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.

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Over the last few months Rupert Murdoch has displayed uncharacteristic shilly-shallying over whether or not to charge for online access to the contents of his mainstream papers. (He already charges for digital access to the specialist Wall Street Journal.) It has finally been announced through Times editor, James Harding that his paper – along with other News Corp titles around the world – will definitely be charging for access to online journalism from Spring 2010.
   Old Rumplechops has many regrettable traits, but being a fool isn’t one of them, and it’s hard to argue with the logic of his response to the reality that any serious commercial news medium must generate enough income to pay for quality news gathering (overlooking for a moment the high costs and penalties incurred by one of News Corp’s more disreputable British titles as a result of the systematic invasion of privacy, subterfuge, incitement to crime and plain old phone-screwing that has passed as news gathering for years under former managing editor, Stuart Kuttner).
   It is inevitable that any reliable and responsibly operated news organisation, in order to survive, will, in the end, have to charge for its product however it is disseminated. And most serious news consumers won’t object. Many already buy fewer hard-copy newspapers each week than they used to, and top up with online editions for free. But those who want to continue to receive quality news, independent analysis and opinion will accept that, in the absence of sufficient advertising revenue to fill the vastly greater space and choices available to advertisers online, it has to be paid for somehow.

Where Harding and (presumably) Murdoch are wrong is in insisting that pay-per-item isn’t the way. He says they’ll offer long term subscriptions, or a daily rate. But this doesn’t reflect the way people now use web news services. They are more promiscuous in their relationship with online news purveyors than they are with the hard copy news they buy. (For example, the Guardian is the online best-seller among British papers, with nearly 33m. worldwide unique online users while it has a hard copy circulation of just 300,000 , compared with the Daily Telegraph’s circulation of c.800,000 with 31m. online users, and the Daily Mail’s huge 2,000,000 circulation and 30m. unique worldwide users.)
As the option to view several different versions or perspectives is there, the users do take advantage of it.
It’s likely that the ultimate means of charging and collecting revenue from online visitors will consist of users signing up to a general news service provider, that will allow then into whichever paper they want to visit, having paid into the single service an advance sum on account of incremental payments of say, 15p per article which the service distributes to the newspapers used.
Multiple subscriptions would be time-consuming and tedious to maintain; most people wouldn’t bother to sign up to everything for that reason. But using a central hub and payment platform, they would be able to access anything from the Tablet, the Spectator or the Telegraph, to the Mail or the News of the World.
Inevitably, some publications – like the Guardian, which already has a very successful online presence – will do better than others, and the competitive incentive for continuing to deliver high-quality, trustworthy news will be as strong as ever.
In practical terms, someone currently spending £15 a week on printed papers and weeklies would be able, for the same money, to access 100 separate articles from the whole range of titles on offer in their newsagent – probably more than most would consume in seven days.
I couldn’t find any logic in Harding’s assertion that “with article-only economics, you will find yourself writing a lot more about Britney Spears and a lot less about Tamils in Northern Sri Lanka.” In case he hadn’t noticed, this is precisely what already separates the Broadsheets from the Tabloids, and has done ever since anyone first noticed the difference.
Regrettably, the single biggest obstacle to the success of online news charging, however achieved, has been widely identified as the BBC’s online news service, which of course doesn’t have to compete for advertising income, because its news gathering operation is funded by the Licence Fee. It can and has been argued that providing free online services is not part of the Corporation’s remit under the terms of their broadcasting charter. After all, they’ve never offered the Radio Times free to all licence holders.
A brave government must address this anomaly by disallowing the BBC to offer this free service, except perhaps in the most basic, headline terms, for if this doesn’t happen, we may well witness within a decade or so in this country the death through lack of resources of the strong, independent news providers we currently have – online and on paper.

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Want to know who’s grassing up the MPs’ expenses to the Daily Telegraph? Of course you do!

The whisper around Canary Wharf, according to my tabloid ear-wigger, is that an individual not entirely unconnected with the fringes of the Cabinet and a European Prime Minister is the canary who sings. But why is he or she doing it?

I await/invite confirmation before I release a name.

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When the Oxford University Press brings out a new edition of one of its dictionaries, the publishers often choose to issue provocative press releases announcing scurrilous new words they have included, which usually guarantees them a crop of useful headlines and a few harrumphs from J Humphreys on the Today Programme.

Recently, though, publicity has been generated for the academic publishers by a mother from Northern Ireland. Lisa Saunders was helping her son with his homework (what?) and found the latest edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary did not contain the words ‘moss’ or ‘fern’ (You might enquire why the child couldn’t spell these simple words, or why he didn’t know what they were, with such a diligent mother to advise him). This prompted her to review earlier editions of the dictionary – aimed at 7-8 year olds – from the past 30 years right up to the latest, published in November 2007.

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