Phillip Knightley gives the ‘insight on Insight’

I was fortunate enough to have a seminar with the legendary Phillip Knightley, two-time journalist of the year and former member of the Sunday Times Insight team. He was fascinating and, what’s more, it all was on the record. He allowed me to record it all on my dictaphone, so here’s a transcription of when he spoke about the Insight team.

But, for now, enjoy this.

I thought I’d give you an idea of how Insight worked. Not the way it’s currently portrayed, but the true story on Insight. The insight on Insight.

So, I was just an ordinary reporter on the Sunday Times. A very loose gathering of reporters… distinguished largely by the fact that they’re on a different floor from the general reporters’ room.

That sort of separated them a bit from ordinary reporting. They were there because the reporters’ room was full. And it was the sixth floor and the fifth floor — I was on the sixth floor with this small group of reporters.

It was a loose group in the sense that Tuesday was the day in which the news agenda was set for the week, or discussed for the week, and the nominal head of Insight [Bruce Page] would come out from the Tuesday news conference and say ‘we’re going to have a look at so and so this week’.

Bruce Page said it’s [a story] handed over to us because ‘the newsroom is busy doing [something else]‘. So we’d begin and as a team effort, which is very important because decisions that are normally one reporter became decisions of a group, and often they disagreed, but there was always that input of four or five people.

After a while doing these investigations – some big, some small, some failed, some successful – a sort of Insight style was also reached. A writing style in which the narrative is almost as important as the narrative [is] to a novel. I don’t know if it just developed or if somebody thought of it, I think it just developed, but it was felt - justified later on – that it should have a distinctly different style to ordinary reporting. Much more discursive and descriptive — a narrative to grab the reader and make him realise he was reading something different.

It was packed with detail, often extraneous detail, along the lines of ’at 3.28pm last Wednesday, outside the rainy entrance to the so and so’. Towards the end of Insight it was a parody of itself, almost.

At the beginning it was so different from ordinary journalism that people wanted to read it. The idea was to keep them guessing at what the story was about, even, in the first four or five paragraphs, and then you hit them with what it really was.

It’s been variously described as ‘we named the guilty men’ journalism, or ‘arrow points to defective part’.

But once we were up and running we became an elite in the organisation. We drank separately, we ate separately, had our own parties, didn’t mix with the other crowd of reporters.

It turned out in the end to be a bit of a disaster, because when the Bloody Sunday report was produced, by Murray Sayle and Terry Humphrey, it had to be - because of the lateness of the delivery on Saturday - telephoned to the newsroom, which was distinct from [Insight]. We didn’t have telephone reporters in Insight because people worked on the story all Friday night.

So the report went missing down in the newsroom, said to be due to the ‘Berlin wall’ that existed between the newsroom and Insight.

We were encouraged to tackle big themes, both by Page and by Hall and Harry Evans – think big, think of big, big things, don’t be frightened of thinking too big.

Phillip also gave an in-depth account of his investigation into Kim Philby, which I’ll transcribe soon, too.