Perched on a desk, Alan Rusbridger was softly-spoken and relaxed as he talked students through the twists and turns of one of the biggest stories of our time, which implicated the CIA and GCHQ in extensive internet and phone surveillance and even led to Guardian journalists smashing up their own hard-drives at the request of British security services.

From the moment Edward Snowden got in contact with him, the former Guardian editor, a Cambridge alumnus, knew that the case was highly unique. In the first place, nothing was normally ever leaked from the NSA. In fact, it was colloquially known as “none such agency”.

“The first decision was whether we should go and meet him in person but already we were skirting around the law, wondering whether we were being hacked ourselves. The Espionage Act in the States has no defence, as with the Official Secrets Act in Britain.”

The stakes were incredibly high. “Anything to do with National Security is about as hard as it gets in journalism. The ease with which the state could attack you is not hard to imagine but we were also aware that if we spilt the wrong secrets, terrorists could get hold of them,” he said.

Rusbridger was shocked to find that it was not just the British government that did not want his paper to publish the leaked documents. Some of those whom he respected in journalism thought that they should not publish what the state did not want them to publish.

“But surely journalism must be separate from the state or it is nothing,” he said.
He went on to describe how in the US and in Britain there are two very different kinds of relationship between the state and journalism.

In Britain someone from the government called him up and told him flatly: “We’re going to smash up your computers.” There was no debate and no discussion. One could be directly looking at a certain document only to be repeatedly told by a government official on the phone that they can neither confirm nor deny its existence.

He was even hauled in front of the Home Affairs Select Committee in 2013 and asked if he loved his country by the MP Keith Vaz. He was reporting this precisely because he loved his country, he said.

In America, however, the culture is “friendlier” towards journalists, partly, as Rusbridger sees it, because of the consequences of the 1971 Daniel Ellsberg case.

In this case, a former US military analyst leaked papers which showed how the country had been misled about the Vietnam War. Though the US government tried to stop The New York Times from publishing, the Supreme Court ruled in the latter’s favour.

“The debate over Edward Snowden in Britain has been pretty pathetic but it has been more grown up in the US because of the protection of the Ellsberg case.”

The end result, as Rusbridger was at pains to point out, was that the sky did not fall in, despite all the opposition and scaremongering. “That was the hardest story of my life but we published it and journalism prompted a debate which Cameron, Obama and the spy chiefs have all now agreed we needed to have.”

Taking questions from the floor, he called for a sense of proportion about the threat that Britain faces at the moment, for example from terrorists.

“You need to keep a sense of history. We’re not in the Vietnam War. We haven’t had an existential threat to the nation. Bloody awful things are happening but compared to when the IRA was active, with bombs going off all over London, it is not like that at all these days.”

According to Rusbridger, the government is taking advantage of the perceived threat to increase its own powers when in reality most terror attacks come from people who are already on the government agencies’ radars. So, if anything, they need more resources, not more powers, he said.

In an interview afterwards, Rusbridger talked about his time studying English at Cambridge and how it had prepared him for a career in journalism. In his time, Rusbridger recounted, Magdalene was “the thick college”.

“Reading English at Cambridge you’d have to do Shelley or Dickens in a week and there was no way on earth I was ever going to read three Dickens novels. So you became quite adept at absorbing all the sources in order to produce a plausible essay at the end of the week. That’s actually quite a good training because journalism is to some extent about pretending to be more knowledgeable than you really are.

“Those nights when you’re staying up all night thinking: ‘shit, I’ve got a tutorial tomorrow, I’ve got to get this essay done’ – I didn’t know it at the time, but actually all that was fantastic preparation for what it’s like to be in a newsroom.”

Rather than becoming involved in student journalism Rusbridger started writing for the Cambridge Evening News during the holidays, and being paid for it.

“You’d pick up a copy of Varsity or Stop Press at the time and it would be full of articles about Nicaragua and it wasn’t what did it for me, but I did love working on the Cambridge Evening News, which was about something sort of very tangible, local and real.”

“I’d tried all kinds of jobs to earn money during the holidays: bottle washing, painting and decorating, picking tomatoes, but the brilliant thing is that you can go and sit in a newsroom and people will pay you to ring people up and ask them questions. I thought: ‘this is wonderful.’”

Now the Principal of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, that passion for journalism has never left him, even if the world of journalism has changed almost beyond recognition since his student days.

“There is lots of soul-destroying work that goes out in the name of journalism these days, but then there’s lots of inspiring work as well and people who risk their lives and do incredibly brave things. Generally in life I like to look on the optimistic side and think about the good examples.”

But did he enjoy his years under intense pressure as Guardian editor as much as writing colourful pieces as a student?

“I’ve enjoyed every day of my life as a journalist, there’s never been a time when I’ve got bored of it.”