Richard Norton-Taylor

Richard Norton-Taylor    (journalist, editor, author, 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 author, 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.

Books

Richard Norton-Taylor's illuminating book

In March 2019, Norton-Taylor's book "The State of Secrecy: Spies and the Media in Britain" was published with this Amazon review:

Richard Norton-Taylor reveals the secrets of his forty-year career as a journalist covering the world of spies and their masters in Whitehall. Early in his career, Norton-Taylor successfully campaigned against official secrecy, gaining a reputation inside the Whitehall establishment and the outside world alike for his relentless determination to expose wrongdoing and incompetence. His special targets have always been the security and intelligence agencies and the Ministry of Defence, institutions that often hide behind the cloak of national security to protect themselves from embarrassment and being held to account.

Encouraged by his trusted contacts in intelligence agencies and Whitehall departments, Norton-Taylor was among the first of the few journalists consistently to attack the planned invasion of Iraq in 2003 and subsequently covered for The Guardian the devastating evidence of every witness to the Chilcot Inquiry. He also enjoyed unique access to a wide array of defence sources, giving him a rare insight into the disputes among top military commanders as they struggled to fight wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with under-resourced and ill-equipped troops.

Described by a former senior Intelligence official as a 'long-term thorn in the side of the intelligence establishment', and winner of numerous awards for his journalism, Norton-Taylor is one of the most respected defence and security journalists of his generation. Provocative, and rich in anecdotes, "The State of Secrecy" is an illuminating, critical and, at times, provocative account of the author's experiences investigating the secret world.

• GRENFELL: SYSTEM FAILURE: Scenes from the Inquiry (Modern Plays)
• The Colour of Justice: Based on the transcripts of the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry (Oberon Modern Plays)
• Justifying War: Scenes from the Hutton Inquiry (Oberon Modern Plays)
• The Tricycle: Collected Tribunal Plays 1994-2012 (Oberon Modern Playwrights)
• Tactical Questioning: Scenes from the Baha Mousa Inquiry (Oberon Modern Plays)
• The Colour of Justice (Oberon Books)
• Knee Deep In Dishonour: Scott Report and Its Aftermath
• Ponting Affair
• Truth is a Difficult Concept: Inside the Scott Inquiry
• In Defence of the Realm?: Case for Accountable Security Services

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

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