Subscribers will know that I wrote in my column for the magazine this week about the revelations by former journalist Roy Greenslade that he was an active supporter of the IRA throughout the Troubles.
But there are a number of people who we should still hear from on this, and have not. One is Greenslade’s long-term editor and defender at the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, now the Principal of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford.
As I mentioned in my column, in 2000 The Spectator ran a piece by Stephen Glover identifying a Republican cell within the Guardian. Rusbridger responded furiously to this, denouncing the piece, The Spectator, the magazine’s then-editor Boris Johnson, and demanding an apology. Naturally the piece was completely right. Ronan Bennett’s IRA sympathies have always been well known. He was the partner of Rusbridger’s deputy editor, Georgina Henry. Greenslade has now outed himself. The 2000 accusations against Jonathan Freedland still stand unanswered. Freedland – who is still at the Guardian – stands accused of being naïve and ignorant. It would still be interesting to hear from him.
Still more interesting would be to hear from Rusbridger, who in 2000 ran a newspaper editorial saying the accusations were ‘half-baked gossip’.
Let us take Rusbridger at his word that he did not know Greenslade was a supporter of the IRA. Yet even if he did not know this in 2000, he must have known it 14 years later. Among many other actions, in March 2014 Greenslade stood surety for the Hyde Park bomber John Downey. By then there could have been no doubt, even in the mind of Alan Rusbridger, that his colleague was on the side of the IRA. As I say, this is March 2014.
In October of that year Maíria Cahill came forward to reveal that she had been raped by an IRA member.
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