Category Archives: Fiona Fox

Further to Robin’s earlier post, here’s another interesting blast from Fiona Fox’s past:

DISGRACED former Labour politician Jim Devine persuaded a friend to call his office manager pretending to be a journalist looking into MPs expenses, it was claimed today.
But when she took time off for stress after discovering his actions had been an elaborate hoax, he told other staff that it was her being investigated for fraudulent expenses claims used to fund a non-existent gambling habit…

…But when she came into the office the following day, the office manager realised it was all a big hoax.
She said: “I went into work and checked my emails and I had access to Jim’s email.
“There was one marked urgent so I opened it.
“It was from Fiona Fox mostly about the Embryology Bill.
“She is the Director at the Science Media Centre in London.
“But at the end there was a PS said that ‘I phoned that poor woman in your office and left the message. Hope you’ve put her out of her misery.“

Guardian science correspondent Ian Sample commented at the time:

Few people who are familiar with the small pond that is science journalism in the UK will have failed to gulp on reading about the ex-Labour MP Jim Devine and the unthinkable bullying he unleashed on his office manager, Marion Kinley.
Devine, who was an MP in Livingston, Scotland, before being caught up in the expenses scandal last year asked an acquaintance to make a fake call to Kinley and pretend to be a journalist investigating her financial affairs. The story gets darker with every step and you can read more about it here. Devine has since been ordered to pay Kinley £35,000.
Though appalling from the off, it was not the top line that shocked many of my colleagues most. What came as a surprise was the revelation far down the story that the fake call in question was made by Fiona Fox, head of the Science Media Centre in London, a prominent venue for press conferences on all matters scientific and medical. Otherwise articulate people who read the story struggled to say more than three letters: WTF?

This is the same person lecturing about “integrity” on the BBC College of Journalism website.

UPDATE. In the comments Beeboidal points us to the BBC’s account of the Devine bullying case. No mention of Fiona Fox, of course.

Fiona Fox, Ray Snoddy’s interviewee on Newswatch, who is clearly a pivotal figure in setting the parameters of BBC science coverage generally and climate change in particular, has precisely the credentials the BBC looks for in its “experts” (an area of responsibility, incidentally, that Sue Inglish manages). Her degree was in meejah studies at the Polytechnic of Central London (just down the road from Broadcasting House in Portland Place). Then she cut her teeth in the Revolutionary Communist Party; moved on to the press office of that quintissential qango, the EOC, and then joined CAFOD, a Roman Catholic Charity that has sold its soul to climate change fanaticism. From there she took up her present role as a science “expert” and now works cosily with Ceri Thomas, the editor of Today. This is all beyond parody. (h/tip Barry Wood)