THERE can have been few stranger journeys in life than that taken by Clive Ponting, the top civil servant who lost his career and risked a long jail sentence to tell the world the truth about the sinking of the General Belgrano during the Falklands War.

He went on to become a respected history professor and author and on moving to Scotland in his retirement he became committed to the cause of Scottish independence.

His death last week at the age of 74 provoked many recollections of his extraordinarily brave action in 1984 when he leaked confidential documents about the sinking of the Belgrano. He was at that time a senior civil servant at the Ministry of Defence and knew the Thatcher Government’s position that the

Argentine cruiser – formerly the USS Phoenix and a survivor of Pearl Harbour– was heading for the Falklands when it was sunk was frankly a lie.

Labour MP Tam Dalyell had tried for many months to get at the truth, which was that the Belgrano was actually heading away from the islands when the order was given to sink the ship with the loss of over 300 sailors, but the MoD and the Government stuck to their story.

Ponting posted the so-called “Crown Jewels” documents to Dalyell who in turn passed them to the chairman of then Foreign Affairs select committee inquiring into the sinking. The Tory chairman, Sir Anthony Kershaw, immediately gave them to Defence Minister Michael Heseltine and Ponting was quickly identfied as the leaker.

He would have resigned quietly but the Tory Government wanted Ponting’s head and he was charged under the Official Secrets Act. His trial in 1985 rested on his defence that he had acted in the interests of the state, but the biased judge Anthony McCowan said the “interests of the state” were whatever the Government said they were.

The jury were not going to be bullied and sensationally found Ponting not guilty. The Thatcher Government responded by tightening up the Official Secrets Act to remove any chance of a “public interest” defence.

Thatcher actually liked and respected Ponting having given him an OBE for his clever plans to cut wasteful expenditure. He had been seen very much as a Whitehall mandarin heading for the top but having resigned from the civil service he went back to his first love, history, and eventually became a noted historian and author of several books.

He retired from his post at the University of Wales in Swansea in 2004, and ended up in Kelso in 2016 with his fourth wife Diane Johnson.

Ponting’s commitment to the cause of Scottish independence came from his observation of the way that Westminster and Whitehall under the Tories were doing everything in their power to frustrate devolution.

In several conversations with him, he told me of his fear that the Tories would use Brexit to undermine devolution. I asked him if he would go public and he did so quite memorably at a packed hall in the Borders.

He said: “There is no doubt that the Conservatives see Brexit as the way to completely neuter devolution, and they intend to do it – they are ruthless enough to do it. And if it is no deal, I think it’s inevitable that the Government will take emergency powers to deal with the problems.

“And I know what some of the emergency powers are because I drafted them for the run-up to nuclear war and they are not likely to be that much different, and it’s not impossible that the emergency powers will actually dissolve the Scottish Parliament.”

We should heed the warnings of this brave man.