The Daily Novel

The story of the canoeist who faked his own death is one of those human interest stories which proves the old cliché that fact is stranger than fiction. Millions have been reading about the story of John Darwin, who was thought to have drowned in his canoe five years ago. Probably far more than watched the fictional Reginald Perrin series on prime Sunday night television. And, of course, the Perrin story was itself inspired by the real life story of the Labour MP, John Stonehouse, who faked his own death when his life was running into the buffers.

John Darwin has spent most of his life doing not very exciting jobs like school teaching and prison officering. But at heart he was a real Walter Mitty. He had dreams of something much more exciting. And moreover he was clever enough to go some way towards achieving those dreams. By playing the stock market and investing in houses in the north-east he built up assets worth hundreds of thousands. And even after he got into massive debt, he successfully faked his own death, resumed his marital life by knocking a hole on the wall of two adjoining houses he owned. He got away with this for several years, benefiting from the life insurance his wife was able to collect, and vesting the proceeds in new ventures in Panama. He was near his dream of establishing a canoeist’s dream hotel there under the name of John Jones, when, for reasons none of us yet know, he decided that he wanted to be John Darwin again. So he turned himself into the British police saying he had lost his memory.

The way the story has unfolded tells us quite a lot about the workings of the British media. The story has been told in great detail by all the British newspapers and been given prime time by the radio and television news bulletins. But so far as I have been able to glean no reporter has yet spoken to John Darwin (although several have got some information from their police contacts, and the police have been asking him quite a few questions in the last few days). All the hard information has come from his wife, Anne Darwin, and she, as far as I can gauge, has only spoken to two newspapers, the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror. The other newspapers and the broadcast media have in effect been rehashing what the Mail and Mirror have been discovering, and publishing as direct quotes by Anne Darwin.

Both papers included the name of David Leigh on the by-lines of their scoops. Thanks to some sleuthing by reporters on The Guardian we now know who he is. (By total co-incidence the leading investigative reporter on The Guardian is also called David Leigh.) David Leigh, according to The Guardian, is a former Daily Mirror reporter who works for the Splash news agency based in Miami. He tracked Anne Darwin down in Panama, took her back to Miami and sold his story to the Daily Mail. But the Daily Mail lost touch with him and it was the Daily Mirror who found out where he was.

So the two tabloids agreed to share the story (which does not stop either of them describing it as an ‘exclusive’!). Both newspapers have said they have paid no money to the Darwins. But both newspapers are presumably paying David Leigh or Splash or both. And not peanuts. I don’t know whether Leigh or Splash has paid money to the Darwins, but my guess is that it is 90 per cent likely that they will have paid them or their companies. That is for the Press Complaints Commission to discover.

Whatever, when I checked the web this morning the Daily Mail proclaimed that it was the Daily Mail who brought Anne Darwin back to Britain. The detailed Mail story proved that their reporters were on the plane, including such gems as this:

Before the plane took off from Atlanta, Mrs Darwin - who takes medication for blood pressure problems and poor circulation - put on her flight socks.

As the packed Delta aircraft taxied towards the arrivals gate at Terminal 2 she fought back tears as she looked out on a bleak, grey Manchester morning.

We also know that when the plane hit the tarmac at Manchester airport no fewer than six policemen, some armed with sub-machine guns, boarded the plane and escorted Anne to a waiting police car.

The mind boggles that this was necessary to arrest a 57 year old woman. The only reason I can think of for such a display of police strength is that the police wanted to make sure that they arrested her before the Daily Mail or the Daily Mirror spirited her off to a hotel in the country!