It was a story that sounded too fantastical to be true. When Ed Jervis approached journalist Gabriel Gatehouse at a podcast festival more than three years ago, it was to tell him about his grandfather, England’s legendary 1966 World Cup-winning goalkeeper Gordon Banks, and how he went down with a mysterious illness in the subsequent tournament, Mexico 1970.
England lost the game that Banks missed – a crucial quarter-final tie against West Germany – despite taking a 2-0 lead. And Jervis told Gatehouse, a former international editor of Newsnight who had become something of an expert in US conspiracy culture with his podcast and book The Coming Storm, that he’d heard that his grandfather had actually been poisoned. By the CIA.
Gatehouse was naturally sceptical, and yet he knew stranger things have happened.
