Slip-up

Keith Waterhouse, who wrote an ill-fated screenplay based on this book, said that Slip-Up was `Perhaps the best analysis of Fleet Street at work ever written.
It is the story of the discovery in Rio de Janeiro of Ronald Biggs, a celebrity fugitive on the run for 12 years after the Great Train Robbery of 1963 and the fiasco that resulted when newsmen and detectives worked out a bizarre plot to bring him back to Britain.

Initially a cosy, if highly irregular, conspiracy between Scotland Yard and the Daily Express, the hunt for Biggs soon embroiled every circulation-hungry rival newspaper. And where Fleet Street led, the worlds news media followed. It was The Story of the Century.

Scotland Yard was outwitted from bungled beginning to embarrassed end. The Express was mercilessly mauled by its opponents. The ends of justice were soon forgotten. Biggs had (unwittingly though literally) planted the seeds of his own salvation and, infamously, he kept out of jail for another 27 years.

Behind the blazing headlines an even more entertaining farce had been played out but the enthralled public and exasperated British government knew nothing of it until Anthony Delano, a veteran Fleet Street man himself, produced this riveting account of greed, ambition and double-dealing among a tribe of high-powered hacks on the warpath.