Richard Norton-Taylor

Richard Norton-Taylor    (journalist, editor, playwright)
Born	Richard Seymour Norton-Taylor 1944-06-04
Alma mater	University of Oxford/Hertford College
Spouse	Anna C. Rendle
Member of	Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies
Writer for The Guardian on defence and security matters

Richard Norton-Taylor (born 6 June 1944) is a British editor, journalist and playwright who writes for The Guardian on defence and security matters, and was the newspaper's security editor.

In July 2017, Norton-Taylor declared:

"I am a supporter of Stop the War Coalition because over the past several decades military intervention by the West and by others has been counterproductive, causing more death and destruction. As we are now seeing, this was the case in Iraq and Afghanistan. It would be much more effective to get to the root causes of the problem behind the spread of terrorism and other security threats."

Early life and education

He was born Richard Seymour Norton-Taylor to Lt. Seymour Norton-Taylor, R.A. and Gweneth Joan Powell (died 9 January 1978).

Norton-Taylor was educated at King's School in Canterbury, Kent, and at Hertford College, a constituent college of the University of Oxford.

Career

He was European Community and Brussels, Belgium, correspondent for both The Washington Post and Newsweek between 1967 and 1975, while also contributing to The Economist and the Financial Times.

Norton-Taylor joined The Guardian in 1975, concentrating on Whitehall official secrecy and behind-the-scenes decision-making.

He has written several plays based on transcripts of public inquiries including The Colour of Justice (1999) based on the hearing of the Stephen Lawrence public inquiries into the police investigation (MacPherson Inquiry) into the police conduct of the investigation into the murder of Stephen Lawrence and Justifying War: Scenes from the Hutton Inquiry (2003).

Norton-Taylor is a Member of Council of the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI).

He is a trustee of the Civil Liberties Trust and the London Action Trust.

Awards

Norton-Taylor won the 1986 Freedom of Information Campaign award, and the same year was prevented by a court injunction from reporting the contents of Spycatcher (1987), the memoirs of the former MI5 agent, Peter Wright. The government's injunction was dismissed in the High Court by Lord Justice Scott.

He was one of the few journalists to cover the Scott Inquiry from start to finish. His play, Half the Picture, based on the inquiry, received a 1994 Time Out Drama, Comedy and Dance award for its "brave initiative".

Personal life

In 1967, he married Anna C. Rendle, eldest daughter of Mr. and Mrs. J. E. Rendle, of Kemerton, near Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire.

 

Documents by Richard Norton-Taylor

Title	Document type	Publication date	Subject(s)	Description
Document:Britain’s creeping cronyism	Article	1 September 2020	Boris Johnson Dido Harding Dominic Cummings Cronyism	The culture of the Johnson government may be very different from that of Whitehall’s “permanent government”. But the two have one thing in common, lack of accountability and addiction to official secrecy.
Document:How British journalists are seduced by the Ministry of Defence and spooks	Article	28 September 2021	MI6 GCHQ 9-11 Information Research Department MI5 Eliza Manningham-Buller UK Special Forces Michael Gove 2003 Iraq War UK/Ministry of Defence Afghanistan/2001 Invasion	In the world of the spooks, few in the media raised questions about the root causes of terror attacks in Britain even when Eliza Manningham-Buller, then head of MI5, warned that the invasion of Iraq would increase the terrorist threat in Britain.
Document:MI5 and the Christmas Tree Files	book extract	1988	MI5 BBC BBC/Deep state control
Document:Re-living the war in an Irish Town	interview	17 April 2005

 

Related Quotation

Page	Quote	Date
Document:Is Martin McGuinness a British Agent?	“Indeed, in 1991 journalist Richard Norton-Taylor revealed the existence of a list of something like 500 prominent Britons, including around 90 in the media, who were in the employ of the CIA, and paid through the old friend of the intelligence services, the BCCI.”	5 May 2004

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External links

• "Richard Norton-Taylor's articles at Guardian Unlimited"
• "Richard Norton-Taylor at doollee.com" the playwright's database

This page imported content from Wikipedia on 13 April 2013.
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