The Sunday Times (UK) - Notable Stories

Notable Stories

Some of the more notable or controversial stories published in The Sunday Times include:

• Thalidomide, a drug prescribed to pregnant women to treat morning sickness, was withdrawn in 1961 following reports that it was linked to a number of birth defects. The Sunday Times spent many years campaigning for compensation for the victims, providing case studies and evidence of the side-effects. In 1968 the Distillers Company agreed to a multi-million-pound compensation scheme for the victims.
• The paper sponsored Francis Chichester's single-handed circumnavigation of the world under sail in 1966–1967, and the Sunday Times Golden Globe Race in 1968–1969, both of which were sensational events in Britain.
• The Insight team ran an investigation into Kim Philby, the Soviet double agent, that ran on 1 October 1967 under the headline: “Philby: I spied for Russia from 1933.”
• Insight carried out a major investigation in 1972 into the Bloody Sunday killings in Northern Ireland
• The newspaper published the faked Hitler Diaries (1983), believing them to be genuine after they were authenticated by the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper.
• Israeli nuclear weapons: using information from Mordechai Vanunu, The Sunday Times in 1986 revealed that Israel had manufactured more than 100 nuclear warheads.
• On 12 July 1987 The Sunday Times began serialisation of the book Spycatcher, the memoirs of an MI5 agent, which had been banned in Britain. The paper successfully challenged subsequent legal action by the British government, winning its case at the European Court of Human Rights in 1991.
• The paper ran a story claiming that Queen Elizabeth II was upset with the style of Margaret Thatcher's leadership. This was notable as the monarch generally maintains a strictly impartial role politically.
• In 1990, in what became known as the Arms-to-Iraq affair, the paper revealed how Matrix Churchill and other British firms were supplying arms to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
• Over two years in the early 1990s, the Sunday Times published a series of articles rejecting the role of HIV in causing AIDS, calling the African AIDS epidemic a myth. In response, the scientific journal Nature described the paper's coverage of HIV/AIDS as "seriously mistaken, and probably disastrous." Nature argued that the newspaper had "so consistently misrepresented the role of HIV in the causation of AIDS that Nature plans to monitor its future treatment of the issue."
• In 1992, The Sunday Times published extracts from Andrew Morton’s book, Diana: Her True Story in Her Own Words, which revealed for the first time the disastrous state of her marriage to Prince Charles.
• In its “cash for questions” investigation in 1994, Graham Riddick, MP for Colne Valley and David Tredinnick, MP for Bosworth, accepted cheques for £1,000 each from an Insight journalist posing as a businessman in return for tabling a parliamentary question. The investigation followed information that some MPs were taking one-off payments to table questions.
• Under the headline, “KGB: Michael Foot was our agent”, The Sunday Times ran an article on 19 February 1995 that claimed the Soviet intelligence services regarded Foot, a former leader of the Labour Party, as an “agent of influence”, codenamed “Agent Boot”", and that he had been in the pay of the KGB for many years. The article was based on the serialisation of the memoirs of Oleg Gordievsky, a former high-ranking KGB officer who defected from the Soviet Union to Britain in 1985. Crucially, the newspaper used material from the original manuscript of the book which had not been included in the published version. Foot successfully sued The Sunday Times, winning “substantial” damages.
• During 1997 and 1998, the paper ran a series of exclusive stories based on revelations from Richard Tomlinson, a former MI6 spy, about life inside MI6 and secret MI6 operations around the world.
• In April 1999, foreign correspondent Jon Swain walked into Kosovo to give the first eyewitness account of the atrocities carried out by the Serbs under the NATO bombardment.
• During the siege of the United Nations compound in East Timor in 1999, the paper’s foreign reporter, Marie Colvin was one of only three journalists (all women) who remained to the end with the 1,500 people trapped there. She reported their plight both in The Sunday Times and in interviews on radio and television and was widely credited with saving their lives.
• In 2003, The Sunday Times exposed confidential Whitehall documents revealing the names of 300 people who snubbed the honours system by refusing to accept knighthoods, CBEs and other awards
• In 2006, in an investigation that became known as Cash for Honours, The Sunday Times revealed how several prominent figures nominated for life peerages by the then prime minister, Tony Blair, had loaned large amounts of money to the Labour Party at the suggestion of Lord Levy, the Labour fundraiser.
• In mid-2009, the newspaper ran a series of articles revealing how members of the House of Lords were abusing the expenses system.
• In January 2010, The Sunday Times published an article by Jonathan Leake, alleging that a figure in the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report was based on an "unsubstantiated claim". The story attracted worldwide attention. However, a scientist quoted in the same article later stated that the newspaper story was wrong and that quotes of him had been used in a misleading way. Following an official complaint to the Press Complaints Commission, The Sunday Times retracted the story and apologised.
• In March 2010, undercover reporters from The Sunday Times Insight team filmed members of parliament agreeing to work for a fictitious lobbying firm for fees of £3,000-£5,000 a day. One of those implicated, Stephen Byers, described himself as "sort of like a cab for hire”.
• In October 2010, an investigation by the newspaper exposed corruption within FIFA after a member of the association’s committee which grants the World Cup guaranteed his vote to an undercover reporter after requesting £500,000 for a “personal project”.
• In 2011, the newspaper broke what became known as the Cash for Influence scandal; it revealed that that Adrian Severin, Ernst Strasser, Pablo Zalba Bidegain and Zoran Thaler tried to influence EU legislation in exchange for promised money. Both Strasser and Thaler resigned in March 2011.
• In March 2012, the paper filmed Peter Cruddas, the co-treasurer of the Conservative Party, offering access to David Cameron, the prime minister, in return for donations of £250,000 ($400,000). Cruddas resigned several hours later. Cameron said: “What happened was completely unacceptable. This is not the way we raise money in the Conservative Party.” The Sunday Times is defending a libel case brought by Cruddas that is likely to go to trial in 2013.
• In September 2012, Jonathan Leake published an article in The Sunday Times under the headline “Only 100 adult cod in North Sea”. This figure was later shown by a BBC article to be wildly incorrect. The newspaper published a correction, apologising for an over simplification in the headline, which had referred to a fall in the number of fully mature cod over the age of 13, thereby indicating this is the breeding age of cod. In fact, as the newspaper subsequently pointed out, cod can start breeding between the ages of four and six, in which case there are many more mature cod in the North Sea.
• In January 2013, the seven-times Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong confessed to having used performance-enhancing drugs during each of his Tour victories. The confession ended years of denials about allegations of cheating during most of the cyclist's professional career. The Sunday Times chief sports writer David Walsh had spent over a decade investigating Armstrong, his team, and the systematic doping rife in the sport. The newspaper was forced to pay Armstrong £300,000 in damages in 2006 after he sued it for libel. Following Armstrong's lifelong ban (and subsequent televised confession) The Sunday Times said it would sue him to recover the damages, plus interest and costs, for the original proceedings which it called "baseless and fraudulent".
• In January 2013, The Sunday Times published a Gerald Scarfe caricature depicting Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu cementing a wall with blood and Palestinians trapped between the bricks. The cartoon sparked an outcry, compounded by the fact that its publication coincided with International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and was condemned by the Anti-Defamation League. The newspaper later issued an apology.