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Clive Ponting in the year of his trialDepending on your viewpoint, the
sinking of the General Belgrano was ei-
ther a high point or a low point of the
1982 Falklands conflict. It remains con-
troversial to this day. At the heart of the
matter was what Margaret Thatcher
and her ministers knew about the loca-
tion of the Argentine cruiser, as well as
its intentions, when they gave the order
to attack it. Was it outside the 200-mile
exclusion zone and sailing away from
the task force or towards it and there-
fore an imminent threat?
In 1984 two official documents on the
subject, nicknamed the “crown jewels”,
were leaked to Tam Dalyell, the Labour
MP, who had never been satisfied with
the government’s explanations. Known
for his conspiratorial frame of mind,
Dalyell believed that the Belgrano had
been sunk, with the loss of more than
300 lives, to undermine a Peruvian
peace initiative. He passed the papers to
the foreign affairs select committee
whose chairman, Sir Anthony Ker-
shaw, in turn passed them to Michael
Heseltine, the defence secretary, who
ordered an inquiry into the leak.
The trail led to Clive Ponting, the pa-
pers’ author and a high-flying assistant
secretary at the Ministry of Defence. As
head of Defence Secretariat 5 he was
responsible for advice and assistance to
naval staff. Until that year he had led
the MoD’s legal division, dealing with
Official Secrets Act cases.
The clean-living, clean-shaven Pon-
ting was an unlikely revolutionary. Ac-
cording to one profile “he was 33 years
old, did not drink or smoke, and was in
appearance like one of those earnest
but athletic young curates who grace
the pages of Victorian fiction”. He was
senior enough to be known to Thatch-
er, who laughed at his jokes and praised
him in cabinet meetings. He in turn ad-
mired her determination to cut waste
and improve the quality of administra-
tion in Whitehall.
Ponting was interviewed on August
10, 1984, by two departmental police of-
ficers who told him they were not sure
that an offence had been committed.
He recalled being told: “It has been
agreed that if you are prepared to resign
then that will be the end of the matter.”
He did just that, but then the politicians
took over. Four days later he learnt that
ministers, still reeling from the case of
Sarah Tisdall, another civil servant who
had leaked defence documents, were
demanding his prosecution under the
Official Secrets Act.
The case came to the Old Bailey,
where it was heard by Mr Justice
McCowan and a security-vetted jury. It
became something of a cause célèbre,
although McCowan stopped plans by
Channel 4 to broadcast nightly edited
versions of the trial with the words spo-
ken by actors.
The court heard that at the time of the
Falklands conflict Ponting had been
head of DS15, a division of the MoD
dealing with legal matters. Although on
the fringes of the war, he was involved in
requisitioning merchant ships and the
application of the Geneva Convention
in handling Argentinian prisoners of
war. “It was a fascinating and stimulat-
ing time of working together for a com-
mon purpose,” he told his trial, denying
suggestions that his membership of the
Buddhist Society in London might have
affected his commitment.
He admitted posting the documents
to Dalyell from a postbox in Padding-
ton, but his barrister, Bruce Laughland,
QC, insisted that the case was about ly-
ing not spying, adding: “The issue is
whether the crown can prove that Mr
Dalyell was not a person to whom he
was authorised to communicate, or a
person to whom it was, in the interests
of the state, the defendant’s duty to
communicate.” Ponting said he had
been sympathetic to the British opera-
tion but reached a “watershed” when
the government refused to disclose key
documents to the select committee.
The verdict was due on February 12,- That morning Ponting met his
legal team at the Savoy Hotel for break-
fast but had little appetite, recalling: “So
certain was I that I would be going di-
rectly from the court to the prison that
I had taken the precaution of filling my
pockets with things I thought would be
helpful ‘inside’ — a toothbrush, tooth-
paste, shaving kit and the collected say-
ings of Buddha.”
McCowan made clear in his sum-
ming up that he leant towards the pros-
ecution. At one stage he even told the
lawyers that he was considering halting
the case and giving a direction to con-
vict Ponting, a move he was persuaded
to abandon. Despite Ponting’s defence
that he was acting in the interests of the
state, McCowan told the jury that the
interests of the state must mean the in-
terests of the government of the day.
The jury disagreed and Ponting was
acquitted. Shortly afterwards he pub-
lished his first book, The Right to Know:
The Inside Story of the Belgrano Affair.
The government’s reaction was to
amend the secrecy legislation, with the
Official Secrets Act 1989 removing the
defence of acting in the public interest.
Clive Sheridan Ponting was born in
Bristol in 1946, the only child of Charles
Ponting, who is thought to have worked
in sales, and his wife, Winifred (née
Wadham). He was educated at Bishop
Road primary school and Bristol Gram-
mar School, where he was involved in
the film society. He earned a first in his-
tory at the University of Reading andHe was so certain he
was going to jail that he
packed a toothbrush
Parker helped to throw custard pies
himself. He had cast the precocious
Jodie Foster as the innocently vampish
Tallulah, fresh from what he called her
“totally sophisticated performance” in
Taxi Driver, and hit the child star with a
“bullseye”. As the custard cascades
down her face, Foster looks at the
camera with a knowing gaze, shrugs
her shoulders and says: “So this is show-
business.”
Despite the American subject
matter, it was shot at Pinewood and was
backed by Rank and the National Film
Finance Consortium. Ironically, the
film flopped in the US, but it was a hit in
the UK and it gave the working-class
Parker the passport to becoming one of
Britain’s most successful, versatile and
controversial film directors.
A self-confessed control freak whoObituaries
Clive Ponting
Whistleblowing civil servant who leaked the Belgrano documents in 1984
began a PhD at University College
London but abandoned it after two
years. In 1970 he joined the civil service.
The previous year he had married
Katherine Hannam, the first of his four
wives. His second marriage, in 1973, was
to Sally Fletcher, who also worked in
the MoD and was with him throughout
the Belgrano affair, and the third was to
Laura, who later taught in Vietnam. All
three ended in divorce. His fourth mar-
riage was to Diane Johnson, who died
in March. He had no children.
When Thatcher came to office in
1979 Ponting became part of a team
tasked with identifying savings in the
MoD. In October that year he made a
personal presentation to the cabinet,
offering proposals for how the armed
services could save £5 million in stock
costs and £500,000 a year in food sup-
ply costs, for which he was appointed
OBE. After that Thatcher intervened to
ensure he was given a new post. With
her blessing he investigated why mili-
tary dentistry cost twice as much as its
civilian equivalent and whether the
country’s military bands really needed
3,000 full-time members of Her Majes-
ty’s armed forces.
After his acquittal Ponting formally
resigned from the civil service and
joined the politics and international
relations department at the University
of Wales in Swansea, where he relished
the proximity to the Black Mountains.
He published more than a dozen books,
including in 1993 a controversial bio-
graphy of Winston Churchill that
painted a picture of the wartime prime
minister as a racist who wanted to forci-
bly sterilise “mentally degenerate” Brit-
ons and send tens of thousands of
others to labour camps.
Retiring in 2004, Ponting and Diane
built a home on the Aegean island of
Alonnisos, but when the Greek eco-
nomy collapsed they moved to France,
settling in Lescure-Jaoul, a village in
the south of the country. After the
Brexit vote they returned to Britain,
moving into a small flat in Kelso in the
Scottish Borders, where in 2018 he
joined the Scottish National Party.
Speaking at the time he claimed that, in
the event of a no-deal Brexit, Westmin-
ster would use emergency powers to
dissolve the Scottish government.
He was a great model railway enthu-
siast, taking his train set with him
around Europe, and adored the music
of Mahler, though he lamented the lack
of opportunities to hear it played live in
his rural habitats. He enjoyed his food
and drink and, though a man of few
friends, was close to those he had.
Ponting had no regrets about his role
in the Belgrano affair, insisting that he
had remained loyal to his country.
However, he admitted to being ambiva-
lent about some aspects of Britain.
“Take cricket, for instance,” he said in
one interview. “I love the game and its
history and statistics, but I heartily dis-
like the blazer-clad, old school types
who still run the MCC like a gentle-
man’s club and who try to run the rest of
the game in much the same way.”Clive Ponting, OBE, civil servant and
historian, was born on April 13, 1946. He
was found dead from undisclosed causes
on July 28, 2020, aged 74Sir Alan Parker
Acclaimed if ‘difficult’ British film director who
managed to be both commercial and controversial
In 1976 Alan Parker launched his career
as a mainstream director and helped to
revive the ailing British film industry,
with a “splurge gun”.
Told that his highly personal film
scripts set in working-class London
were “too parochial”, Parker went to the
opposite extreme with Bugsy Malone,
which was set in a Prohibition-era New
York populated by gangsters and their
molls.
Having conceived the pastiche of
Hollywood gangster movies and musi-
cals, Parker turned the genres inside
out by casting children in all the roles,
commissioned a brilliant score by Paul
Williams and replaced machineguns
with splurge guns that fired a custard
and cream concoction.
When it came to shooting the anar-
chic final scene in Fat Sam’s speakeasy,