Tom Bower’s Boris Johnson: The Gambler – Fabricating Stuart Collier’s “Exposé” of Guppy’s Crime

A hack journalist on smear jobs gets elevated to insurance-fraud sleuth – the timing and the facts don’t add up

Tom Bower, author of Boris Johnson: The Gambler. His unsourced assertions about Stuart Collier are the focus of this Collier Exposed investigation.

In the latest instalment of our insights series, the Collier Exposed Investigative Project, we turn our attention to a widely praised 2020 biography: Boris Johnson: The Gambler by Tom Bower. Tom Bower, whose wife Veronica Wadley was editor of the Evening Standard and who himself has written for the same paper, is no stranger to the tabloid world that first covered Guppygate — a world that also included Marcus Scriven, who broke key details of the Peter Risdon recording of the Guppygate telephone call between Boris Johnson and Darius Guppy about beating up Stuart Collier for his smear hack journalism (see our earlier entry here). While the book contains much that is already in the public domain and has been expanded on and contextualised within this Collier Exposed investigative project about Boris Johnson’s early friendship with Darius Guppy, two specific passages about Stuart Collier’s supposed role in the so-called Guppygate insurance-fraud scandal are demonstrably inaccurate and misleading and is the lazy or sinister deliberate cover story circulated by the Murdoch media group or those too lazy to understand the nuances that lead to truth as is laid bare in our insight entry here. This clearly adopts the Murdoch House cover story for the News of the World and their hack reporter, our investigative target, Stuart Collier.

Here are the exact claims, quoted verbatim from the book:

“Guppy heard that Stuart Collier, a journalist on the News of the World, was investigating that the ‘theft’ had been staged by Guppy and a friend. After pocketing the profits from his fraud, [Stuart] Collier had been told, Guppy was offering the ‘stolen’ gems to Hatton Garden dealers.”

And later:

“Guppy had been convicted at Snaresbrook Crown Court of fraud after [Stuart] Collier had exposed Guppy’s crime in the News of the World.”

(It is worth noting that the two pertinent extracts of the book are publicly referenced and archived here but also accessible here.)

These two sentences form an attempted lasting basis for the book’s portrayal of Stuart Collier as the dogged investigative journalist whose reporting supposedly triggered Guppy’s panic and led directly to his 1993 conviction.

There is no evidence for either assertion.

The Missing Exposé

Tom Bower’s false assertion: Stuart Collier supposedly ‘exposed Guppy’s crime’ in the News of the World — no such article has ever existed

No News of the World article by Stuart Collier exposing Guppy’s crime has ever been located. Despite extensive archive searches, LexisNexis reviews, and cross-referencing with contemporaneous court reports, no bylined piece (or even an unattributed story) by Stuart Collier appeared in the News of the World that broke or materially advanced the fraud case. Guppy and Benedict Marsh were convicted much later on 14 February 1993 at Snaresbrook Crown Court on the strength of evidence provided by their co-conspirator Peter Risdon (more on this here), who had already gone to the authorities in 1991. The trial itself generated the headlines; Stuart Collier’s supposed “exposé” did not.

The Unsourced Hatton Garden Claim

Tom Bower’s unsourced claim: Stuart Collier was allegedly ‘told’ that Darius Guppy was offering the ‘stolen’ gems to Hatton Garden dealers

The Hatton Garden “tip-off” claim is unsourced and appears nowhere else in the public record. The book’s passive construction (“Stuart Collier had been told…”) offers no footnote, no named source, and no contemporaneous document. It is presented as established fact, yet it has no verifiable foundation. As we detailed in our earlier deep-dive, the timing and nature of Stuart Collier’s actual journalistic work had nothing to do with insurance-fraud forensics — he was purely a hack journalist working under Clive Goodman and Alex Marunchak among others.

This is not a minor slip. The book’s framing elevates Stuart Collier from a tabloid reporter known for hack-and-smear stories (as exhaustively documented and will be deeper still in the next phase of our investigative project here across Collier Exposed) into a serious fraud investigator whose work supposedly brought a major crime to light. That narrative is simply false. As we established in “The Murdoch House Cover Story” (linked here), Stuart Collier’s involvement was peripheral at best, and the decisive information that sank Guppy came from inside the conspiracy itself.

Why does this matter?

Because The Gambler is still cited as a serious work on Johnson. Repeating the myth that “Stuart Collier exposed Guppy’s crime” sanitises the Guppygate timeline in a way that lets off the Murdoch paper and, opportunely, its gutter reporter Stuart Collier and airbrushes out Peter Risdon’s central role while conveniently burnishing the image of a journalist whose output was, in reality, far removed from insurance-fraud reporting. It is the very definition of the “hack journalist” framing we have been documenting since the project launched.

Open Letter to Tom Bower

We have written to the author directly. The full open letter appears below as an image for the historical record. We have left a private preview link in the letter and remain happy to revise this post (or any future material) should Mr Bower provide verifiable evidence that can be independently checked. The credibility of his book rests on these claims being accountable.

The formal open letter sent to Tom Bower challenging his unsourced claims about Stuart Collier in Boris Johnson: The Gambler.

We will update readers if a substantive reply is received. In the meantime, the public record stands: the two key claims in The Gambler about Stuart Collier do not withstand scrutiny. Another chapter in the Collier Exposed series is now closed – with the facts, not the myths, on the page.

This post is part of the ongoing Collier Exposed Investigative Project. All prior entries, including the full Guppygate timeline and the Murdoch House series, remain available via our insights series of journal entries here along with our mainline exposures here.