US election reporter's drunken 'resignation' lands on YouTube

Many of us have done it: had one too many, said something we shouldn't have, woken up the next morning regretting it, and still had to go to work.

Few, though, can claim to have blundered quite so spectacularly as Adam Smith, a reporter for the Birmingham Mail, who woke up the morning after Barack Obama's historic election victory to be told by friends to check YouTube, where he could find a video of himself issuing a drunken, expletive-ridden resignation to his editor.

The video, which showed Mr Smith slumped against a set of railings with his laptop, confusedly trying to email a story back to his office, was viewed 20,000 times in 48 hours after it was posted on YouTube by a Dutch tourist.

Watch the video

Speaking in a slurred Birmingham accent, Mr Smith said: "As an ill-advised promise, I've decided to say to my paper back home that I'd write about the American election. I wanted to be here because I'm here for history. The trouble is, the readers are going to get my version of history. And I'm just a little bit pissed."

Later in the three-minute clip, the reporter appears to admit to plagiarising his story from the BBC (a statement he has since withdrawn). He added, with a two-finger salute for the benefit of his employers: "My name is Adam Smith... who has just resigned from the Birmingham Mail, the Birmingham Post and the Birmingham Sunday Mercury, to set up my own magazine ... Fuck you."

Mr Smith is understood to have accepted a redundancy package along with 65 of his fellow employees, and is due to leave at the end of next week.

He could now find himself without a payout after his rant forced Trinity Mirror, the parent company of the Birmingham Mail, to deny plagiarism.

In a follow-up video also posted on YouTube, a distinctly more sober Mr Smith tried to explain his actions. "I was off duty, I am on official holiday working at the South Beach Miami Barack Obama campaign where I had just done an 18-hour shift trying to make the world a better place. Please check every BBC News outlet and see if I have cut and pasted anything. I have not, it was a joke and should be taken in the spirit it was said."

Steve Dyson, editor of the Birmingham Mail, commented: "This is an internal matter, we cannot discuss it."