Incoming Washington Post editor Robert Winnett earned the moniker of “rat boy” for his reporting across London newspapers. But as he’s set to take the helm of the storied D.C. newsroom later this year, the one where Woodward and Bernstein changed history by breaking Watergate, the shady methods he used to secure some of those scoops may come back to haunt him.
They included placing a reporter undercover in a government department where she removed official secrets which Winnett used to break stories. The reporter was arrested and could have been jailed.
Winnett was a reporter at the Sunday Times, a paper he joined in 1995 while still a student at Oxford. One of his colleagues at the time was David Leppard who, according to former Guardian reporter Nick Davies’ 2008 book Flat Earth News, tried to land the juiciest stories for Fleet Street by any means necessary.
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Those methods included having a reporter go undercover within the government and leak its secrets.
According to Davies, Winnett and Leppard placed junior reporter Claire Newell within the U.K.’s Cabinet Office, the British civil service unit that supports the Prime Minister and their cabinet, in 2003 to feed them a stream of government documents. She worked as a temp within the Cabinet Office for 15 months until October 2004. After an angered Tony Blair ordered an investigation into the leaks, the country’s elite counter-espionage police unit arrested Newell for alleged leaking. Newell was never prosecuted, and she and Winnett would later share bylines at the Sunday Times.
Should Newell have been successfully prosecuted, Davies noted, she could have ended up in jail.
“From this vantage point, she was feeding back a succession of officially secret documents, any one of which could have landed her in jail if the government had chosen to prosecute Murdoch’s paper,” Davies wrote.
Winnett did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The Post did not provide a comment, but executive editor Matt Murray noted “the importance of our strong and independent journalism, immune to any outside pressures” in a Thursday memo to staffers praising the paper’s reporting—including the Post’s own coverage of its internal drama.
Undercover journalism is not foreign to U.K. or U.S. outlets, though its use is less common stateside. Newsrooms generally deploy journalists undercover as a method of last resort, and it is usually when a reporter could not unearth the information otherwise. The Society of Professional Journalists’ (SPJ) code of ethics states that the information “must be of vital importance to the public, and not just ‘interesting,’ or what readers might want to know.” In other words, the ethics would prevent reporters from embarking on so-called “fishing expeditions.”
The Post’s own standards also indicate that journalists “will not misrepresent their identity or their occupation” and “will not portray themselves as police officers, physicians or anything other than journalists.”
It’s unclear, however, whether Newell’s quest started as a last-resort quest for “vital” information. In a 2004 Guardian report detailing Newell’s arrest over the leaks, a Sunday Times journalist told the paper they saw reporters digging through documents in the newsroom in the apparent hope of finding a nugget of news. During Newell’s secret operation, stories emerged from the Cabinet Office on everything from Tony Blair’s attempts to forge relations with British Muslims to how some officials tried to secure themselves large pay raises.
Nor was it clear whether Newell’s operation should have gone so far. The Guardian reported in October 2004 that Newell was granted a security clearance, an unusual distinction for someone apparently acting in a journalistic capacity. It was unclear at the time what security clearance she was given, though a clearance at all suggests the government’s vetting never revealed her work at the Sunday Times, nor her previously expressed interest in journalism.
Winnett’s role in managing Newell, whom he eventually worked with at the Telegraph, has largely flown under the radar since Will Lewis’ announcement on Sunday that he would lead the Post’s main newsroom after the 2024 election. The episode was often overshadowed by Winnett’s work at the Telegraph, including how, in 2010, he—under the guidance of Lewis—paid a source at least £100,000 for a trove of documents exposing how large numbers of Britain’s Parliament abused their expenses. Another Winnett story involved undercover reporters posing as a cabinet member’s constituents and covertly recording him.
The use of so-called “checkbook journalism” has largely been disavowed by journalism ethics organizations—including the SPJ, which noted in its code of ethics that, while the practice has been used in the U.K., it can be “ethically perilous.” That issue, however, was dismissed by Lewis in a 2020 Telegraph documentary, where he outlined why he personally authorized the departure from the newspaper’s long-held practice.
“The payment thing is a red herring,” he said. “This is one of the most important bits of journalism, if not the most important bit of journalism, in the postwar period. I can’t think of a more impactful bit of journalism for Britain and British society, highlighting such profound wrongdoing and systematic abuse.”
But in 2011, another brewing scandal in British journalism, the hacking of cellphones–including those of Princes William and Harry–by journalists from Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World exploded. Davies revealed that reporters had deleted the voicemail message of a missing 13-year-old girl, potentially impeding the search for the teenager, who was later found murdered.
Murdoch turned to Lewis, who had just left the Telegraph, to run the so-called Management and Standards Committee, to oversee News Corp’s response to the scandal. Lewis’ alleged attempts to cover up the hacking scandal have thrown him into potential legal peril more than a decade later and have roiled the Washington Post newsroom—the one Lewis has now hired Winnett to lead.
