SCREWS INTERNATIONAL have just announced that the Wapping Testarossa, Rebekah Wade will become Chief Executive of the Murdochs’ British newspaper operation in two months’ time. This expected upward move will put her in overall control of the Screws, the Sun, the Sunday Times, the Times, and freesheet, the London Paper. It is claimed that these titles (bar the freesheet) represent 40% of the UK market in National newspaper sales.

It is truly amazing to me that as a former editor/deputy editor of the Screws and the Sun who has made so many crass and blatant errors of journalistic judgement, she should be rewarded with this massive job. It says a lot, of course, about Rupert Murdoch’s priorities. But it’s alarming to consider how someone of the Testarossa’s low tastes and preoccupation with trivial bollocks is going to influence the direction of the not entirely worthless Sunday Times.

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It is a little shocking that a seasoned news consumer such as myself can read a broadsheet headline: “Jordan fears consequences of Israeli Wall”, and react to it by spluttering between clenched teeth, ‘Who gives a monkey’s what she thinks!’ before realising that they’re talking about the Hashemite Kingdom, not the witless, talentless, faux-poitrined ‘former glamour model’.

Because it is part of my function to peruse the front pages of the Red-Tops and Shag-Rags, it is with growing disgust that I have seen these papers leading every day for the last fortnight with the holiday antics of this sad, ridiculous person. I don’t (though I would like to) know if the editors or the punters are driving this incomprehensible obsession. Possibly, by some bizarre twist in the taste of the public who choose to buy these papers, the former glamour model has taken the place of the late Princess Diana, and is required to be on the front page, because if she isn’t, a red-top will lose out to its rivals in the way editors claimed they did in the heady days of Diana’s roller-coaster sex-life.  Much as I deplored the gross coverage given to the late Princess, for her privacy as well as my own boredom with her activities, at least there was some justification in that she was the mother of the future king.

But that Jordan, vapid nonentity, should justify any space at all could make you think either that the shag-rag editors or their punters are in the last throes of death by trivia. But this is the insidious nature of persistent coverage that seeps by osmosis from the tabloids e’en unto the Journaux serieux. I don’t know what excuses can be made for papers like the Guardian writing about her and her pointless husband. Of course, any reports (like the most recent, under the banner of television review) in that paper are loaded with appropriate irony. But that’s not enough and still produces more column inches. And was it irony that prompted them to give 2/3 of page to the obituary of the late St Jade Goody – if you can remember who she was?

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Last weekend Ludlow festival kicked off its 50^th anniversary in the profound hope that the rain Gods would lay off. The key element of the festival has always been a fortnight of performances of a Shakespeare play – this year, Romeo & Juliet­ – held in the magnificent arena of Ludlow Castle’s inner bailey. On a warm summer’s evening, as the swifts swoop across a pinkened sky, there can be few more lovely settings.

In the cold rain, it is a species of purgatory.

Alongside the play, other shows, concerts and talks have been put on in an attempt to develop the fortnight into a full-blown arts festival, although somehow this has never really evolved into the recognisably cohesive, focused occasion it could be. Nevertheless, some of the individual events are imaginatively conceived, as was a concert performed by English Ayres on Sunday night in the magnificent, west-facing dining-room of Oakly Park House, three miles north of Ludlow. The Georgian mansion, home of Lord and Lady Windsor, was reordered extensively in the 1820s for Lord Windsor’s ancestor, the Hon Robert Clive by C R Cockerell and is one of his and Shropshire’s finest. Before the concert we stood on the lawn in front of the house, looking  across paddocks and parkland liberally strewn with the venerable oaks that gave the park its name, while we drank a few glasses of champagne.

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On Monday the BBC broadcast a Panorama programme “The Death of Kiss & Tell.”

It’s unsurprising that the BBC should slant its take on “Kiss & Tell” against the victims; it is embedded in the BBC ethos that anyone rich and powerful should be challenged, especially if they use the law to protect themselves from hungry journalists and greedy tabloids.

In a lightweight resumé of the issues (along with some pointless visuals of studio lighting techniques) and in line with the prevailing tabloid obsession with celebrity,  reporter Clive Coleman chose not to talk to any of those non-celebrities who have been also been damaged by unscrupulous, muckraking tabloid editors. The programme failed to acknowledge that such privacy laws as there are, are there to protect any member of the public – rich or poor – from unwarranted intrusion, and that less well-off victims are also beneficiaries of the much vilified Conditional Fee Arrangements (CFAs), which mean lawyers don’t charge if they lose, and take double if they win. It also failed to make the point that those laws don’t exist to protect the rights only of poor people, that the rich have as much right to privacy as anyone else, and because, in the very nature of modern tabloid journalism, they are always going to be targeted more regularly.

I have always fully concurred with the fundamental and freedom enhancing right of the media to report on matters of public interest, and the belief that that end excuses all methods of journalism, but Panorama dwelt only momentarily on that critical definition of public interest. I entirely accept there is no question that when a story has a direct bearing on an individual’s function in public office, or an abuse of privileges that might come with it (like the bonking MP in his office), or points up hypocrisy in actions that fly in the face of an individual’s public pronouncements, the press have a duty to report.

But there should be not a hint of doubt that these criteria have been met before a life-destroying story is unleashed by a national newspaper, never to be expunged from the public domain. Mark Oaten, the conscientious and well-respected MP for Winchester, having decided not to stand following the News of the World’s outing of his gay sex life has decided to bow out gracefully by conceding that the paper was acting in the public interest. I disagree.

If he were a marriage guidance counsellor, or a bishop preaching against adultery or homosexuality, they would have had an uncontestable case. But Oaten was not elected because he was not gay, and it’s questionable that he would have lost any votes if he had been unmarried or openly gay.

Is it in the public interest simply to be told what individuals do in the intimacy of their bedroom? Unless it is illegal or in direct contradiction of public moral positions they have adopted, I think not. But Panorama seems firmly to support the right of any woman who sleeps with a footballer (a premiership one, at least) who is married to someone else, to make a handsome windfall by selling the story to one of the ShagRags. But it doesn’t take much imgination to guess how Panorama front man, Jeremy Vine would feel if some casually (or not so casually) encountered female did the same to him.

Private Eye’s Ian Hislop was wheeled out to back up Paniorama’s positioon  – as a celebrity himself now, thanks to his regular, scathing, chubby presence on HIGNFY – and sneered at the right of anyone to expect their private life to remain so. God help him if he strays (if anyone will have him) and gets caught.

Alan Rusbridger of the Guardian – now the paper of choice for most opinion-formers of all persuasions – was more circumspect, as you might expect from the editor of a paper which, he told the Commons Culture Media Sport Committee last month , has never been sued for invasion of privacy, but nevertheless successfully (and more so than most) covers all major public interest stories.

The self-serving, imbalanced conclusions to which the Panorama producers attempted to steer their audience did not make edifying viewing.

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Last week Opera (see Mozart Rusticana); this week Flamenco in, of all unlikely places, the Georgian Assembly Rooms in Ludlow which still function as the town’s entertainment centre.

I’ve always been attracted to the musical subtleties and sheer physicality of flamenco music and dance and I have regularly promised myself a short sojourn in Seville, to be spent in small, smoky bars where guttural singing and harsh guitar chords echo off low vaulted ceilings – a promise which I have so far failed to keep. With a strongly held view that raw peasant culture like this doesn’t export easily, I had doubts that this powerful musical form would convince when performed on the stage of a provincial English theatre.

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