March 4

March 4 saw my first James Bond film live, so to speak, in a cinema on my tenth birthday. All I can remember is a waiter who, having done something unpleasant with a scorpion, gets a bomb stuffed down the back of his trousers before being thrown over the side of a boat.As I say, it was a James Bond movie.This was the era of The Man from Uncle,The Saint,The Persuaders, and The Avengers. Dark suited, troubled, and desirable mannequins who quipped acidly in crises and who sported guns in umbrellas, explosives in ping-pong balls, and missiles in the trunks of their cars. We read TV21—a weekly newspaper for advanced screen addicts—in the car on the way to school, the same way our fathers read The Times or did the crossword in The Daily Telegraph. We knew what we wanted to be. My friend Chris and I used to act out Dr No in the woods at the back of his house. Or Thunderball in the swimming pool at the front. We created a secret society, signified by a gold pin (not so secret, but we didn’t think of that at the time) and had strict entry criteria for our other friends. None of this adventure amounted to very much. Chris is now a computer programmer in Cardiff while I am, for the time being, an unemployable ex-doctor. Still, the memory lives on, as it seems to have done for Dominic Lawson, the current editor of a UK Sunday newspaper owned by the Canadian media tycoon, Conrad Black. Lawson has two things going against him. First, he is the son of the former British cabinet minister and chancellor of the exchequer Nigel Lawson, now author of diet books (he applied the same philosophy of precipitous slimming to both occupations). Second, Dominic Lawson wrote a hagiographic work arguing the virtues of his chess hero, Nigel Short, the man who was once hammered by Gary Kasparov and who has never been heard of since. At any rate, Lawson ran into some embarrassment before Christmas last year when he was outed as an alleged spy for the intelligence agency, MI6. On December 18, The Independent, a rival to Lawson’s Telegraph, ran the headline: “The spook, the leak, the editor, and his rival”.A picture of a chubby Lawson looking like he had fallen out of a suitcase after a long-haul flight stared out at the reader. The story had come from a sacked and disgruntled former MI6 officer now living in Geneva. The label of spy fitted Lawson perfectly: ex-Eton,ex-Westminster,and ex-Oxford,then moving on to a smooth and rapid ascent of Mount Media. The Independent asked “how far it is acceptable to cultivate a relationship with the security service in the name of collecting good journalistic sources”. The paper also criticised the fact that articles written in The Spectator—a weekly right-wing news magazine that Lawson, like his father, once edited—by a “Kenneth Roberts” were actually penned by an MI6 officer. “There is rarely an excuse for false by-lines”,the paper wrote.“Readers

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THE LANCET • Vol 353 • March 6, 1999

Blaby have the right to expect that authors are who they say they are.” An important principle. On December 20, in his own newspaper, Lawson denied everything. Almost. He wrote that “I never worked for the intelligence services. The only sort of agent I could ever be is a free one”. Meanwhile, The Times, another unfriendly competitor in the oily hands of Rupert Murdoch, noted that “MPs expressed deep unease at the suggestion that MI6 may regard newspaper editors as legitimate candidates for recruitment”. Readers might well perceive editors who are so recruited as sleeping with the enemy. However, it does happen and it is a double standard to draw a distinction between Lawson/MI6 and CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, who last year hitched herself to James Rubin, the chief spokesman at the US State department. A curious liaison maybe—The Times called their nuptials a “strange marriage of hack and flak”—but one that inevitably raises a serious question o ver Amanpour’s journalistic neutrality in the field. The journalist-as-spy was well known to Bond’s creator, Ian Fleming. As a naval intelligence officer, he employed journalists to become British agents during World War II. A neat cover with the welcome advantage of exploiting the journalist’s eye for detail. The Guardian adopted the loftiest editorial tone in the Lawson affair by stating that “it is unacceptable to blur the lines between the media and the state”. No room for manoeuvre here, although its own Richard Gott was revealed in 1994 to have had close contact with the KGB, a connection for which he resigned. But The Guardian was right. If journalists really are part of the Fourth Estate, they must abjure all relations, however well meant, with those they report on. Matthew Parris, a conservative but independent-minded columnist, wrote in The Spectator on Dec 19/26 that the vanity of journalists-cum-media-commentators had made them not only too powerful but also filled with hubris. If one is in the media, “one is automatically thought terribly inter esting. It’s hip, crucial, wicked to be in the media: well regarded, well rewarded,and socially smart . . . we are puffing ourselves up to a size and at a rate which seems to me to promise some kind of bang”. Andrew Marr, another political columnist, admitted his own private rules in The Guardian: “The main one is simple: doing their daily jobs, politicians and journalists are on different sides”. And so, rather long windedly, that brings me to editors of medical journals. As I leaf through the credentials of the editors of our two leading weekly UK journals, I spy a string of diplomas that are, I suspect, largely honorary. And yet I bet that both editors would claim to be watchdogs of the medical establishment.The question arises, therefore, especially since I am someone who has felt the sharp edge of establishment cover up, whose side these editors are really on? RVB

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