No one got cracked over the head for no reason: dispatches from a crime reporter

Martin Brunt has been called a ‘bloodsucker, scum, pariah’ and worse. ‘Sometimes I feel I deserve it,’ the veteran crime reporter muses in this thoughtful memoir. But as with most old-school journalists, there’s also a sense that Brunt relishes being part of what Tom Stoppard called ‘a privileged group, inside society and yet outside it, with a licence to scourge it and a duty to defend it’.

Brunt, a former Mirror reporter who moved to Sky News in 1989, is genuinely old school. His scoops from the grim frontline of crime tend to come from personal contacts with coppers and villains – and a murky corps of operators somewhere in between – rather than press officers.

In general, notwithstanding the cases of Wayne Couzens and David Carrick, the police come out of his anecdotes pretty well. Brunt is evidently moved by the long-running attempt to identify ‘Adam’, the torso of a young boy found in the Thames in 2001; a murder, one suspects, even the perpetrators assumed would consume little police time.

Other notorious cases where he had an inside track range from those of the Wests to the Hatton Garden heist. Plus that tabloid failsafe, the disappearance of Madeleine McCann. Here, in a chapter entitled ‘Trolls’ we have a story he wishes he had never done.

Oddly, lawyers play only small parts in these reminiscences. Perhaps Brunt is protecting sources.

The old school of crime reporting is now under threat. When Brunt moved from tabloids to TV, he had to give up lunchtime boozing with contacts. And, since the Leveson report, unofficial channels between police and press have firmly shut down. (By contrast, says Brunt ‘nothing much has changed in the way hacks and MPs interact’.)

Should anyone care? ‘The same people who hurl abuse at me go home and turn on the TV news,’ Brunt observes. ‘I wonder where they think the news comes from.’

Give me an old-school hack over TikTok, any day.

Michael Cross is news editor at the Law Society Gazette