Sunday Times political editor Caroline Wheeler’s journalist of the year win was the culmination of a personal crusade that began during her first week in journalism 23 years ago at Sunday Mercury in Birmingham.
Wheeler received a phone call from a man who told her a story that was so extraordinary she said she thought her news editor was playing a prank on her to see if she could spot a conspiracy theorist.
The caller was Mick Mason, one of 30,000 people in the UK infected with contaminated blood products in the 1970s and 1980s. He was given just six months to live when he was diagnosed with HIV at the age of 18.
Wheeler dedicated her British Journalism Awards prize to Mason and other campaigners who she said have become friends over her 23 years writing about their plight..
She said: “There are many of them not here any longer and sadly some of them are still dying as we speak today.”
Wheeler said it was the “privilege and honour” of her life to sit with Mason in the House of the Commons on the day the Infected Blood Inquiry report was published earlier this year and prime minister Rishi Sunak apologised and announced a £11.8bn compensation scheme for the victims.
Wheeler also thanked the many other journalists who have worked on the story and the Sunday Express, where she led a campaign on the issue before joining The Sunday Times.
Wheeler said one of the most challenging aspects of the story, which has been the subject of the Sunday Times Bloody Disgrace campaign, has been persuading victims to speak out because of the stigma that has been associated with HIV and Hepatitis C.
She said: “One of the most important things in moving forward with this story was winning the trust of people who are willing to talk about this.
“What I found from the beginning was people want to be involved but they didn’t want people to know necessarily that they were HIV positive or had Hepatitis C.
“That’s why it too so long. People didn’t necessarily want to tell their stories.
“But little by little we gained their trust. If we hadn’t brought them with us we would never have got this.”
Sunday Times story that helped prompt public inquiry
The key turning point for the campaign came in 2017 when Theresa May lost her majority and had to rely on support from the DUP in order to govern.
Wheeler recalls bumping into Diana Johnson, the Labour MP who led the parliamentary campaign on behalf of the blood scandal victims, outside Portcullis House in Westminster.
“I said I think we have made some progress here because we have Labour, the Lib Dems, we’ve got the Greens, we’ve got the DUP. And she was like ‘we’ve got the DUP?…
“We got this letter signed by all the leaders of the parties, it was probably the most insignificant story that I had ever written. It was on page four of The Sunday Times, it made about 400 words and that letter then precipitated an urgent debate in the House of Commons and just after the debate had been announced Number 10 called me and said: ‘Congratulations, you’ve won your public inquiry’.
“They didn’t want to have a face-off with the DUP so early in their tenure into power-sharing. That was the moment of every journalist’s dream really, that was the moment when the hairs stand up on the back of your neck and you can’t believe something so seismic has happened.
“We didn’t think we were ever close to that happening. We really thought we were howling into the wind, so that was moumental and it changed everything.”
‘You can affect change in a massive way’
Asked what she had learned about running a successful campaign and keeping the momentum going, Wheeler said: “Never give up because you can achieve amazing things, you can affect change in a massive way.”
She added that a big factor in maintaining interest in the story was “showing the human side of it”.
She said: “That’s what readers have really picked up on. Going back to the editors time and time again and saying ‘look, the readers are interested in this’.
“There was a story we ran in The Sunday Times about seven brothers and they’d all been infected with HIV and Hepatitis C and five of them had died. We had their photograph and we put it on the front page and the readers’ comments were incredible.
“They were saying things like ‘why isn’t this on the front page of every newspaper, why are people not making more of this?’.
“When you read those comments you take them back to the editor and you use that to galvanise them to keep running these stories.
“It hasn’t been easy. There have been loads of times when the story has gone into a fallow period, but we’ve always then had a new thing to hitch the campaign to or a new case study, or somebody that’s never spoken before and then it has ratcheted back up the news agenda.
“I never got a front page out of the contaminated blood scandal until this year – it’s always been a story that’s been relegated to the middle pages or the feature pages. It does take enormous perseverance.”
Paying tribute to the efforts of other journalists to successfully secure justice this year for those wrongly jailed as a result of faulty Post Office IT systems, she said: “There’s lots of evidence of the power of journalism.”
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