Almost as soon as the jury made its award BBC reporter Nick Higham, who had been interested in the LM story from the start, reported the verdict on the BBC’s Six O’Clock News. When he came to describing the judge’s summing up he conflated the remarks. Higham said on air, ‘In his summing up, the judge, Mr Justice Morland, told the jury LM’s facts might have been right but he asked, “Did that matter?”’ It certainly mattered to ITN, who immediately contacted the BBC and asked for an apology.115 ITN said that nowhere in his summing up had the judge used the words ‘LM’s facts might have been right’. Although he had used the words ‘but does it matter’, this had been in connection with another issue, namely whether the ITN team had been mistaken in thinking that they were not enclosed by an old barbed wire fence.116
BBC News acknowledged that their 6 p.m. summary of the judge’s wording had been ‘too condensed’.117 Later that evening they broadcast a different and more accurate version of the story in the Nine O’Clock News. But they did not broadcast any retraction or apology for the earlier story. ITN made a formal complaint to one of the television regulators, the Broadcasting Standards Commission. The BSC examined the matter thoroughly and took representations from both parties. It considered Higham’s draft script, ‘which had been more precise about the role of the fence’, but noted that Higham had ‘been asked about 10 minutes before the start of the bulletin to shorten his report by at least 20 seconds’. In that time he ‘over-condensed’ his story. The BSC’s verdict was that
it was clear from the report as a whole that ITN had won the case. However … the BBC’s paraphrase of the judge’s summing up could have left viewers with the false impression that ITN had got its facts wrong and won its case on a technicality. The Commission finds that this was unfair to ITN and to Ms Marshall and Mr Williams.
The BBC had to broadcast the BSC’s finding.
LM and its supporters were more focused on the court’s verdict rather than the BSC’s finding and Mick Hume wrote a short piece in The Times. He complained about the trial’s limits and that
we could not win because the law demanded that we prove the unprovable – what was going on in the ITN journalists’ minds eight years ago. We have apologised for nothing but we are not going to appeal. Life is too short to waste any more time in the bizarre world of the libel courts.118
Twelve years later Hume was still smarting, at least a little, when in a book about free speech, he explained how ‘my publisher and I were left with a personal bill of around a million quid in costs and damages’. He told his readers that ‘the only thing this case has proved beyond reasonable doubt is that the libel laws are a menace to a free press and a disgrace to a democracy’.119
In 2000, John Simpson published another volume of memoirs in which he included a chapter of miscellanies, which he entitled ‘Absurdities’. One issue on which he dwelt over two pages was ITN’s duel with LM. He did not disclose what he had said in his witness statement about ITN ‘misleading’ the world. But nor was there any sense of regret about his support for LM – almost the opposite. He referred to ‘the clever, iconoclastic magazine LM’ and mentioned that it had been sued by ITN ‘for alleging that some of its pictures had been misleading (ITN’s boss said, with I presume a very unintended irony, that the case had been brought in order to defend freedom of speech)’.120
In Simpson’s view, the main point remained about the ‘heart of the problem with television news, which is the interpretation of pictures’. He said that ‘everything depends on the impression that they are allowed to give the viewer who saw these pictures’.
Simpson did not mention the doctor’s evidence of what had actually happened at Trnopolje but offered his own analysis that
it was essentially a transit camp where people like the skeletal figure they filmed were taken before being released or moved onto other, or worse camps. Unpleasant things could certainly happen to prisoners there; no Muslim in the hands of Bosnian Serb captors during that evil war was entirely safe. But that didn’t make Trnopolje what most viewers assumed it was.
On the role of the barbed wire, ‘unfortunately the videotape “rushes” which might have proved this one way or the other could not be found’. He concluded: ‘LM lost the case, and was driven out of business by huge damages. Thus was the cause of free speech defended.’ 121
And the story might have finished there in 2000. But for the other reporter who had been there with the ITN teams at Trnopolje and Omarska back in 1992. Through all the years of controversy Ed Vulliamy of The Guardian never doubted that what he and the ITN journalists had reported was true and was not misleading. He believed it with a passion and made it almost a personal mission to bear witness to the truth of what he had seen. He kept in touch with the victims and gave evidence at the International Court. Although his own newspaper had not joined the legal battle with LM, Vulliamy had never sought to distance himself from those who did. He praised the editor-in-chief of ITN, Richard Tait, ‘who realised two things had to be reclaimed: the reputation of his correspondents and the establishment of the truth about what had happened in the camps’.122
In 2012 he wrote a powerful and personal book, The War is Dead, Long Live the War: Bosnia: the Reckoning. The Observer newspaper had the bright idea of inviting John Simpson to review it.
A decade on from his allegation of ‘profoundly misleading’ reporting, the BBC’s world affairs editor had been having second thoughts. He wrote of ‘the overwhelming evil of Omarska, Trnopolje and Srebrenica’ and ‘the siege of Sarajevo’. He confessed that
Vulliamy’s account of what happened in the camps is completely unanswerable; and I’m sorry now that I supported the small post-Marxist magazine Living Marxism when it was sued by ITN for questioning its reporting of the camps. It seemed to me at the time that big, well-funded organisations should not put small magazines out of business; but it’s clear that there were much bigger questions involved.
But what of Michael Gove, then of The Times and now the Education Secretary in Her Majesty’s government? We wrote to his special adviser, putting these questions for Mr Gove:
Mr Gove said Trnopolje was ‘a transit camp for prisoners-of-war’. What does he now believe happened at Trnopolje?
In the light of John Simpson’s statement that he is now ‘sorry’ does Mr Gove have any regrets about the position which he, Mr Gove, took? If so what are they?
With hindsight how happy is he that – in the words of the Times headline – he was ‘speaking up for the Serbs’ over allegations of ‘ethnic cleansing’?
His special adviser, Henry de Zoete, emailed back, ‘I will pass on to Michael and let you know asap.’ Mr de Zoete did not get back to us. We sent him two further emails asking for Mr Gove’s response, but received no reply.123
When John Simpson summarised the Bosnian conflict twenty years on he wrote, ‘Few people – journalists, politicians, soldiers – came out of the Bosnian war with much credit.’124
Some readers drew the conclusion that Simpson was accepting that he wasn’t among the few. But maybe Dr Idriz Merdžanić, who risked his life to establish the truth about what he had seen as a camp doctor, was one of those few people who did emerge with credit.
2
W. N. EWER
Long before there was television news in Britain, before there was even regular radio news, the reporters who helped the public understand international events, the John Simpsons of their day, were the diplomatic correspondents of the national newspapers.
It was common practice for them to be by-lined by their initials rather than their Christian names. So it was that W. N. Ewer, while never a household name in the way that TV reporters such as Simpson would become, was a highly respected journalist for decades, not just in Fleet Street, the heart of the British newspaper industry, but also in Whitehall, the centre of British political power.
Yet the full story of W. N. Ewer was known only to those working elsewhere in London, in the various buildings that made up
what the British civil service called ‘Box 500’ – the postal address of MI5, the British counter-espionage agency. MI5 kept an eye on Ewer throughout his career and from their files we have been able to piece together his story.
The extraordinary life and times of W. N. Ewer were symbolised on 22 September 1964 when a spry and distinguished-looking gentleman stepped out of a car at No. 1 Carlton Gardens, knowing that inside they were going to make a real fuss of him. He knew the place well, having been there before on business, but this time he was to be the guest at a particularly special lunch being held in his honour at the Foreign Secretary’s official London residence.
There to greet him was not just the current Foreign Secretary, R. A. ‘Rab’ Butler, but also one of Butler’s predecessors, Selwyn Lloyd. It was an unusually grand welcoming party for a reporter.
At seventy-eight years of age W. N. Ewer had been, for some time, the doyen of his particular trade – London’s leading diplomatic correspondent. He had spent most of his career working on the Daily Herald, but had also made broadcasts for the BBC, written articles for other publications and penned the occasional political pamphlet. He had also been to Buckingham Palace five years earlier in morning suit and top hat to receive a CBE for his services to journalism.
William Norman Ewer – he rarely used his first name – was known to many of the assembled guests as ‘Trilby’ after the eponymous George du Maurier character. His friends gave him the nickname when he was young because, like Trilby, he used to walk around barefoot. He didn’t do that anymore – at least not when he was ‘on duty’.
Norman Ewer had been invited to lunch because afterwards he was to be given a very special gift, which marked the twilight of a distinguished career. He had just officially retired from the Herald after fifty-two years. The paper had closed down.
After a short speech Rab Butler presented him with an engraved pass. It was a pass that would give W. N. Ewer, as he signed himself, access to the Foreign Office’s News Department, effectively its press office. Such was the esteem in which Norman Ewer was held that he was presented with a pass that would give him access to all of the Foreign Office’s press facilities in perpetuity.
It was ironic considering that four decades earlier, in the 1920s, Norman Ewer was a Communist Party member committed to destroying everything that No. 1 Carlton Gardens and the Foreign Office press facilities stood for. In pursuit of that ambition he had run a brilliant network of reporters, Russian spies and former and serving Special Branch policemen. Their aim was to find out everything MI5 knew about the Communist Party of Great Britain. So they spied on the spy-catchers. And so successful were they that even MI5 had to admit that sometimes Ewer and his network knew what MI5 had discovered before they realised it themselves.
Getting started
Norman Ewer’s journey through extremism to extremely respectable retirement began in a middle-class family in Hornsey, north London, in 1885. His father was a silk merchant. The son won scholarships to Merchant Taylors’ School and to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he read Mathematics and History. After initially thinking of following a civil service career he began working for a prospective Liberal MP, Baron de Forest, who despite his Austrian title was a radical. De Forest won West Ham in a 1911 by-election. As a result of his work for de Forest, and the people that he met, Ewer became politically radicalised. He soon met George Lansbury, who represented the adjoining constituency. Ewer clearly impressed him because when Lansbury founded the Daily Herald in 1912 he recruited Ewer, along with other talented people such as G. D. H. Cole, Harold Laski and Francis Meynell, who would also go on to carve prominent careers for themselves. Collectively they would be known as ‘Lansbury’s Lambs’.
From the outset the daily paper had close links with the Labour Party and the TUC, and took radical positions, backing strikes and suffragette law-breaking; it also promoted syndicalism. Later, it enthused about the Russian Revolution.
The First World War provided an unexpected career break from journalism. Ewer registered as one of the conscientious objectors to the war. Some were assigned to non-combatant roles in the army, others to ‘work of national importance’ such as farming. Ewer ended up with a job as a swineherd on Lord Astor’s estate at Cliveden and his first mention in MI5 files.
In July 1915 he gave what the files call ‘a highly pacific and anti-British’ speech. With Britain at war with Germany pacifism was a subject that aroused intense emotions. For some years before and after the war, membership of a range of organisations (some later considered as legitimately democratic bodies) was regarded with deep official suspicion and, in the case of activists, justification enough for further attention. Pacifists were of special interest to officials: were they pro-German? Were they cowards? Were they revolutionaries?
After the war Ewer returned to the Daily Herald and soon became its foreign editor. MI5 continued to keep an eye on him and they had the perfect way of doing it. Even though the war was over, any Briton who wanted to travel anywhere near Germany needed official permission in the form of a passport. Passports were at that time a relatively new-fangled concept: it wasn’t just a matter of popping down to the local Post Office, passing over the forms and paying a fee. Official permission was required, and the process would not be regularised until later, under the auspices of the League of Nations. In February 1919, with the Armistice just three months old, the Herald wanted to send Ewer to find out what was going on inside Germany. He wouldn’t be going to Germany, but he wanted to visit neighbouring Switzerland and Holland. So his editor wrote to the Acting Foreign Secretary, Lord Curzon, asking if he could kindly help get Ewer permission and a passport.
Before Curzon did, and because the letter came from the left-of-centre Herald, Curzon took soundings from other government departments. The Director of Military Intelligence (DMI), General Thwaites, advised that ‘it is considered undesirable from a military point of view that he should be allowed to go to Switzerland or to Holland for the purpose of getting in touch with German and Austrian socialists’. MI5 provided extra detail and colour, telling the Foreign Secretary that Ewer ‘preaches peace with Germany, followed by “revolution through bloodshed”’. His wife Monica, who was the daughter of the editor of the radical Reynold’s News and, like Ewer, a journalist, was said to be ‘equally rabid’. Ewer himself was also said to be ‘a clever writer and fluent speaker’ who had published poetry and was ‘a dangerous and inflammatory agitator’. His card was clearly marked. MI5 had even spotted that he had put up £125 of his own money to fund a mass meeting at the Albert Hall and had lost it because the event was called off.
There is no copy in the files of Lord Curzon’s reply to the Herald but we do know that nearly a year later, in January 1920, the Herald made another request for Ewer to travel, this time to Egypt. The Foreign Office had been unhappy about Ewer’s reporting from the Paris Peace Conference, which had ‘contained a number of carping criticisms directed against the policy of the Peace Conference from an extreme Labour standpoint’. But they realised that there was a bigger issue:
unless some other substantial reason for refusing permission to leave is produced from authorities there, we are sure that such a refusal would only raise a storm of protest and lay us open to the suspicion of pursuing a policy which would not stand criticism.125
The Foreign Office seemed to realise that what they would like to do would not be defensible. If the same tactic was applied to all journalists writing stories that governments or officials did not like a large proportion of Fleet Street would have been instantly refused the right to travel.
Marked man
What Norman Ewer did next made him a marked man. On 31 July 1920, at the Cannon Street Hotel, in the heart of the City of London, a meeting of around 160 revolutionary socialists founded the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). Soon afterwards Norman Ewer became one of its members.
The British state devoted considerable resources to keeping this fledgling party under
surveillance. During the inter-war years there were periodic police raids. At various times its King Street offices in London were bugged, its telephones tapped and its post intercepted. Agents were placed inside its offices with the aim of collecting incriminating evidence. Membership lists were copied and some of the members and their families were kept under surveillance.
Historians of the British Communist movement agree that Ewer was a key linkman between the Daily Herald, which had supported the Russian Revolution, and the Communist Party headquarters in London. In fact he was also a link between the Herald, the CPGB and the wider Communist movement, the Communist International.
In 1922 he went to Moscow. The main reason was to try to get help for the Herald. Ever since its creation the paper had been short of funds and at the beginning of the 1920s it lurched from one financial crisis to the next. With a circulation of less than 250,000 and failing to attract advertisers, partly due to its political stance, it was constantly on the look-out for financial support.
But this time, it was not just MI5 and Special Branch who were interested in what Ewer was up to; it was also a rather exclusive group of politicians: the men who were running the country. Lloyd George’s Cabinet was told about Ewer’s travelling arrangements in one of a series of weekly reports under the title ‘Report on Revolutionary Organisations in the United Kingdom’.
Report number 137, dated 5 January 1922, informed the Cabinet: ‘Norman Ewer has gone to Russia, ostensibly to make arrangements in connection with the Daily Herald Russian News Service. Interesting information regarding the crisis in the affairs of the Daily Herald is given in this report.’ There was no explanation of who Norman Ewer was; presumably everyone around the Cabinet table knew that already. The government’s interest in the foreign editor of the Daily Herald grew.
It is clear from the files that at least some of Ewer’s (or possibly the Herald’s) letters were being read by the security services and his travelling companions were being noted:
When Reporters Cross the Line Page 5
