The Guardian, July 2008
It was just before midnight when the first police officer hit Mark Covell, swiping his truncheon down on his left shoulder. Covell did his best to yell out in Italian that he was a journalist but, within seconds, he was surrounded by riot-squad officers thrashing him with their sticks. For a while, [...]
Late on December 20, the day Parliament rose for its Christmas recess, the Government published a bill. It was extremely short; its text took up barely a page. Yet it has profound constitutional implications. It also contains the seeds of a potentially significant threat to civil liberties.
It was a rotten time, aggressive and cynical. The task force was back from the South Atlantic, the cruise missiles were coming into Greenham Common, they were shooting to kill in Belfast, they were banning unions at GCHQ and trampling down strikers in the coal fields. It was a time of ruthlessness in Government and of the crushing of enemies. And everywhere, there was the shadow of the secret state, arrogant and apparently ominipotent.
Luck sometimes gets so bad that it no longer seems like luck at all.
Real mysteries are rare, but there are occasions when ordinary life is violated by an incident which is so bizarre and so unexpected that even when time has passed and all the little fragments of fact have been swept up and fitted together, the truth still defies the most ingenious imagination. And it is invariably the most ordinary of lives which produce the most baffling mysteries.
On Tuesday morning, April 17 1984, a 35-year-old decorator left the Rio Tinto Zinc building where he was working in St James Square, London to go to the bank to get some change for his parking meter. As he strolled across the road, he passed several dozen police officers clustered in one corner of the square and he caught the eye of a young woman constable.
Tiny Rowland, as everyone knows, is a bastard. He is greedy, ruthless and arrogant, a capitalist red in tooth and claw. As a boy, he was a member of the Hitler Youth. During the war, he was interned with Mosley’s fascists on the Isle of Man. As a businessman, he has made selfishness a way of life, turning an ailing African mining company called Lonrho into an international giant by pillaging his way through the third world, bending rules, breaking opponents and incidentally besmirching the reputation of the Observer newspaper.
There are people in the Foreign Office who confide privately that they believe Terry Waite is dead – seized as a spy in the wake of the Irangate scandal, tortured to extract information about his links with Oliver North and finally brutalised beyond endurance.
The Guardian, April 1989
Eleanor Hudson had nothing but a handful of flowers. The guard at the White House gate could see that. He had dark glasses, a gun on one hip, a night stick on the other, and a big gold badge on his chest. He told her to back off and started closing the [...]
It was only afterwards – after the dust had settled and all the reporters and supporters had gone home – that Bert Ammermann finally calmed down enough to realise what he had done.
