Three Papers Thought They Were Blacklisted. The Rota Sorts By Owner, Not Masthead.
Six years of draw sheets and the secretary's working spreadsheet, obtained under freedom of information, show the defence ministry's press rota has not been re-randomised since 2014. The shuffle macro was deleted in a security upgrade.
Analysis is written by news reporters and interprets facts they have verified. It is not opinion, and it takes no position on what should be done.
LONDON, United Kingdom — Three newsrooms believe they have been kept out of the defence ministry's rotating press pool since 2019, when each of them ran a story the department disliked.
They have not been. The rota has never reached them.
This newspaper obtained six years of draw sheets and the pool secretary's own working spreadsheet under freedom of information, rebuilt all 312 draws, and found the reason in column C.
What the rota sorts on
The list runs alphabetically. It does not run alphabetically on the masthead. It runs on the registered corporate name of the subscribing organisation, which is the field the subscriptions team fills in and the only name the spreadsheet has ever held.
So a paper called The Fenwick Review sits under T, for Thurloe Free Press Ltd. A paper whose title begins with G sits at position 1, because its owner begins with A.
Thirty-six organisations. One column. Nobody chose the order.
Nothing has moved since 2014
The workbook's last structural edit is dated 3 March 2014. Since then the order has changed exactly twice, and neither change involved a person.
In April 2019 a holding company renamed itself from Wexley Publishing Group to Corvid Holdings plc. Its title moved from position 22 to position 8 in the next draw and has attended forty-one briefings since.
In November 2019 a merger placed The Fenwick Review under Thurloe Free Press Ltd. It moved from 13 to 34 and has attended none.
Both events fell in 2019, the year the three excluded titles believe they began to be punished, which is the coincidence that made the account plausible. Both are on the public register, with effective dates, and the register gives a cause for each. Neither cause is a story.
The button that is not there
The rota was designed to be re-randomised annually. The workbook still names the module that did it. The module is not in the file.
In February 2014 the department completed a security upgrade that blocked macro-enabled workbooks across the estate. The spreadsheet was re-saved, three weeks later, in a format that cannot hold code.
Nobody rewrote the shuffle. There is no record that anybody was asked to.
The list has therefore been drawn from the same starting order for twelve years, and the draw has gone past position 22 on four occasions in six years. Positions 23 to 36 have never been reached at all.
The three titles that say they are excluded sit at 29, 31 and 34.
The other quiet failure
Sign-ups close at 18:00 the day before, by email, to a distribution list last rebuilt in 2017.
Two subscriber addresses on that list point at a domain decommissioned in 2021. Mail to them does not bounce back to the sender. It is accepted and discarded.
Both titles are below position 22, so we cannot show this has cost either of them a place. Neither can they, which is a sentence we would rather not have to write.
The secretary
Bridget Ansah-Whitlock has run the pool rota since 2018, on a 0.4 full-time assignment. Two days a week.
She has raised the sorting problem in writing four times — in September 2019, twice in 2021 and again in March 2024. She holds every reply. Three are acknowledgements. The fourth asks her to bring it to a forum that has met twice in seven years.
She gave us all four exchanges without being asked for them, in an interview with a press officer sitting in the room, and then asked us to make sure we said that the department had never told her not to.
What this desk takes from it
There is no blacklist. There is a deleted macro, an alphabet and a corporate registry, and that is a duller machine than the one three editors have described to us for six years.
It is not, however, an acquittal, and the editor of one of the three says so at length at the foot of this page. His argument is that a department told four times in writing that its list excludes the same three names, which does nothing on all four occasions, has made a decision by declining to make one. We could not answer him and we have not tried.
He also does the thing this desk finds hardest to print, which is to begin by saying he was wrong. He told us in March there was a list. He has read the workbook and there is not.
The rota will run again next Tuesday, from position 8.
The six o'clock edition
Three stories a morning, in your inbox before the coffee is made.
How Others Covered This
The same events, as reported elsewhere on the same day. We list what each outlet had that we did not, as well as what we had that they did not — including where we come off worse. Why we print this.
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The Hollow PostThe List They Say Does Not Exist
Read the six-year absence as an instruction carried out quietly, and asked which minister gave it.
Had that we did not
The 2019 coincidence, which is real and which we would not have looked for without their piece.
Left out
The workbook. It was obtainable, in native format, by asking for the file rather than the printout.
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Signal & LedgerRota Governance: What One Ministry's Spreadsheet Tells Subscription Managers
A procurement lesson about sorting keys, with a sidebar on macro-enabled workbooks after a security hardening.
Had that we did not
The mechanism, laid out in a diagram cleaner than ours.
Left out
That three newsrooms have spent six years believing they were being punished, and that nobody in the department told them otherwise.
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They Buriedthis newspaperThree Papers Thought They Were Blacklisted. The Rota Sorts By Owner, Not Masthead.
Asked for the file instead of the sheets, rebuilt all 312 draws from it, and checked every position against the register on the day.
Had that we did not
The sorting key, the missing macro, the two register events, the bouncing addresses and the four written warnings.
Left out
Our headline hands the department the sentence it has wanted for six years, and puts the four ignored warnings in paragraph twenty-six. An explanation is not an excuse, and we let the explanation be the story. — V. Ashcombe-Doyle, standards editor
Right of Reply
They Buried contacted Kit Marchetti-Lowe, editor of The Larkhill Sentinel on 4 August 2026 with the full draft, the workbook, the four warning letters and the register filings, and three weeks in which to answer. Replied by email on 19 August 2026, asking that it run in full and unedited. It does.
I told your reporter in March that there was a list. There is not a list. I was wrong about that, and I would rather be the one who says so than have it said about me for the next ten years, so let it stand at the top of this where people will read it.
Now let me tell you what you have got wrong, which is the whole meaning of the thing.
You have found the mechanism and you have mistaken it for an innocence. Those are different objects. A sorting key is not a motive, agreed. But a department that is told four times in writing that its sorting key excludes the same three titles, and does nothing on any of the four occasions, has made a decision. It made it by not deciding, which is the way departments prefer to make the decisions they would not care to sign. The absence of a name on a piece of paper is not the absence of a choice. It is the absence of a signature.
And look at what the machine does when it is asked nicely. A holding company changes its name in April 2019 and the rota reflects it in the next draw. Nine days. My own request to be listed under our masthead rather than under a company nobody has heard of has been outstanding since February 2020. It has been acknowledged four times. Same spreadsheet, same secretary, same column. One change went through in nine days and one has not gone through in six years, and the difference between them is not the alphabet.
I want to be careful about Bridget Ansah-Whitlock, because your piece is fair to her and I want to be fairer. She has done nothing wrong. She is two days a week and she has flagged this in writing more often than anybody above her has replied to it, and she handed you the correspondence without being asked, which most people in her position would not have done. If the department wants to be angry with somebody about this story it should be angry with the people who wrote her those acknowledgements.
What has it cost us? I will be exact, because you like exactness. Six years, nought briefings. Two reporters who left because a defence correspondent who cannot get into the room is not a defence correspondent, and both of them told me so on the way out. A running joke among people we compete with. And a slow thing that is worse than the jokes: you begin, without deciding to, to pitch the stories that do not need the room. That is what exclusion actually does. It does not stop you writing. It quietly changes what you write about.
You will publish under a headline that says we only thought we were blacklisted, and by Thursday a press officer will be sending that headline to anybody who asks about us. I do not blame you for it. It is what your piece found. But I would ask your readers to hold two facts at once, because your headline can only hold one: nobody built this to keep us out, and everybody who could have fixed it has been told, and it is six years, and we are still not in the room.
Published unedited under our right-of-reply guarantee.
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