A former Telegraph foreign desk manager who spent a decade as a police reception officer has described Leicestershire Police’s decision to bar a photographer from a job because he “knows too many journalists” as “risible”.
Former Leicester Mercury photographer Christopher DeBretton-Gordon told the BBC last week that he had been set to take up a job as a call handler for Leicestershire Police until the force belatedly told him his employment carried too great a risk of “information leakage”.
Now Paul Hill, who spent 37 years at The Daily Telegraph before moving into a similar public-facing police role as the one for which DeBretton-Gordon applied, told Press Gazette he was “worried” by the implication that journalists are necessarily untrustworthy.
Press Gazette is aware of at least three journalists who changed careers to become police detectives in recent years, and police force press offices around the UK are filled with former reporters.
Under police counter-corruption guidelines, social connections to journalists are “notifiable associations” which must be formally reported to the force. His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services says that the purpose of this policy “is to protect police officers, staff and the force from people who may, or may be perceived to, compromise their integrity”. Other notifiable associations include people with unspent criminal convictions and people awaiting trial.
In 2022 the Crime Reporters Association objected to a report by HM Inspectorate of Constabulary that criticised the Metropolitan Police for not having a policy requiring staff “to disclose their association with journalists or extremist groups”.
Hill said he “never, ever — not once, even with my huge contact list” leaked or sold a story to the press in his decade as a civilian officer, arguing his journalistic background prepared him well for his newer role.
[Read more: HMIC apology after warning police to declare associations with ‘journalists and extremist groups’]
‘I was good at listening for a news story and translating it into a crime report’
Now retired, Hill worked at The Telegraph from 1971 to 2008 managing the activities of the paper’s network of foreign correspondents and remains in contact with many of his ex-colleagues. Those colleagues include former prime minister Boris Johnson, who served as The Daily Telegraph’s Brussels correspondent under Hill’s tenure.
“I just loved dealing with fires, famines, floods, coups d’etat, wars, assassinations, mayhem,” Hill told Press Gazette. “The whole world was just full of news, and I just took to it like a duck to water. And I so loved it.”
Hill was responsible for the logistics of the organisation’s foreign operations, at all hours.
He said: “Literally, my home phone would go at three o’clock in the morning: ‘There’s been an earthquake’… We had 24-hour travel agents, and I would [take] maybe 15, 20 minutes to do all that, and then go back to sleep again. I was quite content…
“Correspondents really liked me, because when I sent them off to very, very dangerous places, life-threatening situations, I’d be the cheerful voice on the other end of the phone — I’d keep in touch with their wives at home, or their husbands… and keep them in the loop that they were okay. Because sometimes it really was quite dangerous”.
Hill was made redundant in 2008, four years into the newspaper’s ownership by the Barclay brothers. His daughter, who worked in the Metropolitan Police, gave him the idea of applying for a job as a jailor in Bromley — a role he was rejected for on the grounds that they thought he was more suited to be a station reception officer instead.
The new job, a civilian role working at Bromley Police Station rather than within the force itself, meant “dealing with anybody who came off the street… taking crime reports at the front counter.
“So if somebody came in and said, ‘I’ve had my wallet stolen’ or ‘Somebody’s bludgeoned my budgie to death’ or whatever — you would take the crime report, you would make a judgment as to whether it was a crime for the first instance, and if it was a crime then you’d record it as a crime.”
Hill was good at writing these reports, he said, because his years in news meant he could better pick up and communicate the key points of someone’s claim in a report.
“With the training I’ve had over the years, I was good at listening for a news story and translating it into a crime report,” he said.
Hill said he ultimately made 2,438 of those crime reports over the decade he worked at the station. His own success in the role meant he “was quite disappointed to see Chris DeBretton-Gordon not getting the job… I was quite shocked and disappointed when I saw that his contacts with the press were a no-no.
“I mean, it’s risible that means he’s not trustworthy. And that worries me.”
Leicestershire Police said application to be a police call handler, for which he successfully interviewed, was turned down late because vetting is only carried out after a start date for training is set.
The force said: He said: “Due to the nature and number of notifiable association relationships disclosed by the applicant, it was felt that the risk was too great to manage by the force.
“The force has to be alive to the many and varied risks associated with people entering the workforce, including where there is potential for leakage of information to the media.
“We have a duty to protect sensitive information about the many people and incidents we deal with every day. That is paramount, and I believe it’s what the public would expect of us.”
Hill noted that in his job he had been required to sign the Official Secrets Act, telling Press Gazette: “I could have made some money out of it, but I never did… If you do a quiet phone call away to a newsroom — who would know? But I never did it. It’s a question of trust: I was trusted by the police and I trusted them… Though I had news skills, I didn’t abuse those skills.”
Asked whether he had ever been the subject of suspicion from his police coworkers because of his past life in news and his links to journalists, Hill said: “Well, I used to say to them: ‘This is a great story… I’d love to phone The Telegraph.’ So they knew, everyone knew.”
But there had been no issue, he said, and oftentimes it was the police themselves who would tell Hill details about their work.
“They would come in and talk to me in the night shift, especially when it’s quiet after one o’clock in the morning when nothing much was happening… and chat to me about what they’ve been up to and the various really, really good stuff — you know, sometimes sexual stuff, sex crimes or whatever. All sorts of stuff, all sorts of crimes.”
Hill said DeBretton-Gordon “has got a lot to offer, as I hopefully did. And for some reason, they just don’t seem to trust him”.
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