Shooting the Messenger by Andrew Fowler

Author:Andrew Fowler [Andrew Fowler]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

8

TRUTH TO POWER

The Ministry of Defence (MoD) in central London, not far from the Palace of Westminster, the Houses of Parliament, is not famous for providing top cuisine in its canteen. It serves staple fare, from fish and chips to spaghetti bolognaise with the possibility of a glass of rosé to wash it down. These are hardly facts that need to be kept under lock and key, but until a few years ago, that is exactly how the MoD treated them – even the canteen menu, as an internal MoD publication, was a state secret. Anyone publishing it, according to the letter of the law, would be in breach of Section 2 of the Official Secrets Act (1911). As an act of publicity for its launch, as much as its desire to draw attention to the all-encompassing nature of Britain’s secrecy laws, the first edition of the News on Sunday, in 1989, reproduced a copy of the MoD canteen menu under the headline: ‘This Newspaper Is Dangerous. If You Read Page 11 You Are Liable to Two Years in Prison.’1

Had the News on Sunday published the menu from the Ministry of Agriculture, the same rules of secrecy would have applied, but it might not have been as promotable from the newspaper: ‘You are technically breaking the law and could go to prison for reading News on Sunday.’2 While most, though possibly not all journalists would be untroubled by Section 1 of the Official Secrets Act which deals with spying, it was Section 2 that was a much greater problem. This part of the Act made it an offence to publish any government material without the express permission of the minister concerned.3

The broadening of the UK’s first Official Secrets Act (1889) to include Section 2 had its roots in the early 1900s – a time when large sections of the population believed Britain was under threat of an imminent invasion. Their fear was fed by what was known as ‘invasion scare’ fiction: books that conjured up visions of French and Russian forces capturing British military charts and codes, and in one celebrated case carrying out the murder of a military officer. The main perpetrator of this scaremongering was author William Le Queux, a journalist with a flair for creative writing, the ability to blend fact and fiction and the aptitude to pass off fiction as fact. He prefaced one of his books, Spies of the Kaiser, with the statement that the book pointed to the ‘important lesson’ underlying it: ‘the French are laughing at us, the Russians presume to imitate us and the Day of Reckoning is hourly advancing,’4 he wrote. Spies of the Kaiser, published in early 1909, was a bestseller and, according to author Philip Knightly, it soon became clear that the book’s thousands of readers considered it ‘as they had every right to do in view of Le Queux’s ambiguous presentation of the book as fact in fictional form – as being totally true’.5 Other books by Le

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