I admit I’m a sucker for tales of old Fleet Street. Like all good stories, they always get better in the retelling. So I hope you enjoy this one about the former People reporter, Len Adams, who died aged 88 on 4 March.
He was renowned - as one of his colleagues, John Smith, has noted - for “using a mixture of guile, cunning and charm to breathe new life into a story and emerge with an exclusive angle which had the rest of Fleet Street seething with envy and breathless with admiration”.
On at least one occasion, he left his own boss seething with fury, as this wonderful anecdote, courtesy of another ex-People staffer, Frank Thorne, reveals.
First, the background. In 1973, two junior Tory ministers, Lords (Antony) Lambton and (George) Jellicoe, were forced to resign after their “friendship” with a “call girl” (to use the euphemism of the time), Norma Levy, was exposed.
The story behind the story was, as so often, fascinating in itself. Levy’s husband, Colin, decided they should profit from the fact that one of her clients was Lambton, then a parliamentary under-secretary of state for defence.
Levy approached the News of the World and agreed a £30,000 deal (a huge sum at the time). In order to prove the liaison between Lambton and Norma, a cine camera was set up behind a two-way mirror and a tape-recorder microphone was concealed in the nose of a teddy bear on the bed.
All of this was arranged by the NoW’s reporter, Trevor Kempson, who was delighted when his plans worked out. Lambton was shown in flagrante with Norma and a second woman. He was also pictured smoking cannabis.
But the newspaper’s editor, Tiny Lear, was too nervous to publish the story and, to Kempson’s astonishment and displeasure, he was told to hand back the evidence - the photographs and recordings - to Colin Levy.
He responded by taking all the material to the People. Its staff were amazed at their good fortune, laughing heartily when they played back the tape. The opening words were spoken by their former reporter who had left them for the NoW just months before:
“Testing, testing, testing... this is Trevor Kempson, News of the World...”
Needless to say, the People remained concerned about the NoW changing its mind or that another newspaper would get to hear of the story. So, in time-honoured fashion, it was decided to shift Colin and Norma Levy ahead of publication of its “world exclusive” to a secure location - Spain.
Now for Frank Thorne’s recollection. The People’s news editor, David Farr, assigned Len Adams to baby-sit the Levys in Madrid.
And, as expected, the NoW did have second thoughts once they realised their great rival was about to publish what they regarded as their own scoop.
Kempson guessed, rightly, that the People would have smuggled the couple abroad and Farr got to hear he had been in touch with the People’s travel company to obtain the flight details.
Farr immediately withdrew hundreds of pounds from the cashiers, handed it to another reporter, Fred Harrison, and dispatched him to Madrid to hand it to Adams. Meanwhile, Farr instructed Adams to get the “first flight out”.
In that pre-mobile phone era, it was some 36 hours later - on the Saturday afternoon before the Levy exclusive was due to hit the streets - before Farr heard once more from Adams.
In the following years, that short phone conversation was recalled endlessly in the People’s pub, the Stab in the Back (aka White Hart).
Farr: “Hello, Len, mate. Where are you?” Pause. “Rio de Janeiro? Oh my god! What the hell are you doing there?”
Len: “I did what you told me, David. That was the first flight out!”
The reporter had obeyed his boss to the letter. Farr is said to have fallen off his chair. Nor was he too happy the next day because the News of the World’s “exclusive” on the Lambton affair, as it became known, was virtually identical to the People’s “exclusive”.
Lambton resigned. Jellicoe, the Tories’ leader in the House of Lords, also resigned after misguidedly thinking the newspapers had discovered his own liaisons with Norma Levy.
For a while, the Lambton-Jellicoe resignations were big news (witness the Sun’s follow-up), because the affair appeared to echo the Profumo scandal 10 years previously. Both politicians have since died, as did Norma, in sad circumstances, in 2007.
Many more anecdotes about Len Adams will surely be told at a memorial service on 23 March at St James’s church, Avebury, Wilts, starting at 2pm. It will be followed by a reception at a nearby pub. His funeral on Thursday (19 March) is private.
See also tributes to Len here on the Mirror pensioners’ website.
