Former civil servant who accidentally left top-secret files on train reflects on ‘biggest mistake’ of his life

Richard Jackson has spent years regretting a simple yet catastrophic mistake he made on a train.

The former British civil servant was commuting to work in London in 2008, clutching a file containing top-secret intelligence documents he had accidentally taken home.

Jackson stepped off the train. Icy dread dawned when he realised the bright red cardboard file hadn’t made it out of the carriage with him.

That split-second lapse in judgement changed his life.

“It just felt for a moment like the world had stopped,” Jackson told BBC Radio 4’s ‘Life Changing’ podcast, 18 years on.

“I was frantic. Everything, every movement felt very jerky... I felt sick.”

Jackson tried hopelessly to track the missing documents down, visiting every station along the line to ask if a folder had been handed in.

But somebody had already found the classified files and passed them on to the BBC.

The story aired the following evening on the broadcaster’s 6pm bulletin.

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He was eventually demoted three levels and was charged with breaching the Official Secrets Act. He avoided jail and was fined £2500 ($4760).

The court heard Jackson had been under intense stress at work at the time of the incident.

The ordeal made him consider ending his own life.

“I’d spent the morning trying to find a painless way to die,” Jackson reflected.

Jackson’s wife of 26 years, Maddie Birch-Jackson, was his rock.

She praised her husband in a post on LinkedIn for bravely speaking publicly about the “mistake that nearly cost him his life”.

“His career was his whole identity, and when he lost it in front of the world, he believed he had nothing left to live for,” Birch-Jackson wrote.

“He couldn’t have been more wrong.

“Today, the man he has become is strong enough to share his story publicly, in the hope that it reaches someone who feels their world has fallen apart and that there is nothing left for them.”

After several years spent in several lower-tier government roles, Jackson pivoted to life coaching.

He chose to speak publicly on this painful time on the BBC podcast – owned by the same network that broke the story in 2008 – to remind listeners you can “recover from the biggest mistake of your life”.

“I could tell my story... and there’d be a point to it. There’d be a reason for what I did,” he said.

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"You can be in a really bad place, and you can still stand up, and you can get through it and there are ways to help yourself do that and get help."

Jackson was once “deeply ashamed” of this chapter in his life, adding that it took a long time to recover from this unusual brand of trauma.

He stressed that one mistake does not define your personhood.

“Don’t confuse your worst moment with the whole story of your life,” he said,

“You are still the person who existed before it, and there can still be a person after it whom you haven’t met.”

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