The investigative journalist famed for high-volume encounters with ‘baddies’ of all shades was let go by the corporation. But he’s turned it into material for a novel

The Derek and Joy Sander College of Drama and Elocution has a lot to answer for. When he was 10 years old, John Sweeney’s family moved from Manchester down to Hampshire, and at his new school Sweeney was teased and bullied for his northern vowels. His worried mum sent him to elocution classes in Southampton to help him fit in. The drama college did not change his accent much – Sweeney was cast in plays as the flat-capped northerner – but it did an expert job in teaching him to project his voice.

That voice has been a primary weapon in Sweeney’s one-man tour of duty as a reporter over 40 years, not so much speaking truth to power as, on occasion, yelling it. It was most notoriously employed against the official spokesman of the Church of Scientology in 2007; a clip of Sweeney (who apologised for “losing it” on assignment for the BBC’s Panorama) has been viewed several million times. It has also been consistently raised against tyrants and terrorists and gangsters (Sweeney, who retains a schoolboy sense of right and wrong, still likes to call them “baddies”). Its finest hour was when Sweeney spoke out, after a four-year investigation, about the evidence given by specialist witness Sir Roy Meadow in a series of cot-death trials. His stubborn work was crucial in helping to free three women falsely convicted for murdering their babies from Britain’s jails in 2003 and save several others from prison.

I first heard Sweeney’s inimitable foghorn nearly 30 years ago in the Observer newsroom or, just as often, in the Coach and Horses pub next door, invariably telling stories of the places from which he had recently returned and just about lived to tell the tale. For a few of Sweeney’s dozen years at this paper, I was his editor, taking in copy from his surrealist road trips through civil wars in Algeria and Bosnia and Burundi, heartfelt gonzo stories which dramatised the troubles of the world with himself at centre stage.

When I knocked on his door in south London last week, I hadn’t seen him for a few years, but he is one of those people with whom you just pick up in mid-sentence. He’d invited me over to talk about his new book, The Useful Idiot, a novel set in Stalinist Moscow in 1932, as well as what he calls his “latest troubles with the Beeb”.

In Sweeney’s rumpled sitting room, bike in the doorway, books everywhere, photos on the walls cheerfully askew, we talk first about Gareth Jones, the hero of his novel, someone whose real-life story I’d never heard. Jones was the junior foreign correspondent of the Western Mail in the 1930s, born in Barry. Having been posted to Russia in his 20s, he became the first journalist to tell the story of mass starvation in Stalin’s regime, at a time when the rest of the world was hearing Soviet fake news. Sweeney’s dramatic reconstruction of these events does not aspire to great subtlety, but the story of Jones, a man after the author’s heart, is an enthralling one. (And the inspiration for a film released this week called Mr Jones, starring James Norton.)

“For me, writing novels is like learning to be a brickie,” Sweeney says. “My first two thrillers were overcomplicated. But these historical thrillers (the first, Elephant Moon, was set in Burma during the second world war) I think I can do. I’m just finally doing that thing of writing exactly the books I would love to read.”

The Useful Idiot was written partly as therapy during the extremely stressful months in which Sweeney came to the end of his 17-year career at the BBC. The final act of that long and often volatile association had been a well-publicised series of clashes with the former leader of the English Defence League, Tommy Robinson.

Sweeney had made an investigative film for Panorama about Robinson, exposing his links to far-right extremists in Germany. But the film – which went through 45 revised scripts – was never broadcast after Sweeney himself was secretly filmed, after far too many drinks, trying to persuade an associate of Robinson’s to speak to him on camera. Along the way in that video, circulated online, he was heard suggesting that “the BBC was a stupid and irritating organisation” and that he shared with Robinson heritage as an “Irish scumbag”.

An online hate mob of Robinson supporters came after Sweeney and hundreds of them protested outside the BBC’s Salford offices about his proposed Panorama film. The corporation felt it had no choice but to publicly apologise for the remarks Sweeney had made, which had been “offensive and inappropriate”. He was put on gardening leave before an eventual parting of the ways. In a parting shot to Robinson, Sweeney took to Twitter to say: “… I can finally say these are not the views of the BBC, but he’s a complete c**t.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ambushing Vladimir Putin in Yakutsk, Russia in 2014 over the shooting down of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17. Photograph: Alamy

By his own admission, Sweeney had something of a breakdown during that period. His second marriage had not long ended and he had recently lost his mother. He wasn’t sleeping and was getting paranoid about the abuse. “I would wake up at three in the morning and all this stuff was going round in my head. I have been threatened lots of times. But in Syria or Iraq or Afghanistan, you have a helmet, a flak jacket, perhaps a security officer. Suddenly the dangerous place is just outside your own front door. I’m cycling around London and people are shouting: ‘Fuck off Sweeney! Tommy Robinson owns you!’”

He went to see a psychiatrist about PTSD. The psychiatrist asked him if there were any events he had witnessed that might have triggered his anxiety. He started to tell him about a career that had taken in just about every conflict zone in the world. He talked about the genocidal Hutu and Tutsi killings in Burundi and was still describing things he had seen in Bosnia in the 1990s when the psychiatrist had to intervene to tell him that the session was nearly up. In the end he worked out a rest cure for himself. He and his ex-wife had bought an attic flat in Umbria a decade ago. “I fucked off to Italy and Italy cured me,” he laughs. “Though it is true that certain wine bar owners in Perugia’s old town, when they see me, their faces do light up.”

Sweeney now lives just south of the river with his dog, Bertie. His two kids are in their 20s and 30s. In the months since he left the BBC he has begun the research for a podcast series investigating the killing of his friend Paul Jenks, the British photographer who was shot by a sniper while working in Osijek in Croatia in 1992. He has started on the next novel as well as a memoir and remains involved with campaigning for justice for the murdered Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, about whom he co-wrote another book.

I wonder where, looking back, he thinks he gets his restless sense of injustice from, his need to go after the baddies. In reply he talks first about his parents, whose photos are on the wall above where we are sitting. His dad left school at 14 to be an apprentice at Cammell Laird shipyard in Birkenhead. In 1943 he was a third engineer in the merchant navy during the battle of the Atlantic. “He was a very funny man,” Sweeney says. “He used to do an impression in the pub of how it felt when a depth charge went off when you were in the engine room and the whole world shaking.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A frank exchange of words with Tommy Robinson during filming for Panorama. Photograph: BBC

His mum was originally a scouser too. “They spent their whole lives either laughing or throwing verbal hand grenades at each other. Which was great. I think they both had a very big sense of social justice and fairness and honesty, and I liked that. For example, I would never, ever fiddle my expenses,” he laughs. “Though I’ll admit they have been substantial on occasion.”

I remind Sweeney that one of his lasting legacies at the Observer has been a more parsimonious approach to spending. This dates back to 1992 when he was in a hotel bar in Dubrovnik and the city was under siege. The hotel was being shelled. Sweeney used his voice projection to address the bar: “We are all going to die, champagne is on the Observer.” Fortunately for the assembled hacks – but unfortunately for Sweeney’s expense account – the hotel was spared. Five months later, when the siege ended and the hotel reopened, he received a bill by post for £983.

He set out as a teenager wanting to be a lawyer, but having gone along to trials could never imagine himself defending anyone he believed to be guilty. Journalism did not require that. He got his first break when doing shifts on the Sheffield Telegraph. He’d gone away to visit a friend who was backpacking in India, and on the trip managed to talk his way into an interview with the Dalai Lama. He thought he better dress up like Sir Robin Day for the occasion. The interview began with the Dalai Lama asking Sweeney why he was wearing a bow tie but no socks. It made a centre spread. When he returned, a report of a local crime came in and the news editor sent up the immortal words: “There has been a murder in Barnsley, where’s the fookin’ Tibet correspondent?”

His subsequent career is punctuated with comparable punchlines. Though apparently haphazard, he has an intuitive sense for the bigger picture. He was the first TV journalist, in 2013, to confront Donald Trump about links to the Russian mafia. No sooner was the name of convicted mobster Felix Sater – a former business partner of Trump’s – out of Sweeney’s mouth than Trump shook his hand and concluded their interview.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest John Sweeney: ‘I see my hobby as annoying the far right.’ Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Observer

Sweeney’s proudest moment in this regard was his ambush of Vladimir Putin. He was making a film about the shooting down of the Malaysian Airlines flight MH17, generally believed to be the work of Russian military in Ukraine – an allegation the Kremlin denied. His producer had realised Putin was due to open a new woolly mammoth museum in Yakutsk, Siberia and they thought they might confront the president there.

Sweeney arrived in Yakutsk straight from a long and bibulous night at his niece’s wedding, hungover and jet-lagged. “My beard was quite full, and we reckoned I could pass quite easily as a professor of mammothology,” he recalls. He lined up with all the other museum curators, who had formed a guard of honour for the president. As Putin came up the steps, Sweeney greeted him with the words: “Tell me about the killings in Ukraine, Mr Putin.” Putin, startled, stopped to give his version of events. When Sweeney tried to ask a follow-up question, “a wall of Kremlin muscle closes around me and I am marched off down to the basement where I’m locked in”. He had no phone signal so was unable to contact his bosses at the BBC.

When he lost his job recently, Sweeney being Sweeney, he fired off a “subject access request” to obtain the emails that were sent about him while he was in Siberia. He subsequently sends them to me. They include a note which reads: “Funny! I’d like to investigate John Sweeney. It’s always him isn’t it?” and “I’m just concerned that Sweeney is going to go roaming and try to do another doorstep [interview with Putin].”

The management have never known what it feels like to try to get neo-Nazi thugs to talk

He sees these notes as indicative of an organisation that – under siege from all sides – has lost its nerve. “You can’t be as neurotic as they are and cope with someone like me. It takes up too much time for them.”

He used to have a joke with Mark Thompson, the former director general, who “whenever he saw me in the corridor he would make a point of literally running in the opposite direction”. Under Tony Hall, he suggests, that retreat was much more in earnest. People like Sweeney, the kind of troublemakers that the best newsrooms have always indulged, “became like the coronavirus”.

He concedes that he probably did not advance his case by addressing director of news and current affairs, Fran Unsworth, in emails as “Kim Fran-un”. His great problem, he says, the complaint of journalists the world over, is that “the management have generally never known what it feels like to try to get neo-Nazi thugs to talk or to be under fire in order to get a story. My fantasy has always been just to work for someone who has also done that stuff.”

That was part of the substance of a recent letter to the TV regulator Ofcom that outlined his belief that there had been systemic editorial failures at the corporation, in particular in its handling of Brexit and Russia. He is awaiting a response. In the meantime, one or two of his run-ins with BBC management find their way verbatim into his novel and fit apparently seamlessly into an account of the Soviet secret police in the 1930s.

His departure was a prelude to the coming round of BBC redundancies, which are no doubt likely to focus on the more expensive elements of news gathering – fewer filmed investigations, more talking heads. Before he left, like everyone else, Sweeney was doing vox pops about Brexit. He got it down to a fine art. “I would get off the train, head straight to the main square, find the guy on a mobility scooter with a Waffen SS sticker and get his views on taking back control. Then head over to Waitrose and find some professor on their day off to put the Remain argument. Then, on the way back to the station, a mother with her kids saying: ‘I just want them to get on with it.’ Forty-five minutes tops. I could do it. But it wasn’t anything to do with journalism.”

There has been, in the best of Sweeney’s journalism, something far more dogged, that sense of being a proper pain to those with plenty to hide – and of looking for comedy as well as tragedy. He cites his TV heroes as Alan Whicker, Malcolm Muggeridge and celebrated Scot Fyfe Robertson. Before he left the BBC he at least fulfilled his ambition to do “a proper Fyfe Robinson intro”. He had been despatched to interview Ruth Davidson in January. The opening shot of his report was Loch Ness. Flat calm. And then suddenly, breaking the surface, Sweeney announcing: “All journalists worth their salt should avoid cliches like the plague. So where better than here, in Loch Ness, to start the hunt for that rare mystical beastie, the Scottish Conservative.”

Sweeney is 61 now, but very far from any sense of retirement; in many ways he feels like he is just getting going. “It’s like Rod Stewart has train sets, some people collect stamps,” he says. “I see my hobby as annoying the Church of Scientology, Kim Jong-un and the far right.”

The Useful Idiot is published by Silvertail Books (£9.99)