How we broke the Huw Edwards story

Also this week: front-page thugs and swinging elections.

It’s a Monday morning and my news editor rushes in: “We think Huw Edwards has been charged.” It has been a year since the Sun ran a front-page story saying a BBC presenter had paid thousands of pounds to a 17-year-old with a drug dependency in exchange for explicit pictures. The piece led to a huge media storm. Suspended by the BBC and later named as the subject of our story by his wife, Edwards sought medical treatment for mental health issues.

At the time the Sun faced a backlash from his friends and other commentators after the teenager issued a statement saying our story was “rubbish”. TV crews were outside the building and there were calls for my head amid ridiculous claims that we had “terrorised” Edwards – we hadn’t even named him.

The pressure was intense. But I never doubted that our story was true and that it deserved to be reported. The BBC had already failed to act on a complaint. Not publishing would have meant being part of the ultimate conspiracy of protecting the powerful. Thankfully, I had firm support from Rupert Murdoch, who is familiar with being at the centre of a storm.

Duty of the press

After our tip-off about the charges against Edwards, we found his name listed for a court appearance. We had been asking the Met Police for months whether he had been arrested, as we understood he had been. Our queries were met with obfuscation. Yet again we put in calls to the Met and the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) for a statement. They promised one within the hour, so we prepared to break the story online. I was stunned at the seriousness of the charges: the making of category-A child abuse images. And stunned that the CPS had not publicly announced he had been charged weeks earlier. It’s a democratic country, but this felt like something out of North Korea.

To those who think we shouldn’t have run our original story, I ask what should we have done with the information that came to us? Bury it in a drawer in the “too difficult” box? Keep it quiet and report it to the BBC’s HR department, as one prominent commentator suggested? The evidence from the stories the Sun published last July was handed to the BBC in a dossier shortly after. None of it was as unimaginably horrific as the crimes he pleaded guilty to. But the Sun’s evidence showed a pattern of behaviour that should have been clear for the BBC investigators to see.

Making headlines

During the riots of 2011, the Sun published a “Shop a Moron” front page, identifying a bunch of thugs being hunted by police. It clearly lodged in the memory of David Lammy, who was then (and remains) MP for Tottenham. Lammy, now Foreign Secretary, told the cabinet that our splash had helped to bring the 2011 chaos to an end as would-be rioters didn’t fancy finding themselves on page one.

Might the Sun be considering a similar front page, 13 years on? The answer was yes. This time, the headline was “Nailed and Jailed”, alongside pictures of the first louts to appear in court. The stiff sentencing – and the public’s awareness of what was going to happen to anybody who carried on rioting – helped to restore order. The mainstream media was incredibly careful during the riots not to inflame tensions. The same can’t be said for the big social media companies.

Under new management

Discussions about who to back at the 4 July election had been going on in our office for at least two years. The media was obsessed with which way the Sun would go, unable to decide if we were powerful enough to swing an election, or had no power at all due to the decline of print media. Speculation began long before Rishi Sunak called the snap election, which incidentally took place while I was at a News Corp meeting in Australia. I took a call from the then prime minister at around 4am local time, in which he explained his logic. He and his party were clearly exhausted.

I was delighted that Sunak and Keir Starmer agreed to take part in a debate with Sun readers, held in our London Bridge HQ ten days before the election. Hosted superbly by the Sun’s political editor, Harry Cole, it had to be carefully choreographed as neither leader wanted to be in the room at the same time as the other. Determined not to show any favour, we decided I couldn’t wear “Labour” Red or “Tory” Blue on the night for fear commentators would take it as a sign of which way we were going to swing.

On the eve of the election, we went with the front-page headline: “Time for a New Manager”. It was clear our readers wanted change and only Labour could deliver that, while the Tories needed to rebuild.

Victoria Newton is editor-in-chief of the Sun