His truth-seeking changed the nation. Rotherham Council launched its inquiry into its rape gangs because ‘The Times won’t leave us alone’. He compelled our complacent rulers to account for their grotesque failures. He did something else, too – he reminded us of the searing virtues of a free press. In intruding on the ‘conspiracy of silence’, he asserted the public’s liberty to know over the establishment’s low instinct for censorship and self-preservation. ‘The free press is the ubiquitous vigilant eye of a people’s soul’, said Marx. ‘It is the spiritual mirror in which a people can see itself.’ Norfolk embodied that spirit of free and vigorous national self-reflection. In the vile squalor of the establishment’s cynical silence, girls were raped. In the light of Norfolk’s truth-telling, they were vindicated. Now we know: liberty saves lives. He deserves every accolade for reminding us of that.