Mick Hartley

Hadley Freeman, in the context of the Southampton football-spying saga, recalls her own experience:

It was about twenty years ago and I wasn’t an intern but a fashion assistant at The Guardian, which probably is the journalism equivalent of being a performance analyst intern at Southampton FC. Back then, the tabloids had a running stunt of planting fake bombs around the royal family to expose how bad their security was. So the then features editor of The Guardian, Ian Katz, decided it would be a laugh if I planted a fake bomb in the offices of The Sun to expose how bad their security was. He built me a fake bomb out of a block of Blu Tack stuck onto the back of what I can only describe as a Chairman Mao alarm clock and dispatched me to The Sun’s offices. (Katz, you may or may not be amazed to learn after hearing about this wheeze, went on to become the head of Channel 4.)

Alas, either The Sun had better security than the royals or I was more inept than any tabloid reporter (let’s go with both), because I couldn’t even get past the front gates. So I came back, put the fake bomb on my desk and returned to my usual job of stocktaking in the fashion closet. But when I emerged about ten minutes later, no one was in the office. Literally no one. I happened to look out the window and there were all of my colleagues, standing on the pavement. While I was in the fashion closet, someone from the obituaries desk heard the Chairman Mao clock ticking and called the bomb squad. So, on the plus side, I did plant a fake bomb in a newspaper office. On the down side, it was my office.