Roy Greenslade: IRA supporter in Fleet Street kept silent until he paid off his mortgage

The School of Journalism at London’s City University didn’t waste any time. No sooner had Roy Greenslade confessed to being a member of Sinn Fein and a supporter of the IRA’s “armed struggle” than he was stabbed in the front quicker than you could say “knife”. Officially, it was Greenslade’s decision, but he went before he was pushed.

Quite right, too.

Greenslade – a former editor of the Daily Mirror, senior executive at the Sun and Sunday Times, columnist for the Evening Standard and long-time media commentator at the Guardian – had been a professor of journalism at the school for 15 years, with a particular interest in journalistic ethics.

Now retired, aged 74, he has ever since been styled as a professor emeritus, or, alternatively, as an honorary visiting professor.

But when the top brass read over their cornflakes on Sunday that their erstwhile colleague had for years hidden from them the fact that for the last 40 years he had “covertly” supported the IRA’s “long war” against the British, there was only one possible outcome. The school, it was reported, would look into the situation as a matter of urgency. Twenty-four hours later, Greenslade resigned.

Only at this stage was it revealed that he was not in fact a professor emeritus, but rather an honorary visiting fellow – the Quare Fella of British academe.

It should be noted that Greenslade is ill. He has been treated for cancer. He is also fully retired from journalism, having been “let go,” as he put it, by the Guardian in 2018. Thus, while he has arguably little to gain from his belated candour, he also has nothing to lose, at least in terms of his career.

Will he now write a book in which he tells all? I have no idea, But it would certainly sell well enough in Ireland, as well as in what now passes for Fleet Street.

Two things in particular stick in people’s throats in consideration of the Greenslade Question. The first is that the man himself is a self-serving hypocrite. Many of us were well aware of his Republican leanings. He was outed some years back as a contributor to An Phoblacht (The Republic), the voice of Sinn Fein, writing under the sobriquet George King, and has often expressed the view that a united Republic is the best way forward for the people of Northern Ireland. No harm in that. You either agree with him or you don’t. As a matter of fact, I do. Where we part company is over the “armed struggle,” the key feature in a conflict in which some 3,500 people were killed over 35 years. He supported it. I did not. On the contrary, I consider the Provisional IRA to have been murderers and butchers.

This is what he wrote as part of his 3,000-word confessional in the latest edition of the British Journalism Review: “I came to accept that the fight between the forces of the state and a group of insurgents was unequal and therefore could not be fought on conventional terms … in other words I supported the use of physical force.”

Can he really be surprised, therefore, to find himself described as a terrorist-loving charlatan?  For years, he has owned a house in Brighton, not far from the Grand Hotel which in 1984, with Margaret Thatcher as the primary target, was bombed by the IRA during the Conservative Party Conference.  Five Tory activists, including an MP, were killed in the attack. Another 31 people were wounded, among them the wife of Norman Tebbit, one of Margaret Thatcher’s leading ministers.

The next day, the IRA issued a statement defending the slaughter. “Mrs. Thatcher will now realise that Britain cannot occupy our country and torture our prisoners and shoot our people in their own streets and get away with it. Today we were unlucky, but remember we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always.”

Greenslade saw for himself the consequences of that particular outrage, just as two decades earlier he had seen, on television, the horror of Bloody Sunday. To him, logically, it seems one justified the other. Though he regretted civilian casualties, this was war, and the IRA continued to enjoy his secret support.

The second thing that sticks in the craw is Greenslade’s justification for keeping his true allegiance concealed during a long and successful Fleet Street career. He needed the money, you see. For he had a mortgage to pay and couldn’t afford the luxury of honesty.

You will not be surprised to learn that he did rather well out of this particular compromise. I don’t know what his home in Brighton is worth, I only know that I couldn’t move there in the 1990s because I couldn’t raise the cash. But in 2007 his Georgian manor house in County Donegal, set in 14 landscaped acres, was put on the market with an asking price of €3 million (£2.6m). It didn’t sell. More recently, it was up for €1.4 million and there was talk of Greenslade and his wife downsizing while remaining in the area. According to an article in the property section of the Irish Times, a total of €400,000 had been spent down the years on a “substantial restoration” of the house, the grounds of which were described by estate agents as “extremely private”.

Bear in mind, Greenslade  was for several years a member of the Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist) and is now a proud member of Sinn Fein, whose policies in Ireland, both north and south of the border, include demands for a swingeing wealth tax to help pay for much-needed social housing.

Where did the money come from? Presumably from working for Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers, and from the Scott Trust that owns the Guardian and, entertainingly enough, the late Robert Maxwell, the disgraced one-time owner and ransacker of the Daily Mirror, whose life story he wrote up in a quick-turnaround biography, Maxwell’s Fall, that lays heavy emphasis on the tycoon’s penchant for deception and greed.

Greenslade’s two other books are Goodbye to the Working Class, from 1976, and Press Gang: How Newspapers Make Profits from Propaganda, which came out in 2003. Whether these titles drew unconsciously on the author’s own political journey I am in no position to say.

The point of this sorry saga is what it reveals about the man himself – someone who long ago helped get me a job on the Sunday Times and who later puffed my memoir of growing to adulthood in Belfast alongside a future leader of the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) who in 1979 masterminded the murder of the war hero Airey Neave in the carpark of the House of Commons.

I liked Greenslade. I found him a genial soul and a first-class journalist. And, as I have said, I agree with him on the issue of Irish unity. But it turns out I hardly knew him at all. I have an image in my head now of him as the equivalent, in Irish terms, of Guy Burgess, who lived on in Moscow long after his spying days were done thinking wistfully of his past life in London. Prompted by my friend Noel Fahey, a former Irish ambassador to Washington, I wonder does Roy think there is a small niche for him in the pantheon of England’s Irish heroes, next to Maude Gonne, Erskine Childers, Ken Loach, and Jeremy Corbyn. Probably not, but you never know.

All we can say for sure is that at last he has come clean. The Dagenham One has told his story and and can retreat to his home in Donegal secure in the knowledge that his grandchildren in America can in future boast of his life as the Fleet Street Pimpernel. In the meantime, is there anyone out who could follow the example of Burgess’s mum and send him an occasional hamper from Fortnum’s?