Spycatcher (Peter Wright)

Spycatcher is not banned in the UK today, but for more than two years it was effectively off limits. Margaret Thatcher’s government fought in courts around the world to stop the memoir of former MI5 officer Peter Wright, and gagged British newspapers from reporting it. The fight ended on 13 October 1988, when the House of Lords lifted the injunctions.

Why the government tried to stop it

Peter Wright had been an assistant director of MI5. After retiring to Australia, he wrote Spycatcher with the journalist Paul Greengrass. The book claimed that MI5 had bugged embassies, plotted against Prime Minister Harold Wilson, and that a former MI5 head may have been a Soviet agent. The government argued that former intelligence officers owe a lifelong duty of confidence and must never reveal secrets.

Courts on three continents

The government first sued in Australia, where it lost. In Britain, the Observer and the Guardian reported some of the allegations in June 1986, and the Attorney General won temporary injunctions to stop more. On 12 July 1987 the Sunday Times printed extracts, and two days later the book was published in the United States, where the government did not try to stop it. Copies poured into Britain in travellers’ luggage, yet on 30 July 1987 the Law Lords voted 3 to 2 to keep the gag in place.

How the ban ended

By late 1987, Spycatcher was a bestseller in the US. In October 1988, the House of Lords accepted that worldwide publication meant there was no secret left to protect and refused permanent injunctions, as the case record shows. In 1991, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that keeping the gag after US publication had breached freedom of expression.

Spycatcher shows how a ban can collapse once a book is everywhere else. India’s ban on The Satanic Verses ended in court too, decades later. See more banned books or the UK page.