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: 11% [?]

 I don’t know if swine flu is yet rife within the offices of News Corp’s world wide operations, but there is a visible increase in cases of galloping amnesia, if not downright mendacity, doing the rounds among their senior executives, especially when being asked questions by Members of Parliament.

Les Hinton, with silver locks well coiffed and a chummy habit of calling his questioners by their Christian names, consented to give evidence today to the House of Commons Culture Media Sport Committee via video-link from New York. He used to be Executive Chairman of News International, which owns the Murdoch newspapers in Britain, until December 2007, when he was promoted CEO of Dow Jones in New York, after Murdoch’s News Corp acquired it in their takeover of the Wall Street Journal.

          He was, therefore, boss of Stuart Kuttner, Tom Crone and Andy Coulson, the management in charge of the News of the World when Royal Editor, Clive Goodman was jailed along with private investigator Glenn Mulcaire for tapping the phones of members of Prince Charles’ household.

          As executive chairman at the time, he was as responsible as any of his subordinates for what went on – unless, of course, they knew more than he did about those events. But one of the committee today pointed out the striking similarity in the way Hinton answered the questions put to him and the efforts of his former executives. The number of times he shrugged his shoulders and declared he was “sorry but he just didn’t know”, or that, “given how busy he was at the time, he just couldn’t remember”, almost rivalled Andy Coulson’s performance in front of the same committee in July, when he declared he had no recollection of his paper publishing a transcript of a telephone message left by Prince William for Prince Harry, reproduced verbatim on p.7 of the Screws with a strap across the front page.

          However, Les did let slip one little droplet of truth.

          Asked, ‘Did it surprise you that Andy Coulson didn’t know that a voicemail had been hacked?’ he answered, ‘He might well have known.’

          Thanks, Les. That’s what we’ve all been saying.

          But, on the other hand, Les didn’t know why News International had given Gordon Taylor and his associates a million quid in damages, although he was very much in charge when the events that led to it took place.

          That is so surprising, you could be forgiven for thinking Les was being a tad disingenuous. And when asked who had given him the advice that NI should give a substantial settlement to a journalist who had been dismissed for plainly breaking his contract, or how Clive Goodman had been able to afford a top QC to fight his case (when he’d already pleaded guilty), he’d jolly well forgotten again.

          If I were a share-holder in News Corps, I think I’d be very worried that one of its principal assets is being run by a man who has lost his capacity to remember such important details.

Popularity: 2% [?]

All power to the Information Commissioner, Richard Thomas who has instigated a fresh prosecution for offences against the Data Protection Act. Despite lack of resources, he has been resolute in bringing such prosecutions where he can, when he stands a chance of seeing a conviction.

Ian Kerr operates an organisation innocuously called the Consulting Agency which trades in personal, sometimes very long term personal information about British construction workers – particularly any items that might indicate a tendency to combat malpractice and injustice to members of the workforce.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Outgoing PCC Chairman, Sir Christopher ‘RedSox’ Meyer doth protest a lot –  you could say, too much. He complained yesterday while giving evidence to the HoC Culture, Media, Sport Committee Inquiry that a number of London media law firms regard the PCC as their sworn enemy. He was referring of course to those law firms who act for plaintiffs who have been libelled or had their privacy violated by the newspapers whose excesses Meyer’s organisation is supposed to keep in check.

Popularity: 1% [?]

On July 7th I blogged about the absurdity of a classic Screws front page fantasy headed ‘BURRELL: I HAD SEX WITH DIANA’, with a photo of the Princess filling the page.

At the time it was clear to anyone with any perception of the Screws version of the truth that the whole story was nonsense. They’d paid Burrell’s brother-in-law, a shifty little chancer called Ron Cosgrove to tell them that Burrell had told him (back in 1993) that he’d had sex with Princess Diana.

Popularity: 1% [?]