Here’s an odd story….

In the little Indie on 23^rd May 2011, under a spot on their gossip page 15, called “iquotes”, we read that actor Dominic West tells the Sunday Times how he and a friend reacted when the now  Samantha Cameron said she was to marry David, the future Prime Minister. West is quoted as saying ‘We were like: “Why do you want to marry that Tory boy?”.’

I wanted to check the story in the Sunday Times – presumably recent (although, maybe not, if the little ‘i’ is really scratching its arse for tattle) but couldn’t, because I cannot sign up to the News International PAYWALL. Given my current relationship with NI news harlot, the News of the Screws, whose lawyers Messrs Farrer & Co are threatening me with legal action if I don’t apologise to truth-molesting  Mazher Mahmood for damaging his reputation (which I’m not going to), and knowing their methods of information-gathering, I think it would be unfair to give them my  address, email address, mobile telephone number, landline number or bank account  details, because they might be tempted to plunder private data about me – not that they would find anything of interest to the public or even in the public interest, so squeaky clean has my life been.

So I looked elsewhere and I found a piece in the Guardian dated 17^th July, 2008 nearly three years ago…..

‘David Cameron was a couple of years ahead of (Dominic West) at Eton. “I didn’t know him then but I do now,” West said. “I know his wife a bit because my best friend used to be crazy for her. When she wound up marrying Cameron, we were like, ‘Why do you want to be with that fucking Tory boy?’” West now lives just a stone’s throw from the Camerons in west London but claims not to have infiltrated the Notting Hill set. “I must try harder to ingratiate myself with them,” he laughs.’

Odd, don’t you think,  that the Sunday Times should have repeated the story almost verbatim, give or take a “fucking”, three years later, especially when you consider the relationship between the PM and News International’s boss, Rebekah Brooks, who has without any doubt instructed all the editors of newspapers under her control to be very Cameron-positive.

At first sight, most readers might see West’s assessment as a little negative. On the other hand, last year before the election, Andy ‘Soon-to-have-a-Felt-Collar’ Coulson, then (as a result of DC’s distressingly poor judgement) running the Conservative propaganda show, arranged for it to be ‘leaked’ that the lovely Sam Cam had once voted Green, not Tory, thereby immediately improving her profile as a modern independent woman (not the Sloane-Ranging, Tory-loving young Hooray Henrietta the public might have expected DC to marry), thereby giving her and him (as a broad-minded chap who understands that bright young females don’t always vote Tory [bet she does now though]) some useful street-cred. (Coulson performed a similar reverse spin for George Osborne in the Screws five years ago, when they became firm friends).

Andy Coulson may have gone, but his fingerprints linger on, with the help of his old mates at the Sunday Times.

And here’s a side note, Cameron’s claim that the reason he had dinner last Christmas with Rebekah Brooks, who is now clearly seen to have been in charge of what was effectively a criminal organisation in Wapping, was that he was an old school friend of  her husband, Charley Brooks, looks pretty thin.

Brooks was three years older than DC at Eton, and in a different house, thus very unlikely to have had any intercourse with him – other than of a rather beastly nature. And frankly, the ambitious Cameron’s interest in Charley Brooks the race-horse trainer manqué, not to say Ladies’ Underwear merchant ( also manqué), and novelist – most would agree, manqué – would have been non-existent.

But Bonker Brooks has made it to home base with Rebekah the Testarossa, and for DC being on good terms with Ole Rupe is a Number One PR priority – otherwise why would had have taken the absurd risk he did in taking the mendacious Coulson to Downing Street, just to keep Rupe happy?

Popularity: 2% [?]

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% [?]

The politicising of the Coulson scandal is inevitable, but it doesn’t help anyone. It would do a lot for the rehabilitation of politics for the voters to see a few Tories break ranks and acknowledge that, despite the short-cut to the heart of Murdochia that he provides, Andy Coulson’s appointment as Communications Chief was a disastrous error of judgement. And the refusal to remove him is now undermining the Government and the Coalition.

One can understand Mr Cameron’s reluctance to give up having Rebekah Brooks’ old mate in the office next door, but the damage this is doing to the credibility and goodwill which the country is generally prepared to show the new PM must far outweigh the benefits of that proximity.

Naively, in a discussion on BBC Radio Wales yesterday, I suggested that there were Tories who would be delighted to see the back of Couson; I cited John Whittingdale, Tory chairman of the Culture Media Sport Committee, for having been vigorous in his pursuit of truth from the News of the World. When the paper’s management Andy Coulson, Stuart Kuttner (managing editor) and Tom Crone (legal boss) appeared in front of his committee last year they lied so blatantly in their claims that they remembered nothing that committee members and watching journalists were laughing.

Coulson had been asked point blank by Welsh committee member, Adam Price how The News of the World had been able to run a story (by as yet uncharged Neville “Onan the Barbarian” Thurlbeck) entirely based on a message left on Prince Harry’s voicemail by his brother William, which could have been obtained by no other means than illegal voice-mail hacking, without the editor questioning its provenance and the way it was acquired.

            The story was prominent – the whole of page 7 – with a front page “exclusive” banner trail. The crassness of running a story so obviously acquired in this way is mind-boggling, but not as utterly incredible as Coulson’s reply that, as editor at the time, he knew absolutely nothing about it and had no memory of the story. Any reasonable jury would have deemed this evidence enough of Coulson’s complicity with his reporters’ illegal news-gathering. The footage from the committee proceedings was shown to an incredulous nation on Channel 4 news that evening.

The committee even concluded in their report last February that they had encountered a stone-wall of “collective amnesia”. But yesterday, not half an hour after I’d been commending the independent and objective stance of his chairmanship, John Whittingdale was on BBC’s World at One saying that his committee had to accept Coulson’s denial as they had no other evidence, and that there was no further case to answer.

Popularity: 2% [?]

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?

Popularity: 5% [?]

 You wouldn’t have to be Nostradamus, or even Mystic Meg to predict plausibly that Gordon Brown won’t be running the country next summer, nor Harriet, nor Jacqui, nor Milli, nor any other pretenders. The Murdochs have been reading the polls too, and they don’t think Labour will win the election. Nor do they like to back losers, so they’ve grandly told the world today, through the editorially independent Bore-away SUN that they think Gordon and Labour are a pair of busted flushes.

       Having, with customary irritating hubris, taken responsibility for getting New Labour elected in ’97, the Shag-Rag makes no apologies for having persuaded their readers to vote for a party who they now claim has done bugger all - listing their failures in a garbled, Sun-style, bullet-pointed rant, put out by its new young editor and World Big-Brother expert, Dominic Mohan.

To this was added specific support for David Cameron – not very surprising, given that young Dave’s head spinner (still disgracefully and dangerously in place at Central Office) is Andy Coulson, notorious purveyor of non-truth and serious amnesiac, who was a Screws editor as well as confidant and assistant to the Testarossa, Rebekah (Wade) Brooks, CEO of Murdoch’s British papers.

Even if the ‘readers’ of the daily ShagRag could be bothered to read its puerile piffling editorials, they’re not going to be swayed by anything it has to say. That’s not why they buy the Sun. And Young David should stop letting Andy persuade him otherwise. It’s like trying to bribe the voters with a pair of Page 3 tits, and it demeans a grown-up political party. And PS, Dave…… keeping Andy on the team may just make Rupert feel he’s lot more important than he is.

Popularity: 1% [?]