The trainee question: 'What would you do?'

Re Andrew Tarnowski's wonderfully entertaining account of his time in Cuba [How I became Castro’s sacrificial lamb], I now, at last, understand why I was asked at my interview for a place on the Reuters graduate traineeship programme in 1969: “Suppose you were the Reuters correspondent in Havana, and you learned exclusively that the Cuban sugar harvest had failed, but you had also been warned that if you published the information, the Reuters office in Havana would be shut down and you would be arrested and expelled from the country. What would you do?” 

I replied that I would seek advice from head office in London, which seems to have been the right answer because I was one of only six university graduates who were offered a place as a graduate trainee. It was not the job I had set my heart on, but it was the only one I was offered.

More of my time with Reuters in my memoir “Is Anything Happening?”, to be published by Biteback on 19 January. ■