FIEFDOM of the PRESS

In the vast fields of cant and humbug, few notions are cantier and more humbuggy than that mantra of holy writ “the freedom of the press”. It is trotted out at every verse end as a supposedly unanswerable Good Thing. But think about it for a moment: is it even remotely true that the press is free?

“The function of the press in society is to inform,” wrote the great American columnist AJ Liebling in 1947, “but its role is to make money”. And so it is. British newspapers like to characterise themselves as the fourth estate, the next power in the body politic after the peers, the bishops and the Commons. In truth, they constitute no such civic, disinterested thing: more accurately, they are the first snouts in the free market trough.

Like football teams, hotels, theatres, airlines and television companies, newspapers are speculative ventures available only to those with money to burn. They can be cash cows but they can also harmorrhage capital. Consequently, newspaper proprietors (like their coevals in the big, chancy project game) are apt to seek to avoid paying tax. Most owners of British newspapers live abroad for tax purposes. They have a vested interest in the editorial lines of their organs being angled in favour of politicians who may be expected to allow them to continue to benefit from tax loopholes.

Ed and Ralph Miliband

Their own survival as hobbies for non-doms is a powerful incentive for newspapers to back parties that preach low-tax, deregulated, small-government, liberal economies. For them, the left in general and regulation in particular are the sworn enemies. It follows that all notions associated with change in the balance of power and of benefit are anathema to most of the public sheets.

How can they claim to be a free press? Try to place a piece excoriating capitalism in The Daily Telegraph or an article advocating progressive social values in the Daily Express. Well, good luck with that. The greater part of the muster of national newspapers is called, for good reason, “the Tory press”.

The moniker can be misleading, though. Several titles have habitually given David Cameron a roughish ride because they consider him a trimmer and they oppose his positions on coalition, on Europe and on social issues, particularly same-sex marriage. Cameron is not Tory enough for them. Yet the News International papers, at their proprietor’s bidding, shifted away from the Tories when Tony Blair had practised sufficient bowing and scraping to Rupert Murdoch to convince the old rogue that his businesses had nothing to fear from a less principled – particularly on Europe – party leader than the then Tory prime minister, John Major.

Simply put, right wing and compliant political leaders get a kindly press; reformist, liberal or supposedly ‘weak’ leaders get hammered. Harold Wilson, Edward Heath, Jim Callaghan, Michael Foot, Neil Kinnock, John Major, William Hague, Gordon Brown, David Cameron and now Ed Miliband became victims of wave after wave of black propaganda, though given a choice between Cameron and Miliband the papers obviously favour the former. Margaret Thatcher scampered up and down Fleet Street bestowing knighthoods and tax breaks to all and sundry and they loved her for it. Tony Blair, Ian Duncan Smith and Michael Howard all were broadly supported.

But politics doesn’t especially shift copies, especially when (as now) the owners don’t care for any of the leaders. Consequently, all the papers have become more brutish about what they see as their right to cover anything and everything. In a telling television documentary, Michael Jackson and the Boy He Paid Off, made by Blast! Films for the BBC in 2004 (before the extended court case that cleared Jackson of abuse), two American views provided a chilling insight into the behaviour of UK hacks. “I think all of Fleet Street loaded up all their money and put it in a 747 and flew it to the United States to start the buying of information” said journalist Don Ray. And Ray Chandler, the uncle of the eponymous boy, reported that “it was mostly the British tabloids that would invade your privacy. Most of the press was pretty good. They stayed on the public street. But the Brits don’t seem to have much concern for that. So they’re definitely the most aggressive”.

It’s this right to report, however unwelcome to whomever, that the papers claim. “Freedom of the press” Liebling observed drily “is guaranteed only to those who own one”. And the freedoms that the monkeys of those owners claim are the freedoms to lie, to distort, to invade people’s privacy, to blackguard and traduce anyone they fancy to be fair game, preferably public figures who sell more copies but, if not, hitherto obscure people. The countervailing right – to be left alone – is not one that the press feel a need to champion.

Cutting edge journalism from the Mail

Not that I wish a return to the bad old days, when the only readers denied knowledge of Edward VIII’s determination to wed a divorced woman were those in his own country. Such a matter is a legitimate public concern. But people in the public eye ought to be able to lead their lives, even if reprehensibly in a moral sense, without papers buying the tittle-tattle of their intimates. Unbridled chequebook journalism makes privacy impossible for public people.

Whether a footballer committed adultery is of no interest to me and I genuinely wish it were of no interest to anyone else. Editors will throw up their hands in mock innocence and say that this salacious gossip is what the readers want.

Well, the press created the appetite for it in the first place. Now scurrility is an industry, presided over by its laughing-all-the-way-to-the-bank king, Max Clifford. Whenever you see this PR man interviewed on location, you always glimpse a palatial home in the background. He has negotiated another silly-money fee from a tabloid and pocketed his handsome cut. No wonder those who have had sex with the famous are tempted to betray them. How poetic that the worm may have turned and Clifford himself be feeling the bite.

The treachery is much grubbier when perpetrated by a former employee, especially one with whom many moments of personal pain have been shared. If anybody embodies the debased spirit of the age, it is surely the former butler to the royal household, Paul Burrell. His comprehensive duplicity and flagrant lack of taste, judgment or modesty set a new low no doubt to be aped by others who, in another age, would have been dismissed as cads and bounders.

There is an exception to the right of public figures to keep their family and personal considerations private. When politicians parade their spouses and children in their election literature and on the stump, the electorate are entitled to be appraised if this happy image turns out to be a sham. Cæsar’s wife must be above suspicion as Plutarch is so often quoted as having it (“I thought that my wife should not even come under suspicion” Plutarch has the Emperor say in The Life of Julius Cæsar). By making an electoral convenience of an image of a conventional home life, politicians do surrender any right to betray that home life with impunity.


Ralph Miliband served in the Royal Navy during the war and took part in the Normandy landings

Which brings me, sideways-on, to the business of the Daily Mail and Ralph Miliband, the late father of Ed and David. On September 28th, the Mail ran a piece, credited to an in-house hack called Geoffrey Levy, about the politics of Ralph Miliband. The piece was highly selective, calculatedly nasty and designed to affront Ed. It was just the sort of piece that alienates those who believe the paper to be a scurrilous, biased mouthpiece for the archetypal blowhard barfly who knows nothing but has a loud and definite opinion about everything. The Mail doesn’t care about that. It doesn’t seek such people as readers.

The article used terms like ‘determined’, ‘uncompromising’ and ‘cause’ as though they proved that Ralph Miliband was a dangerous fanatic, as though such terms could never attach themselves to the Mail’s character. Even his “quickly learning English” implied something sinister, rather than an example of the self-discipline that the paper would ordinarily expect of immigrants and refugees like Miliband.

The former Labour spin-doctor Damian McBride was quoted, not my own choice for a reliable source. Indeed, McBride was described as a degenerate, a curious way for a paper to treat a man after happily publishing extracts from his book for which Paul Dacre, the editor, paid a six-figure sum.

Trying to link Ralph’s Marxism to Ed, the piece singled out “giving councils draconian new powers to seize into public ownership land held by developers who fail to build on it”. As it happens, this dangerously revolutionary Miliband policy is also proposed by that notoriously unreconstructed Leninist Boris Johnson.

And of course the kind of IVth-form psychology that always has a place in tabloid smears was not forgotten: “One is entitled to wonder whether Ralph Miliband’s Marxism was actually fuelled by a giant-sized social chip on his shoulder as he lived in his adoptive country”. Ah yes, the Mail unerringly gets to the nub of it: envy of the sort of inherited wealth enjoyed by the Rothermeres through their ownership of the Mail produces an inferiority complex in those unfortunate enough to be anything other than stout-hearted, god-fearing Englishmen.

Paul Dacre, editor. His father Peter was eligible for call-up in the war but was excused thanks to his connections with Lord Beaverbrook. He loved this country, though

Much more calculated, nasty and offensive than anything in Levy’s paste-together were the headline (which Ed Miliband reasonably called “lurid”) and the standfirst put above the article: “The man who hated Britain: Red Ed’s pledge to bring back socialism is a homage to his Marxist father. So what did Miliband Snr really believe in? The answer should disturb everyone who loves this country”. Paul Dacre knows what he’s doing. He knows that headlines are what stick in the memory. “The man who hated Britain” and its association with Ed Miliband will resound in the subconscious of many who see it. It of course carries a whiff of xenophobia, a stance that always plays well with the Mail’s readership, but the Jewish name of the author of the piece acts as a beard to cover that possibility.

Ed Miliband was inevitably faced with a dilemma. Rising to the bait risked projecting the story’s impact far beyond the readership of the paper. The matter of press regulation is about to come back into the public consciousness with the privy council due to pronounce on the proprietors’ proposal for continued self-regulation of the press on October 9th. Miliband has already made an enemy of News International over phone-hacking. The argument that he is a threat to “press freedom” is likely to be made far beyond the editorial offices of the Mail.

On the other hand, the Tory press and party like to try to characterise him as weak, even though he has made several moves that Cameron would not have dared to make. He went with his instinct and requested a right to reply in the paper, which took his piece but reprinted the offending article alongside it and ran an editorial (smacking of Dacre’s own hand) that began, in demeaning and puerile fashion: “Red Ed’s in a strop with the Mail” and went on to refer to “his tetchy and menacing response”, which account could only have been swallowed by readers who didn’t read the Miliband.

Alex Brummer, who wants an apology from the Labour Party

The paper also described its original piece as an “exposé of [Ralph Miliband’s] political philosophy” as if it had hitherto been some kind of secret that he was a Marxist. “As for the Falklands war,” continued the editorial, “our [sic] defence of British sovereignty so appalled him that it moved him to four-letter words of disgust”. Be assured that no such outrage has ever sullied the editorial floor of the Daily Mail.

Another absurd reference was to Miliband’s “attacks on us, repeated ad nauseam by a gleeful BBC”. To characterise Miliband’s measured response to a pre-emptive personal strike initiated by the paper as “attacks” is plain silly. As for the BBC, no chance to take a pop at that institution is ever turned down, even when, as here, there is no justification for it. The BBC’s coverage has bent over backwards to balance the Mail’s view with that of its opponents – who have emerged from all parts of the political spectrum – and it has returned to the story no more regularly than any other news outlet.

Last Friday, on the 6 o’clock and 10 o’clock news bulletins on BBC1, the Mail’s city editor, Alex Brummer, was put up to speak for the paper. That Brummer is the son of refugee Jewish immigrants and a former Guardian man did not escape notice. Here’s what Brummer had to say: “I think the Labour Party’s stepped over a line by turning its guns on us over a whole week. I mean, we addressed the problem, we gave Ed Miliband space in the paper to rebut the charges against him. He’s chosen now to turn it into a political argument. He’s using his own family to turn it into a political argument against our paper. I think we should be robust and resist that”. The final sentence was cut from the later broadcast.

The saying “what planet is he living on?” springs to mind. By Friday, the matter had only been news beyond the paper and Ed Miliband for four days, not “a whole week”, and the Labour Party has played less than a walk-on part. The paper’s “charges” were against Ralph, not Ed Miliband, and Ed rebutted only the lies about his father; David Cameron rapidly remarked that he would do the same. As for “using his own family”, this is just preposterous. Did Brummer miss the references to Miliband’s father in the offending article that kicked off the episode? That original piece said: “Like all left-wing thinkers, Ralph Miliband knew how to explain away awkward events”. It’s a skill Brummer might usefully acquire.

Here’s what I would say to Brummer. The Labour Party does actually punch very hard, not physically but using its skills as a political organisation which appeals to a huge number of people in this country. And this scares the press. They then say “I’m being bullied”. Oh for heaven’s sake, grow up, y’know. I just don’t have much sympathy.

The veteran Mail reporter Ann Leslie was also on the early BBC bulletin. I’m glad the Blair government gave her a damehood because she always sports so much slap that she looks like a pantomime dame – neither George Lacey nor Douglas Byng ever favoured such maquillage. Here’s what the dame had to say: “The Daily Mail does actually punch very hard, not physically but using its skills as a newspaper which appeals to a huge number of people in this country. And this scares the left. They then say ‘I’m being bullied’. Oh, for heaven’s sake, grow up,’ y’now. I just don’t have much sympathy”. For the record, the Mail’s circulation is a little over 1.5 million. The number who voted Labour in the 2010 general election was a little over 8.6 million.

Brummer wrote a piece for the Mail defending the paper against suggestions that its attack on the Milibands was anti-semitic. He referred to the “knee-jerk anti-Zionism shown by the left”. Brummer knows better than I do that there is anti-semitism, there is anti-the-existence-of-the-state-of-Israel, there is anti-Zionism and there is anti-the-(present)-government-of-Israel and that these four stances are very different from each other. There is plenty of anti-Netanyahu sentiment on the left, that’s for sure, and most of it is among Israelis. There is anti-Zionism in the sense that many on the left deplore Israel’s unique capacity to continue to break international law (over settlements) with total impunity. But to imply that there is inbred suspicion of or even hatred of the Jews on the left is as wicked a lie as to suggest that there is similar sentiment against Islam on the right.

Ann Leslie about to go on as Widow Twankey

On the other hand, it’s disingenuous of Brummer to pretend that there is no suggestion of xenophobia in the way the Mail has characterised Ralph Miliband and, by implication, his son. As the Milibands are Jews, that xenophobia by definition shades into antisemitism. The fact that Brummer and Levy and Melanie Phillips find a happy home on the paper doesn’t cancel out that ingredient in the Mail’s stance.

As it has panned out, the Mail emerges looking distinctly queasy from this encounter. It will not have bargained for two former Thatcher ministers fiercely attacking it and defending Ralph Miliband. The statements of Brummer and Leslie look a little wary and defensive. Paul Dacre has studiedly kept his head below the parapet and been mocked for it. Readers of the paper have taken to the internet in droves to complain and scorn.

In the paper’s editorial, there was a passing remark that the Mail is not Pravda. It was a heedless thing to say. Pravda means ‘truth’.

The POLITICS of TRUTH

From the audience at BBC1’s Question Time the other week, a man in a Max Miller jacket delivered himself of the opinion that “I look at people talking sometimes and I know that they’re lying, right? You can see that they’re lying. And talk about pulling the wool over your eyes, they try to do it. I’m glad I came here today to say that, because when I watch it on telly it’s like a film, d’you know what I mean? It’s not real. But I’m just saying – people want to be more truthful. If not, bring out lie detectors, d’you know what I mean?”

This barely coherent sentiment elicited a low rumble of approval in the hall, but none of the parliamentarians on the panel – Sir Menzies Campbell, Iain Duncan Smith and Harriet Harman – rose to the challenge, though they must have assumed, as I did, that this was the self-consciously sober version of the pub sentiment: “these politicians, they’re all fackin’ liars, d’you know what I mean?”

No doubt in his own dealings, Max Miller Man is veracity personified. But his aperçu is one that many evidently recognise; or rather, one that many lazily embrace, because politicians are easy targets and scoring points off aunt sallies is a national sport. Ever since the 1950s, when television put public figures into our homes on a regular basis, the deference shown by previous generations to the elites – of class, power, wealth, achievement, fame, intellect – has melted away. Now, anyone who tiptoes into, strides into or is thrust into the limelight is riding for a fall from the off.

It’s flying in the face of fashion, conventional wisdom and even perhaps common sense, but I want to suggest that politicians as a class are poorly served by the commentariat and the court of public opinion. Of course I disagree politically with practically all of them, there being very few parliamentarians, now or in history, holding, voicing and maintaining genuinely radical and progressive views. If a chap sees the world in a way diametrically opposed to how I see it, then naturally it follows that he is a cad, a shyster or a fool. But MPs as a breed are not significantly less honourable, scrupulous or altruistic than, say, postal workers, composers, solicitors, cricketers, interior decorators, farmers, travel agents, firefighters or bookies; and rather more so, I venture, than journalists and press barons.

Inextricably mingled with that falling away of deference has been the ever-increasing scrutiny inflicted by the media on the minutiae of day-to-day – even minute-to-minute – politics. Tony Blair’s nose hair, Gordon Brown’s fingernails, David Cameron’s incipient bald patch, nothing is too insignificant or too personal to escape the discourtesy of commentators. There is an unarticulated consensus that every politician has the hide of a perissodactyl and hence cannot be embarrassed, crushed or wounded, however presumptuous or disobliging the assault.

Of course, compared with actually being a politician, the likes of Quentin Letts, Andrew Rawnsley, Richard Littlejohn, Will Self and Simon Hoggart have a laughably undemanding function, tossing off a few hundred words of scorn and prejudice every few days. Any jerk can stand on the sidelines and jeer, as we see every week on Have I Got News for You?. Stanley Baldwin’s famous rejoinder, supplied by his cousin Rudyard Kipling, ought to have killed off for ever the readiness of newspapers to carry political comment: “What the proprietorship of these papers is aiming at is power, and power without responsibility – the prerogative of the harlot through the ages”. Eighty-one years later, the paper tarts are still there.

Consider the chasm between the accountability of political diarists and columnists and that of MPs. If Melanie Phillips’ latest passionately held conviction is totally at odds with what she wrote ten years ago, who cares? But politicians are expected to square the circle about every issue every day and woe betide any minister rash enough to suggest that he might have modulated his thinking, or that differing contexts might require nuanced responses. The coalition is on a hiding to nothing just at present because there has been some tinkering with policy detail. Their party opponents, naturally enough, cry “U-turn” but so does everyone else. Yet if ministers didn’t trim out tax and other adjustments that look more hindrance than help, the chasing press pack would howl that they don’t listen. So they are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. Of course, the real answer is to get policies right in the first place. But there are no medals for being wise after the event.

Consider another impossibility we have been tutored to demand of our politicians. This is that each of them echo, word for word, everything that everybody else in their own party ever says about anything. As soon as any individual falls short of this ridiculous litmus test, the commentariat whoop and holler like children on a sugar rush.

Oddly enough, here in the real world, intelligent people find that they may make congenial alliances even with other intelligent people with whom they discover profound and wide differences. This is not permitted in British politics: every member of a political party is expected to parrot every party line. In a more sophisticated democracy – Greece, say, or Israel – it is a given that if there are twenty people in a room, even though they all be members of the same political alliance, there will be twenty separate views about pretty much everything more significant than the weather. We might learn something from that.

Because British politicians are under continuous pressure to subscribe to orthodoxy, the concept of “collective responsibility” is highly significant for cabinets and shadow cabinets alike. The effect of this constraint is that front-benchers – and, by association, loyal party supporters – are obliged to subscribe vociferously and regularly to policies and (more uncomfortably) statements to which they may be, at best, indifferent. This frequently requires the deployment of a talent that is rarely mastered, that of persuasive circumlocution. This talent is also called upon when some aggressive interviewer demands a yes/no answer to a question that lends itself to no such bald simple-mindedness. Politics, m’lud, is a subtle business, and monosyllabic, unstructured answers are usually no answer at all. Columnists and opinion-makers are never called upon to jump through this kind of hoop. It would be instructive to see them required to do so.

I suggest that we are setting the bar impossibly high for our politicians, individuals who, with few exceptions, have chosen to submit themselves to a role that offers relatively modest and certainly unpredictable personal rewards. It is always possible that day-to-day political manoeuvrings at Westminster are quite as corrupt as in Chicago or Kiev or Palermo, though I beg to doubt it.

It is in the nature of becoming a legislator that you are going to find yourself encountering, socially or in the way of business, billionaires and other highly powerful people. As an MP, even as a minister in a cabinet proverbially of millionaires like the present one, you may well find yourself at a reception where your personal wealth cannot hold a candle to that of fellow guests like Bob Diamond, JK Rowling, David Beckham, Damien Hurst and Richard Desmond. They know that quite as well as you do. Aware that they could buy you several times over, they may not be about to extend to you the condescension that your status as a legislator might be thought to merit. This is a pretty uncomfortable tightrope to walk.

It is hardly to be wondered at if, in the big-willie world of power and dealing and high finance, mere politicians feel in some degree inadequate. What is very surprising is that many more of them are not corrupted than the small number that gets found out. And what is so dismally revealing is the lack of ambition, the petty degree of corruption that does get uncovered. When The Daily Telegraph began its long and deeply relished dance-of-the-seventy-veils that was the great MPs’ expenses scandal, you could picture the Barclay twins, to whom falls the not terribly onerous task of owning The Telegraph, scoffing at the pathetic level of graft that their reporters uncovered – flat-screen tellies and duck houses indeed! – as they read the revelations on their island of Brecqhou where they enjoy their wealth untroubled by the tax man because they get away with being registered in Monaco.

Another proprietor whose organ routinely disdains politicians of all colours is Lord Rothermere, inheritor of the Daily Mail titles. Rothermere lives in practice on a fine estate in Wiltshire but, for tax evasion purposes, is a citizen of Paris. Thus do Baldwin’s harlots continue to wield power without responsibility while enjoying wealth without contributing to the public purse.

Something else about politicos that is routinely derided is their custom – a requirement of party managers – to shine a flattering light on every manifestation of their efforts. I have news for you: this instinct is not peculiar to MPs. Talking up is as old as language itself. But commentators would have you believe that this gambit was born in the Blair era, when it gained a powerfully evocative name: spin.

Well, you know, we all employ spin. The still-extant ancestor of the aforementioned Question Time is Radio 4’s Any Questions, chaired these many years by Jonathan, the younger brother of the television programme’s host David Dimbleby. In recent years, Dimbleby Minor has taken to referring to the lunchtime repeat of his vehicle as “the Saturday broadcast”, but for many seasons before that, he was content to account the repeat as “the Saturday edition” as if, in some mysterious manner, it differed from the original live transmission on a Friday evening. This, boys and girls, is pure spin. Indeed, “the Saturday broadcast” is not significantly less a piece of spin than “the Saturday edition”. We all, constantly and in our daily lives, attempt (often unconsciously) to put the best … er … spin on everything we say and do. And why not?

But be fair: spinning is not lying. And giving a comprehensive answer, even if it inclines to the tortuous, is not lying. And avoiding a candid declaration that you feel a lot more sanguine about some of your party’s policies than others is not lying. A politician may twist and turn and temporize, but if she tells a lie to parliament she will surely sacrifice her career. Max Miller Man would do well to remember that.

FEAR and LOATHING in the 21st CENTURY

The moment I heard the bare headlines about the murder of a 28 year-old barman in Ayrshire last weekend, my gaydar detected a homophobic element. At the time of writing, this instinct has yet to be wholly justified by what has been publicly disclosed, but if the evident fact of Stuart Walker’s relaxed and unconcealed sexuality proves to be a total red herring, I’ll be very surprised.

An 18 year-old has been detained by the police. Only very sketchy details of the killing have been released. Initially, Strathclyde Police declared that, while it was not “a random attack”, there was “nothing to indicate that this is a homophobic crime”. However, it was “an extremely violent attack” and Walker’s body was found to be “charred”. Reports have conflicted as to whether he had been tied to a lamppost and whether torture and/or a weapon were involved.

There has been a moving response from the public, both in Cumnock itself and in the wider on-line world. Evidently, Walker was well-liked. The nature of his death – outdoors at night but in an urban area where the events leading up to the attack and the attack itself might easily have been witnessed – has clearly shaken locals, but so has the possibility that someone might have been bludgeoned merely because of his sexuality.

Stuart Walker

Stonewall Scotland says that its researches indicate that two out of three Scots are relaxed about the question of gay marriage. The campaigning organisation also reckons that there has been a five-fold increase in “hate crimes” against LGBT people in Scotland in the last five years. But of course this calculation may be tempered by a greater readiness to report such crimes and a greater diligence on the police’s part in recording and following up reports.

For the police and for other public services, sexuality has become a subject to be treated as if walking on eggshells. This is not to say that institutional homophobia has significantly lessened in those services, only that it is much less often openly expressed. We can only count this “improvement” a mixed blessing.

Elsewhere, there is clearly a long way to go. In recent weeks, there has been much comment about alleged racist remarks made on the pitches of the premier football league in England. The sport’s authorities, the clubs and the media have scrupulously maintained a fierce disapproval of such behaviour, while simultaneously reserving the fallback position that some such allegations might be erroneous, unjustified or even malicious. One suspects, though, that disobliging remarks made in heat about sexuality would provoke rather less soul-searching, let alone official investigation.

The notorious lewd pantomime performed in 1999 by the then Liverpool player Robbie Fowler in order to rile the Chelsea player Graeme Le Saux was penalised by the Football Association and the club. Le Saux was sometimes “accused” by fellow players of being gay on the basis of his distaste for the raucous and drunken celebratory culture widely indulged in top-flight football and – bizarrely – because he read The Guardian rather than The Daily Star. However, it is difficult to determine the degree to which either the FA or Liverpool disapproved Fowler’s behaviour because his offence was processed simultaneously with a further example of juvenilia at a different match when Fowler pantomimed snorting the touchline. The player was fined for both incidents by both club and regulatory body. The FA did, though, impose a four-match suspension for the “cocaine” business and only a further two-match suspension for the “bum-waving”. I wonder what penalty would be imposed today and whether calling another player a “poof” would be deemed an offence.

Dog-Walker

In the media and of course on-line, anti-gay sentiment is much more rife. Some of it is intended, some of it merely thoughtless, born of an instinctive but unexamined response. Though the coverage of Walker’s death has generally been treated with as much persuasive horror and concern as, say, the murder of Jo Yeates, you don’t need to look far to find the attitudes that still lurk beneath the professional surface.

On the Daily Mail’s on-line site, for instance, there is a piece headlined: “Man held over inquiry into death of gay barman who was facing child sex probe”. The “child sex probe” is not, the report goes on to explain, some kind of medical device or sex toy but a legal procedure. “However,” says the report (and it is not wholly clear why that particular word is used), “it has come to light that the 28 year-old had only recently been questioned over an alleged incident involving a 12 year-old boy in August and a report was sent to the Procurator Fiscal”. In fact, as the report goes on to make clear, the Procurator Fiscal had closed the case. Hence there is no earthly reason why the “alleged incident” should have been mentioned, especially as the report quotes the Strathclyde Police thus: “There’s no suggestion that this incident is in any way connected to the murder”. The website is either flying a kite, hinting at something the reporter has heard but cannot publish, making mischief or appealing to the perceived homophobia of its readers (this is the Daily Mail, after all, a rag known to many as the Daily Hate-Mail). The on-line report, by the by, is credited to a certain “Oliver Pickup” and if, as seems likely, that is a pseudonym, it was singularly insensitively chosen.

Daily Mail writers and other right-wingers implicitly subscribe to a view, whether expressed outright or not, that attraction to members of the same sex is “unnatural”. If these objectors also embrace supernatural delusions of one stripe or another, they then frequently deem homosexuality “sinful” and “corrupt”. As one who spurns supernatural delusion as itself unnatural, I cannot spend precious time on the notions of sinfulness and corruption. As for the “unnatural” argument, I offer that it is natural for me. Humans do many things that are not found in nature: cooking food, driving cars, firing missiles, taking part in “reality television” programmes, claiming to be divinely inspired. When homophobes argue that god did not intend humans to indulge in sodomy, for instance, I want to ask why in his infinite wisdom he went and made the anus an erogenous zone. Did he know his business?

For aeons, greybeards have attempted to “explain” homosexuality, as if it needs to be swaddled and safely buried in theory. Every so often, it is thought that some breakthrough is about to demonstrate conclusively that attraction to the same sex is a product of nature rather than nurture or, just as often, the other way around. As a gay man myself, I would much prefer the issue were left alone, because I know in my bones that whichever comes to be pronounced “the definitive answer” will be used against us. If it’s nature, prospective parents will require the sexuality of the foetus to be revealed and, in some cases, will demand that this is sufficient justification for a termination. If it’s nurture, the behavioural experts will be put to work to determine those gay responses that are indeed “learned” so that they may be eradicated with extreme prejudice.

Life and Soul

Rather than burning brain cells on futile attempts to account for what makes individuals gay, I propose that the homophobia mystery be the one that is solved. That would benefit society a great deal more. Actually, of course, it is not such a mystery, especially to anyone who has encountered it. Many people’s homophobia is merely an outward manifestation of their supernatural delusion – or, to give the dog its name, their religious bigotry. It is in the nature of being a subscriber to a religion that intolerance of those who differ follows. A righteous person by definition measures herself against the “wrongeousness” of others. Nowhere is this expressed more forcibly than in Islam, according to which anyone who does not embrace the Muslim faith is an infidel and hence not fit to live. I don’t know any lesbian or gay people who consider that heterosexuals should be put to death, only that they are missing out. Mostly, though, we just hope that straights will let us alone.

There is another view of homophobia – more a theory than a study – which is that those whose hatred and fear is not taught and motivated by scripture may be driven by an insecurity about their own sexuality. This is a perception akin to that of the Jew-hating Jew, save of course that Jewishness is rather more clearly a fact about a person, whereas sexuality is a lot to do with movable positions on a spectrum of behaviour and instinct. At any rate, my own anecdotal evidence does suggest that those heterosexuals who are most relaxed at being around gays are themselves the most comfortable in their own sexual identities. I remember back in the 1970s, during the week of one of the first of what were then called Gay Pride marches in London, I was working at Time Out magazine. The editor of the theatre section was a lovely man called John Ashford and, for the duration, he sported a lapel badge that read “Sad to be Straight”. It might not be thought exactly correct now, but back then I was grateful for such fraternal solidarity, particularly as so much of the left was extremely tardy in understanding and responding to sexual politics.

The spot where Walker's body was found

LGBT people do not ask for special consideration. We only want a shake equivalent to that enjoyed by everybody. In particular, we want to be able to go about our business without being persecuted, abused or despised. Or indeed murdered.

WHAT’s to be DONE?

Over the last ten days, Britain has taken leave of its senses. I do not refer to the urban riots that have scarred the social fabric, or rather I do not only refer to them. I am thinking more seriously and worryingly about the mooted mood – the “clear public mood” as BBC reporter Chris Buckler called it – of anger, blame, vengeance. When he was leader of the opposition, David Cameron sought to do the then government a piece of no-good by coining the phrase “broken Britain”. After barely fifteen months of his premiership, Britain looks to be in pieces, psychologically as well as physically.

No doubt stung by accusations of lolling in Tuscany (happily not at the Castello del Nero) while Britain burned – encapsulated by John Prescott’s #wheresthegovernment campaign on Twitter – Cameron rushed home to reassert his tottering authority. Given this perception, it was inevitable that the key to his reaction would be that useful machismo concept, cojones. Paradoxically, it fell to a woman – the Home Secretary, Theresa May – to give the most consistent running commentary exhibiting this notion and as a consequence no single sentence that fell publicly from her lips last Wednesday failed to include the word “tough”.

Well, tough is a pretty blunt instrument. Tough has a great appeal to Tory backbenchers of the string-’em-up/send-a-gunboat school and so far politicians imagine that it hasn’t played badly among the reeling public, those completely unaffected (directly) by the riots even more than those who survey an urban landscape that resembles Kabul, Baghdad and Beirut.

Mrs Tough, Theresa May

Some of us – thoughtful people, I like to think – would prefer a reaction erring more on the side of thoughtfulness. Politicians often warn against so-called knee-jerk reactions but they love to indulge such easy stuff themselves. I venture that any fool can deplore, condemn and fulminate. It doesn’t require much in the way of brainpower, let alone a university degree and a lifetime in the subtle arts of politicking. But we need our leaders to be a bit bigger than that. We need solutions more than condemnations. I offer the following constructive proposals for mending Broken Britain. Do not hold your breath for any of them to be implemented.

1: Dozens of rioters and looters are being handed jail sentences in an extraordinary panic of court activity, with magistrates and officials being required to sit through the night and at other unusual times. Anecdotal – and, more importantly, systematically analysed – evidence emerging from this process shows that a great many of those found guilty are being detained for petty offences that in the ordinary course of things would be dealt with far less punitively, especially when committed by a first-time offender or a teenager. If the courts are taking the view that the circumstances render these misdemeanours more serious than usual, they should also consider the commensurate special factors that mitigate: excitement, peer-pressure, opportunism, copycat behaviour, a climate of anarchy. Is the spur-of-the-moment grabbing of an item lying in a broken shop window really a greater felony than a planned and carefully executed act of shoplifting?

Punitive sentences that smack of politically encouraged vengeance contribute nothing to the aim of bringing society back together. The jails were already groaning at the seams and the Justice Secretary, Kenneth Clarke, had been commendably seeking ways of reducing Britain’s disproportionately high jail population. Worse, there is plenty of evidence that the most far-reaching effect that jail has on the inmates is to teach them a great deal more than they already knew about the criminal life. Politicians who insist that jail is always the answer ignore that, in most of our jails, drugs are epidemic, gang culture and pecking orders determined by menace are entrenched, and many of the warders are complicit and indeed, in some cases, downright corrupt. When the opportunistic miscreants are disgorged from these crime colleges after several months’ exposure to a criminal hierarchy much more effective and organized than any in their home neighbourhoods, some of them will inevitably return to those neighbourhoods thoroughly criminalised and resentful, rather than quelled and regretful. And all this banging-up just adds to the taxpayers' burden.

David Cameron gets down with the kids

I have long argued that only those deemed by the courts (after careful consideration of all the evidence and background reports) to constitute an actual danger to the public should be incarcerated and that those so detained should be taken off the streets for many years. The argument for short jail terms for minor offences is bankrupt and its only point is to satisfy those who seek vengeful punishment largely for its own sake.

The answer to crime that does not imperil members of the public – and most of those being jailed as I write did not imperil any member of the public – is to impose hefty community service orders. In the present circumstances, those who looted their neighbourhoods would by this means be seen by their neighbours to be making good, and some of them might even gain a sense of what both community and service mean. Perhaps even those who want the rioters and looters to bloody suffer might be mollified by the argument that the estimated cost of each inmate of a British prison exceeds £40,000 per year [Kevin Marsh, The Guardian, July 28th 2008; it must be higher now]. Throwing people in jail is a cripplingly expensive method of dealing with a social problem. To coin a phrase, the Prime Minister should have thought of that before he demanded that the courts favour the jail option.

2: David Cameron has suggested that the families of convicted rioters and looters should lose their entitlement to social housing. This is an astonishing remark for a political leader to make. To begin with, it cuts across the administration of law. There is no provision under statutory law in this country for a person who has not committed a crime to be penalised for the commission of a crime by another person, even if the additionally penalised person is the parent or guardian or in loco parentis. If Cameron wants to change the law, that is his prerogative, but he will need to be mindful of all those past and present ministers whose children have broken the law, not least his hero Tony Blair whose teenaged son was once found drunk and incapable in Leicester Square. Perhaps the then Tory leadership missed a trick by failing to demand that the Blairs be evicted from no 10 for bad parenting and a largely absent pater familias.

Euan Blair, now doing well but surely no thanks to connections

How can exacerbating the problem – turfing a whole family onto the street – possibly help to mend a broken society? Don’t vindictive responses simply raise the ante? And how will it look if the courts (usually wiser than politicians in the implementation of law) overturn the eviction notices handed out by local authorities? When the first case comes to court brought by progressive lawyers on behalf of, say, a six year-old girl who has been thrown onto the street with the rest of her family because her teenaged brother stole a mobile phone, Cameron might even have the grace to be discomfited.

3: The government has settled on the line that the problem is, in Cameron’s words, “criminality pure and simple” and specifically that a supposed gang culture is at the root of this unrest. It seems obvious to me that this is a rationalisation and that it represents handy code for suggesting to the public that ministers are on top of this rather than embarking on any hard work. Muddying the water further is an apparent lack of understanding by ministers – Cameron and May in particular – about the separation of powers. Although Cameron appears to subscribe to a traditional Tory stance of less rather than more government (and, by extension, ministerial interference), a foolish power struggle has developed between the government and the police, concentrated on the Home Office and the Met.

In her interview on The World This Weekend today, May harped continually on gang culture and what she presents as “the public mood”. I wish Shaun Ley – who was otherwise commendably determined – had pressed her to explain where she got her evidence of the public mood. She certainly didn’t ask me and nothing she says represents my mood. In particular, the constantly iterated trendy trope – “let me be clear/we are absolutely clear” – was continually undermined by her refusal to answer candidly and clearly any question about who is (or thinks they are) in charge.

For myself, I am perfectly clear, and capable (I believe) of expressing it in clear, candid language. It is for the police and only the police to identify, to attempt to contain and, insofar as is possible, to break up any gangs that may operate in our cities. It is for government to attempt to determine why gangs should spring up, if they do, and to address the socio-economic conditions that their existence indicates. Ministers are not chief constables, nor are they magistrates. It may well fall to them to articulate what may be perceived as the public mood, but more important is that they lead and, where necessary, educate that public mood. Blame is for columnists on the Daily Mail. Government’s role is governance and leadership.

Miss Selfridge, Manchester after the attention of an arsonist

In any case, the public mood, even if it genuinely exists, is not always a practical help. The latest bromide of e-petitions to Downing Street seems likely to reveal a strong groundswell among the public in favour of the restoration of capital punishment. You can bet your boots that parliament will not soon satisfy such a sentiment. The notion of the public mood is only cited when it may be presented as chiming with government policy.

4: Politicians and commentators bang on incessantly about rioters and especially looters. There is a third group – a relatively small one – within those who were on the streets in the last few days and who made considerably more of an impact than all the others put together, yet they are rarely mentioned. I do not mean anarchists or professional agitators or gangsters. I mean a particular kind of highly dangerous individual who occurs in all age groups, classes and cultures. I am talking about arsonists.

There is a special fascination about starting fires that needs to be teased out and addressed. In the last few months, there have been wildfires in many parts of the world, fires that destroyed vast acres of valuable and productive land, thousands of defenceless wild and farm creatures, homes and possessions; and indeed in some cases took human lives. Some of these started by accident, greatly assisted by bone-dry conditions and high winds. But most began through criminal carelessness or deliberate mischief. The cost of the damage done by such fires hugely outstrips that of rioting and looting. Ministers need to isolate this particular phenomenon, to seek help in understanding the psychology behind it and to initiate some sort of education programme to ensure that parents and children understand both that arson is a crime quite as serious as murder and that it will be punished accordingly. We need to get ourselves into a position where claimed ignorance of the possible consequences of starting a fire cannot possibly be ameliorating.

An unhugged hoodie enacts shooting the PM

5: The government is under pressure from all sides to halt the cuts it proposes to impose on the police. Cameron, May and George Osborne have decided that they will not accede to this pressure. They are taking a line already tried out in relation to local authority cuts and funding of the BBC: that others must implement the cuts that the government imposes and that there is no such response as “can’t”, however much councils or the BBC or, in their turn, the police warn that there is an optimal operational cost below which the fabric of the service inevitably must suffer. The government will have none of it. We seem required to accept that, if necessary, these services can be provided by volunteers who take no pay and therefore that the savings that may be made are almost infinite. The happy outcome for the government, so it believes, is that the electorate will blame the councils, the BBC and the police when it perceives that the services hitherto taken for granted are no longer forthcoming. Do not doubt that the NHS is being subjected to the same disingenuous policy.

So far, the police are disputing the government’s strategy robustly if not consistently. Theresa May’s refrain that “visible policing” will not be reduced cuts little ice with shrewd chief constables. The police are already wholly invisible to the public, save at national and local set pieces. And imposing swingeing cuts on back office expenses cannot possibly be achieved without the efficacy of the operation being affected adversely. The much-vaunted paperwork and Labour-imposed targets, while not quite a myth, are not so bureaucratic and onerous that they and the staff who are responsible for executing them can simply be chopped away with impunity.

6: Clearly, too much is asked of the police. If government will not fund the force properly, the force itself must seek extra funding. I have argued before that service charges could and should be imposed by the officers who are required to deal with incidents accountable to drunkenness in town centres. My argument then arose from the need to tackle alcoholism. Now I offer it as a means of contributing to police costs. In the breathalyser, officers already possess a gadget that will objectively determine alcohol consumption. The courts do not need to be troubled. A night in the cells and/or the attention of police (and indeed of paramedics) can attract a fixed or sliding scale of call-out charges. Let the drunks take legal action if they feel hard done by.

In another part of the forest, we are regularly told that the English Premier League is the richest football hierarchy in the world. So let the clubs stand the full cost of policing matches. ACPO, the Association of Chief Police Officers, have been seeking this change for years. Last season, the policing of just the local derbies between the two Glasgow teams (Celtic and Rangers) cost £2.4million, of which the clubs themselves tipped up rather less than 20 percent. Let them pay 100 percent. Otherwise, the police should refuse to enter the football grounds, which are, after all, private property. I don’t think ACPO need wait for legislation or a government directive. They should give the Football League an ultimatum and a deadline – October 1st, say. The government ought to be pleased that the police are standing on their own feet in such a way.

The Home Secretary gives the Met their orders for the day

7: Something else that the police should do is to reopen the matter of MPs defrauding the public purse. Cameron and other leaders talked grandly about this matter when it first came to light two years ago: “no excuses”, “criminality pure and simple”, familiar phrases. Yet only a handful of members went to jail: exemplary cases but not even necessarily the most flagrant ones, which made those so punished feel rather understandably indignant.

MPs who stole amounts running into four figures were permitted to repay (part of) their ill-gotten gains but to fight the next election as if nothing untoward had transpired. Some were pressed to stand down but none of them suffered any further penalty. These are not deprived kids living in urban squalor and without proverbial fathers. These are handsomely-rewarded legislators expected to set an example of probity to the rest of society. Some of them have legal qualifications as well as the responsibility of making the law. How can they still show their faces in public? Yet some of them have been voluble about the “disgrace” of the “criminality” shown in the last ten days.

Here are some of those who embezzled more than £1,000 through their illicit expenses claims: Hazel Blears, Sir Menzies Campbell, Ronnie Campbell, Quentin Davies, Alan Duncan, Julia Goldsworthy, Michael Gove, Douglas Hogg, Phil Hope, Stewart Jackson, Sir Gerald Kaufman, Andrew Lansley, Oliver Letwin, Shahid Malik, Margaret Moran, Richard Younger-Ross. If David Cameron – himself obliged to pay back a wrongly claimed sum – is serious about the broken society, he needs to look at the chimneys and the sunroof as well as the drains.

Cameron, cruel victim of satire

8: Ministers need to sit down and talk with those who manage and direct the culture, in particular the culture of broadcasting. Our television is a showcase for the acquisitive society. It is not merely the advertisements that have been pumped into our homes for nearly sixty years at a greater and greater rate, the appeal of which is ever more to a subconscious sense of insecurity and misplaced duty – you must have this, that and the other product or you will be out of the loop/sexually unattractive/failing as a mother. The programmes themselves grow more and more like the advertisements that fund them, with acquisitiveness the most apparent of all the medium’s moral messages. I caught a trail on the Biography Channel this afternoon for a programme in which “six of Miami’s elite ladies flash their cash and reveal everything about their enviable lifestyles”. The key words, you will have noticed, are “flash” and “enviable”. Is it any wonder that viewers spend most of their viewing time unconsciously wanting things that they can never acquire by legitimate means?

The bosses of advertising and television – and of radio and the print media, which are no better – must be compelled to address the values that they casually inculcate in their consumers. This is a real issue, not a gestural concern. It is a problem that grows more acute by the day and if ministers do not make them confront it, who will?

9: Allied to the above is the responsibility of the various national bodies that administer sports. All sports have been transformed over the last half-century by the injection of big money: investment for a return by advertisers and broadcasting but also ownership by speculators, many of them with little grasp of the traditions and histories of the sports in which they have taken such large stakes.

With the possible exceptions of golf, sailing, swimming, diving and darts, all sports are now widely sullied by cheating, drug-taking, performance enhancement, results fixing, bribery, psychological pressure on officials and other manifestations of corruption. As sports people have a more significant impact as role models than anyone, including pop singers and movie stars, the requirement for them to be beyond reproach is all the greater. Ministers need to sit down and talk to the sports administrators about unprecedented levels of sanctions against cheats of all kinds. If “no excuses” applies to moments of madness indulged by kids who anyway have little consolation for the deprived lives that they lead, it must apply big time to cosseted, overpaid stars who have no need of any extra boost given by backhanders and steroid dealers.

Martin Rowson's take on blame culture

10: And then there’s the big political picture. The contradiction between politicians finger-wagging about violence on the nearby streets who yet glory in sending jets, bombers and tanks into the neighbourhoods of innocent people who seemingly count for nothing because they live a long way away. The contradiction between politicians who pretend that bankers’ bonuses are essential because these people need to be millionaires in order to have an incentive to stay in London and speculate against the pound and against British businesses, yet who simultaneously discount the aspirations of people unfortunate enough not to have gained posts as asset-strippers and arbitrageurs and who imagine that volunteering to shoulder half a lifetime of further-education-imposed debt is sufficient motivation to contribute to a society that values city failure higher than academic study and social service. The contradiction between politicians who blink at massive evasion of taxes by those wealthy enough to live in tax havens and to hire clever accountants yet who pounce angrily on supposed benefit cheats whose peccadilloes pale by comparison and who have no compunction about withdrawing support from the most vulnerable members of society: the disabled, the mentally incapacitated, the unemployable.

Over the decades since World War II, the gap between rich and poor has only widened. Tragically for the electorate, Labour has during the same period offered no alternative to Tory refusal of any notion of the redistribution of wealth. In an arresting phrase when preparing to be Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer in the 1970s, Denis Healey threatened to “squeeze the rich until the pips squeak” but in his long five years in the post he never actually did that. George Osborne has yet to rule out the abolition of the 50 percent rate of income tax and, given the government’s usual cavalier treatment of any notion of “the public mood”, we should expect this to come to pass in the fullness of time.

Frankly, there is little to hope for from the politicians, One might as well riot.

JUST ANOTHER WORD for NOTHING LEFT to LOSE

Until about a decade ago, I was, for thirty years on and off, a working journalist and a fully paid-up member of the National Union of Journalists. I’d be a journalist again if anyone took my stuff, but I am too long out of the business; the people who decide things have never heard of me and don’t deign to respond to unsolicited pieces; and maybe what I think and/or how I write is no longer wanted (quiet at the back there).

I had a lot of regard for many of the people I met in my newspaper and magazine years – photographers, stringers, reporters, printers, sub-editors, reviewers, researchers, columnists, editors – but I learned to be very sceptical about the culture of the press. Almost everything that made me feel uncomfortable in those years has got more intense since.

Some scene setting before we get onto that. The press is in terminal decline – no one can doubt that. If there are any printed newspapers at all a decade hence, it will be astonishing. In Britain, many national and London newspapers have (come and) gone in my lifetime: Daily Sketch, News Chronicle, The Star, Daily Herald, The Graphic, Sunday Dispatch, The Evening News, Today, The European, The Post, The Illustrated London News, Sunday Correspondent, London Daily News, Sunday Sport. The Guardian came awfully close to closing its stable-mate, the oldest surviving British paper The Observer, last year and commentators ring the death-knell of The Independent and Independent on Sunday pretty much every month.

The late News Chronicle

It’s the very necessity to publish and print that hands the newspapers their fatal disadvantage. Direct on-line printing is certainly quicker than the linotype, cold press, peeling-a-spread-off-the-stone world that still obtained when I joined The Observer in 1977. It’s the distribution that kills it. I don’t know if the same routines obtain now but, in my day, if you walked along Fleet Street around 4:00 am and peered down the side streets, you’d see the Bedford vans, bearing the liveries of the national organs and the news-agency chains, parked on the pavements, while bundles of early editions tumbled down chutes to men waiting on the tailboards below: the press’s nocturnal emissions.

First cinema newsreels, then the wireless, then much more decisively television, now conclusively the internet, the print’s successors have demonstrated the crucial ingredient that printed newspapers can never have: immediacy. As a consequence, those fast media have marauded into newspapers’ primary source of revenue, advertising. Compare any printed paper’s current edition with one from just two or three years back and the drop in advertising is stark, classified even more than display.

And compare the coverage. Most papers have trimmed the number of their supplements and rationalised their staff. There are notably fewer special offers and give-aways. And the newsprint on which The Guardian is printed is clearly flimsier than a year or two ago.

At the same time, the press has been markedly slow to respond to challenges from elsewhere. Only three years ago, The Daily Telegraph still carried a large proportion of pages printed in monochrome. This is no competition for television that has been in full colour for nearly half a century.

The Times in the days when its front was given over to classifieds

The strategies that editors and proprietors have followed are rarely admirable and not always comprehensible. It’s not just the dreary, industry-wide reliance on pictures of “pretty girls”, notoriously naked ones in Rupert Murdoch’s The Sun, which has actually trademarked the phrase “Page Three”. It’s that Murdoch, more than any media proprietor, has sought to influence governments and in that quest he has been highly successful.

Of the British prime ministers over the last fifty years or so, those who assiduously courted Fleet Street in general and, more recently, Murdoch in particular, have benefited from a generally benign press – Harold Macmillan, Harold Wilson, Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair – while those who scorned such low cunning have found themselves increasingly excoriated by columnists and editorial alike – Sir Alec Douglas Home, Edward Heath, Jim Callaghan, John Major, Gordon Brown. Thus far, David Cameron has diligently shown himself to belong to the former camp, with what result only the 2015 election will show; although note that Ed Miliband has not seemed to attend much to press relations.

In a wider sense, the wider media has invented and developed that horrendous phenomenon of contemporary society, celebrity culture. The famous were ever a staple for the popular press – hitherto known as “the tabloids” until middle market papers like The Express and Daily Mail adopted the format, followed by supposedly “quality” organs like The Times and The Independent which call their tabloid manifestations “compact”. Cinema, wireless and then television, in their form such threats to the very existence of newspapers, yet furnished a lifeline by vouchsafing sprinklings of stardust that reporters and photographers might gratefully snort up. And now, newspapers from all parts of the market are celebrity obsessed. One reason why no-name journalists like me ceased to find work is because so many columns and reviews are written by – or at least by-lined by – actors and comedians.

The relations between reporters and photographers and their prey soon grew complicated. With the growth of so-called “yellow” journalism and the arrival of the paparazzo photographer (named after the aggressive lensman in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita), the famous found themselves more the victims than the beneficiaries of press interest.

Ryan & Stacey Giggs, tweeted into the limelight

So we come to the present sorry and entangled juncture, at which people in the public eye attempt to cover their personal affairs (in every sense) by securing so-called super-injunctions that can be ignored by thousands of civilians gossiping on social internet platforms like Twitter. The latter breach of law – if that is what it is – is clearly far too easy to commit. I did it myself, mentioning the footballer Ryan Giggs en passant as “a super-injunctor” because by the time I did so he had already been fingered numberless times.

The reality is that Twitter hands its users a power that they do not have the inclination to ponder. Those few of us who bother to read the drearily endless legalese of the terms and conditions, that every commercial site posts somewhere and diligently prompts joiners to read and agree to, can hardly be expected to carry in our memories the responsibilities to which we have signed up, even if we had ever thought about them. No doubt there will sooner or later be a test case – perhaps the action taken by South Tyneside Council to secure from Twitter the identity of a tweeter whom it wants to sue for libel – that will bring home starkly to the Twitterati the enormity of the responsibility they undertake in setting out to gossip to the world.

But there is an ocean of muddy water here and the press is itself as responsible as anyone for making it so muddy. Consider the related but conflicted notions that are in play in this whole area: discretion, confidentiality, privacy, security, secrecy, evasion, dissimulation, subterfuge, suppression, conspiracy, treason. And in confronting all of these related but importantly separate notions, the press invokes the holiest of modern holy cows: the freedom of the press.

Not in the most perfervid of imaginations can the press truly be said to be free in any meaningful sense. First of all, the newspapers are owned. Their owners are much like those billionaires who buy football clubs. They tend to be foreigners or at any rate domiciled abroad, technically if not actually. They have bottomless pockets and they need to have such because newspapers, like football clubs, swim in seas of debt. And of course those owners have views and they are inclined to want to see their mouthpieces reflecting those views in a general and sometimes in a particular sense.

Proprietorial requirements dictate a great deal of the stances taken by the press. For instance, Rupert Murdoch’s complex interests in broadcasting are reflected in the consistently hostile posture struck by his organs towards the BBC and, to a lesser extent, ITV. This is less true of coverage of individual programmes or stars, because the editors gain little from being out of step on what the public adores. The constant carping is upon corporate policy. The editors imagine that this undermines the public’s affection for the BBC so that readers may be drawn to BSkyB instead.

The Barclays, honoured by the Queen for services to tax avoidance

What brings viewers to Sky is its greedy accumulation of rights to sports and ever newer movies. Viewers grumble that they can no longer see major sporting events and films “free” on the traditional channels but then vote with their credit cards and sign up for Sky packages. The Murdoch papers play a significant cheerleading role in this process, just as Richard Desmond’s papers are obliged to enter into mutual promotion with Channel Five since the media empire builder added that faltering enterprise to his portfolio.

It can’t be news to many that the press is full of special pleading, self-interest and hypocrisy. The long and far-reaching campaign conducted by The Daily Telegraph concerning parliamentary expenses made my blood boil. The seemingly not very onerous task of owning The Telegraph (along with The Spectator) is conducted by the identical Barclay twins, Sir David and Sir Frederick, from their home on Monaco where they protect their billions from taxation. They must have enjoyed enormously their reporters’ stories of the trivial swindles of the pathetic politicos while they themselves wallow in untouched dosh. But none of their paper’s rivals pointed out this contrast: The Guardian declined to publish a letter I wrote, couched in diligently diplomatic terms, on the matter.

Not so far from us in Wiltshire lies the grand estate of Lord Rothermere, owner of the Daily Mail. I have no intelligence as to how much of each week, month or year his lordship resides there but, for the purposes of taxation, he “lives in France”. I’d be interested to hear his explanation as to how that arrangement differs from those of the so-called “benefits cheats” against whom his columnists rail. As long as the coalition government shows no sign of attending to the legal loopholes that allow the mega-rich to avoid paying taxation on a massive scale, you can be sure that the Tory press will not be switching its allegiance to Labour. Little wonder that Cameron smarms up to the news proprietors.

Lord Rothermere plus disinterested friend

And what do the editors and reporters do with their endlessly trumpeted freedom? Well, they invoke it most often in conjunction with another illusory shibboleth: “the public’s right to know”. These two great causes may be thought well served when the press works long and hard, carefully and restrainedly, to uncover real wrongdoing. The exemplary research and diligence that powered the campaign in the 1960s by The Sunday Times to have victims of the drug thalidomide recompensed remains a template for investigative journalism.

Pursuing salacious stories about people who’ve been on the telly is not of the same order. To combat this blood sport, it is hardly surprising that the hunted have sought legal protection and so we have the super-injunctions that have attracted such scorn and been preposterously dismissed as an attack on “the freedom of the press”.

What should we make of the Ryan Giggs debacle? So many views are canvassed: that it serves him right, that it overshadows his career as a footballer, that he’s in an impossible position, that he’s perfectly entitled to cover his tracks. The Lib Dem backbencher John Hemming named Giggs in the House, using parliamentary privilege for a purpose that many MPs felt was illegitimate. Under such privilege, an MP may not be brought before the law by anyone for what he says, however libellous it might be, although he may certainly be disciplined by the Speaker for breaching parliamentary regulation and custom.

It’s fair to ask whether, if MPs are to use their privilege in this way, the protection it offers ought to be withdrawn. I have long believed it utterly iniquitous that, if the employee of a foreign embassy kills your child through dangerous or drunken driving, he is not liable and you may have no redress because he enjoys diplomatic immunity. And it hardly distinguishes Hemming’s stance that he himself is a ludicrous figure with a personal life as messy and amoral as any soap opera character, lived with careless unconcern.

John Hemming MP, not especially choosy about his causes

The notion that Giggs “deserves everything he gets for cheating on his wife” errs on the side of puritan severity and determinism. Giggs is one of the oldest professional footballers still active at the highest level of the game and the corollary of that is that the world has changed profoundly since he entered the game. It’s easy to be morally superior about relatively uneducated working class boys who become very rich and famous without much psychological tuition in how to handle it. Henry Kissinger, a very clever and well educated man, once observed with delighted surprise that “power is a great aphrodisiac”. Giggs and Wayne Rooney and John Terry may not know what that means but they experience its operation. So did I in a small way. In the years that I was a television producer, I was offered sexual favours on a far more regular – even routine – basis than I ever was at any other period of my life. It’s an extremely disciplined individual who remembers always to just say no.

On the other hand, Giggs is a grown-up and he must know that involving himself in an adulterous relationship is a risky business, especially with a woman whose own “fame” derives from a so-called reality show and who could very readily be mistaken for a gold-digger. It’s in the nature of “cheating” in any way – adultery, drug-enhancement, expenses-fiddling, plotting terrorism – that a degree of furtive behaviour is required in its execution. Behaving furtively in itself implies a danger of being found out. Everybody being furtive must understand that the behaviour is AYOR.

But of course it’s nobody’s business what Giggs gets up to in his sexual life and nobody has any basis on which to pontificate, for instance, that his behaviour has “destroyed his family”. It might be that the public fuss has done far more damage to his domestic situation than would have been caused had he informed his wife of the adultery in his own time and without the hovering media. None of us can know what the ramifications might be but Mrs Stacey Giggs may well reflect that there have been four people in her marriage: her and her husband, his mistress and the watching world.

Into the middle of this melange has erupted another matter on which the press has not distinguished itself. I am not of the view that the highest achievement of press freedom is its willingness to pour abuse upon a public servant. The press, loudly led by the tabloids, decided very quickly after the so-called “Baby P” case broke that the witch to be hunted should be Head of Haringey Social Services, Sharon Shoesmith.

Sharon Shoesmith, a rare image not chosen to suggest that she is smug

Now that she has appealed her dismissal and won her case, the knives have been unsheathed again. I accept that Shoesmith has not helped her own image with some of the comments she made to the media. Many a tweeter thrust into the spotlight might make comments that were not thought-through too. The Twitter bandwagon blackguarding Shoesmith is gleefully leapt on by thousands of know-nothings who wouldn’t themselves dream of taking a social worker job for ten times the miserable salary and wouldn’t begin to have the sense or sensibility to consider the conundrums daily presented by social work.

In a posting when the story first broke, before Shoesmith’s unfair dismissal, I wrote the following and I stand by it:

“Armchair pundits, among whom I readily number myself, have turned their special venom on the hapless social workers of Haringey. Because Baby P died on their watch, they have, in an inimitable headline from The Sun, ‘BLOOD ON THEIR HANDS’. Being wise after an event that they didn’t even know had happened until they read about it in the news columns is the special talent of armchair pundits. Columnists who couldn’t find Haringey in the London A-Z (let alone their arses with both hands) profess to know better than seasoned social workers what constitutes a palpable risk. Columnists whose entertainment expense accounts are higher in a week than a social worker earns in a month demand that heads roll.

“Social work is a vocational career. You need infinite patience and human sympathy. You have to be ready to work anti-social hours and be poorly paid. And you are immediately made aware that it is an art rather than a science. The decisions you make are based wholly on impressions and assessments that are subjective. There will be people whose casework you take on who will tell you what they think you’ll want to hear; others who will have few means of articulating what their situation is; and most of them will be in some degree desperate and not all of them can be saved from self-harm or harming others. Nobody pays you any heed until something “goes wrong” and then a bunch of scandalised know-alls in London, whose knowledge of social deprivation derives almost entirely from an occasional look at EastEnders, start writing about you as if you yourself are a serial killer.

“I honestly don’t understand why cases like this are taken up by the media at all. They have no news value. Editors prate about ‘human interest’ but if viewers, listeners and readers are ‘interested’ it is because the media does its best to make them so. It’s mere prurience. The day after the Baby P case went large, there was a brief story, played almost as big for a day or two, of a mother who had been sectioned after killing her two small children. Tragically for the pundits, there was no evidence of social workers stoking the fire of this particular case so it fell off the news agenda. That didn’t prevent the BBC Television News bulletins from carrying a vox pop with a neighbour who was too emotional to be able to contribute anything useful. What is the value of this kind of coverage? Do the editors believe that we need to be shown someone upset before we can understand that the case is upsetting? And what are we supposed to do with this knowledge? Wring our hands? Take to the streets? Perhaps write to our MPs – not least the prime minister and the leader of the opposition – and ask them to stop uttering the word “families” as though it has a religious connotation when all the media evidence suggests that families can actually be fatal for children?” [P BABY: NO MORE DRAMAS November 19th 2008]

Traditionally, the point at which one fully realises how grossly inaccurate is the daily reporting carried by the papers is the occasion when one is unfortunate enough to become the object of press interest. Again in a modest way, I have had my own small experience of this. The arrogant assumption, empty speculation and reckless kite-flying that routinely informs press coverage has been further overlaid of late by the greatly increased encouragement of rebarbative levels of abuse from readers. On-line comment threads attached to the threadbare and frequently synthetic sneerings of columnists and the gathering momentum of sanctimonious abuse on Twitter have demonstrated just how widespread among the public is the taste for impotent rage. The press gleefully throws petrol on these wildfires in the form of hapless individuals: Ken Clarke one week, Ryan Giggs the next, Sharon Shoesmith the next.

The media wields enormous power and prompts millions to assume they have knowledge that in fact they do not have. I would have a great deal more faith and confidence in the press if it considered and discussed its own responsibilities half as readily as it shouts its claims to rights to which it is not entitled.

DON’T BE VAGUE …

Is it a libel if one describes a person as gay when he or she is not so? If it is indeed libellous, why would it be so? Homosexuality is not against the law in Britain, so long as it is between consenting adults in private. In what would consist the libel? Is being gay a stigma in the eyes of the law, even though it is not illegal?

And are there degrees of liability in such a case? Would a false accusation of homosexuality still be held to be defamatory per se or would the plaintiff now need to show that it was defamatory per quod, that is to say that actual damage was caused, whether directly financial or indirectly financial – in the sense of adversely affecting the plaintiff’s career? These are shifting sands and no juridical toe has been dipped in them since the end of 2005 when Robbie Williams was awarded substantial damages against The People newspaper for carrying an allegation that he was secretly gay and that his then imminent autobiography would perpetrate a deception upon the public by accounting him heterosexual.

Clearly an important ingredient in the matter is the direct accusation or veiled suggestion within the supposed libel that the subject is a liar. This is a further fraught area. Is it defamatory to accuse someone falsely of being a liar? In the world of politics, mendacity is taken very seriously. In neither house are you permitted to call a fellow member a liar or to imply as much. Alan Clark famously described himself as having been “economical with the actualité”, a thrust that he would have made against a fellow politician at his peril.

All these questions arise in the light of today’s lead story in The Daily Telegraph, headed “Cabinet minister may act over false claims of gay affairs”. You can read the piece at

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/7968924/Cabinet-minister-may-act-over-false-claims-of-gay-affairs.html

The very headline raises a number of questions. Is something that “may” happen legitimately a news item? Shouldn’t the newspaper take a more even-handed line with the story, for instance by placing the word “false” in quotation marks? To state falsity baldly implies that the paper accepts without question that the claims are false. Putting the word in quotes would more properly and appropriately indicate that the cabinet minister in question holds that they are false. But if the paper does not believe that there is any fire under the smoke, why is it running the story at all, let alone as its lead?

Coyly, the paper never hints at the identity of the cabinet minister. Such fastidiousness is unusual in the press, including The Telegraph itself which, in repeating rumours in the past while denying or questioning them, has not been backward in naming those touched by the rumours. Simultaneously, the paper today carries the news, shared with all its fellows, of the statement by the junior minister Crispin Blunt that he has separated from his wife and has “decided to come to terms with his homosexuality”. On another page, the paper repeats the “gay rumours” concerning the MI6 operative whose body was found earlier in the week. These rumours it roundly denounces as “smears”, seemingly picking up the term from the dead man’s family. I will not have been alone, immediately the story first broke, in suspecting that we would sooner or later hear of a real or imagined gay angle to this bizarre killing.

The cabinet minister story has been circulating on the internet and it is the work of but a moment to identify the subject, if one couldn’t already guess. It is William Hague, the Foreign Secretary. In truthfully asserting that he is the subject of rumour, I do not, I think, commit any offence against him. I am not crediting the rumour. It is not for me to judge whether it be true or false.


William & Ffion Hague

But William Hague is a grown-up and a politician in the public eye. Indeed, he has been in the public eye for more of his life than any of his peers – 33 of his 49 years – because he famously scored a hit with the Tory Party and the then leader Margaret Thatcher when he addressed the party conference at the tender age of 16. So it is reasonable to examine his behaviour and to ask whether he might have avoided the possibility that rumours of homosexuality might attach themselves to him.

Hague married Ffion Jenkins shortly before he himself became leader of the Tory Party. He was then 36, young to be leader, old to marry. Bachelor MPs inevitably provoke questions. When he appeared on Desert Island Discs, Gordon Brown was asked by then host Sue Lawley: “are you gay?” He said “no”. He didn’t appear to take umbrage. Nothing more was made of it. Brown finally married at 49 but I have never heard the whisper of a suggestion that he was gay or thought to be gay by anyone. (Someone once told me, laughably yet earnestly, that Tony Blair was gay; not a belief shared by many, I suggest).


Thatcher with her 16 year-old fan

If he wanted to avoid any suspicion about his sexuality, William Hague went about it in a decidedly cavalier fashion. At Oxford, he was befriended by Alan Duncan – they both became President of the Union, a customary rung on the ladder to a political career. They subsequently shared a Battersea flat and both became management trainees at Shell Oil. Duncan then swanned off to make his fortune in business. Duly achieved, some of the fortune was ploughed into a swanky house convenient for the Commons and Hague became Duncan’s lodger at the rent of a monthly case of champagne. The street in which they played house, they may perhaps have enjoyed telling people, was Gayfere Street.

Hague became an MP at a by-election in 1989 and Duncan joined him on the government benches in 1992. When John Major stood down after the 1997 election defeat, it was Duncan who persuaded Hague to stand in his own right rather than as number two to Michael Howard. Hague somewhat unexpectedly won the ballot. But his time leading the party was unhappy, partly because Duncan was initially his advisor and gave lousy advice. Hague had made Duncan his parliamentary political secretary, a post that had never existed before and has not been reinstated since Duncan stepped down from it and from being Hague’s press advisor.


Akan Duncan with his civil partner James Dunseath

After the Tory failure at the 2001 election, Hague was replaced as leader by Iain Duncan Smith. It was only a few months later that Alan Duncan publicly acknowledged for the first time what everyone at Westminster and on Fleet Street had always known: that he was gay. What wasn’t remarked at the time - though it certainly occurred to me – was that the reason why Duncan had passed ten years in the house before coming clean was that it might have occasioned questions about his relationship with Hague. Now that Hague was yesterday’s man, it was of no interest to anyone.

But Hague is now Foreign Secretary and questions about him appear to bear renewed pith. What has sparked this particular flurry is the appearance in the Daily Mail of pictures of Hague with one of his aides, a 25 year-old called Chris Myers. Ostensibly, the paper was running the picture sequence in order to mock Hague's reversion to the baseball cap that did his image such damage when he was first Tory leader (he is clutching the cap in the picture I reproduce below). But of course the real interest lies in his choice of strolling companion. Myers has recently become Hague’s third special advisor. The government has undertaken to cull the number of special advisors, but no Labour foreign secretary required more than two such.


The man of the people down the pub

To describe Hague’s appearance with Myers as “informal” would hardly be to overstate. Admittedly these photographs were taken last year, when Hague was only shadow Foreign Secretary. On the other hand, it illustrates that the pair were at the very least on matey terms before Myers’ elevation.

Now I must make clear that I neither make nor intend any innuendo about this relationship. All I submit is that Hague has been reckless with his image, knowing as he must do that the press will put two and two together and make 180 if given half the chance. If he wants these rumours to be stilled, he needs to govern his behaviour. And, if I were he, I wouldn’t submit myself to media interview for a good long time. Because if someone asks Sue Lawley’s question, he will have to say a blunt, simple and entirely truthful “no”. Anything else would bring him down. That is why the per quod action is pertinent to any libel suit he may decide to pursue. But of course he won’t be resorting to the courts. The precedents for such action are not encouraging.


With aide Chris Myers