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?

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Of all the poisoned chalices to be passed by a much-loved colleague — Should the government allow the venal and highly self-interested News Corp to dominate the British news agenda by giving them control over a significant share of the news outlet? — the BSkyB decision could not have been more sensitive, especially when the boss is so obviously in lerve with the Testarossa – Rebekah the Larrikin – accepting her invitations; inviting her round, too, from time to time for quite intimate gatherings. She probably loves the intellectual stimulation, which she doesn’t get from hubby, Charlie ‘Bonker’ Brooks.

It all smells pretty nasty, Young Vagina, so chuck away the nose peg, and send Ol’ Rumplechops and his billions packing. If you don’t, you’ll look as big a fool as your boss does just now over his ‘loyalty’ to Andy C.

And you don’t want that, do you?

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IN the Independent this morning, Stephen Glover (who co-founded the paper in 1986) takes a worryingly soft approach to Rupert Murdoch. He suggests that because the old cobber is now 80 he has become less of a threat to a diverse press in the UK, and anyway, his English newspapers don’t concern him as much as they did 25 years ago – as if he no longer had an agenda in Britain.

But Glover must know that if the Murdoch bid to own all – rather than just 39% – of BSkyB succeeds, it will make a clear and potentially dangerous difference to the channel’s editorial drive. It is patently the case that without a co-owner to balance the Murdochs’ pursuit of their own interests and priorities, they will simply deliver a version of political news and events that matches their aspirations, as they already do in the papers they own.

For instance, when the story of the News of the World’s first phone-hacking pay-off to Gordon Taylor was revealed by the Guardian 18 months ago, Sky News sent a unit to Ludlow to interview me – as an informed  commentator and clearly identifiable critic of Murdoch’s approach to British media – and broadcast the interview live and unedited. It seems inconceivable that a 100% Murdoch-owned Sky News would do the same.

The Times and the Sun, for instance, (unlike the Guardian, the Telegraph, the Mail, and Glover’s own paper, the Independent) seem happily unaware that the Prime Minster may be harbouring in Downing Street a man who was not only party to, and therefore chargeable with criminal offences under the Regulation Of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA), for which two of his employees were jailed, but also heard to declare under oath at Tommy Sheridan’s recent perjury trial that he had no knowledge of the illegal activities going on at the News of the World, when he was editor. Very few informed observers believe that this is possible; thus it could be that Andy Coulson could be facing a charge of perjury himself at some future date.

Glover (with either startling naivety or gross disingenuousness) goes on to ask why those who castigate Murdoch don’t do the same to Richard Desmond.

But, of course, they do, so far as there is a comparison to be made between Dirty Dick and the Dirty Digger. Desmond is the worst kind of sleaze merchant to be operating a national newspaper or TV channel, but the possession of low standards of sexual morality and bad taste are lesser crimes than the desire to influence in an utterly undemocratic way the operation of a sovereign government.

Neither Mr Desmond himself, nor any of his senior executives are close personal friends of the Prime Minister, as Murdoch’s Rebekah Brooks is. He doesn’t have a trusted ex-employee installed in an office a few doors down from the PM.  His national newspapers (the Daily Express and the Daily Star, whose Sunday edition employs former criminal and Screws royal reporter, Clive Goodman)  are low-grade, clapped out arse-wipers that carry zero authority. His TV Channel is a despised depository for much of Britain’s worst television. I don’t imagine anyone in Downing Street gives a toss what a Desmond paper says.

It’s hard to guess Glover’s own agenda in writing this piece. Perhaps his paper’s new owner, Alexander Lebedev (also not an ideal candidate for British newspaper ownership) asked him to. Or perhaps he’s not getting on well with Mr L and he’ll pop up in the pages of a Murdoch newspaper one day soon.

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The real target of the New York Times in their reopening of the Coulson affair, if not Rupert Murdoch himself, is Les Hinton, an Englishman (now naturalised American) in New York, and currently CEO of Dow Jones, publishers of the Wall Street Journal.

In January 2007,  two men working for the News of the World were jailed for illegal phone-hacking, while Hinton was Executive Chairman of Screws owners, News International in London.

He is a deeply experienced, hard-nosed, long-serving, loyal Murdoch henchman. When I was researching for my book, News of the world? Fake Sheikhs & Royal Trappings, I was told by very well placed associates of the then NI chairman that knowledge of the illegal practices at the News of the World would certainly have stretched right up to Les Hinton, and nothing he has said since has convinced me otherwise. When the Commons Culture Media Sport Committee took evidence from him last autumn during their inquiry into the phone-hacking scandal, while denying any knowledge, his nervousness and body-language failed to convince anyone of the innocence he professed of any involvement in the paper’s illegal activities.

The NYT is famously involved in a pretty desperate circulation war with the Wall Street Journal, and to bring about its CEO’s disgrace would be a very useful feather in its cap in a nation which is even more anti-News Corp than this one.

If the police and the two parliamentary committees now involved do manage to make the truth (which is so obvious to all observers) stand up, Les Hinton’s head will be on the railing spikes alongside Andy Coulson’s and that of sacked former managing editor, Stuart Kuttner.

David Cameron is getting most of the stick for his lack of judgement in appointing a man so obviously tainted as Andy Coulson, but it should be remembered that he was reacting to the urging of his then Shadow Chancellor, George Osborne.

Osborne already had a relationship with Coulson, encompassing some apparently bizarre anomalies.  This friendship went 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 then unflawed Shadow Chancellor, it claimed that eleven years before, while he was at Oxford, 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 wasn’t the only one struck, not by the damage that might have been done to the young politician, but by how much good it had done him. After all, the story didn’t say George himself had 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 little 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.

            No doubt it was Coulson’s skill in devising sophisticated reverse/negative spin that attracted Osborne and maybe convinced Cameron. A good example of this was evident this year when it was ‘leaked’ that Samantha Cameron had once voted Green as a student.

Pretending  that the leak was alarming to them, Cameron’s camp knew that it certainly hadn’t done any damage and it would do a great deal of positive good in suggesting David Cameron’s broadness of vision and sympathy with those beyond the standard Tory pale.

However, it’s likely that the government will soon have to manage without this gifted manipulator of information, and perhaps William Hague won’t be too sorry about that.

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 The News of the World have been ordered to pay out yet again for their sleazy journalism.
    As I predicted on this blog back in January, the High Court in London has today awarded Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie a settlement (undisclosed but likely to be huge) for the paper’s illegal intrusion of their privacy. The Screws had bought some dodgy information, and (as is their practice) drawn the conclusion that suited their permanently warped sense of news. The wrong conclusion, naturally.
   Ol’ Rupert Rumplechops must be getting mightily pissed off with his former love, The Harridan of Wapping, especially as the finishing touches are put to a fresh major revelation about the mess his people made there three years ago when they clumsily tried to cover up their involvement in a string of phone-hacking crimes.
    And the boss in London then, Les Hinton, is now boss of Dow Jones/Wall Street Journal. That will be more than a bit embarrassing.

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