Discover the Best Books Written by Clive Ponting

Clive Sheridan Ponting was a senior British civil servant and historian. He was best known for leaking documents about the sinking of the ARA General Belgrano in the Falklands War in 1982. At the time of his resignation from the civil service in 1985, he was a Grade 5 (assistant secretary), earning £23,000 per year (£70,214 in 2020). He wrote a number of books on British and world history. His most influential works include a Green History of the World (1991), which was revised as A New Green History of the World in 2007, and a biography of Winston Churchill (1994) and 1940: Myth and Reality (1990).

Ponting was born in Bristol, the only child of Charles Ponting, who is thought to have worked in sales, and his wife, Winifred (née Wadham). He was educated at Bristol Grammar School and the University of Reading. While a senior civil servant at the United Kingdom's Ministry of Defence (MoD), Ponting sent two documents, subsequently nicknamed "the crown jewels", to Labour MP Tam Dalyell in July 1984 concerning the sinking of the Argentine navy warship General Belgrano, a key incident in the 1982 Falklands War. 

After Ponting admitted revealing the information, the Ministry of Defence suspended him without pay. On 17 August 1984, he was charged with a criminal offence under Section 2 of the Official Secrets Act of 1911. The Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, had his pay reinstated once she had been briefed on what had happened. Ponting's defence at the trial was that the matter and its disclosure to a Member of Parliament were in the public interest. It was the first case under the Official Secrets Act that involved giving information to Parliament. 

Although Ponting expected to be imprisoned, he was acquitted by the jury. The acquittal came despite the judge's direction to the jury, and hence by definition a "perverse verdict". The judge, Sir Anthony McCowan, "had indicated that the jury should convict him", and had ruled that "the public interest is what the government of the day says it is". In 1985 Ponting came across the one file about Operation Cauldron—1952 secret biological warfare trials that had led to a trawler being accidentally doused with plague bacteria off the Hebrides—that had not been destroyed, and confidentially told The Observer newspaper about it, leading to a story that July headlined "British germ bomb sprayed trawler".

Ponting resigned from the civil service on 16 February 1985. In May 1987 he made an extended appearance on the first ever edition of Channel 4's After Dark discussion programme, alongside among others Colin Wallace, T. E. Utley and Peter Hain. Shortly after his resignation, The Observer began to serialise Ponting's book The Right to Know: The Inside Story of the Belgrano Affair. The Conservative government reacted by amending the secrets legislation and by introducing the Official Secrets Act 1989. 

Before the trial, a jury could take the view that if an action could be seen to be in the public interest, the right of the individual to take that action might be justified. As a result of the 1989 modification, that defence was removed. After the enactment, it was taken that "'public interest' is what the government of the day says it is". The events of Ponting's charge and trial were dramatized by Richard Monks on BBC Radio Four in May 2022.