I met Duncan Campbell, who died on Friday (Report, 16 May), when I joined the National Union of Journalists in my early days on the Peace News staff, getting to know him better during our involvement in the defence campaign around the ABC official secrets trial, referred to in your obituary (16 May). After becoming a defendant myself in a spin-off case – charged with criminal contempt for naming a “secret” witness in the main trial – I found Duncan’s cool, charismatic demeanour to be very much what I needed on my side.
But my most abiding memory of Duncan is from the time he was news editor at Time Out (then a radical magazine). There was a dispute when the owner wanted to abandon the system of pay parity; despite being one of the people whose pay would increase, Duncan was as solidly opposed to the change as were his colleagues.
