In October 2006 the Church was set to open its spanking new £25 million centre in the City of London. Our Great British Weather, sadly, rained on their parade. Drizzle, drizzle, relentless drizzle. I came along to do a spot of filming from the street. As soon as we started, an official of the Church, Janet Laveau, asked us to stop filming. I told her we worked for BBC Panorama and the law allowed us to film in a London street. She said that they had blocked the street, it was a private function and she had a problem with Panorama. Janet was referring to the BBC Panorama documentary, ‘The Road to Total Freedom? filmed in 1987, 23 years before I joined the BBC. I repeated that that the BBC is allowed to film in London streets. We could not film inside the Church (or Org, in SciSpeak) but we could film on the street. I pointed out to her that had I been a car, she would have had a point because cars were not allowed on the road today. But I was not a car.
We filmed a top City of London copper, Chief Superintendant Kevin Hurley, splendidly reassuring in his uniform, walk up to the podium. The police chief praised the Church as a 'force for good’ in London, 'raising the spiritual wealth of society’.
It was time for the pope of Scientology to wow the faithful. David Miscavige bounded onto the stage to the rapture of the crowd, not perhaps as big as the organizers had planned. The Church of Scientology claims to have more than 10 million devotees worldwide, with 123,000 in the UK but the crowd did not look much bigger than a thousand people, if that. Quite a few seemed to be European, not British, as if they had been shipped in to bulk the numbers. But they all loved Miscavige. In the flesh, he has the manner of a high-end estate agent, smooth, polished, markedly short. The drizzle never stopped. The umbrellas twirled prettily.
'Thank you very much,’ said Miscavige. ‘It’s a pleasure to join you on a day that genuinely qualifies as momentous...’
(Church of Fear, p. 17-18)