Q&A


What made you become a journalist? Best job in the world, isn’t it?


What other job might you have done?


I studied law and might have been a lawyer but not a very good one.


Who is your biggest hero? James Cameron.


When did you join the NUJ and why? In 1973 – I think Bernard Levin and Angela Phillips were at my first meeting. It was very exciting! And the NUJ, in the shape of the boyish and much-missed Gary Morton, supported us during a long strike over equal pay at Time Out in 1981, which led to the formation of City Limits magazine as a co-operative.


Are many of your friends in the union? All my journalist friends are – unless they’re lying.


What’s been your best moment in your career? Greatest relief was winning the libel action brought by five Stoke Newington police officers, backed by the Police Federation, over an article about a corruption investigation. God bless juries and Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, who was terrifically supportive.


What is the worst job you’ve ever had? I was a door-to-door Kleeneze brush salesman as a holiday job in the 1960s; that said, those were gentler times and good- hearted Edinburgh housewives always bought a duster or a clothes brush out of sympathy.


And the best? The Guardian without a doubt.


NUJ & Me Duncan Campbell is a


former crime correspondent for the Guardian


And villain? Staying in the world of journalism – all those Conservative politicians, led by John Whittingdale, trying to destroy the BBC to suck up to their newspaper proprietor chums.


Wh


W at advice would you give someone st


starting in journalism? Ge


Get a specialism and learn a language so, when the foreign ed


editor asks if you speak Spanish/Chinese/Arabic, you can say:


y “Oh, yes, of course.” And join the union!


Which six people (alive or dead) would you invite to a dinner party? Plug alert! As I’ve been doing a history of crime reporting, I’d like to invite six great crime writers: Daniel Defoe, Charles Dickens, WT Stead, Hilde Marchant, Fryn Tennyson Jesse and Duncan “Tommy” Webb. But can I also have Groucho Marx, Richard Pryor, Nina Conti and Billy Connolly joining us for dessert?


What was your earliest political thought? I voted for Andrew Cockburn, now a distinguished journalist in Washington, who was standing for CND in the school mock elections in the 1960s. I was his only vote.


What are your hopes for journalism over the next five years? That newspapers don’t disappear.


And fears? That they might.


How would you like to be remembered? It will probably be: “Er, which Duncan Campbell was that?”


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