UK Censors, Too

D-notice slapped on MoD's history of censorship, Secrecy and the Media

Secrecy and the Media, written by Rear-Admiral Nick Wilkinson, who was secretary of the committee from 1999 to 2004, should have been hitting all good bookshops this month, according to the academic publisher Routledge’s website.

But an extraordinary wrangle over the 300,000-word manuscript in the corridors of Whitehall threatened at one point to junk the book entirely. A compromise was reached only after the intervention of Christopher Andrew, a Cambridge historian and an expert on the intelligence services.

The book will now be published in May, but without its final five chapters. These cover the Blair years, charting the winding-down of the Irish terrorist campaigns and the War on Terror.

...when the D-notice committee decided that the time was ripe to publish its own official history, nobody imagined that it would fall victim to its own system. The history of the D-notice committee has, in effect, had a D-notice slapped on it by the D-notice committee...