Accused colonel ‘ has risked his life in the line of duty’

A retired colonel accused of fleecing the taxpayer to fund his children’s private education was a ‘father figure’ to colleagues while deputy director of the Government’s Covid-19 taskforce, a court heard. Marcus Reedman, 52, denies defrauding the Ministry of Defence (MoD) out of tens of thousands of pounds to pay his children’s £75,000-a-year private boarding school fees. Reedman had a desk job at the MoD building in Whitehall at the time of the fraud allegation between October 2016 and August…