Some articles that I get in the newspapers with the help of Freedom of Information (FoI) requests give me real pleasure – mainly because they come to me it the strangest of ways.
One such article was this piece that ended up being used in the Sunday Mirror about former Cabinet big-wig and now TV star Michael Portillo.
While waiting at Kings Cross station looking eagerly at the noticeboards for when my train might be leaving there were a rash of announcements over the station loudspeaker system all voiced with the unmistakable dulcet tones of Mr Portillo.
Knowing that Network Rail which runs the station is a publicly-funded body and that it almost certainly paid Portillo for the work I thought that if I could find out how much it might make a good story – and so it proved.
Here is a copy of the FoI response from Network Rail to my request to find out how much it had cost. PDF
However, what really made this story wasn’t so much how much was paid to Portillo but the fact that his 20 voice snippets about the history of Kings Cross were despite the government saying we already had enough annoying, useless messages bombarding the eardrums of long-suffering rail passengers.
