Victims of long-term stalkers usually reach a point where discomfort turns to real fear. Andy Coulson, the PM’s Communications Director and the Murdochs’ man in Downing Street must be changing his underwear a lot more frequently these days.
    His personal stalker has been dogging his steps for 3½ years and, since his entry into Downing Street, he must be feeling the hot breath of this unfamiliar stranger on the back of his neck. And like a bad dream, the faster he runs from it, the quicker the pursuit. He’ll fall hard when finally it catches him with the help of the Hounds of Fate – grown-up journalists of all political hues, affronted public figures and politicians (though not obedient Tories) and even a former senior policeman.
    For Truth is a relentless pursuer, who never flags, and never goes away, while Coulson is behaving like a man who truly believes he can outrun the truth while fending it off with crass, oafish denials. But he’s wrong and his Nemesis is closer than ever.
    His position was weakened still further last night by Channel 4’s Dispatches, presented by Daily Telegraph columnist, Peter Oborne. It was hard-hitting, not overloaded with misty reconstruction and sinister music and, while an anonymous senior Screws ex-hack who gave a damning account of Coulson’s compliance with illegal practices failed to deliver that knock-out punch, any ringside judge would have declared Dispatches an easy winner on points.Now the Daily Telegraph and even the not exactly squeaky-clean Daily Mail have finally got their gloves out, the cumulative fusillade will sooner or later  bring Coulson to his knees and the pressure on him to resign, or David Cameron to chuck in the towel on his behalf, will be irresistible.

To illustrate the difficulties in allowing the truth to break free in cases like this, here’s a post I put up last year on Coulson’s performance in front of the Commons Culture Media Sport Committee.

 A CASE FOR WATERBOARDING

22^nd July 2009.

The MPs on the Culture, Media, Sport Committee must have been asking themselves yesterday, what on earth a reasonable person could do when confronted with three hardened, well-rehearsed liars, all desperate to avoid having their collars felt?

Experienced interpreters of body-language can enjoy a revealing session by tuning into the video-archive of yesterday’s oral evidence in front of the CMS Committee in Portcullis House.

Andy Coulson – bullish, assertive, knowing his best defence is attack, with a dash of cheeky chappy charm.

Tom Crone – for once not so sure of his ground, nervously cutting in a little too quickly when little Colin Myler gets it wrong, with a giveaway sheen of sweat on the strong, ruddy features.

Stuart Kuttner – eau de nil, haunted, shaking like an aspen, fiddling, fiddling, picking up his water, putting it down undrunk, rearranging files and pens, moving his large spectacles from side to side – meaning, for those who speak body language, that he is shitting himself; that after an ignominious dismissal by … who? Which Mr Murdoch? … his long, wicked career at the Screws is well and truly on the skids.

Little Colin Myler doesn’t need to lie. He wasn’t there when events at the centre of this enquiry took place. [When he’d arrived, he did arrange a few training sessions in act-cleaning-up for his newsroom hacks. But did Mazhher Mahmood and Neville “Onan the Barbarian” Thurlbeck attend? From the continuing and relentless shoddiness of their output, it seems they were excused – or just weren’t paying attention.]  

When Crone, legal boss of News Group is asked about the terms of a pay-off to Glenn Mulcaire, a former investigations contractor who has been imprisoned for carrying out tasks from which his company profited, and he claims he doesn’t know what those terms were (although he’s very sure that Mulcaire did not sign any non-disclosure agreement), you have to conclude either that he is suffering from severe amnesia and should instantly be relieved of his post, or that he is not telling the truth.

He directed the MPs to ask Stuart Kuttner.

When Kuttner told the MPs, confirming that an arrangement had been made with Glenn Mulciare, he too was utterly unfamiliar with the terms, conditions and size of the pay-off, and that he didn’t know who in an organisation of which he has been Managing Editor for 22 years was responsible for making such arrangements, you have to conclude that he has become insane – for imagining that any rational person would believe him.

When Andy Coulson tells his questioners that he has no recollection whatever of a story, flagged on the front page of an issue of the paper that he’d edited, occupying the whole of Page 7, depicting a verbatim transcript of a message left by one prince on another prince’s voicemail, knowing that not a single person in the Wilson Room in Portcullis House, or viewing the session on Parliament TV, or in the evening news broadcasts would believe him, you a have to conclude that here is a youngish man who sees his whole future in jeopardy if he breaks and admits to a scintilla of knowledge of the phone-hacking that was involved in acquiring the story.

It was very clear that before the three men came in to answer the awkward questions that would be put to them, they had agreed between themselves that they would simply declare either that they didn’t know the answers or that they couldn’t remember the events.

Although this made them look utterly ridiculous, and Tom Crone, as a senior media lawyer, a disgrace to his profession, they knew, if they toughed it out, there was little the MPs could do, for, naturally, there was never a paper trail to confirm the involvement of any of them in the Goodman/Mulcaire case – and short of getting them to submit to US Intelligence gathering techniques on the waterboard, there was nothing more the committee could do to extract the verité.

It was a sad day for British justice and the state of British popular journalism.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Despite a display of arrogant disdain and disingenuousness, Mail editor-in-chief Paul Dacre was given a soft ride by the House of Commons Culture Media Sport Committee when he gave evidence to their Inquiry into Press Standards.

It was disappointing to see that besides the chairman, John Whittingdale, only five of the ten members turned up. I hope there were good reasons for their absence; after all, Dacre is now surely the most influential – and most feared – newspaper editor in the country and it seems likely they would have wanted to put their questions at first hand. I truly hope they didn’t stay away because they didn’t want to upset him. For Dacre has a history of intimidating Members of Parliament – even Prime Ministers, as he did (and subsequently boasted about it) last year when he persuaded the government to remove Clause 76 from the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act, which would have made offences against Section 5 the Data Protection Act 1998 punishable by imprisonment – thereby protecting those of his journalists who make a habit of doing that sort of thing.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Is this the place to put a healthily independent paper? Poor old Independent isn’t only inviting up to 60 staff redundancies, it’s being forced to move and take up lodgings in the Mail building in Ken High Street. The big worry is that they may catch something nasty from Muckraker Dacre’s diseased organ.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Paul Dacre’s conference on Thursday, once the Max Mosley v News of the World judgment had been handed down, must have been as rambunctious as they come. He ordered an all-out 5-page, sixteen gun broadside against the judge in the case, Mr Justice Eady and all he stood for. The judge is to be the victim of a campaign that will see him intimidated and harried until he loses the urge to make judgments that don’t match the thinking of the Nation’s greatest middle-England organ, and the thoughts of Chairman Dacre.

Star scribbler, witty, biting Quentin Letts was told to lead the attack.

Popularity: 1% [?]