Interview: Daily Star former reporter Richard Peppiatt

People sometimes do things in life which make them feel less than proud. It could be a drug addiction, an affair or some dodgy business at work. For journalist Richard Peppiatt it was the latter. His job at the British tabloid The Daily Star was something he would find himself trying to hide from other people. “It wasn’t the sort of thing you boasted about,” he tells Weekend Review. “I wouldn’t tell people that I worked for The Daily Star. I would say that I am a journalist, and try and avoid discussing where. I think the moment you are doing that you have kind of got to ask yourself, ‘Why am I doing this at all?’”

Not everyone gets what they want in life, and Peppiatt wasn’t an exception. After completing his studies, a degree in Philosophy and Literature from Warwick University, he did some journalism work for the Mail on Sunday and then was with the Ferrari Press Agency for six months. Then The Daily Star came along and offered Peppiatt full-time work. “So I took it,” he says. “As much as The Daily Star wasn’t the paper I wanted to work for, you kind of are in a position where you need the money and you think: ‘Hey, it is a step on the ladder. It is a start.’ Because there are so few journalism jobs around, you don’t turn them down. You know what I mean? It is difficult.”

Peppiatt himself personally preferred to read The Guardian, a newspaper which was in line with his politics. If he had wanted to work for a tabloid he figures the left-leaning Mirror would have been more appropriate. Yet he ended up staying at The Daily Star for two and a half years. Then one day, he finally left the newspaper, in a manner which would alarm and upset his employers.

But before coming on to that, we first turn to the circumstances which led to Peppiatt being disillusioned with his job. While he enjoyed the various perks of working for a tabloid such as The Daily Star, the parties and mixing with celebrities, he was unhappy with all the news fabrication that went on.

There was the time he made up a story about celebrity Kelly Brook using a hypnotist to help her cut down on the time she took to get ready, and was given a bonus of £150 (Dh853) for the work. Other stories he made up included those about Michael Jackson, Robbie Williams and Katie Price. But one of his really big concerns was the tabloid’s biased coverage of Islam. “The Daily Star more than any other paper took a very anti-Muslim view on things,” he says. “Their perspective was that Islam and Britishness were just incompatible. And often to present Islam in a bad light, stories were spun out of kilter, stuff was just invented. That had been going on for some time.”

He gives a couple of examples of stories he was unhappy about. “I went into work one day and the editor said, ‘Go and buy yourself a burqa’,” he recalls. “I was like, ‘Why don’t you go and get a woman to do it? Why me?’ Well she said that is the point: How do we know who is beneath these burqas? It could be anyone. It could be men. It could be a terrorist. It could be a paedophile. We don’t know. Despite the fact there has never been a case, as far as I am aware, of a paedophile in a burqa, it is not what I would call an inconspicuous outfit, so the editor asked and I did it.”

So Peppiatt went down to the market and bought himself a burqa. Then he went out for a day dressed in the all-covering outfit, with a cameraman about a hundred metres away with a long lens trying to capture people’s reactions.

Members of the public soon started to get alarmed by what was obviously a man wearing a burqa. Soon the police were called and Peppiatt found himself being searched. There are no pockets on a burqa. So he didn’t have his wallet, ID or anything. And so it took some explaining on his part, to say the least. “They were angry,” he recollects. “They were like, ‘What are you doing? We have had dozens of phone calls.’”

And he wrote his piece. It was a first-person account of his day in a burqa. He says it was a sort of “even-handed” article saying he was treated like anyone else and what made Britain great is there are lots of people of different cultures and beliefs who all live side by side. “When it appeared in the paper it had all been changed and it was this complete ‘let’s ban the burqa’, which I had never said,” Peppiatt recalls. He was really upset about it because it was attributed to his name, and claimed to represent his beliefs — when it wasn’t the case.

Another story he worked on was about a shopping centre which was building a “Muslim-only” toilet with the bill being footed by the tax payer. The only problem was the story wasn’t true. There wasn’t going to be a “Muslim-only” toilet, and the taxpayer wasn’t going to pay for it because it was a private shopping centre. Peppiatt says The Daily Star already knew the story wasn’t true. “Then when the next day there was quite a lot of outrage about it,” he says. “Many complained because it was so blatantly untrue and because I was told to write a follow-up story saying — not apologising but saying — that the plans had been blocked because of The Daily Star’s highlighting of it.”

Another troubling aspect was the reception he would get when going to cover rallies or protests by the English Defence League (EDL), a far-right group which tends to attract racist and anti-Muslim supporters. “The minute they find out that you are from The Daily Star they would treat you like you were a king,” he says. “They try and pick you up. They believe that The Daily Star was their newspaper.” It was a wake-up call for Peppiatt. “At one point I did think to myself that, when things were getting quite bad, what if some guys read in The Daily Star a story about Muslims doing XYZ and they get angry and they go down to a mosque and throw a brick through a window. And then the worshippers come out, there is a big fight and maybe someone gets killed.” He wondered if his conscience could live with that.

He wasn’t alone in being unhappy with the paper’s coverage of Muslims. Peppiatt recalls another journalist who got into trouble for refusing to work on a story. “I can’t remember the story but it was a sort of anti-immigrant/anti-Muslim story and she refused to write it and basically got shouted at,” he says. “She lasted a couple more days but as a result of saying no to one story she got given every single anti-immigrant story to do. So every story was hers to do and in the end she left because she had been bullied.”

Peppiatt had gone into journalism with a desire to try and enlighten people. He wanted to tell people something which was new and interesting about the world around them, not to try and pander to their prejudices and fears. For six months he had wanted to leave but wasn’t sure how. He felt maybe he didn’t try hard enough. Part of him wanted to get fired since he thought it would be easier to have them make the leap for him. There were days he would not put in the effort and argue back in the hope of getting fired. “I was still scared about not having a job because I had to keep a roof over my head,” he says.

“In the end there was a run of stories about the English Defence League that were very positive. They had a front-page story which said they were going to become a political party and that sort of thing,” he says. “And that was when I went, ‘This is getting ridiculous, I am going to have to leave and I am going to do it publicly.’” So he wrote a resignation letter and then sent it to The Daily Star. It was addressed to Richard Desmond, the proprietor.

The letter began: “Dear Mr Desmond,You probably don’t know me, but I know you. For the last two years I’ve been a reporter at The Daily Star, and for two years I’ve felt the weight of your ownership rest heavy on the shoulders of everyone, from the editor to the bloke who empties the bins. Wait! I know you’re probably reaching for your phone to have me marched out of the building. But please, save on your bill. I quit.” The letter went on to complain about the tabloid’s biased coverage of Islam and other factual inaccuracies and untruths which Peppiatt had become accustomed to.

He sent a copy of the letter to The Guardian. Unfortunately at that time Rupert Murdoch had launched a bid to take over BSkyB. The story completely dominated the media pages and an uncertain Peppiatt found himself waiting for a few days before his letter was finally published. During the period while he waited he started receiving threats. They included messages such as, “You’re now a marked man till the day you die — Oh dear” and “We are planning a kiss n’ tell on you”. Peppiatt is convinced they were from The Daily Star but he couldn’t establish the link. “Within hours of the resignation and before it was published, I started getting threatening messages, phone calls and things like that,” he says. “And that went on for a couple of weeks until the police became involved and arrested someone and gave a warning — someone who is linked to The Daily Star.”

After the letter was finally published by The Guardian on March 4, 2011, his letter went viral. The paper also published news of the threats he was receiving. Peppiatt feels there is no way the person would have had the information about him that they had without someone who had access to his e-mail account at The Daily Star having given it to them. “That was half the reason that I decided to keep speaking out,” he says. “Because I wasn’t prepared to be bullied and threatened into shutting up. If it’s annoying you that much, I am going to keep doing it.”

And keep doing it Peppiatt has. During a holiday in Spain some months after the resignation he got an e-mail asking whether he could share his experiences with the Leveson Inquiry, which was set up by Prime Minister David Cameron to investigate culture, practice and ethics of the British press following the phone-hacking scandal. “I was like, ‘Yeah, fine I am happy to do that,” he says. “I thought I was giving a quick ten-minute talk to Lord Justice Leveson and five-ten other people. When I turned up on the day there were about 500 people there — all the editors, executives, TV cameras and the lot. And the things I had in my notes were quite strong. I didn’t expect that I was going to say these things to the people who they were about.”

But now that he was here he decided to go through with it and so he did. “And that caused a bit of controversy as well,” he says. “That was on the news. It was quiet a nerve-racking experience. I gave proper evidence at Leveson after that — I gave two sets of evidence.”

Having turned into a sort of minor celebrity in media circles his agent suggested Peppiatt do a show about his experiences. If he could give speeches in places such as the Leveson Inquiry why couldn’t he do it in front of the camera? And so was born “One Rogue Reporter”, Peppiatt’s comedy show where he goes after tabloid editors, delving into their private lives, doorstepping them, hiring paparazzi to follow them. “A show about the hypocrisy of it,” he tells me, in his apartment in Highbury, London, where I have been listening to his story for the past half hour, “that they don’t like the treatment which they are happy to dole out to other people.” He took it to the Edinburgh Festival and it went really well. Now he is touring different parts of the United Kingdom.

Interestingly, he has done a couple of news reports on Islam for the BBC and The Independent, although the stories are from a very different angle to the ones he did at The Daily Star. They cover the experiences of British converts to Islam. Was he trying to make up for his earlier reporting on the religion? Peppiatt, who gets asked to speak to various sorts of groups — including Muslim groups — about his experiences, says: “It was certainly — I became a lot more interested in Islam, the people and the culture. It became an area that I was interested in and so that is how the show came about. I was interested in the experience of converting, or reverting as some would say, to Islam.”

Although he made some enemies by speaking out, Peppiatt feels he could have gone back to the industry if he had worked hard enough to find another job. “But I felt I had my chance and I had blown it to a degree and there were lots of other journalists who deserved the chance,” he says. “And beyond that I had lost the passion to do it. I just wanted to try something else and I didn’t feel that journalism was a career that I wanted to pursue into the future. I didn’t want to be sitting in a newsroom in 20 years’ time doing the same sort of stuff. And I looked around the newsroom where I was working and I saw these thrice-divorced alcoholics who hate their lives, and I thought to myself, ‘I don’t want to be that guy.’”

He certainly is doing well with his comedy performance. Hugh Grant described his routine as “hilarious, brave and strangely arousing”. The Guardian called it “Litigiously funny”. The Telegraph thinks it is an “important show”. It would appear Peppiatt has carved a niche for himself as a comedian with a focus on the world of tabloids. A few months ago he teamed up with comedy producer Marcus Mortimer to launch his video blog called The Spike, a take-down on some of the worst stories in the tabloid press. “Once you have been on the inside and written the stuff it is very easy from the outside to pick it apart and deconstruct it and see what is going on behind the headlines,” he says.

One noticeable change is that The Daily Star’s coverage of the English Defence League appears to have become more critical. “The thing is you actually see less of it since I left,” he says. “Especially in the 6 to 9 months after I left, they have really toned it down. I don’t claim that was all me but I certainly think that it was me highlighting the issue, and then knowing that people were paying more attention to what they were writing, that helped stop that behaviour.”

Syed Hamad Ali is a writer based in London.