What happens when journalists take sides

This is a curious book. Its title and the name of its publisher suggest that it is going to be an indictment by two journalists of their old profession. These two are now safe and snug in higher education: Stewart Purvis, a former chief executive of ITN, became Professor of Television Journalism at City University in London, where Jeff Hulbert is an honorary research fellow.

For here the roll-call begins: up first is W.N. Ewer, who between the wars wrote for the Daily Herald and is mysteriously thought to have been responsible for the lines ‘How odd/ Of God/To choose/The Jews’, though Purvis and Hulbert do not mention this. Instead, they assemble details of an even more mysterious career, first as a man who ran a Soviet spy network, then became so rabidly anti-communist he was capable of referring to Stalin as a latter-day Genghis Khan. MI5 spied on him for his entire career, he spied on them and, naturally, he was then given the CBE and treated to a retirement party by the foreign secretary Rab Butler.