Lord and Lady Lucan

WHENEVER one of those opinion polls is conducted to sort out the goodies and baddies, journalists are ranked among the most despised professions – just below estate agents, lawyers and parking wardens but above Chelsea managers.

Surely cocktail makers who call themselves mixologists are worse, but I won’t take it personally.

You might assume that this hatred for newspaper reporters comes from a view that every story is a lie, or at last gleaned from a hacked phone.

Trust me, we are not all like the journalists working for the Walford Gazette and those soapy incarnations where everybody is breaking into hospital wards or eavesdropping in cafes.

No – the real reason people hate journalists is that they just can’t stop puffing on about who they have met and the great stories that they have claimed as their own.

So, with no further delay and on the occasion of the Westminster Extra’s 1,500th edition, let Harrington tell you about how a “world exclusive” is made. You look in the ads section…

In October 2015, doing this found the son of Lord Lucan, the famously missing earl and murder suspect, taking out a legal notice in these very pages announcing that he was applying to have his father “presumed dead”.

The front page on Lord Lucan

The chain of events would mean a death certificate finally being issued and the title being inherited.

Any mention of Lord Lucan leads to huge interest, and not just from conspiracy theorists. To me, the case is so doused in mystery that the fact that a woman lost her life in bloody circumstances is often skated over in the search for the most outlandish answer at to what happened to Lord Richard John Bingham.

The 7th Earl of Lucan, of course, vanished without trace in 1974.

His children’s nanny, Sandra Rivett, was found bludgeoned to death with a lead pipe – yes a lead pipe – at the Lucan family home in Lower Belgrave Street, Belgravia.

After he booked his ad, the West End Extra asked his son George why he was initiating the proceedings. Back came an economical email which simply said: “Call it closure”.

The latest development was picked up by every national title and, due to the intense fascination, papers around the world. Perhaps it wasn’t what his son had expected to come from what was a discreet little notice.

In stealing the story, the Daily Express – itself a factory of exclusives when it comes to predicting snowstorms and Princess Diana theories – wrote: “The West End Extra does not often produce the sort of journalistic scoops that are followed up around the world but on October 16 central London’s local newspaper published a gem.”

Snark all you like, our readers had a global exclusive in their favourite weekly read.