Nick Davies on Investigative Journalism

Thanks for speaking to us. I thought we’d dive in by discussing your first choice, All the President’s Men. Was this your inspiration? Isn’t that the dream: bringing down the government, exposing corruption?

[Laughs] Well I guess it is. Initially I didn’t mean to be a journalist. I planned to go to Latin America and become a revolutionary when I finished university. Not very realistic, I realise now, but I was quite serious about it. But Watergate was just hitting the headlines around then and it made me realise that I could "bring down the government" without having to move to Mexico City or learn Spanish.

What is so good about All the President’s Men is that most books about journalists are full of gun fights and car chases – but that’s just not what the job involves. Woodward and Bernstein simply wrote a great, really detailed account of the work that went into the case. I still use sections from it as case studies when I give lectures.

Certainly when I read it, it was the first time I realised how little they initially understood what they had stumbled upon – I’ve heard one investigative journalist, I think it was David Leigh, describing the beginnings of an investigation as being like wandering around in the dark with a knife.

Yes, that sounds like something he might say. Many investigations start like that – you’ll have one or two leads, and then you need your imagination to develop theories about what the truth might be. So you are in the dark about what the truth is.

You’ve had some pretty huge investigations in your time – most recently the News of the World hacking scandal. Have you ever felt really out of your depth? If you’re not sure where you’re going with the investigation you must have to be good at thinking on your feet.

You can feel out of your depth in more ways than one. Firstly you can feel out of your depth in terms of understanding – by that I mean in very complex and technical investigations like the ‘Tax Gap’ investigation that I worked on with The Guardian earlier this year. Or it might be simply because you don’t know where the investigation’s headed, and what exactly you want to find out.

Also, you can feel out of your depth when you find yourself in a risky situation. When I was working on my book Dark Heart – investigating poverty, working with child prostitutes, trying to get into crack houses – you do get into slightly dangerous situations. I’d be dealing with some big guys, who I’d definitely come off worse than in a fight.

Philip Knightley’s book, A Hack’s Progress, is another investigative reporter’s memoirs, is that right? He was a pretty major player, working on the Profumo affair, and the thalidomide case.

Yes. Knightley is simply an amazing journalist. He was on the Insight investigation team at the Sunday Times while it was under the editorship of Harry Evans. And, as with All the President’s Men, it’s a book that has two different kinds of appeal – for a journalist, it’s full of technical insight about what works, but beyond that, for any reader, it’s just full of great tales.

And Harry Evans is the author of your third recommendation – Good Times, Bad Times – which recounts the transition when Rupert Murdoch bought The Times and the Sunday Times in 1981.

Well, yes. But it covers a wider period than that. Harry Evans was a really wonderful editor – and a fantastic journalist. If you asked British journalists today who they think is the best journalist of all time I imagine a large proportion would say Harry Evans, straight off. Under his leadership, the Sunday Times was well ahead of the pack. And you couldn’t tell what its politics were. It’s a different paper now – I wouldn’t have it in my house these days.

The reason he was so good was that he understood reporting, which many editors don’t, and he really loved reporting, which many editors don’t. He would never back away from a fight.

Do you mean legal challenges?

Yes, but more than that. Take the Philby case, for example. They took on MI6. Many editors would back away from that.

When I first started working at The Guardian it suffered from a very weak leadership. I remember they would have stories and simply not print them. I did one investigation that wasn’t published, so I simply handed it to a politician who read out long passages in the Commons. As soon as that happened, and it all kicked off, The Guardian jumped on it and printed it without a problem. It’s not like that at all now.

Running the tax avoidance investigation must have taken some guts. Taking on the big guns.

Yes, The Guardian were brave with that. And all the more so because they had just finished a very lengthy and rather scary legal battle with Tesco over tax-dodging allegations. It must have been tempting to have backed away from printing this investigation, but Alan [Rusbridger, editor of The Guardian] is very good. It was a bold move, too, in that long articles about corporate tax aren’t going to sell millions of copies.