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.

Gary Lineker takes Rupert’s Shilling to join the Queen of Shag-Rags

For a man perceived as being unusually wholesome in the tawdry milieu of professional football and possessing limitless goodwill towards his fellow men, it’s more than disappointing to learn that, to compound his already questionable championing (for a big sack of loot) the thoroughly unwholesome foodstuff that is Walkers Crisps, he has now agreed to “write” for the News of the World, the nation’s most insidious Sunday rag and a publication that attacks privacy, promotes voyeurism with tacky sex and drug stories, that lies, breaks the law and is devoid of any visible standards of journalistic integrity.
     And if you don’t like what Gary “writes”, blame the ghost. It emerged in a libel suit against him in 2005 that his column in the Telegraph hadn’t been written by him; he’d simply chatted to a hack on the phone and his by-line had gone at the top. Is that how Charlie Brooks (Mr Rebekah Wade) does it?

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.

I know who it is, but I don’t yet have documentary back-up and I am debating with myself whether or not it is in the public interest to reveal his identity. (Yes, he is a male). He is not a civil servant, he is not unknown to the public; he is not a politician, although he is close to the Labour Party and to a cabinet member, and in touch with a European Prime Minister.

If his motives were essentially political, and he felt that the revelations would favour Labour, he would have to be deemed dangerously naive. If, more likely, he just wanted to walk away with a sackful of cash, then he has surely had a result, for whatever the Telegraph may have admitted to paying, it is likely it was a lot more than that.

Is it in the public interest?

I could only justify my exposure of this exposeur of parliamentary truths (although truths that should not have come as a surprise to any sophisticated observer) if I was convinced that the public had a right to know his identity. They have been delivered the full panoply of tacky, underhand activities that was the semi-official remuneration system for a parliament without the courage to put openly to the electorate the case for salaries in line with those in commerce and the professions.

Do the public need to know…. will it help them to know who was responsible for bringing it to their attention?

It seems to me that if the motive was pure – the desire to inform, then they do not.

But if the motive was merely to line pockets, already pretty well lined, then they do have a right to know.

This tussle with the truth, and my conscience continues.

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.

The way the Westminster trough has grown, and the reasons for it are symptoms of a classic British fudge.

Those with any understanding of the market value of effective analytical and executive brains know that it is considerably higher than an MP’s official salary. Thus, over the years in order to attract people of the right calibre to fill our legislative chamber this salary has been systematically ‘enhanced’ with add-ons in the form of various tax-free allowances. Because the British public is so used to being handled by Parliament and the media like a prickly teenager who must not be upset at all costs, an open, honest debate on the topic hasn’t taken place. And yet, compare the salaries of the 645 MPs with the top 645 individuals in banking, in the law, in the media/ entertainment world, even the top 645 sportsmen and women. In terms of remuneration, the MPs are patently the also-rans.

This, obviously, has been recognised by the Members and their administrators and ways of achieving some kind of realistic approach to salaries have been sought, but it has had to be done in an underhand way, so as not to upset an ill-informed and suspicious electorate.

As the Daily Telegraph revelations unfold, it is clear that the civil servants controlling the purse strings regularly reject some of the more fanciful claims that are lodged, but those who have put in chitties for swimming pool cleaning have had them passed, presumably because they fall within the proscribed criteria – and it isn’t reasonable to blame them for the system. They’re not abusing the system; the system itself is an abuse. In any case, a cynic might concur that a swimming pool is essential for someone who has been wallowing in the sewer of Westminster all week.

Throughout the pubs of the land I can see the great British Public’s reaction to this concept, as they jump up and down, yelling that our MPs don’t deserve any more money and they are all greedy tossers – well, if they are (and I’ll readily concede some) it’s because they are not paid enough, and not enough of the right people will make the sacrifice. In a hangover from a time when only people rich enough not to have to work stood for Parliament, we cling on to the quaint C18th British idea that the job of government should be purely vocational. In the C21st it can’t and shouldn’t be, but our affection for the old ways makes it hard for us to accept the realities.

If MPs were paid the money they could earn at the top of their professional or business tree, individuals of the highest calibre wouldn’t have to sacrifice large incomes to join parliament and we could demand that they gave the job their full attention, with clear rules about extra-curricular activity and strict monitoring of attendance.

But, of course these revelations making highly entertaining breakfast reading, though I’m delighted that our own Ludlow MP, the punctilious and hard-working Philip Dunne, at the last count, did not claim a penny for his London residence (and he lives 165 miles from Westminster).

Even more amusing would be to see the lists of expenses claimed by members of the journalistic profession, especially those at the muckier end of it. Mazher Mahmood, for instance, intrepid “investigations editor” at the News of the World regularly puts in chitties for the purchase of cocaine. We know this because he was forced to admit it in open court.

Not even our most flamboyant and spendthrift MPs have tried that on.

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.

She was appalled to find a significant change over that time in what words have been left out and those that have been added. From this she claims to have detected a deliberate policy of social engineering on the part of the compilers.

It will not come as a surprise to learn that the Telegraph and the Mail were right behind her in deploring the diminution of Christian terms and references, among which, inexplicably, they highlighted ‘holly’, ‘ivy’ and ‘mistletoe’ – throwbacks to a British pagan past.

The Telegraph reported that “academics and head teachers” felt the changes to the 10,000 word Junior Dictionary could mean that children would lose touch with Britain’s heritage. They also dug up a Professor Smithers, director of the centre of education and employment at Buckingham University, who declared puzzlingly, “We have a certain Christian narrative which has given meaning to us over the last 2,000 years. To say it is all relative and replaceable is questionable.”

I don’t know what dictionary Prof Smithers’ parents thrust into his eager childish hands, but evidently, not one that allowed him a good grasp of British cultural history. St Augustine, the first major and effective Roman missionary, did not arrive on the Kent shore until 597, and several English kingdoms remained unconverted until well into the 8th century, when the Christian narrative could be said to have been established – a mere 1,300 (not 2,000) years ago.

This historical inaccuracy weakens the professor’s contention that, “The word selections are a very interesting reflection of the way childhood is going, moving away from our spiritual background and the natural world and towards the world that information technology creates for us.”

A lot of weaselly old piffle, really.

The OUP quite reasonably claim that they are restricted, for practical purposes of size, to some 10,000 words, when there are 264,000 in the main dictionary, and that space must be made for words reflecting the prevailing preoccupations of childhood…

Broadband, MP3 player, voicemail, attachment, database, export, analogue, celebrity, tolerant, vandalism (surely around since the sacking of Rome?) negotiate, interdependent, citizenship, childhood, conflict, debate, EU, drought, brainy, boisterous, bilingual, committee, compulsory, cope, democratic, allergic, biodegradable, emotion, dyslexic, donate, endangered, Euro, incisor, trapezium, alliteration, colloquial, idiom, curriculum, classify, and chronological.

There doesn’t seem much to object to in these – all useful words and some quite complex concepts. But the Mail and the Telegraph expressed shock and horror over them, and some of the words left out…

Dwarf, elf, goblin. Abbey, aisle, altar, bishop, chapel, christen, disciple, minister, monastery, monk, nun, nunnery, parish, pew, psalm, pulpit, saint, sin, devil, vicar, coronation, duchess, duke, emperor, empire, monarch, decade, adder, ass, beaver, boar, budgerigar, bullock, cheetah, colt, corgi, cygnet, doe, drake, ferret, gerbil, goldfish, guinea pig, hamster, heron, herring, kingfisher, lark, leopard, lobster, magpie, minnow, mussel, newt, otter, ox, oyster, panther, pelican, piglet, plaice, poodle, porcupine, porpoise, raven, spaniel, starling, stoat, stork, terrapin, thrush, weasel, wren.

Acorn, allotment, almond, apricot, ash, bacon, beech, beetroot, blackberry, blacksmith, bloom, bluebell, bramble, bran, bray, bridle, brook, buttercup, canary, canter, carnation, catkin, cauliflower, chestnut, clover, conker, county, cowslip, crocus, dandelion, diesel, fern, fungus, gooseberry, gorse, hazel, hazelnut, heather, holly, horse chestnut, ivy, lavender, leek, liquorice, manger, marzipan, melon, minnow, mint, nectar, nectarine, oats, pansy, parsnip, pasture, poppy, porridge, poultry, primrose, prune, radish, rhubarb, sheaf, spinach, sycamore, tulip, turnip, vine, violet, walnut, willow.

Once again, the Telegraph was enraged, agreeing with Ms Saunders that ‘The Christian faith still has a strong following. To eradicate so many words associated with the Christianity will have a big effect on the numerous primary schools who use it.’

Whoever thought that children derived their faith from the pages of a dictionary? And all the flora and fauna omissions exist as entries in the various OUP encyclopaedias, which is where children should be looking for them. The primary function of a dictionary is to offer definitions, rather than physical descriptions. Generally it is conceptual words that require definition, and on the evidence of Ms Saunders findings the OUP have been diligent in making sure that they have included modern conceptual terms like negotiate, democratic, and dyslexic.

The breadth of coverage this Northern Irish mother’s views have generated is surprising, although, undoubtedly, it offers papers who like that sort of thing a chance to squeal about political correctness ‘gone mad’, allowing logic to leave the room.

It’s puzzling too that the Telegraph should complain about the omission of the word ‘sin’ – a concept long since abandoned by the established church whom the paper generally supports. The Anglican bishops no longer dare to suggest anything as uncomfortable as their adherents taking responsibility or being accountable for their own actions. In the modern Anglican church, it seems, any action which might once have been called a ‘sin’ is now attributable to some character trait beyond an individual’s control, or the result of some external influence, like parents.

One could interpret this as another example of political correctness gone mad, but the Telegraph will probably pass on that one.