Susie Boniface (born in Tonbridge,susie boniface partner Retrieved 16/4/21. Kent) is an English journalist and author who has written for several newspapers and uses the pseudonym Fleet Street Fox in her Daily Mirror column and on Twitter and Bluesky. She used the name Lillys Miles while writing an anonymous blog, but revealed her identity when her book Diaries of a Fleet Street Fox was published in 2013.
Today Susie Boniface is recognised for her investigative journalism covering the case of the British Nuclear Test Veterans and their fight for recognition and justice. She has uncovered evidence of serious discrepancies in UK government statements in Parliament and repeated court cases connected to nuclear weapons testing during the Cold War.
This evidence included the discovery of the Nuked Blood Scandal in 2022, in which Boniface established that there was a widespread programme of blood, urine, thyroid and x-ray testing on British Cold War Nuclear Testing troops which had been consistently denied by government authorities. It was later confirmed by an internal UK Ministry of Defence review ordered by ministers.
In 2024 she was Special Adviser to a landmark BBC documentary about the scandal, titled: Britain’s Nuclear Bomb Scandal: Our Story
From 2025 – 2026 she acted as an advisor to the University of Liverpool for their Nuclear Justice Project
Early life Susie Boniface was born in 1976 or 1977. She became interested in journalism in 1989 after the fall of the Berlin Wall and then reading Bluff Your Way in Journalism (1988) by Nigel Foster.
Career Aged 18, Boniface became a reporter at the Kent and Sussex Courier. She later worked at the Plymouth Herald as defence reporter. She then joined the Sunday Mirror, where she worked for ten years, until she volunteered for redundancy in March 2012. As of 2013, she was a freelance reporter at BBC, Bella, the Daily Express the Daily Mail, The Mail on Sunday, the Daily Star Sunday, The Guardian, The People, The Sun, Reveal and the Press Association.
Boniface joined the journalism department as a visiting lecturer at City, University of London in 2016.
She has written the Bluffer's Guide To Social Media (2015), the Bluffer's Guide to Journalism (2019) and Exposed: The Secret History of Britain's Nuclear Experiments (2024).
Fleet Street Fox Boniface began her first anonymous blog, now removed, in April 2009 and started tweeting as fleetstreetfox in October 2009. She started a second news-based blog as Fleet Street Fox in 2011. She revealed her name in The Times in 2013 at the same time as her book was published by Constable & Robinson, though her identity was not a closely kept secret before then; she had been named on Twitter at least once in May 2012 after an argument with Jemima Khan.
Julie Burchill praised her blogging in the British Journalism Review, but said of the book, "I hated it." Broadcaster Jeremy Vine described it as "the first book I've read that starts at 90mph and speeds up".
Nuclear Testing investigations
Susie Boniface is a expert on the history of the British Nuclear Tests and the British Nuclear Veterans. She has spent more than 20 years researching this unique aspect of British Cold War history and interviewing the veterans and their families.
In interviews she has referred to it as her ‘white whale’ story which she hooked by chance 2006 when an editor of the Daily Mirror asked her to follow up on a story about reputational damage to one of the lead researchers of a government study into the death rates of nuclear veterans.
She wrote in her book Exposed: The Secret History of Britain's Nuclear Experiments
'…News broke that Sir Richard Doll, a medical expert renowned for making the link between smoking and cancer, had been taking money from the chemical industry at the same time, as a consultant. He had also worked on the first NRPB report, and it was a chance to run out the old campaign again. Sunday Mirror news reporter Susie Boniface was tasked with finding out what the BNTVA thought, wrote it up for page 6, and thought no more about it.’ (Page 148)
She added:
'A few days later the phone rang and on the line was Craig Prescott, who wanted to tell ‘the test vets’ newspaper’ how his dad Roy had won a war pension from the Americans, but been denied one by his own government. The MoD spokesman was quoted saying war pensions were available. Boniface was a ‘taxi rank reporter’, there to pick up whatever came in, whether it was a celebrity interview, crime story, or hopping on a plane to a distant humanitarian disaster.
She was quick to file copy but thorough, with a knee-jerk instinct for insubordination which annoyed every news editor who had to deal with her. She was previously a local defence reporter in the naval city of Plymouth, where nuclear submarines regularly berthed, and radiation had been a hot topic.
Her father was once a civilian contractor on Renown-class submarines in the 1960s, and she could grasp the basic physics.
She also knew the way the MoD was handling this story was different to others, with flat, unfriendly denials that took days to be approved for release, and made no sense. Despite joining the newspaper four years earlier, she had given little heed to the occasional campaign updates buried at the back of the paper.
A brief marriage had ended badly in 2005, and her attention was given to having a good time, rather than work.
That fateful phone call from Prescott’s son came at the right time to the right person: someone looking for a cause, who knew how both radiation and the MoD worked, and had a naturally-contrary nose for news. Prescott’s story was followed by a steady stream of ‘ring-ins’ from veterans and families, who thought a fresh byline was a boost for the campaign' (Page 148)
Since then, Susie Boniface has gone further than most investigative journalists by actively campaigning for the subjects of her reporting.
She explained this unusual step by saying:
‘After going freelance, Boniface had reinvented herself as a columnist and broadcaster, with a high profile on social media. It brought her the ears of people who would never usually pay much attention to mere news reporters, and she decided to exploit it. She persuaded Labour’s deputy leader Tom Watson to back the campaign, who vowed: ‘Their service was unusual and of crucial importance to Britain’s place in the world. I will do whatever I can in Parliament to ensure they get the medal they so justly deserve.’ (Page 161)
Nuked Blood Investigation
In 2018 Boniface partnered with, first, the British Nuclear Test Veterans Association and later Labrats, a charitably incorporated company, to demand a Nuclear Test Medal for service at the weapons tests LINK.
Despite a series of refusals, Boniface used Freedom of Information requests and coordinated Parliamentary pressure to engineer a meeting between veterans and then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson in June 2022.
It was the first meeting in history between a sitting Prime Minister and survivors of the nuclear weapons programme. In this meeting she produced the first evidence of blood testing of troops, and that the information had been subsequently removed from men’s personnel files. She reported later that Johnson had agreed that, if true, it was a criminal offence.
Boniface first reported in the Mirror in November 2022 that some troops involved in nuclear weapons testing had their blood tested before, during and after exposure.
She specifically quoted the case of Squadron Leader Terry Gledhill, later a Group Captain, who led crews from RAF 76 Squadron into the mushroom clouds of Operation Grapple at Christmas Island (now Kiritimati) in 1958.
The article reported a secret memo between scientists at the Atomic Weapons Establishment discussing the "gross irregularity” in Sqn Ldr Gledhill's blood tests LINK, citing the results and an Air Ministry Order.
Sqn Ldr Gledhill's family had been refused access to his medical records LINK. Boniface reported this order would have covered dozens of other air crew and ground crews at the weapons tests, and that wider groups of veterans from other detachments had subsequently found their medical records were missing details of the blood and urine sampling they could recall.
Subsequent reporting uncovered similar orders covering all three branches of the armed forces, plus civilians and indigenous people, at all of the UK’s 45 major weapons tests and almost 600 ‘minor trials’ radiation experiments.
The ‘Gledhill Memo’ was found to be among thousands of records on a database held behind national security at the Atomic Weapons Establishment. Boniface obtained a list of 150 records on it about blood testing LINK, and Veterans Minister Andrew Murrison ordered these records declassified following a Parliamentary debate in November 2023. LINK
They were published the following March and Boniface's reporting revealed they contained evidence of extensive blood testing of British and Commonwealth personnel and civilians. Some of the files referenced blood tests of “natives” and others Australian troops LINK. After a change in government, subsequently the entire database - codenamed ‘Merlin’ - was declassified in September 2025 LINK.
They are now available in the National Archives under the classification ES 38. The documents were the subject of the Nuclear Justice Project at the University of Liverpool and Centre for People’s Justice on which Boniface was a consultant, and the Project Merlin podcast of which she was a host.
The 150 blood files were featured in a 2024 BBC documentary which led to widespread media coverage. On the BBC R4 Today programme ahead of the programme’s airing, Boniface said:
‘So far we’ve got the Foreign Office, the Ministry of Defence, the Atomic Weapons Establishment and the Government Legal Department all with questions to answer about potential crimes of misconduct in public office, because officials have given sworn, false testimony to multiple courts over decades that these blood tests never took place and we now have evidence - 4,000 pages of evidence - that they did.’
Shortly afterwards her book Exposed was published, revealing for the first time how previous legal cases had been interfered with by officials, after a legal settlement was agreed by ministers but never offered to the veterans.
Also in 2024, she successfully campaigned for an extension to the Nuclear Test Medal for crews who had been ordered to fly through the explosions of foreign nuclear weapons, highlighting the stories of Operation Bagpipes and 543 and 27 Squadrons LINK. Crews who decontaminated the planes at home in the UK, while being medically monitored like others, are still not included in the medal criteria.
During Boniface’s reporting of the scandal she has highlighted how MoD officials altered official scientific studies into deaths of veterans LINK, established some veterans were monitored up to a decade after they returned home, and identified that some data on medical monitoring of nuclear veterans could have been shared with foreign governments as part of the Tripartite Technological Cooperation Programme, now known as the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing scheme.
Boniface reported in 2025 how Andy Burnham, then mayor of Greater Manchester and later Prime Minister, had supported nuclear veterans and families in reporting allegations of misconduct in public office to the Metropolitan Police . These allegations were later passed to Thames Valley Police which in 2025 began a major crime review. LINK