Rebekah “Babbling” Brooks announces that two News International titles under her control will start charging for online access come next May.
I understand that serious, quality newsgathering has to be paid for, and I deplore the fact that when the time comes (as it will) in which all commercially published newspapers have to charge for their online content in order to supplement the dwindling hard copy sales that currently pay for quality journalism, the BBC will still be offering it for free, subsidised by the licence payers.
This will be profoundly unfair, and massively damaging to non-state owned independent newspapers. The BBC will owe it to the British public who fund it to abandon this anomaly.
It became clear during the London ‘Freeshite’ bonanza that hard copy papers given away for nothing are worth, in news terms, a lot less than the paper on which they are printed [and not even a healthy arse-wiping option].
Similarly, Mrs Brooks evidently doesn’t feel she can charge for online content of her two prominent best-selling ShagRags – the Sun and the Screws – no quality journalism to pay for there. (Unfortunately she does have a number of lawyers’ bills and penalties to pay for a pile of upcoming damages for illegal phone-hacking, and they still have to fork out for unproductive journo-nasties like Mazher Mahmood, because he knows all the dirt on sensitive former execs, like Les Hinton and Andy Coulson – not to mention Stuart Kuttner).

Still, one must – albeit grudgingly – hail Ol’ Rumplechops for having the bollocks to lead where others will have to follow.

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Max Clifford has made up with the News of the World after a four year tiff. He originally fell out with the Screws (when Andy Coulson was editor) over their rough treatment of someone called Kerry Katona (remember her?), who was then (but not now) his client. Posing as a white knight for that sad individual must have been a tricky position to maintain. I dare say Mr C is glad to have £1m gift from the paper as an excuse to climb down. (I’m told the Screws are still the best payers for celebrity trivia.)
 A  publicity agent like Max Clifford being paid a million quid by a Sunday newspaper is a very big story – but it doesn’t feature much in some papers.
Coverage in The Times – 0 words
                 The Sun – 0 words    
Are they asleep on the news desks at Wapping.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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