was never a good timekeeper.

We married on 30 March 1968, a rainy Saturday, in a red-brick Catholic church in Elstree, Hertfordshire, not far from the council house where Mary lived with her mother, Sally, a cleaner, and her younger brother, Danny. Her father, Martin, a merchant seaman, had died of cancer eight years earlier at the age of 52.

There was a patriotic campaign sweeping Britain at the time, intended to raise the country’s morale during an economic downturn. People were wearing Union Flag ‘I’m Backing Britain’ badges, and the Daily Express was running the strapline every day on its front page. We found the mood disagreeable — an earlier symptom of the jingoism and lurking xenophobia that contributed to the 2016 Brexit vote — so we staged our own mild protest by spending more than we could afford hiring two Mercedes as our wedding cars.

As a non-Catholic, I was required for several weeks before the ceremony to attend religious instruction meetings with the gaunt and ancient parish priest, Father Murray. We sat in our overcoats in front of an inadequate electric fire while he explained the superiority of the Roman Catholic faith over the Anglican version into which I had been baptised. We failed to agree most of the time, and for our last few evenings together we talked about photography, which was his hobby. He tried to sell me a second-hand camera.

Mum travelled by ship from Adelaide for the wedding. As a Liverpool Protestant, she had not reacted well to the news I was marrying a Catholic of Irish descent. It took a while, but Mary won her over and they became close.

Mary and I sailed to Australia in the autumn of 1969. For the one-way trip to Adelaide I got a job as a ‘press liaison officer’ on the P&O-Orient liner SS Oriana. We received free passage and two first-class cabins, in return for which I had to find interesting stories to offer reporters greeting the ship at every port. It was not hard. I found a flood of human-interest stories by running a competition in the ship’s newsletter. Passengers were given free drinks in exchange for stories about their lives and their reasons for going to Australia. When we arrived in Fremantle in Western Australia, one local television channel ran the first 10 minutes of its nightly news with stories from the ship.

Mary liked Australia, but not its attitude to women. The personnel manager who gave her a job behind the information desk of David Jones department store did so only after she promised not to become pregnant. Mary immediately broke this promise, and enjoyed the angry glares of the personnel manager at the growing evidence of her disobedience.

They welcomed me back when I asked for a job on The News. Ron Boland, the editor-in-chief, wanted me on the subs’ desk, but I resisted and became a feature writer. The office had been rebuilt. Instead of separate rooms for reporters, subs, sports, and features, we were all in one huge desegregated newsroom.

Five years in Fleet Street had taught me a lot. The News was a first-rate local newspaper, better than most of its British counterparts. But for me the place that had been so frantic and intimidating years before now seemed leisurely. Nothing improves a newspaper more than the stress of competition, and in Adelaide there was almost none.

After 10 months living with Mum and Dad in their bungalow, we sailed back to England. We had never intended to stay, and Mary, who was five months pregnant, wanted our baby to be born in Britain. We might not have made the best decision. It was a six-week journey, and by the time we arrived at Southampton docks, I thought Mary might die. She had become ill three days before arriving in Southampton and was losing blood. We were in an Italian Sitmar Liner, and the ship’s doctor seemed bewildered by her condition. He sent a radio message to Southampton that an extremely sick mother-to-be was on board and, while I sat at her bedside, spent most of his time playing cards with shipmates.

The doctor who came on board in Southampton wouldn’t let Mary get out of bed. When I asked whether the baby would be all right, the doctor led me out of Mary’s room. We sat down together, and she looked at me silently and gravely for a moment.

‘Look,’ she said, ‘this could be very serious. Never mind the baby for now — we need to worry about your wife.’

The doctor had diagnosed a condition called placenta previa, which meant that the placenta nourishing our unborn child was in the wrong place inside Mary’s womb, blocking her cervix. As well as being in the wrong location, her placenta had lost blood and might do so again, putting both mother and baby in danger. Mary was wrapped in blankets against the cold and carried by stretcher down the gangplank to a waiting ambulance. She was admitted to the Southampton General Hospital maternity ward, surrounded by newborns and their happy parents. Our child was not due for two months, and the doctors ordered complete bed rest. Southampton was 80 miles from London, but the doctors said even an ambulance ride was too risky.

Life stood still for four days. None of our plans mattered — no new house, no reunions with Mary’s family and our old friends, no job. Everything was in limbo and I was a wreck.

‘I feel fine,’ said Mary. ‘I’ll lie here because they’re telling me to, but honestly I feel normal. You can’t just sit there for the next two months. Go to London and find a job.’

I had been in London 48 hours when a doctor called from Southampton. ‘How soon can you get to the hospital?’ he said. He sounded so anxious, I panicked.

‘We need you to pick up your wife as soon as possible,’ the doctor said. ‘She’s well enough to be discharged.’

It turned out the hospital had made a serious mistake. By the time I arrived back in Southampton, she had been moved from the maternity ward to an isolation room. Mary’s illness had been misdiagnosed. She was suffering a serious bout of contagious food poisoning — salmonella. This poisoning had been the cause of her bleeding, not placenta previa.

The hospital had put into a maternity ward of vulnerable newborns a woman with a condition that could be fatal to them. For three days, proud mothers had allowed her to hold and admire their new babies. No wonder the doctor who phoned me had sounded desperate.

‘They were really alarmed when they found out,’ Mary said, as we drove to London. ‘They thought I was going to kill them all.’

Mary recovered, and Martin was born on 9 January 1971. I did not see him for several hours; it was not yet customary for a father to be at the birth. When we met, I stroked his cheek with the outside of my left index finger. His skin was as soft as velvet.

—

The Sun was not glad to see me when I arrived in search of a job. Nick Lloyd, the news editor, gave me a few late-night shifts, but that was all. Lloyd was then 29 and starting out on a long newspaper career that would reach its peak with his editorship of the Daily Express and a knighthood from Margaret Thatcher when she resigned as prime minister in 1990. Lloyd was then at the height of a distinguished career. His newspaper had been one of Thatcher’s most ardent supporters.

‘I can’t give you a full-time job,’ he said. ‘Larry doesn’t want any more old Sun trade union militants. They’re causing havoc.’

Larry Lamb, the new editor, was the prickly son of a Yorkshire colliery blacksmith. He had been a veteran of Cudlipp’s Mirror, but was Manchester editor of the Daily Mail when Rupert poached him.

The Sun’s trade union roots — dating back to the days when it was the Daily Herald — lived on among a significant number of journalists. Disputes with management were constant.

‘But I’m not an old trade union militant,’ I told Lloyd. ‘And I started working for Rupert in Adelaide when I was fifteen.’

Lloyd paused when I told him this. I reinforced my case by sending him a note with details of my association with the new owner. I don’t know what happened next, but within a few weeks I was on the staff.

By now, The Sun’s circulation was soaring — and Rupert’s infamy was growing. In 1969, the News of the World published the memoirs of Christine Keeler, a model and ‘party girl’ whose relationship with John Profumo, the secretary of state for war, had forced his resignation.

As scandals go, the Profumo affair of 1963 had everything. It was a blend of juicy hard facts and wild rumour, with beautiful call girls, country mansion frolics featuring masked aristocrats, royals, and a love triangle that included a Soviet spy. It was the biggest political scandal of the 1960s, and a perfect story for the News of the World. The difficulty was that the paper published the Keeler memoir six years after the scandal, by which time Profumo was redeeming himself with charity work in the East End of London.

The newspaper and Rupert were eviscerated for digging up old dirt. There were angry denunciations in the House of Lords and from church pulpits — as well as among the Fleet Street rivals he had beaten to the story, and who were by now worrying that they had underestimated this interloper from Down Under.

Rupert, in an effort to explain himself, made the mistake of appearing on live television. He put his case to David Frost, then Britain’s paramount TV interrogator. With a studio audience cheering him on, Frost demolished Rupert, who stormed out of the studio, allegedly hissing at Frost: ‘You’ll keep, David.’

Rupert said later that when he and his wife, Anna, left in his car that night they felt like heading straight for the airport and leaving town.

That was the early drama that inspired Private Eye, the satirical magazine, to award Rupert the immortal name of Dirty Digger.

Everyone knew by now that Rupert had come to Fleet Street to tear up the rules. Criticism never seemed to deter him. Like a punk rocker storming the stage of a Mantovani concert, he showed no respect to anyone.

The Sun that I returned to had joined the world of Murdoch and was a changed place. The easy life had ended. Long lunches and late filing had been abolished, and everyone had more work to do. There were fewer reporters and no longer a large contingent of specialist writers. On the old Sun, reporters expected to be assigned a story a day, maybe two, and sometimes none at all, but getting no assignment was a terrible feeling. Even now I get anxiety dreams that I’m sitting in a newsroom waiting to be sent on a job while everyone else is busy. At the new Sun, we were each given three or more stories a day.

There was no dallying in the pub over lunchtime pints. If you were given a story in the morning, you needed a good reason for failing to hand it in before lunch. To achieve this, reporters could be seen eating sandwiches at their desk, which was unknown in the old days.

The new newsroom overlooking Bouverie Street was tightly packed and spartan. In the space occupied by reporters, padlocks and chains secured a typewriter to each desk. A thief would have to be strong and poor because the typewriters were heavy and old, and pretty worthless.

I was soon caught up in the militancy that frustrated Larry Lamb. Strikes had become commonplace. We walked out over crazy grievances. Even the National Union of Journalists wouldn’t support us most of the time.

We once stopped work when a reporter in the Glasgow office was sacked after he returned drunk from lunch, unzipped his fly, and exposed himself to female staff. This sounded to me solid grounds for dismissal, but we went on strike for almost two weeks. I couldn’t pay the mortgage that month. But management refused to reinstate the Glasgow flasher, and we went back to work when they agreed to give him a payoff.

Striking journalists never prevented the newspaper being published. Senior editors could patch a newspaper together with agency copy. These editions weren’t much good, but they thwarted the militants. Only print unions had the power to stop the newspaper going out, which made journalists feel like second-class strikers. Sometimes journalists would talk about physically preventing the newspapers from leaving the building. This never worked because it required confronting our brothers in the press hall, and they were tougher than us.

Malcolm Withers was our Father of the Chapel — a quaint old term for union leader — and he once urged us to lay in front of lorries to prevent them leaving Bouverie Street with their cargoes of newspapers. Attempting to lead the way, he sat feebly on the pavement with his feet in front of a lorry, wearing a suit and clutching a briefcase to his chest. Withers was a cautious kind of militant, whose plan fell apart when the lorry moved a couple of inches and he quickly withdrew his feet to let it pass.

Putting aside the mischief of militants, I had sympathy with old Sun people who had honest trouble adjusting to the redtop rowdiness. The new Sun was rough-edged and proud of itself. A typical self-aggrandising front-page description of itself in huge type was: ‘It is the biggest, the brightest, the boldest, the very, very best.’

Television was still seen as the enemy of print, but Rupert became the first proprietor to use it to sell newspapers. These commercials were low-budget and it showed — not many retakes were allowed for a Sun spot. The frenetic, shouted voiceovers were like old-style fairground barking.

Their creator was Graham King from Adelaide. King was a 1950s pioneer of the Murdoch empire. He was promotions manager of Rupert’s first television station, Channel 9. King was a genius at getting attention. When Rupert wouldn’t give him a raise at Channel 9, he delivered socks with holes in them to his office every day, with notes saying he couldn’t afford new ones, until Rupert relented.

Intentional or not, King’s television ads were hilarious. They were also effective. Here’s one about suburban ‘swingers’:

Scene:

Couple in a passionate kiss.

Voiceover: There’s a whole new freedom in sex today … behaviour once confined to the free and easy world of the rich is becoming more commonplace. How far can it go …? The Sun reveals that ordinary people who meet every day at work, or even down your street, are taking this new sexual freedom for themselves.

I helped write that Sun series and spent time with these wife-swapping ‘swingers’. They didn’t seem ordinary to me.

My neighbour in the newsroom was Keith Deves, a veteran of serious news. He had covered trouble spots in the Middle East as a Reuters correspondent; known Kim Philby before he was exposed as a Soviet double agent; and been shot in the leg with a Sten gun during a coup in Baghdad.

On The Sun, different work was required. Deves was sent to interview a Miss Whiplash at the house where she entertained clients. As he was leaving, Miss Whiplash stopped him. ‘Wait, I’ve forgotten something,’ she said, and opened a cupboard to reveal a naked and agitated old man, gagged and bound. ‘Now calm down, judge,’ she said. ‘I’m only showing this nice man from The Sun newspaper around.’

Deves was perturbed. ‘Was it really necessary to tell the poor old judge I was a reporter from The Sun?’ he asked.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Miss Whiplash. ‘It’s all part of his torture.’

The Sun’s wild side gave it much of its commercial success, and the disdain of newspapers whose circulation it was stealing. But it ran many serious stories about politics, economics, industry, health, and crime. It was the combination of these two extremes that made it exceptional and successful.

For me, it meant a lot of weird work, and not what I imagined as a 15-year-old dreaming of life as a foreign correspondent. After a while, the silly-to-serious ratio of my assignments changed for the better, but I covered a lot of strange things.

I had to walk the streets asking bald men to talk about their sex lives. Research, very dubious research, had found that bald men had more sex. I gave up on that job when a huge man in a camel hair coat with a velvet collar chased me across the concourse of Euston station shouting, ‘Sex life? I’ll give you sex life. Come back here and I’ll end yours with a bloody big kick in the balls.’

Other research, this time about people’s willingness to accept charity, had me offering strangers £1 notes. This was interesting. Those who looked most hard up were least likely to take the money. The woman in hair rollers pushing a pram through a Brixton council estate looked terrified by the offer, but a man in a bowler hat on the steps of the Bank of England accepted it without hesitation.

A pioneering dating company, Dateline, had the idea of organising a package holiday of single people paired into couples by computers. I flew to Corfu with 60 excited lonely hearts. Whatever success technology has since achieved at playing Cupid, the Corfu experiment was not an encouraging start. This became clear when the 60-year-old widow of a Surrey accountant was introduced to her computer generated ‘match’ — a junior supermarket manager of 30 who lived with his mother in Bridlington. Their friendship did not blossom. The women were divorcees, widows, and unmarried women looking for fun, but the men were younger, shy and terrified. On the first night, a dozen men organised a chess tournament among themselves, forming a defensive circle in the bar that no woman managed to penetrate. The newsdesk was expecting a story about frolics on a romantic Greek island. My story demanded careful exaggeration to avoid disappointing them.

One story of mine was immortalised in a painting by Beryl Cook, a hugely popular artist whose work the art establishment of the time disdained. Linda Lovelace, the star of the porn film Deep Throat, wrote a memoir — Inside Linda Lovelace — that was so graphic its publisher was accused of obscenity at the Old Bailey. The jury reached a verdict of not guilty. The newspaper with my by-line — headlined ‘Don’t Crush “Sex Nut” Linda, A QC Tells Jury’ — appeared in Cook’s painting in the hands of a man on a crowded London underground train who appeared to be groping a woman passenger. I tried to buy the original, but its Swiss owner wouldn’t part with it.

Sometimes the work could be serious and hilarious at the same time. Jeremy Thorpe was a 1970s Liberal politician alleged to have hired a hitman to kill his troublesome gay lover, Norman Scott, a former model. Thorpe was put on trial for conspiracy to murder; he was acquitted, but too late to save his career.

Scott had threatened to make public his claim to have been Thorpe’s lover in 1961 when gay sex was illegal. At Thorpe’s trial, it was alleged his friends hired a hitman to kill Scott. Although this was never proven to a jury’s satisfaction, it was revealed that a man had driven Scott to Exmoor in 1975 and shot dead his Great Dane, Rinka. Scott claimed the man tried to shoot him, but that his gun jammed, allowing Scott to flee.

The scandal made Norman Scott a household name and he became a Sun ‘buy-up’ — the term for when a newspaper pays the main character in a big story for exclusive interviews. My photographer friend Arthur Edwards and I were appointed to be his minders.

Scott was completely open about his sexuality, which was not usual in the 1970s. He was also very fond of a drink, and since The Sun was paying to keep him safe from its rivals, he was drunk most of the time.

One night, the three of us were hiding away in Devon at a Barnstaple hotel and found ourselves in the dining room in the middle of a gathering of Church of England ministers. They soon recognised the notorious guest among them and gazed at him with disapproval. This irritated Scott, who drank even more and started to pull tongues at everyone he caught staring at him.

Arthur and I were already anxious when the bishop stood, with the clink of a glass, to silence his flock for the royal toast. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he said, raising his wine, ‘the Queen.’

Scott staggered quickly to his feet, clattering the glasses and crockery on our table and capsizing a bottle of claret.

The bishop froze and the room went silent as everyone turned their attention to our table. Scott was swaying severely, a beaming smile on his shiny red face.

‘A toast for me?’ cried Britain’s most famous gay man to a room of gasping vicars. ‘Oh, how kind of you all. Thank you so much. I should now like to make a few remarks in response.’

Arthur and I seized our charge, taking one arm each, and marched him from the room.