Ceri worked for many years at the BBC where he was the longest-serving editor of the Today programme and, later, editor of Panorama.
Ceri Thomas
Editor and partner
“Tortoise gives me the space to tell stories, and stories change the world.”
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Thursday 28 October 2021
18:30-19:30 BST
High taxes, high wages, high prices: what does the Budget mean?
A ThinkIn to figure out what the Budget means for households, businesses and the wider economy.
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Thursday 23 September 2021
18:30-19:30 BST
New Labour: Did It work?
Did New Labour succeed in its mission to change Britain? What, in the end, did it get right?
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Tuesday 19 October 2021
18:30-19:30 BST
The Catholic Church and abuse: what next?
“If it was any other organisation, they’d have shut it down.” This was the response at a Tortoise news meeting to the revelation that French Catholic Clergy abused over 200,000 children since 1950. At this Open News meeting we asked, what happens next?
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Thursday 9 September 2021
18:30-19:30 BST
How has Brexit changed politics, business and the shape of the UK? with Mark Drakeford, First Minister of Wales
The First Minister of Wales in conversation with Tortoise Editor Ceri Thomas.
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Tuesday 27 April 2021
13:00-14:00 BST
Open News
Add your voice to the Tortoise editors’ weekly news conference. Bring story ideas and perspectives. Have your say.
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Tuesday 26 January 2021
08:00-09:00 GMT
Are big investment platforms making fools of small investors?
Are small investors losing too much of their savings to big platforms?
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Wednesday 13 January 2021
18:30-19:30 GMT
Finding Covid’s lost children: how do we bring them back?
We ask experts what happened to the lost of children of Covid, and what we can do about it.
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Tuesday 27 October 2020
07:55-09:00 GMT
Covid-19 winners and losers: the food business
What next for the food business in the UK?
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Monday 23 November 2020
18:25-19:30 GMT
Is covid cover for corruption?
Is corruption rife in the government? Are our leaders allowing ‘chumocracy’ to flourish and using the pandemic as cover?
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Monday 28 September 2020
18:25-19:30 BST
Can Boris survive?
Boris Johnson’s 80 seat majority should have given him a bulletproof five-year term in office but Covid-19 had other ideas.
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Wednesday 16 September 2020
18:20-19:20 BST
Is everything we know about food wrong? With Professor Tim Spector
One of the world’s leading scientists reveals why so much of the current advice on food and nutrition is dangerously inaccurate.
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Friday 18 March 2022
Nazanin’s homecoming could be part of something bigger
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Thursday 11 November 2021
10 minute read
Sensemaker: Trapped in Whitehall
What just happened
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Thursday 30 September 2021
10 minute read
Sensemaker: Pfizer’s pandemic
What just happened
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Thursday 29 April 2021
10 minute readRethinking Harvey Proctor
What just happened
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Monday 29 March 2021
10 minute readSensemaker: Access to finance
What just happened
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Monday 2 November 2020
Trans Rights
JK Rowling and the Unfinished Business
The Tortoise Slow Newscast pieces together the story of the Harry Potter author’s very political, very personal interventions on gender and identity
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Saturday 27 July 2019
How do we begin to fix the mental health crisis?
This was the question we investigated at a pair of recent ThinkIns. Here are the key points of the discussion, as well our thoughts on where we’ll head next
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Friday 1 September 2023
Can the US and China be the best of frenemies?
James Harding and the team are joined by the FT’s US Financial editor Brooke Masters to discuss Gina Raimondo’s trip to China, the ULEZ expansion and massive pandemic relief fraud.
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Monday 24 July 2023
Odesa cathedral, green policies reconsidered and Cookham Wood
In this episode Liz Moseley is in the editor’s chair. The team discusses the Russian attack that damaged Odesa cathedral, the fallout from last week’s by-elections and shocking failures at a young offender institution.
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Monday 10 July 2023
BBC presenter suspended, NHS & big pharma, and cluster bombs
Before founding Tortoise James Harding was head of BBC News. In this episode he’s joined by journalists Liz Moseley, Will Brown and Ceri Thomas, a former editor of Radio 4’s Today programme, to discuss the scandal surrounding a BBC presenter and what it means for the corporation. They also cover the US government’s decision to send cluster bombs to Ukraine, and the links between the NHS and big pharma.
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Thursday 6 July 2023
The whole truth
In the final episode, Ceri travels to meet Rob in a peaceful garden in rural Wiltshire. What unfolds is a heated exchange about what Rob’s story really is and what adds up to the whole truth.
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Tuesday 4 July 2023
The verge
When Global Witness out Rob in 2015, things quickly fall apart. He loses everything that matters to him but to this day he believes that if his voice had been heard, it would have all worked out differently.
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Tuesday 4 July 2023
Chicken feed
Rob is adamant that in all the years he was undercover, he never sent information back to his spymasters that harmed the campaigners. But when you’re the only one in control of the decisions, can you always get it right?
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Monday 3 July 2023
France riots, Ukraine’s counteroffensive, and affirmative action
The team discusses the violence that has erupted in France, Ukraine’s faltering counteroffensive and the US Supreme Court’s decision to overturn race-based college admissions.
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Tuesday 27 June 2023
Poison into medicine
Rob Moore says he can justify going undercover among anti-asbestos campaigners because he was following a Buddhist principle, turning poison into medicine. To this day he believes that if the people he infiltrated would really listen to his story they’d understand him differently. But does his story really stand up to scrutiny?
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Tuesday 27 June 2023
Project spring
It’s 2012 and Rob Moore goes ‘into the dirt’, undercover, to infiltrate a group of campaigners fighting for a ban on deadly asbestos. None of them knew they had a private spy in the camp. But it’s hard to stay hidden forever.
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Tuesday 27 June 2023
The truth
Three years ago a former private spy came to our newsroom at Tortoise. He told an incredible story about infiltrating a campaign group, deceiving people for years but all the while being a ‘double agent’, before his world fell apart. And it all played out in the opaque world of corporate intelligence. Since then, journalist Ceri Thomas has been asking who Rob Moore really is and what his motivations were.
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Monday 26 June 2023
Into The Dirt
Private spy. Double agent. Whistleblower. Just who was Rob Moore?
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Tuesday 27 December 2022
The women who could change Iran
This year the stories of two Iranian women – Mahsa Amini and Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe – can help us understand the challenges facing Iran’s regime
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Monday 10 October 2022
Britannia unhinged
What happened in the 17 days between Kwasi Kwarteng becoming chancellor, sacking the Treasury’s top civil servant and his fiscal event which crashed the British economy?
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Thursday 22 September 2022
A crime in the making: Russia’s atrocities
No war crime is ever inevitable, but it’s possible to make one likely. Russia did exactly that before 53 prisoners of war burned to death at Olenivka
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Friday 18 March 2022
A citizen’s rights
Richard Ratcliffe’s extraordinary campaign – culminating this week with the release of his wife Nazanin – has changed the way we relate to power in Britain
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Friday 31 December 2021
The dissident journalist
In May, Belarus forced a plane to land because it had an exiled journalist on board. It created an international diplomatic crisis.
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Monday 20 December 2021
2021: Our year in stories
As 2021 draws to a close, Basia Cummings looks back over a year of Slow Newscasts with her colleagues James Harding, the co-founder of Tortoise, and Ceri Thomas. What’s changed in the way we think about podcasts at Tortoise? And are there any you’ve missed which you might want to catch up on over the Christmas break?
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Tuesday 9 November 2021
Nazanin: Trapped in Whitehall
Since 2016, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe has been held hostage in Iran. Her supporters recognise that the Iranian government must be held responsible for her ordeal, but missteps and machinations in London have ensured that it hasn’t been brought to a swift end
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Monday 27 September 2021
Pfizer’s war
It’s been said often enough: the pandemic has been like a war. Economically, on civil liberties and the deaths it has caused, it’s hard to find a better comparison. And just like a war it places responsibilities on companies that make vital supplies which are different from peacetime – to profit, but not to profiteer
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Monday 12 July 2021
Genesis: The mystery of where Covid began
The truth of an origin story has never mattered more: did Covid cross to humans from an animal, or did it escape from a laboratory? The arguments between science, politics and, now, the intelligence services have only grown fiercer. And in the fog of war, the World Health Organisation lost its way
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Thursday 29 April 2021
Mixing and merging
It seems important for all of us to understand the meaning of what’s happened to Harvey Proctor. What was it which liberated the media and the police to behave as they did; to create or fuel the two scandals which wrecked his life?
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Wednesday 28 April 2021
The high wire
For the second time in his life, Harvey Proctor was being battered by a storm of dreadful allegations. His lawyers advised a safety-first approach. He had other ideas
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Tuesday 27 April 2021
Incredible
To suffer one shattering public scandal in a lifetime is hard enough. Harvey Proctor has endured two. In the second episode of Pariah, one of the highest profile police investigations of the past decade – Operation Midland – comes knocking on his door
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Monday 26 April 2021
Intolerance
Harvey Proctor’s political star burned brightly in the 1980s. He was the anti-immigrant heir-apparent to Enoch Powell, until a tabloid sting exposed him as a gay man who paid for sex
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Monday 2 November 2020
JK Rowling and the Unfinished Business
Why did a famous author wade into the debate over trans rights?
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Tuesday 1 September 2020
Beat police
The law against music in London