Margaret Gilmore is an award winning writer and broadcaster, and a Senior Research Fellow with the leading security think tank RUSI (Royal United Services Institute). She’s just written a book with Andy Hayman, the former police chief who was in charge of UK Counter-terrorism, which is now back on sale. “The Terrorist Hunters” is the first definitive account of the terrorist threat of the past five years. It’s exciting, haunting, controversial and almost impossible to put down once you start reading it.

Andy and Margaret submitted the book for vetting and agreed to more than a hundred changes requested by MI5 and the Crown Prosecution Service. The book was serialized in “The Times” newspaper and had sold nearly 800 copies in less than a week when to the astonishment of the authors the CPS via the Attorney General Baroness Scotland, called out a High Court Judge late one night and argued it should be banned. Under the circumstances Andy and Margaret believe the judge had little choice but to stall sales temporarily to ensure the jury in a court case could not interpret a small passage, rightly or not, as a reference to that case. However the ban is now lifted and the book back on sale with no change to the disputed text. The Judge at a full hearing said: “The book aims to inform the public on matters of the greatest public interest, and it does so in a serious way”.

Margaret Gilmore is perhaps best known as an authoritive face on our television screens. For 19 years she worked for the BBC, most recently as Senior Home Affairs Correspondent, before that as Environment Correspondent and on “Newsnight” and “Panorama”. She continues to appear as a security analyst specializing in homeland security, and to write and make films and chair conferences. She’s also on the Board of the Food Standards Agency.