Eric Allison, the Guardian and Observer prison correspondent, was scathing about the evidence I gave from the witness box against him and others at the Old Bailey. “If I knew you were going to be that bad, I wouldn’t have pleaded guilty,” he told me more than a decade later, when, implausibly, he was a reporter and I was news editor of the Observer.
At our first meeting in the early 1990s, he was holding a fistful of stolen blank British passports and offering thousands more and I was a reporter playing the part of an upmarket crook who had driven to the meet at a Manchester airport hotel in a two-seater Porsche.
