Rocks Don’t Move, by Shari Kasman, Self & Company £20, 320 pages
On the second day of her memoir-writing exercise, Mrs Kasman, a journalist, decided she wanted to write about something in the spotlight.
“I hadn’t thought to ask what ‘scandals’ my newsroom most wanted to talk about, but I did come to the conclusion that the ‘frank’ story about the most senior official at the Environment Agency, in response to a straightforward question about some foggy answers to a particularly pointed question from my bosses, had to be a standout contender,” she recalls.
“As this was a ‘boardroom conversation’, the audience couldn’t be banned, nor the journalists excluded. This time I would actually let the story out.”
It had been a few weeks since Leveson, the report into the culture, practice and ethics of the press. The two stories in question were the phone-hacking scandals, during which one of Kasman’s “friends” was involved, and the Met appeal to the public for information about John “Johnny Squiggle” Duffy, a young actor, who had gone missing in 2003, “perhaps because he was about to be sacked for not paying for a fox hunt”.