Robert Mendick
The Telegraph/Sunday Telegraph
His investigations into the shooting of WPc Yvonne Fletcher led to the High Court finding a close associate of Colonel Gaddafi liable for her murder in a landmark judgment 38 years after her death. A dossier of the case, including a leaked prosecutor's report obtained by the Daily Telegraph, was used to secure the judgment. Mendick has been reporting on the case for many years. That included the revelation that the prime suspect had become a UK ‘state asset’ allowed to live in this country. Exclusives include Prince Andrew taking £1m from an alleged fraudster who won a prestigious entrepreneur's event the Prince had organised. The scoop was the result of a series of investigations into Pitch@Palace, the Prince's charity, which enabled Mendick to connect the alleged fraudster to the Prince. Mendick also unearthed the first photograph of Prince Andrew and Ghislaine Maxwell at Buckingham Palace. Sources with the entourage, that also included Bill Clinton and Kevin Spacey, said Maxwell was the Prince's ex-girlfriend and had the run of the Palace. Mendick was leaked the findings of the Dyson report into Martin Bashir's duplicity in securing the BBC's interview with Princess Diana. The exclusive splash followed months of digging into a scandal, described as the BBC's 'phone hacking moment'. Mendick had previously obtained a series of doucments that showed Bashir was seeking to blame Prince Diana as part of his defence. His reporting into the pursuit of veterans over deaths in Northern Ireland during the Troubles culminated with the last interview with Dennis Hutchings, an 80-year-old former soldier dying of heart and kidney failure. Two weeks later Hutchings died having contracted covid midway through his trial. Mendick further embarrassed the defence secretary when he disclosed that the MoD refused to give Hutchings a military funeral, prompting a u-turn. The furore led to a change in the law that will prevent future prosecutions of soldiers and paramilitaries. Mendick’s 3,000 word examination of what went wrong in the lead up to the Grenfell Tower disaster, including heartbreaking interviews with families that had never previously spoken, shows the breadth of his reporting skills. His exclusive interview with Director K, the head of MI5’s hostile states counterintelligence branch, followed months of delicate negotiation with the intelligence services. In the interview she revealed the inadequacy of the UK’s spying laws. For the first months of the Ukraine war, he anchored the Telegraph’s brilliant coverage, producing insightful, informative splashes and inside recons. His examination of oligarchs included the revelation that the tycoon who bought Vladimir Putin his summer palace on the Black Sea was secretly living in London in one of its most expensive properties. Mendick’s articles over the timeframe have secured almost 34 million pageviews and led to almost 2,800 subscriptions, phenomenal figures in the Telegraph’s subscription strategy.