Duncan Campbell obituary
Guardian crime correspondent admired for his determined and scrupulously fair reporting of wrongdoing, including miscarriages of justice
The journalist, author and broadcaster Duncan Campbell, who has died aged 80 from lymphoma, was the most respected crime correspondent of his generation. The determined, scrupulously fair way he pursued evidence of wrongdoing, including miscarriages of justice by the police and prosecuting authorities, was widely admired. It reflected a tolerance and respect for people from all sorts of backgrounds, qualities enriched by an extraordinary life of travel and experiences that gave him rare insights into human behaviour, prejudices and beliefs.
The world of crime never ceased to fascinate him. He earned the trust of criminals and senior police officers alike, establishing an astonishing network of contacts. The former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger described how Duncan “moved effortlessly between the lawyers, the cops and the villains. When he threw parties a great game was to try and gauge which was which. A retired bank robber would be rubbing shoulders with a judge next door to a chief constable. I can’t think of any other crime reporter who could bring that off.”
In 1997 Rusbridger enthusiastically agreed to fight a libel action brought by police officers over an article that Duncan wrote about corruption in Stoke Newington, north London. Duncan successfully defended himself before a high court jury – the first journalist to win a libel action by the police after 95 cases, a victory that landed the Police Federation with £600,000 in costs. The acquittal by the jury was greeted with loud applause in court.
Duncan’s success, in the face of a judge who did his best to persuade the jury to return a guilty verdict, is regarded as a turning point in the history of police libel claims. A House of Commons motion congratulated Duncan for what it called a “landmark victory both for responsible journalism and for the maintenance of public confidence in the police”.
Born in Edinburgh, Duncan was the son of Ian, a lawyer in the family firm of Archibald, Campbell and Harley, and Jean (nee Sanderson), who was educated at Edinburgh University and later engaged in voluntary work. Duncan was educated at Edinburgh academy and Glenalmond college, Perth and Kinross, where he was part of what became known as the Bolshy Club with Alex, Andrew and Patrick Cockburn, the three sons of the great campaigning journalist Claud.
At Edinburgh University, where he studied law (1963-66), he edited the magazine Student, where fellow contributors included the eventual Labour foreign secretary Robin Cook.
Contemporaries describe Duncan as extraordinarily popular, usually wearing a battered leather jacket and skinny black jeans. His triumphs as a reporter there included writing features on big issues of the time such as abortion and homosexuality. Both were still illegal, although abortion was carried out and there were well-known gay bars. He interviewed a former chief constable, William – known by the media as Wee Willie – Merrilees, who proudly told Duncan that Edinburgh dealt with what he called “homos” by going round the pubs of Rose Street and putting them on the night train to London.
After university, Duncan travelled to South Africa, where he took a job as a teacher in Pietermaritzburg and travelled around the country. His first-hand experience of apartheid affected him deeply. After a spell as an advertising copywriter in Puerto Rico, he returned to Britain. In London in the late 1960s, he was part of a commune in west London, which also had a retreat in the Forest of Dean. It was a time of radical rethinking of everything, and for Duncan it was the start of a life of not conforming.
Under the banner of No Blame – a name taken from an ancient Chinese I Ching belief – they formed a theatre group and performed at the Edinburgh fringe. When the group split up, Duncan hitchhiked round the world, with extended stays in India (1971) and later California. He never lost the understanding he gained from his travels of non-western, especially Asian, philosophy and teachings.
He returned to London and to journalism, becoming in 1975 news editor of Time Out – then much more than a London-based listings magazine – edited by John Lloyd, Duncan’s university contemporary and subsequently member of the London commune. While at Time Out, Duncan was involved in a number of notorious cases, including the ABC official secrets trial (1977-78) of a former soldier and two journalists (including another journalist called Duncan Campbell, a coincidence that both journalists liked to play on).
It was an exciting time at Time Out, Duncan recalled: “We never knew when there’d be a raid. One colleague interviewed an IRA member and was arrested under the Prevention of Terrorism Act.” Some stories were less serious: “We had a great idea – to show how easy it is to get hold of replica weapons.” A number were rented and the magazine’s photographer took shots of the staff wielding fake submachine guns on the office roof. “Seven or eight minutes later we heard the helicopter, then its loudspeaker: ‘Drop your weapons now’.”
“We were taken to Bow Street police station. We had to write a craven letter to the Metropolitan Police … The Met closed the whole of the Strand. Anyone with long hair was being arrested. Of course we reported it, under the headline ‘Police Hit the Roof’.” One of Duncan’s contributors at Time Out was Philip Agee, the former CIA officer who was deported in 1977 after identifying CIA members based in Britain.
With other Time Out colleagues, Duncan left in 1981 in protest against the decision by Tony Elliott, the magazine’s owner, to abandon its equal pay policy. He joined the breakaway publication, City Limits. That went on to fold in 1993, unable to withstand commercial pressures, but by February 1987 Duncan had already left to join Robert Maxwell’s new and ill-fated publication the London Daily News. When it collapsed in July the same year, he successfully applied to join the Guardian.
After a spell on the news desk, he was appointed the paper’s crime correspondent, a role that further established his name as the leading, most authoritative, journalist on that beat. He was elected chairman of the Crime Reporters Association and was awarded the Bar Council’s newspaper journalist of the year in 1992. In an inspired move, Rusbridger appointed Duncan the Guardian’s Los Angeles correspondent, from where he also covered South America.
He left the newspaper in 2010, but continued to be an active member of the National Union of Journalists, alerting members to what he regarded as just but neglected causes, including growing threats to journalists around the world.
Just last year, welcoming the release of Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, he wrote: “Why – why, for heaven’s sake – has it taken so long? And what about all the others who languish in crazily overcrowded British jails?” He went on to pose the question: “Who cares about prisoners or the scandal of those still wrongly held under the discredited Imprisonment for Public Protection laws”? He was meanwhile urging the Criminal Cases Review Commission to pursue the murder conviction of Wang Yam, a Chinese and former MI6 agent, in light of new DNA evidence. It was an intriguing case on which I worked with him for several years.
Duncan’s sense of humour, his observations on the quirks and frailties of the human condition, attracted him to the comedian Billy Connolly. A relationship that Duncan valued deeply led to two book collaborations – Billy Connolly: The Authorised Version (1976), which became a bestseller, and Gullible’s Travels (1982), about a Connolly tour of Britain in 1975, and, six years later, of the Middle East.
His book That Was Business, This Is Personal: The Changing Faces of Professional Crime (1990) was a series of interviews and profiles of criminals, detectives, lawyers and others in the criminal justice process. The Underworld (1994) was written to accompany the BBC series on organised crime in Britain, with an updated version published in 2019. His supreme talent at spinning a good tale, often inspired by an unrivalled knowledge and experience of shady and not-so shady worlds, was brilliantly reflected in two novels – The Paradise Trail (2008) and If It Bleeds (2009) – and in We’ll All Be Murdered in Our Beds, subtitled The Shocking History of Crime Reporting in Britain (2016).
Duncan’s calm, modest nature, and consideration for others – rare qualities in the world of journalism – attracted a wide circle of close friends. After his best friend died young, Duncan immediately took his daughter, Lorna Macfarlane, under his wing and made her his ward.
One of his friends observed that Duncan’s natural curiosity about people and life around him meant that he would often be the most knowledgable person in the room, something he wore lightly and with great humility. He was quietly charismatic, and able to navigate class divides in the world of criminal justice. His Scottish background and roots helped him remain something of an outsider in his professional life, independent of any particular circle or club. He was still writing articles aged 80 with the same zest and passion he had displayed throughout his professional life; social justice and human rights were at the heart of most of his investigations.
A gifted, funny raconteur, he entertained friends and colleagues with anecdotes, including as a cricketer. He was a key member of the New Statesman cricket team in the 80s, a side made up of journalists, lawyers, actors, cartoonists and others only loosely connected to the magazine. A fellow member described him as a tidy off-spinner and patient batsman, “utterly selfless as a player”, adding that “his prime skill lay in using his inquisitive kindness, his empathic soul, to magically fuse the individuals, some of them socially awkward, into a team”.
Duncan was always aware of the outsider, and was quick – a fellow member recalled – with a consoling quip and a pint at the bar after the game for the wretch who had dropped that dolly catch or run out the star batsman. It was as if he followed an inner code of conduct known only to him; a code far subtler than the mere laws of the game. He was the driving force behind six tours of India, including a match against the Bollywood film industry side. In the world of football, he was an ardent Arsenal supporter through what a fellow supporter calls “the dour years of George Graham to the fantasy era of Thierry Henry and beyond”.
In 2005, in India, Duncan married his longtime partner, the actor Julie Christie. They met in 1978 at the Dingwalls club in Camden, north London.
She survives him, as do his sister, Fionna, and brother, Niall.
• Iain Duncan Campbell, journalist and author, born 15 December 1944; died 16 May 2025