efore joining The Independent for its launch in the autumn of 1986, I was on the news desk of the Sunday Times. I have been reminded of that period by the current series of The Crown, detailing as it does the tension between The Queen and the then prime minister, Margaret Thatcher.
In episode eight, the Sunday Times breaks the story about this tension in July of that year, with the front-page headline “Queen dismayed by ‘uncaring’ Thatcher”. And there is a scene when the palace’s press officer Michael Shea is told by one of his underlings that Simon Freeman from the Sunday Times had been repeatedly calling.
Yes, I remember Simon. He was a first-class investigative reporter, one half of the paper’s investigative team for a long time with the older reporter Barrie Penrose. Where Penrose was middle-aged, scrupulously correct, affable, polite and old school, Freeman was a different sort of journalist, a young buck, great company and a bit of a chancer, all perfect attributes for an investigative reporter. The Penrose-Freeman partnership was disbanding at the time of this front-page story, and the byline on it was shared between Freeman and the political editor, Michael Jones.
