on our patch


Salisbury poisonings


In a new series, Ruth Addicott talks to local journalists about their work when a national story breaks on their doorstep


T


he sight of fire crews in hazmat suits searching in the undergrowth in Salisbury is an image that will stay with many people, not least Rebecca Hudson, former reporter on the Salisbury Journal.


It was a wet Sunday afternoon in March 2018 when Hudson


received the tip-off. “I was at a 50th birthday drinks with a family friend and someone said they’d seen the air ambulance land in the city centre,” she recalls. “My editor had emailed, so I said, ‘I’ll head down there and see what’s going on’.” Two people had been taken to hospital after collapsing on a bench. They were former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, and the event triggered the biggest, most surreal and extraordinary spy story of recent times. Hudson, then still a trainee, was the first reporter on scene. “There was a very small police cordon and no one there apart from the police,” she recalls. “The police kept saying, ‘We’ll be lifting it in a minute, you can go’. I kept saying, ‘No, it’s fine, I’ll wait until you head off’. It didn’t make sense to me if it was a drug overdose why was the scene being cordoned off?”


Tips on securing that big story


Trust your instincts Rebecca Hudson says always follow a tip-off and don’t always believe what the emergency services say: “Wiltshire Police denied they told us it was a fentanyl


20 | theJournalist


incident, but they did. Don’t be too trusting of police press officers.”


Local contacts The Salisbury Journal received a tip-off every time


there was an incident, so were often the first to arrive. “People trusted us,” says former editor Joe Riddle


Get it right Luke Harding, senior


international correspondent at The Guardian, says the main difficulty was verification. “How does one verify the real identity of the killers?” he says. “All the normal things you’d


Hudson called journal photographer Tom Gregory. Next thing, fire crews in green hazmat suits were decontaminating the area.


“I thought, ‘This doesn’t look like any drug overdose I’ve


ever seen’,” says Hudson. The pictures made the front pages of the papers the


following day. On the Monday evening, the BBC revealed a Russian spy had been poisoned. Then the world’s media descended. “I remember that first Monday night, there was a press conference at the hospital – I went back to the office and got home just before midnight,” recalls Hudson. “I was just about to go to bed when I got a call saying they’d cordoned off Zizzi’s restaurant in town, so I got back up and went down there.” Three days later, police revealed a nerve agent had been used and the case was being treated as attempted murder. Wiltshire police officer Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey was seriously ill in hospital; Theresa May told the House of Commons it was ‘highly likely’ Russia was responsible. With the phones ringing off the hook and calls from as far


as Australia, the problem for the Journal was resources. The team was working flat out.


“I remember speaking to someone from The Times and


they’d brought four or five journalists – that was more than we had at the paper full time,” says Hudson.


do – such as call up or ask a press officer – it doesn’t work in a totalitarian state that lies all the time. There’s no point asking the Kremlin for a comment. You want to get it right, you don’t want to be slow but also you have to be careful not to be inaccurate or sensationalise.”


MAIN IMAGE: PA IMAGES / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO


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