J-Lab Episode 29: Failures of state, with George Arbuthnott of the Sunday Times Insight team

J-Lab

George Arbuthnott and Jonathan Calvert of the Sunday Times Insight team have published the first major book telling the inside story of Britain's battle with coronavirus and exposing failures at the top of government which may have cost thousands of lives. In this episode, George explains the reporting behind the story and discusses the methods used by Insight – perhaps the most successful and certainly the best known investigations team in British newspapers. Insight's long string of successes stretches back to uncovering the Profumo affair, the thalidomide scandal, the discovery of Israel's secret nuclear weapons and more recently the Fifa cash-for-votes corruption. And since joining the Sunday Times, George has exposed a global doping scandal in athletics, human trafficking in the UK and war crimes in Afghanistan by members of the SAS. This podcast is brought to you by the Civic Journalism Lab at Newcastle University.