David Leigh

This article is about the journalist. For the scientist, see David Leigh (scientist).

David Leigh
Education	Nottingham High School, King's College, Cambridge
Occupation	investigative journalist, assistant editor
Title	The Guardian's Investigations executive editor
Nationality	British
Years active	197? – present

David Leigh is a British journalist and author, currently investigations executive editor of The Guardian.

Early life

Leigh was born in 1946 and educated at Nottingham High School and King's College, Cambridge, receiving a research degree from Cambridge in 1968.

Career

Leigh has been a prominent investigative journalist since the 1970s,^{[citation needed]} He was a journalist for the Scotsman, The Times, and the Guardian, and a Laurence Stern fellow at the Washington Post in 1980. From 1980 he was chief investigative reporter at The Observer. His 1988 book The Wilson Plot increased public interest in alleged attempts by the British security services and others to destabilise Harold Wilson's government in the 1970s. His 1995 TV documentary for World in Action, "Jonathan of Arabia", led after a libel trial to the jailing for perjury of former Conservative defence minister Jonathan Aitken. With colleague Rob Evans, he published a series of corruption exposures in the Guardian about international arms giant BAE Systems. After criminal inquiry by the US Department of Justice and other international prosecutors, the company was eventually hit with penalties totalling $529 million. In 2006, Leigh became the Anthony Sampson Professor of Reporting in the Journalism department at City University London.

WikiLeaks investigation

in 2006 Leigh headed the Guardian team, which investigated the WikiLeaks releases, and which worked closely with Julian Assange. This relationship soured however. This caused David Leigh to tweet: "The #guardian published too many leaks for #Assange 's liking, it seems. So now he's signed up 'exclusively' with #Murdoch's Times. Gosh."

In a book he published with Luke Harding, Leigh mentioned the password to a set of unredacted classified US State Department cables. WikiLeaks had earlier distributed multiple copies of files containing all these cables, and others had mirrored their files with BitTorrent. Julian Assange of WikiLeaks blamed Leigh and the Guardian for unnecessarily disclosing the password.' In response the Guardian said "it's nonsense to suggest the Guardian's WikiLeaks book has compromised security in any way". According to the Guardian, WikiLeaks had indicated that the password was temporary and that WikiLeakshad seven months to take action to protect the files it had subsequently decided to post online.

Awards

In 2007, he was awarded the Paul Foot prize, with his colleague Rob Evans, for the BAE bribery exposures. The prize is awarded annually by Private Eye and The Guardian in memory of the campaigning journalist Paul Foot. Leigh and Evans were also presented with the Granada TV What the Papers Say Judges' Award for "an outstanding piece of investigative journalism that uncovered a story of great significance". In 2010, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists awarded him and five other journalists the Daniel Pearl Award for their investigation of Trafigura.

Bibliography

• David Leigh, The Frontiers of Secrecy: Closed Government in Britain, Praeger (30 June 1980), ISBN 978-0313270932
• David Leigh, High Time: The Life and Times of Howard Marks, William Heineman Ltd (8 October 1984), ISBN 978-0434413393; HarperCollins (1988), ISBN 978-0043640234
• David Leigh, The Wilson Plot: The Intelligence Services and the Discrediting of a Prime Minister, Pantheon Books (1988), ISBN 978-0394572413; Arrow Books (1 June 1989), ISBN 978-0749300678
• David Leigh, Betrayed: Trial of Matrix Churchill, Bloomsbury Publishing PLC (4 February 1993), ISBN 978-0747515524
• David Leigh, Luke Harding and David Pallister, The Liar: Fall of Jonathan Aitken, Penguin Books (1997)
• David Leigh and Ed Vulliamy, Sleaze: The Corruption of Parliament, Fourth Estate (17 March 1997), ISBN 978-1857026948
• David Leigh and Luke Harding, WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy, Guardian Books (1 February 2011), ISBN 978-0852652398

External links

• David Leigh on Twitter
• Column archive at The Guardian
• Article archive at Journalisted
• Leigh: "European Audience Troubled By The Toll Afghan War is Taking on Innocent People" - video interview by Democracy Now!