Just alerted by former colleagues that Brian Paddick has been decent about me at the Leveson inquiry . Today’s Guardian blog comes out with following :
12.23pm: Brian Paddick, a former Scotland Yard deputy assistant commissioner who is now a Lib Dem politician, has taken the stand as today’s first witness.
12.26pm: Paddick says while he was at the Met he had lunch with staff from the Guardian and the Daily Mirror – although he describes the latter as “more of an audience with Piers Morgan”.
He says the Mirror lunch followed a “kiss and tell” on him by the paper; he had got to know Morgan when the journalist called to get a quote.
A bunch of Channel 5 weather girls were there as well, he says.
Leveson is bemused as to what Morgan had to say and why Paddick went. Paddick suggests it was a thank you for his co-operation with his newspaper. “Requiring you to listen to him?” asks a bemused Leveson to laughter.
“There was lunch as well,” explains Paddick
12.31pm: Paddick says he also has a working relationship with a (now former) Financial Times journalist Jimmy Burns.
“We were on the same page in wanting reform of the police, better handling of race relations and that sort of thing,” says Paddick. “We had an immediate rapport and had a series of lunches that he paid for.”
We were indeed. Just to add to the record: One of the lunches Brian Paddick and I had together when I was still working at the FT was at the restaurant above the Globe theatre. He wanted to ask my advice about how he should handle ‘coming out’ publicly as a gay as he was about to be promoted into the higher management strata of the Met. I told him that if he left it up to the tabloids they would most likely take him to the cleaners. I suggested that I would write a measured profile about him in the FT but mentioning that he was gay deep in the piece and in context for it was -as far as I recall-mainly about him as a reformer across the board and being a breath of fresh air within the Met which he was- and continues to be (although now as an outsider) .
Long before he hit any kind of headlines, I met Paddick for the first time when he was still a young commander in west London. I was investigating the Met’s homophobic and sexist ‘canteen culture’ and its institutionalised racism following the enquiry into the first police investigation into the Stephen Lawrence murder . Paddick struck me immedeately as an enlightened reformer and I speculated in a piece later that he might one day become a Commissioner. He probably would have become one had he not not gone against the system.
He was one of the few senior cops I know who was prepared to say the truth about the shooting of De Menezes . You can check the articles I wrote about Brian Paddick. I think I am the only journalist who gets a possitive mention in Paddick’s autobiography. I never offered or paid him a dime nor did he ask for one. Our lunches I claimed off FT expenses.It’s a pity he hasn’t a hope in hell of becoming Mayor of London, but he deserves a place in the Lords. After all, Sir Ian Blair got a peerage , didn’t he?
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