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MAX SETTLES FOR MURDOCH’S MILLION.
Max Clifford has accepted £1m in what is described not as compensation for invasion of privacy (which is what it is) but as “costs” and a “personal payment” from the News of the World. A Court Order rescinding the Feb 3rd request for disclosure by Mulcaire and of the Screws’ settlement with Gordon Taylor, also states that there shall be no order as to costs, and makes no mention of a settlement, which effectively allows the Screws to deny any wrongdoing, despite this massive pay out to avoid having to make the potentially catastrophic disclosures ordered at the request of Clifford’s lawyers.
No wonder the deal has taken so long to work out, with all this give and take, though it seems likely, with Max holding the whip hand, and Ol’ Rumplechops hopping around in New York, worried shitless about the truth coming out, that he could have held out for a great deal more. After all, Les Hinton was in charge of News International at the time of their Royal phone hacking debacle, and there are few who doubt he knew what was going on, at leat as much as managing editor Stuart Kuttner (who master-minded the scheme), head of legals, Tom Crone and Andy Coulson, who was editor at the time. This is a big problem for Murdoch who is desperate to be perceived as a respectable, major player in New York, as the proprietor of the pre-eminent Wall Street Journal, which Les Hinton now fronts up for Rupert.
I understand that everyone has their price, as Rupert knows well. Since the Royal phone-hacking prosecution revealed five more victims, the Screws have already paid off Clive Goodman and Glenn Mulcaire, the hacks who’d been hung out to dry. They have also given a fat fee to Elle Macpherson for an interview (by Sarah Brown, for heaven’s sake!) in their “Crapulous!” magazine, in which pages are devoted to plugging her range of knickers. They’ve paid Gordon Taylor and his minions c £1m in costs and damages.
But a lot of us were hoping Max would abide by his pledge, issued when he launched his claim against the Screws, that his principal aim was to uncover the Truth. He didn’t especially need the money (and anyway said he would give any proceeds of the suit to children’s health charities.) If he hadn’t take Rupert’s tainted money and persisted with his claim, and won (which he almost certainly would have done), he’d have been lucky to be awarded £30K – £50K, but the News of the World, the Metropolitan Police and Glenn Mulcaire would have been forced to produce details which would have had disastrous effects, possibly leading to widened charges over the original phone-hacking crimes.
So, the Murdoch’s have sort of got away with it this time (for a £1m + their own costs), but the temptation for the growing number of confirmed Screws’ targets to ask for more of the same has been magnified. It only needs one whose sense of public duty outstrips their own greed to go all the way, and force them to throw into the public domain details of endemic illegal news-gathering.
And back in Romania, Albania, and probably still in London,too, is a band of men who have been falsely accused, imprisoned on remand and subsequently acquitted as a result of fabricated stories cobbled together by disgraced Screws Investigations Editor, Mazher Mahmood. In the currrent climate, these victims of the Screws’ outrageous attitude to Truth and Justice could offer a profitable project for a good, hungry lawyer.
Popularity: 3% [?]
CUNNING COULSON SUBMITS SAMANTHA TO A DOUBLE SPIN
The Conservatives’ Master of Ironic Spin and Double-bluff, Andy Coulson has pulled off a useful image-enhancing coup at a key moment in the Tories’ election campaign.
He has contrived to have it leaked, by means of a TV “gaffe” by Tory Shadow Arts Minster, Ed Vaizey that Samantha Cameron, sexy wife of Vaizey’s leader and close friend, has voted Labour in the past. To compound the effectiveness of the spin, of course, the Conservatives are denying it hotly, and Sam announced that she never voted for Tony Blair, adding the unverifiable statement that she has never voted labour.
She may have done; she may not, but in 1992, she and Dave had barely met and weren’t an item (they weren’t married until 1996). During the general election that year (Kinnock’s Greatest Hour and the year of his pre-triumphal rallies in football stadia across the nation), Sam was studying Fine Art at UWE, Bristol. At that time (after 11 years of Mrs T, and a year of dithering by Major) and in that place, she could only have considered voting labour.
On close inspection, and despite the Conservatives’ faux indignation, this revelation that an intelligent art student in her early 20s had – at least temporarily – eschewed her tribal leanings and abandoned the prescribed path of the burgeoning Sloane Ranger or Hooray Henrietta, is entirely positive. It can have done nothing but good for Cameron’s appeal to the middle-ground, as yet uncommitted voters that Cameron needs to swing him into power. It is precisely these non-tribal, thinking voters that he needs to impress – and they will be impressed by Sam’s evident (and quite possibly genuine) independence of thought and social sensitivity.
On the same theme, since my blog last week on the electoral liability of George Osborne (despite Coulson’s best efforts to make him more elector-friendly by dirtying him up a bit through tales of student friendships with less than straight, drug-using, non-white folk), rumours abound that Osborne is to be sidelined in the Conservatives principle electoral push, with the likable, reliable and unsnobby Ken Clarke returning to the fore.
If he moves into No 10, Andy Coulson’s former involvement with illegal activities at the News of the World will make him a serious, long term liability for Cameron, despite his best efforts now.
Since he’s shown them how to do it, DC should bung him out before his presence does serious damage.
Popularity: 22% [?]
METRO BANK TO CATER FOR EXPANDED PROSTATES.
In these days of dwindling numbers of public loos, and burgeoning ranks of older men with expanded prostates, Metro Bank, the new high street operator bank opening this year could be on to a winner – their branches, they say, will cointain lavatories for the use of their customers. There must be millions of older fellows fed up with being caught short with a bladderful, who’ll welcome the chance to belong to a bank in the high street that that will provide peace of bladder seven days a week.
Nappy changing facilities could do the same for the mothers of young children, provided perhaps that they sign up the nappy-changee as future customers.
And a resident physio might attract the armies of Britons who claim to suffer from bad backs. There’s not end to what else could attract the punters under the banner of service.
Popularity: 33% [?]
GEORGE AND THE DOMINATRIX
George Osborne is widely perceived by many potential conservative voters as the wobbly plank in David Cameron’s platform.
It isn’t simply that Osborne looks and sounds too young and inexperienced ; there is also an air of supercilious knowingness about him which effectively trumps Cameron’s sincerity.
He had a chance to show depth and honesty in autumn 2008, the day he had delivered one of his most convincing speeches to the party conference at a time when the full scale of the disastrous mess the bankers had made for us all was still emerging. On television that evening he was presented with a critical moment at which he could have shown sincerity, humility and credibility (if he possessed such qualities).
He gave a long, wide-ranging interview about the banking crisis, in which he could have owned up to the conservatives’ share of the blame.
But at no point did he acknowledge or apologise for his party’s absence of criticism of the bankers’ behaviour, or his own silence on the government’s lack of control over the excessive risks being taken by most of Britain’s larger financial institutions.
Here was a moment when he could have shown courage, by admitting to the electorate, “We should have done more – much more – but we didn’t.”
Another aspect of the liability which Osborne represents for his party lies in the origin of his very close relationship with Andy Coulson, the disgraced former editor of the News of the World.
This friendship goes back several years, to autumn 2005, just before the annual conference, when Coulson ran a front page splash in the Screws…
TOP TORY, COKE AND THE HOOKER
Illustrated with pictures of the angel-faced Shadow Chancellor, it claimed that eleven years before, while he was at Oxford, the then flawless Osborne was said, without any convincing corroboration, to have looked on while ‘dominatrix’ hooker, Natalie Rowe, snorted a line of coke. Her boyfriend, an unnamed friend of Osborne’s had gone on to become an addict, the report alleged.
It was, on closer inspection, an archetypal Screws non-story, devoid of any hard content, worded so as to avoid any come-back, but just salacious enough to justify its front page status, and, of course, devoid of any genuine revelations about the politician, beyond the fact that in his youth he’d had a friend who knew a prostitute and who’d become addicted to an unspecified drug.
When the story appeared, I remember being struck not by the damage that might have been done to the ambitious young politician, but by how much good it had done him. After all, the story didn’t say George himself had actually done anything at all.
He hadn’t snorted the coke, and he hadn’t taken advantage of the hooker’s professional skills, ‘dominatrix’ or otherwise. But it did make him look, by association, as if he’d lived a bit and had a touch of grubby humanity to him, which went a long way to counter the unsexy image of a choir-boy-coiffed goody-two-shoes, that must have been causing concern in the Party’s image department.
In a well-constructed profile of Coulson in the Guardian, John Harris noted that Osborne and Coulson had ‘got on well’, even while discussing the Screws ‘exposé’, although, at the time the article was published, the people around Osborne told Harris that he was suffering severe tummy rumbles and telling everyone how upset he was.
Well, he would, wouldn’t he?
There’d be little point in constructing a subtle piece of well-spun double-bluff, then rushing around telling people how chuffed about it you were. For this astutely ironic act of spin, Andy established his credentials with Osborne and, at least covertly, made his political allegiance known.
George and Andy were still in touch after Andy’s resignation from the Screws for his role in the Royal phone hacking debacle, and it was then that Osborne persuaded his boss that Coulson was just the man to give the white-tie-and-tails Bullingdon folk some much-needed street cred among the elusive middle ground voters.
Osborne no doubt sees it as part of his job to get close to people of great wealth and commercial power, as evidenced by his presence in Corfu in Autumn 2008, when he skipped between three monster yachts belonging to the Murdochs, Rupert’s son-in-law Matthew Freud, and Russian mega-oligarch, Oleg Deripaska, from whom he famously failed to extract a donation (while crapping on his old friendship with the mightily oofy Nathaniel Rothschild). He happily allowed himself to be pampered and wooed by Ole Rumplechops and his Titian-tressed larrikin, Rebekah Brooks, while at home Andy Coulson strengthened the bonds between the Tories and News Corp.
This relationship has been almost irrevocably sealed by the Sun’s conversion to the Conservative cause, the party’s concurrence with Murdoch briefing on the BBC, and the continuing, high risk loyalty being shown to Coulson despite all the outrageous lapses of memory and lacunae of knowledge he displayed in front of the Commons Culture Media & Sport Committee last summer.
It is this relationship, more than anything Gordon does or doesn’t do, that will do the real damage to Cameron’s electoral chances among the voters that matter – those who take the trouble to scrutinise and weigh the issues before they vote, rather than those who simply vote along tribal lines.
It’s too late re-instate Ken Clarke where he belongs, which would appease a lot of the wavering conservative support (while the Europhobes will still vote for Cameron, rather than Nigel Farrago.)
But it’s not too late to ask Coulson to go.
If the Tories don’t dump him, but still get in, are they ready to risk the great flock of chickens out there, flapping their wings before coming home to roost on Coulson’s back, come the autumn?
Popularity: 40% [?]
BBC ONLINE: DON’T CUT – JUST CHARGE
Instead of axing jobs on their Website to save money, the BBC should start charging for access to their online news services, which would give newspaper sites the chance to charge too, and thus generate revenue to replace their ebbing print sales and ad income. In fiuture, this may be the only way they’ll be able to support quality newsgathering and journalim – and that’s going to become rare and valuable.
Popularity: 21% [?]
AC/DC – A SHOCKING MESS. Andy Coulson/ David Cameron
While I applaud John Whittingdale and the Culture Media Sport Committee for their work on making the libel courts a level field of play and for proposing a set of effective teeth for the clapped out PCC, I have to ask myself why in this morning’s Guardian, Whittingdale downplays the importance of their having doggedly pursued the truth about the Screws’ phone-hacking scandal and identified the possibility that senior executives on a paper in Britain’s largest group of national titles may have been complicit, thereby liable to the legal penalties of those who were charged and jailed for phone-hacking.
You wouldn’t have too be much of a cynic to think it likely that people from Conservative Central Office have been leaning on the (minority) Tory members of the committee to leave Andy Coulson alone.
But it would be far safer, in the long run, for senior Tories to ask Coulson to step down, at least until every last investigation has taken place, than to let him stay until they are indelibly tainted by his presence. After all, he hasn’t been doing such a great job with the leader’s image over the last month or so.
With so many Screws’ phone-hacking victims waiting in the wings to sue (and there are hundreds of them), there’s a very good chance that – sooner or later - one of the targets won’t be fobbed off, as I hear Max Clifford will be, with a large purse of gold.
Another confirmed phone-hacking vicitm who won’t be calling in the services of the High Court is Aussie super-body, Elle Macpherson. Why would she, when the Screws , in their tacky little Sunday mag, CRAPULOUS generously gave her a multi-page spread , with an elaborate photo-shoot and a healthy number of name checks for her range of knickers – Elle Macpherson Intimates? (There – she just got another one!)
I dare say Ole Rumplechops (who’s right on top of this potentially disastrous embarrassment), encouraged a large ‘expenses’ cheque for her, too – almost certainly more than she’d have got from Mr Justice Eady for Invasion of Privacy (Max Mosely only got £60K by going to court, but the Screws paid c.£800k to make Gordon Taylor and his friends go away.) Max Clifford won’t come cheap, either. So the Screws may not have been nicked (yet) but it’s costing them plenty to keep out of the High Court, where they’d have to reveal all sorts of nasties. Poor Ole Rumplechops – throwing all that money away when he’s so close to retirement.
Pursuing the truth to the end will take strong principles and big bollocks –
Who’s got ‘em?
Lembit Opik? Not really.
Boris Johnson? I doubt it.
Tessa Jowell? Who knows? (David Mills might.)
George Galloway? Let’s hope so.
Popularity: 33% [?]
Boo-Hoo. Adrian Chiles shows a wobbly bottom lip.
Over the last 30 years the BBC has stealthily assumed the mantle of the nation’s cultural and social anthropological arbiter. This has encouraged them to foist on their listeners and viewers certain performers – mostly in the non-talent-related field of presenting – of minority types to which they feel we should become accustomed and appreciate. A recent example of this activity is the adoption and promotion of the untalented, blubber-lipped, dim-witted, mono-toned, unfunny, unattractive fatso, Adrian Chiles.
Slowly, inexorably as the style wizards at the BEEB have let it be seen that Chubby Chiles represents a suitable role model for our young and impressionable, his flabby frame has been increasingly exposed – until they have given him an early prime time slot on the One Show, a kind of Blue Peter for almost-grown-ups, to which a well-groomed orang-utan could not fail to draw knackered and desensitized viewers after a hard day’s work.
But someone up there in White (Ivory Tower) City has at last spotted that Chiles is about as exciting a performer as a plate of blancmange, and they’ve thought it expedient to replace him on the all-important Friday show with the idiotic but immeasurably more watchable Chris Evans (despite the Ginger One not speaking Brummie, Ulster or Geordie.)
Chiles’ blubbery lower lip is reported to have gone all wobbly at the news. He says he doesn’t want to do the other days if Evans does Friday sitting next to the perma-grinning Christine Bleakley. The BBC are said even to have offered him his own Friday night Plug-Whinge-And-Fart Show – what they like to call a Chat Show.
Incredibly, Chubby Chiles is an £1m a year contract. It is contemptible that the Corporation should chuck our money around to people like this without even asking us. I challenge them to provide any evidence that there is a demand for Chiles, or others like him – e.g: the grim Mogadon that is Stephen Nolan, brought over from Belfast at great expense every week to turn off the listeners of otherwise perky Radio 5 Live for four hours over the weekend.
If Chiles walks from the One Show – which he is mercifully threatening to do – don’t be surprised if they try and slip Nolan in – another dreary fatty with no manners and a bowl of French fries on each shoulder.
And this is not the first time I’ve had to talk about this…
Popularity: 60% [?]
CAMERON: GIVE TOXIC ANDY THE HEAVE-HO.
Yet another indication has emerged that Tory head spinner, Andy Coulson knew perfectly well how much dodgy (= plain illegal) news-gathering was going on at the Screws while he was there.
Guardian sniffer-hack, Nick Davies has identified (though not named, as sub judice) another private investigator who was employed by the Screws when Andy was deputy editor, then went to jail, only to return to their employment when Coulson himself was in the hot seat. Davies quotes Coulson’s reaction to the allegations: “I have nothing to add to the evidence I gave to the select committee.”
Evidence indeed!
All he would say to the MPs was, “I don’t know”, or “I have no recollection,” to every question he was asked – a clear instance of the “amnesia and obfuscation” for which the Committee has heavily criticised the News International executives they called to their inquiry.
By retaining the services of this tainted communications wiz, Cameron is storing up major problems if he ever gets to Downing Street. The thinking electorate (oh yes, there are some) are not happy either with this association, nor Cameron’s relationship with Coulson’s former boss, Rebekah “TestaRossa” Brooks.
If he wants to boost his chances of a win in May, he needs to drop Toxic Andy, right NOW, however much cherubic George complains (and tell the Sun he can do without their help, too.)
Popularity: 42% [?]
Commons Committee scorns Screws evidence
The House of Commons Culture, Media & Sport Committee today publish the long-awaited report on their Inquiry into Press Standards, Privacy & Libel. It pulls no punches in its view of the evidence given by Andy Coulson, Stuart Kuttner and Tom Crone, respectively editor, managing editor and legal boss of the News of the World at the time of the royal phone-hacking scandal.
“Throughout our inquiry … we have been struck by the collective amnesia afflicting witnesses from the News of the World,” the report states, and later…..
“We have repeatedly encountered an unwillingness to provide the detailed information we sought, claims of ignorance or lack of recall and deliberate obfuscation. We strongly condemn this behaviour which reinforces the widely held impression that the press generally regard themselves as unaccountable and that News International in particular has sought to conceal the truth about what really occurred.”
Nevertheless, they say, “We have seen no evidence that Andy Coulson knew that phone hacking was taking place.”
Further on, they refer to a story they published containing a verbatim transcript of a voicemail from Prince William to Prince Harry with an “exclusive” front page strap on an issue edited by Coulson. The story could only have been obtained by illegal phone-hacking. When Coulson was questioned closely on this by committee members Adam Price and Paul Farrelly, he claimed, incredibly, that he had any knowledge or recollection of the story. His denial, with a copy of the 0ffending paper in front of him, was broadcast that evening on Channel 4 News. It was clkear to the millions watching that he was not telling the truth.
I asked committee chairman, John Whittingdale at yesterday’s briefing if he had believed Coulson.
Whittingdale could only say that they’d had to “accept at face value Andy Coulson’s assurances that he had no recollection of the major royal story in his paper.
It has also emerged, the report goes on, that substantial, gratuitous pay-outs were made to private investigator, Glenn Mulcaire, and royal reporter, Clive Goodman in order to ensure their silence.
Since publication of the report this morning there have been calls for a Judicial Inquiry by Culture Secretary, Ben Bradshaw and Lib Dem spokesman, Chris Huhne.
Beyond this most politically charged aspect of their report, John Whittingdale and his committee have come to several well-considered and, if adopted, useful conclusions.
Unless the Press Complaints Commission is extensively overhauled and reconstituted, the report says, it cannot deliver satisfactory regulation of the press. They recommend that the lay (non-journalist) membership of the commission be increased from 10 out of 17 to a two-thirds majority and that its powers be enhanced, to give it effective teeth, although they stop short of advising a statutorily created body. They feel that this shouldn’t be necessary if all the participants are willing.
The PCC should also be more proactive when they see abuses of the Editors’ Code, and not wait for someone to lodge a complaint. They should ensure that all relevant bodies that liaise with potentially injured parties are fully aware of the services the PCC can offer. Victims like the McCanns and the families of the Bridgend teenage suicides should have been referred to the Commission right from the start.
All the national press should participate in the funding of the PCC and their journalists should be mandatorily contracted to adhere to the PCC Code.
The PCC should also have power to ensure that any apologies or corrections appearing subsequent to offending stories should have a prominence equal to the original story. In addition, the Commission should be able to impose financial penalties and, in extremis, the power to order suspension of the printing of a publication for one issue. The committee recommends that PCC be renamed the Press Complaints and Standards Commission, to underline this broader remit.
Under the heading of Press Standards, there are recommendations that the PCC adjudicate over misleading headlines that don’t reflect the content of the piece below them. Public comments on papers’ blog-sites should be more rigidly moderated, and offending text removed as soon as it comes to light.
The use of injunctions and parliamentary reporting was also scrutinised by the Committee, especially as experienced last year in the Trafigura case and more recently in the John Terry case.
They had taken evidence last summer from Max Mosley who explained that as a result of his own experiences he had approached the European Court in Strasbourg in an attempt to establish in England the right of the potential target of a damaging story to have it injuncted until such time as the paper can demonstrate a genuine public interest, on the grounds that a retrospective judgement against a publication will not put the cat back in the bag, after the damage has been done.
The CMS Committee, however, conclude that it would be more appropriate to “encourage editors and journalists to notify in advance the subject of a critical story or report by permitting courts to take account of a failure to notify when assessing damages in any subsequent proceedings for breach of Article 8.” (the right to privacy). Meanwhile, however, the cat is still out of the bag.
John Whittingdale and his Committee have, on balance, produced a thorough and wide-ranging report and have pitched their recommendations within the realms of the practicable, although what legislation will follow a general election, with one of their principal and most elusive witnesses sitting in Downing Street, is another matter.
Popularity: 61% [?]
Will the Culture Media & Sport Committee release a new watchdog – with teeth?
Tom Crone, head legal honcho at News International thinks he has something to crow about in NI’s staff Magazine “We’re News” (oh yeah?). He thinks that Mr Justice Tugendhat’s lifting of the super-injunction over reports of John Terry’s playing away is “a victory by the News of the World which will lead to a fundamental assessment of our draconian privacy laws.”
I doubt it, given the ensuing feeding frenzy on the carcase of an old story about Ashley Cole and a more recent kill, Vernon Kay’s infidelity. This simply demonstrates yet again that large sections of the British press just can’t be trusted to find a balance between every individual’s right to a private life and the papers’ own perceived right to trumpet any intimate details (often regardless of the truth) of a public or semi-public figure’s life, that will sell their squalid little rags.
Inevitably, there will always be a tension between the press (of all hues) who want (and might argue “need”) as few obstacles as possible to their telling the truth about those who are accountable – in some degree to - the public they serve, supply or entertain, and individuals who feel they have a right to protect details of their non-public activities that have no bearing on their public function – even if they do not conform to prevailing moral standards – so long as they are legal.
Genuine newspapers respect this difference, and are rarely sued for breaches of privacy. But as long as the serious and the rubbish press are subject to the same checks and balances, the recidivist tendencies of the tabloids to damage individuals, with no public interest justification, will have to be curbed by effective statutory legislation despite the concerns of the grown-up press, because self-regulation has consistently failed.
The Commons Select Committee for Culture Media and Sport spent most of last year hearing evidence for their Inquiry into Press Standards. After the alarmingly amnesiac performance of the News of the World (including Mr Crone’s) in the Committee Room it is likely to recommend that the problem is confronted by setting up an independent, external industry watch-dog, with real teeth and statutory powers of chastisemnt.
The committee will announce their recommendations on Wednesday.
Popularity: 44% [?]
quite agree. decided not to watch for much the same reason. you can't argue with a closed mind. 
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