On a comically miserable February morning, I made my way to Inner London Crown Court, a few minutes’ walk from the sodden chaos of Elephant and Castle station. Having jostled through security, a helpful staff member directed me across the building to a thin corridor populated by a smattering of uncomfortably suited coppers and crumpled solicitors. A few pensive defendants completed the scene, staring hard ahead or into phone screens. One middle-aged man in a Fulham FC tracksuit and bulging protective boot shattered the uneasy peace with a phone call. ‘Nah, it wasn’t looking good,’ he barked to his unseen interlocutor. The firearms charges were no joke.
Five minutes became ten, as I made my way to the packed public gallery above Court Four. Five Insulate Britain activists had been charged with criminal damage in late 2021, while two of their number had later been imprisoned for contempt of court. A faulty microphone made it difficult to understand the finer details of the defence’s argument. ‘Use your barrister voice and make it carry,’ beamed the judge. The well-wishers in the gallery eyed me with bemusement, perhaps sensing Special Branch or a lone anti-direct action nutjob. How reassured would they be, I wondered, to find out that I was merely a reporter on the loose.
We are sitting at a particularly uncertain juncture in the history of British crime journalism. The true crime supernova has warped our perceptions of its ailing health. For every big-budget podcast or splashy Netflix documentary, a hundred more redundancies have occurred across print media. Between 2012 and 2016, traditional court reporting dropped by 30% and 40% in the national and regional press respectively, a decline which shows few signs of reversal. Almost every national paper once had a dedicated court reporter, or at least a representative tasked with covering the biggest trials. Today, there are far fewer at the national papers, although some regionals still have a full-time correspondent or simply rely on the work of an overworked, underbylined news agency reporter.
This isn’t a positive development. As one veteran crime journalist noted in 2022, ‘the UK public is now largely unaware of how and why so many people – the highest per capita proportion in Western Europe – are punished and jailed’. It isn’t for a lack of interest. A year earlier, the Evening Standard’s court reporter Tristan Kirk had won plaudits, and a mass readership, for his coverage of the COVID fines scandal (his work uncovered thousands of often ludicrously disproportionate fines handed out to ordinary Londoners under the terms of emergency pandemic legislation). Editorial backing and time to hang about the Magistrates’ Court are increasingly tough-to-source ingredients. ‘The local news group I used to work for had ten reporters,’ he told me when we spoke in February. ‘I suspect it’s four or five now. I also think the way local newspapers are run these days, there’s a lot of emphasis on instant news.’
The origins of my interest in the wider subject are personal as well as professional. My late grandfather, David Ward, was a crime reporter for many years during the supposed mid-20th century ‘golden era’ of Fleet Street. His was a career that followed well-worn grooves: a lengthy apprenticeship across a series of regional newspapers, followed by promotion to the nationals, specifically the Daily Mirror. A path, and media landscape, which appears more decorously obsolete with every passing year. He’d enjoyed the job’s ceaseless adrenaline and relative glamour. The apparently mandatory daily boozing – perhaps too much.
We didn’t know each other well, or at all really. He’d died during my early childhood, though there have been no lack of compensatory stories which testified to his integrity and apparently unusually firm moral backbone (he’d resigned from the Mirror in the mid-1960s after refusing to doorstep the family of a recently murdered child). His book-length study of the infamous Victorian robber-murderer Charles Peace remains a compelling read. King of the Lags, first published in 1989, is what a contemporary audience would likely be asked to consider an example of slightly elevated literary true crime. The tone is sober, the prose carefully weighted. Peace – the Yorkshire-reared spectre of middle-class south-east London anxiety dreams – is unhysterically presented as precisely what he was: a vicious grotesque, partly moulded by the absurdities of his age.
In his breezily authoritative history of British crime journalism, veteran ex-Guardian journalist Duncan Campbell marches through three centuries worth of shifting terrain. We’ll All Be Murdered in Our Beds! has it all, from the early 18th-century pioneers (Daniel Defoe is sometimes credited as the first writer to have brought us the ‘celebrity criminal’ via his portrayal of the thief and master escape artist Jack Shepard in 1724) to the great excesses of mid-20th century Fleet Street my grandfather would have known, and beyond, to the rather more circumscribed present. The eye is drawn to a series of outsized Hogarthian characters in bulletproof offices. Men like Jimmy ‘Prince of Darkness’ Nicholson or the News of the World’s Peter Earle (when a woman asked how she could be certain Earle was really from the tabloid, he’d replied ‘because I’m admitting it’).
I met up with Campbell in an east London café on a bitingly cold January morning. Much has changed over the course of his over half-century career, not least the relationship collapse between reporters and law enforcement. ‘It changed after Leveson. Trust was very quickly eroded.’ Campbell isn’t nostalgic for the lost chumminess of the 1970s. ‘There were clearly issues in “mutual advantage”, but this mistrust has created its own problems.’ Three, to be specific, he wrote in a recent piece. ‘Journalists not trusting the police, the police not trusting journalists, and the public often not trusting either.’
