Kenneth Roy

Kenneth Roy (Journalist, Author)
Born	26 March 1945
Died	5 November 2018 (Age 73)

Kenneth Roy, born and brought up in Falkirk, Scotland, was a journalist and author. After ten years working as an anchorman in BBC TV News and Current Affairs he became a critic and columnist in the print media, notably Scotland on Sunday and the Observer. He founded The Institute of Contemporary Scotland in 2000 and became editor of online campaigning journal the Scottish Review.

In 2018, Kenneth Roy was diagnosed with terminal cancer and he died on 5 November 2018. His obituary in the Scottish Review was written by Kenneth Roy himself. He said he rather enjoyed the novelty of writing about himself in the third person.

Featuring Lockerbie

On 2 February 2011, the Scottish Review published Kenneth Roy's article entitled "The Megrahi Scandal":

During the public discussion between us in the Glasgow Concert Hall last week, Robert Black QC wondered aloud why the SNP, untainted by past association with the Megrahi case, had chosen not to confront this judicial scandal and attempt to correct it.

It is easy to overlook that, when Alex Salmond came to power in May 2007, not quite all his predecessors were removed from office. One unexpectedly clung on. Why the Lord Advocate, of all people, survived the demise of the former administration is a question for Alex Salmond and his memoirs. It feels in retrospect like one of his few serious political misjudgements: one made when his feet were only just under the table.

It is true that Elish Angiolini's re-appointment was not exactly accompanied by loud rejoicing. Mr Salmond made it clear that she had lost her place at the Scottish cabinet table. That felt like a demotion, for her or her office or both. From that moment, she became an arm's length chief law officer. But, in effect, the retention of her power base was all that mattered: this ultimate insider – lacking any significant experience of the world beyond the Crown Office – was never likely to pursue Lockerbie with the greatest zeal.

Ten years ago this week, a panel of Scottish judges, sitting in the Netherlands without a jury, convicted Megrahi of 270 murders. It says much for the quality of the judgement that, in its first sentence, it got the date of the disaster wrong. This was the first of many wrongs, few of which have ever been righted.

Since December 2010, the position of the Scottish government has become quite impossible. Here are two statements. I invited the lunchtime audience in Glasgow to reconcile them somehow. No one was bold enough even to try.

Statement 1

There are six grounds for believing that a miscarriage of justice may have occurred. It is in the interests of justice (their words, but my italics) to refer the case to the court of appeal.

Statement 2

Megrahi was convicted by a Scottish court, and Scottish ministers do not doubt the safety of his conviction (their words, but again my italics).

Statement 1 – slightly paraphrased in the interests of brevity – was the conclusion of the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission, an agency of the Scottish government, in 2007. Following this remarkable finding, after a long and painstaking investigation which turned up new evidence not made available to the defence at the trial, there were two years of unexplained delays while the prisoner's second appeal was prepared. For these delays, the Crown Office was largely responsible.

In the end, the appeal was never heard: the declared wish of the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission was thwarted and the interests of justice, as it saw them, were never satisfied. Megrahi, long frustrated by the impediments put in his way, dropped his appeal – it is generally believed as a pre-condition of his release – and, true to form, Mrs Angiolini and her mates in the Crown Office put up their hands and declared to the world that it had nothing whatever to do with them, guv.

Statement 2 is taken verbatim from a Scottish government briefing just before Christmas. The chief law officer may have had some hand in its wording; otherwise, why have a chief law officer?

Since Statement 2 flatly contradicts Statement 1, we must look for an explanation.

Has the Scottish government in general, Mrs Angiolini in particular, simply forgotten about the conclusion of the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission? It got quite a lot of attention at the time and has resurfaced periodically since, usually when people like Robert Black QC demand to know why the commission's report has never been published. (...)

It is, however, unlikely that the Scottish government has forgotten about the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission's potentially damning conclusion. It is much more likely, given the uncompromising terms of Statement 2, that the Scottish ministers with or without the assistance of the Lord Advocate have managed to convince themselves that the most expedient way of marking 10 years of the Lockerbie scandal is simply to affirm the infallibility of Scottish justice.

Mrs Angiolini retires as Lord Advocate in May, perhaps to become a senator of the college of justice. Before she goes, she should tell us to which statement she subscribes. Does she subscribe to Statement 1 with its frank acknowledgement that there may have been a serious miscarriage of justice, or does she subscribe to Statement 2, which denies any such possibility?

The chief law officer cannot logically subscribe to both. Nor can the Scottish government as a whole.

Smearing Dr Fieldhouse

On 11 June 2014, Kenneth Roy wrote the following article entitled "A good man, a smear, and the Crown Office":

There are many reasons to be pessimistic about the outcome of the appeal lodged by the family of the late Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing. I have just finished reading one of those reasons.

There has been one, only one, public hearing in Scotland of the facts about Lockerbie. (I disregard the unsatisfactory criminal trial of Megrahi and one other, which took place in the Netherlands, though under Scottish jurisdiction.) This was the Fatal Accident Inquiry (FAI) heard by Sheriff John Mowat in 1990, two years after the disaster.

The choice of location seems, in retrospect, grimly appropriate: the recreation hall of a psychiatric hospital, converted into a courtroom with seating for 400. When I turned up one morning and reported to the media centre, I found it deserted. There were dozens of desks and cubicles for the international press, but only a handful of them had ever been occupied and there was no need to connect the telephones. Visiting this ghostly place was a strange experience.

In the courtroom itself, the anticipated throng of relatives and interested parties had never materialised: the public benches were deserted. Heavy, dark green curtains, tightly drawn, enabled the proceedings to be conducted in an atmosphere of stygian gloom.

The symbolism was thus complete: in a room shedding no natural light, witnesses presented their testimony to an empty auditorium and, beyond, to a world that had seemingly lost interest. But it is instructive to look back at that under-reported inquiry from the distance of almost quarter of a century – if only for proof that the truth about Lockerbie will probably never be known.

The part of the transcript I had been reading, just before the announcement of the Megrahi appeal, was the evidence of a policeman, a member of the now disbanded Dumfries and Galloway constabulary, concerning the activities of Dr David Fieldhouse.

The name David Fieldhouse may mean nothing to you, yet he is a figure of some importance in the saga. He was sitting in front of the television in his home in Yorkshire on the evening of 21 December 1988 when the first news of the disaster flashed on the screen. His reaction was impulsive. He got into his car and drove all the way from Bradford to Lockerbie, arriving at around 10.50pm.

He immediately contacted the authorities, explained that he was a police surgeon, and offered to help with the search for bodies (there was never any hope of finding survivors). The police accepted his offer and, bearing in mind the Scottish requirement for corroboration, assigned an officer to accompany him. Over the course of the next 24 hours, more than one police officer accompanied him.

Dr Fieldhouse worked through the night and all of the following day; he did so without pausing for sleep and with nothing to eat except a biscuit. It was a heroic one-man undertaking. By the time darkness fell on 22 December, he had found and labelled 59 bodies.

On the morning of the 23rd, he was due to meet a senior police officer at a pre-arranged rendezvous (Tundergarth Church). He waited two hours. When it became clear that the Detective Chief Inspector was not going to show up, Dr Fieldhouse drove back to Yorkshire and compiled a report on his work – an account that he had already given in detail, verbally, on the spot. He was then surprised to learn that his 59 tags had been replaced by 58 'official' ones. There was one missing. It remains a mystery.

David Fieldhouse received no thanks from the police for his act of selfless dedication. He went back to work and, so far as possible, put Lockerbie behind him. Two years later, he was shocked to learn that there had been an attempt by the Crown Office and the police to call his integrity into question.

A police witness at the Fatal Accident Inquiry in Dumfries was asked by the Crown about one of the bodies found and labelled by Dr Fieldhouse:

Q. Would that be another example of Dr or Mr Fieldhouse carrying out a search on his own?

A. It would, my Lord.

Q. And marking the body of the person who is dead without notifying the police?

A. That is correct.

The content of that brief extract is utterly disgraceful on two counts. First there is the innuendo that Dr Fieldhouse was not a doctor at all – that some medically unqualified individual, a mere 'Mr', an imposter in effect, took it upon himself to go looking for bodies. Second there is the specific allegation that he did so without the authority of the police.

Neither the innuendo nor the allegation was true. The police officers who accompanied Dr Fieldhouse confirmed that they were present in every case when he pronounced life extinct, and that the procedures he followed were scrupulous.

Why, then, did the Crown Office, assisted by the Dumfries and Galloway police, spread untruths about him in this way? The only alternative explanation – that it was all the result of some unfortunate misunderstanding – is hard to swallow. The Crown Office had had the best part of two years to assemble the facts; and there were few more central to the purpose of the Fatal Accident Inquiry than the facts about the recovery and identification of bodies. Yet not only did the Crown Office misrepresent what happened on the night of 21-22 December 1988; for no apparent reason they decided to smear David Fieldhouse.

It was left to Dr Fieldhouse to request an opportunity to clear his name. As a late witness, he duly did. But from the Crown Office there was no explanation and no apology. The only person who ever had the decency to apologise was the blameless Sheriff Mowat in his written determination.

The experience of David Fieldhouse is one of the reasons why the truth about Lockerbie will probably never be known. It is a vignette that, like so many vignettes, illuminates a larger canvas.

Put it this way. If the Crown Office was prepared to rubbish the reputation of a completely innocent man, who had acted in the public service for no personal gain whatever, we can expect it to have little difficulty in confirming the guilt of someone over whom a considerable doubt continues to linger – the late Abdelbaset al-Megrahi.

Told to go?

In August 2014, two months after his Lockerbie article, Kenneth Roy wrote an open letter to readers of the Scottish Review:

“It is almost time to pass on the torch. On 7 January 2015, I will relinquish the editorship, hang my last prejudice out to dry, and give up journalism.

“A vacancy arises for a modestly remunerated part-time appointment. Expressions of interest are invited. If you have a notion to be only the second editor of the Scottish Review in human history, let’s be hearing from you no later than Friday 29 August.

“The new editor should have a working knowledge of Scotland, a rough ability with words, a desk and chair of some kind, and a respect for the magazine’s sceptical traditions."

Journalistic career

A former "Man of the Year" in his home town of Falkirk, Kenneth Roy began his writing career on the now defunct Falkirk Mail. He enjoyed a brief spell as greyhound racing tipster with the Daily Record before becoming one of the youngest reporters on the old Glasgow Herald.

He launched the Scottish Theatre magazine at the age of 24 but three years later switched to presenting Reporting Scotland on BBC TV – establishing himself as a current affairs anchor man on television and radio.

He left the BBC to establish West Sound, a new independent local radio station in south-west Scotland, before founding Carrick Media which publishes "Who’s Who" in Scotland.

After a 21-year break, Roy resumed his journalistic career as a weekly columnist on the launch edition of Scotland on Sunday in 1988. A daily column on The Scotsman followed – twice being named "Critic of the Year" in Scotland – as well as writing five books.

After the launch of the Scottish Review, he founded the Institute of Contemporary Scotland – now publisher of the online magazine – in 2000 with Magnus Magnusson as its first patron and himself as first director.

As chairman of the Young Scotland programme, he intends to devote more time to a project which encourages debate and exchange of ideas among young adults.

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