At a time journalism is under attack, let's celebrate the best

It was the summer of 1997 a few months after a notable marathon libel case in which our crime correspondent, Duncan Campbell, had successfully defended his exposé of suspected corruption at Stoke Newington police station.

- ALAN RUSBRIDGER

Around four in the morning, I was jolted awake by a burly policeman in the bedroom. We were living in Highbury, north London, and I soon worked out that the house was swarming with police officers, along with their dogs.

It turned out that a burglar had smashed through our front door in the middle of the night. The police eventually left and, as the last one disappeared up the path, he said to me: “You’re the editor of the Guardian, aren’t you? You might like to know we’re all based at Stoke Newington nick.”

My heart may have missed a beat. Duncan had, after all, just vanquished five of his colleagues in court. But I was wrong: as the copper tugged his dog into the van and drove off, he said: “Tell your Mr Campbell to keep digging.”

That was the thing some people struggled to understand about the way Duncan – who died recently – worked. You could expose bent cops and be in favour of the police. You could be dealing with the Met Commissioner as chair of the Crime Reporters Association in the morning and have a drink with a bank robber in the evening.

Of course, with Duncan, it went further, as anyone who attended one of his publishing parties would know. There would be chief constables, great train robbers, judges, barristers, old lags and old hacks. The art was to work out which was which.

Duncan wrote about the world of crime like no other reporter could even dream of. How he did it, no one could quite explain

Everyone trusted Duncan – except Mr Justice French in the Stoke Newington trial. In the previous 33 months, the police union, the Police Federation, had fought and won no fewer than 95 libel cases in a row. They were called “garage actions” because coppers would use the guaranteed settlement money for home extensions.