The memory of murdered Hickey reporter Geddes lives on after 41 years

SPEAKER: Gabriel Gatehouse

To Oxford for the Geddes Prize lecture at St Edmund Hall, the student journalism award set up in memory of Philip Geddes, the brilliant young Hickey reporter killed by the Harrods bomb just before Christmas 1983. This year it was delivered by Gabriel Gatehouse, the BBC and Channel Four correspondent, and it couldn't have come at a better time for a man who has spent so much of his recent career in the US reporting on the MAGA madness that swept Putin's buddy into the White House.

Gatehouse is not an admirer and, judging by the audience of 250, neither were they. I've written rather a lot recently about Trump so suffice to say that Gatehouse echoed my sentiments expressed in last week's column. Since his talk the American economy has started to tank. I can only hope this might speed the end of this terrible period when one man is turning the world order on its head. So let us instead look at the Geddes Prize, now in its 41st year.

It was Saturday, December 17 when Philip Geddes was shopping in Harrods with his girlfriend. When the Provisionals' telephone warning came the store was evacuated and Philip, ever professionally  curious, followed the police and straight into the blast from the car bomb in Hans Crescent. He was 24 and just three years out of St Edmund Hall, his Oxford college (and Nick Lloyd's too). In the shock which followed, many of us did the most obvious thing and took to the Popinjay. And it was there that Christopher Wilson, the Hickey editor, said to the late and very great Danny McGrory that he felt he had to do something to memorialise Philip. "Well," said Danny, "there were two things in Philip's short life (girlfriend and family aside) Oxford and journalism.” The seed was sown.

 Wislon immediately set about raising money for a student journalism prize in Geddes' name. Not just by passing the hat among colleagues (which he did) but among the Fleet Street proprietors. Within 24 hours a messenger arrived with a cheque for £1,000 from Lord Rothermere of the Daily Mail. Others quickly followed. 

All except from Philip's own employer. 

Eventually Fleet Holdings, then owners of the Express, contributed £1,500. And clawed it back in the most shameful way; that amount was subtracted from the £150,000 which went under the employee life policy to his sole survivors, his grieving parents. 

And so, after much lobbying while still running the Hickey column, Wislon persuaded Teddy Hall, as the college is affectionately known, to establish the Geddes Prize for Student Journalism, now the oldest continuous award in the UK. Forty-one years on there are now three more prizes under the Geddes umbrella; the Clive Taylor prize for sports reporting named after the Sun's peerless cricket writer, the Ronnie Payne prize for foreign reporting and now, new this year, the Paddy Coulter Prize for Opinion Journalism.

Paddy Coulter was at school with me before leaving for Oxford to study classics. His brilliant career embraced academia and, tangentially, showbiz. For it was Paddy, as communications director of Oxfam, who persuaded Michael Buerk to accompany him to Ethiopia and see for himself the famine of biblical proportions. Seven harrowing minutes were given over to his report on the BBC News programmes and among those watching and weeping was Bob Geldof. Thus Live Aid was born and in its wake Comic Relief. 

Paddy later moved to head the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford and was a great long-standing supporter of the Geddes Prize. We were due to have lunch when we heard that Paddy had died suddenly just before Christmas.

This year's winner of the Geddes was, in the words of Wislon, very much in the mould of Philip; a lad from oop North called Anuj Mishra of Exeter College who said he speaks two languages, Bolton and Oxford. In Philip's case it was Barrow-in-Furness and Oxford. Geddes, Taylor, Payne and Coulter are proudly sponsored and promoted by Teddy Hall and its Principal, Baroness Willis. It will live long after we have all gone and hats off the indefatigable Wislon for starting it and never giving up.

*****

The Guardian would have us all believe it is the moral compass of this country. Well last week it showed its true colours and an appalling lack of judgment when it tried to entrap my old friend Richard Dannatt, the former head of the British Army, now a crossbench peer. 

A reporter, posing as the director of a fictional property company, phoned Richard and then recorded a Zoom call to ask if he could introduce the company to relevant government ministers. It was the latest chapter in the paper's 'project' called The Lord's Debate, in which it is trying to prove that those in the Upper House are all rogues. Well, they picked on the least roguish peer imaginable. Throughout the interview Dannatt stressed that he could do nothing if it infringed written guidelines banning peers from lobbying. Indeed the Guardian quoted him saying "I have to keep myself scrupulously above board to make sure that what I'm doing is declared."

In other words, with that caveat this was a non story; the man they tried to stitch up as just another peer on the make was nothing of the sort. And yet for reasons known only to the amateurs at the paper they still ran it, caveats and all.

For the record I have known Richard and his family for the best part of 20 years. I was a trustee of Street Child, now a global aid charity set up by his son Tom and have travelled to Sierra Leone with father and son to see the work of Street Child.  On one occasion the so-called speed boat taking us from Lunghi airport to the capital Freetown broke down at least 10 times in the short journey and during the same trip a tropical storm rained unripened mangoes down on our van that, in Richard's words, it was like being under severe mortar attack. 

The most extraordinary aspect of the Guardian's misjudgment is that a week before the piece last Friday, it had commissioned Dannatt to write an impassioned article on the need for the UK to bolster it army numbers.  

*****

 As a baby boomer growing up in the monochromatic world of the 1950s, the 60s came as a great and welcome shock. Suddenly it was a blistering kaleidoscope of colour, pretty (mostly) girls in mini-skirts and music our parents didn't understand. Food was changing too, there were curries, Chinese restaurants and spaghetti. 

I was reminded just how lucky we were while watching Scorsese's No Direction Home chronicling Bob Dylan's early years as the great poetic genius. We were the truly lucky generation; newspapers really were brilliant training grounds, cars were no longer stodgy saloons painted black but bright red E-Types, colourful Minis, silver Porsches and the great Morris Minor Traveller with its exposed timber. When one was spotted by a visiting American in Stratford-on-Avon she alerted her friend: "Oh look honey, even the cars match the houses.”  Oh well, please yourself...

*****

Has there ever been a more ridiculous woman than Liz Truss? Reviled in this country and a pariah in the party she inexplicably led, all but wrecking our economy in the process, she has decamped to the States where she is now a dedicated, or more probably, a desperate Trump follower. The lettuce says the UK is a "failed state and a deeply rotten system led by commissars".

Her latest idea is to launch a 'free speech media network' to take on the ‘Britain Bashing Corporation' and based in Kent. She assured the fascist Steve Bannon that on her network "you will be uncensored and uncancellable". 

All of which would be simply pathetic but this promiscuous (politically I mean — or do I?) failure is costing this 'failed state' a fortune; £8,000 a month for her private office and a total since her graceless departure of £225,000 and rising.

As she thinks so little of us, Truss should be cut adrift immediately. No private office, no security. Nothing except our contempt. Let Donald Trump look after her, they deserve each other.

ALAN FRAME

12 March 2025