Peter Burden

DID THOSE WHO FED BRITAIN’S FATTEST WOMAN TO DEATH COMMIT MURDER?

Peter — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 17:41:38 +0000

When the law is still unclear over the illegality of a spouse assisting a terminally ill partner to end his or her life, the circumstances of the death of Sharon Mevsimier suggest some uncomfortable possibilities.
    Mrs Mevsimier, who is under 5’ and weighs 45 stone, was in hospital undergoing intensive (and expensive) medical care as a result of her self-inflicted obesity. She had claimed shortly before she died that she had “been left to die. If I was anorexic I would get proper help but no one has sympathy for obese people.”
    She has, it is reported in the Daily Mail, been receiving 24 hour care since 2005, including three months at the Priory Clinic at £5k per month, paid for by the NHS.
    She and her family were warned that as she was on a strictly controlled diet, they should not give her any extra food, or she would risk death.
    Nevertheless, this instruction was ignored and the family smuggled in fish and chips and buckets of fried chicken for her to eat. As a direct result, Mrs Mevsimier died. The family must have known that their actions would lead to her death, that they were, in effect, poisoning her.
    On the face of it, the DPP has a strong case for bringing a prosecution for manslaughter, if not murder.

RORY STEWART’S GAFFE WAS TALKING TO A HACK FROM THE SUN

Peter — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 11:27:31 +0000

In an absurd Comedy of PC Errors, new Cumbrian Tory MP Rory Stewart has had to apologise publicly for making accurate and utterly harmless comments about some of his constituents. In an interview published in the Scottish Sun and written by their “celebrity” interviewer, Matt Bendoris, it was clear that, despite their owner’s professed allegiance to David Cameron’s Conservative Party, the paper’s agenda was to make Stewart look elitist and out of touch, jeering at what they perceived to be his “toff” characteristics, in order, one imagines to curry favour with their intolerant and bigoted Scottish readers.
    Stewart is described, in the windy outdoors of the Lake District, as having “unruly black hair Worzel Gummidge would have been proud of.” [“Worzel Gummidge” is a standard Sun cliché for ‘slightly untidy’, and for years was invariably applied by the paper to the late Labour leader, Michael Foot.]
    His “tailor-made suit” (did Bendoris ask him or did he sneak a look at the label) had “a light dusting of dandruff,” not visible in either of the onsite photos published with the article.
    Stewart also “fiddles with his cuff-links a lot, like Prince Charles..” [another republican Sun bête noir] “..and speaks a little like him too.” [This is a standard Sun jibe at what they perceive to be an elitist toff accent. How, you may ask, would they describe the accent of News International CEO, Rebekah Brooks’ husband, Charlie, an old-Etonian, lapsed race-horse trainer.]
    Bendoris himself goes on to describe the residents of Langwathby, the village they are visiting, as “slightly potty” – a statement for which the hack has not felt it necessary to apologise.
    Stewart’s good manners in looking interested in the scare-crow competition he was inspecting is dismissed as a “toff trait”.
    Bendoris wonders why someone who made it into GQ Magazine’s Top 50 Men of 2010 [whatever that accolade is worth] should want to come to the back of beyond [just off the M6 between Preston and Carlisle].
    Then he quotes Stewart: “Some areas around here are pretty primitive, people holding up their trousers with bits of TWINE (sic) and that sort of thing.”
    And it’s for this that Stewart has been forced to apologise and describe his own remarks as “extremely foolish”.
    The local paper, the Carlisle News & Star, said he had been branded as arrogant and crass.
    The Guardian suggested that Stewart had called his constituents “yokels” which he hadn’t.
    It’s hard to see who can have been insulted by what Stewart had said (admittedly with a certain degree of naivety, given that he was talking to a man from a Murdoch rag). No one I know who wears binder twine would give a damn. In order to convey the flavour of the Welsh Marches where I live, I have often described some of the inhabitants in the more remote corners as using binder twine for a belt, because they do – it’s not a criticism; it’s not a condemnation; it’s not insulting; it’s just what they do (and why the hell shouldn’t they – anymore than young men in inner cities choosing not to wear belts so that their jeans can hang halfway down their arses?)

Rory Stewart is undoubtedly a bit of an eccentric smarty-pants – and thank God for that in a time when this is too rare. I suspect he is also more knowledgeable, more dedicated, braver, more resourceful and immeasurably more entertaining than the mediocre, cliché-scribbling pip-squeak who interviewed him. But, of course, it gave the hack a chance to have a dig at the British upper-middle classes that Rupert Murdoch has despised since he was shunned by a few of them when he was at Oxford back in the ‘50s. A vain old man scorned can be dangerously single-minded.

ANOTHER PAY-OUT AND MORE SHAME FOR RUPERT.

Peter — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 13:12:38 +0000

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.

Andy eases Cameron into the Wall Street Jorunal

Peter — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 16:45:16 +0000

It’s a a great pity that we must be reminded of our Prime Minister’s connection with Rupert Rumplechops through his choice of the Wall Street Journal (The Jewel in the coronet of Rupert’s vanity) in which to write his well-judegd words about the realities of the “Special Relationship”. Of course, DC’s in-house spinner, Andy Coulson is a former partner in crime with WSJ CEO, Les Hinton. How long will he remain to taint the air in Downing Street? The countdown has started.

Can Andy Keep his Breakfast Down?

Peter — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 07:30:38 +0000

Andy Coulson’s been out of the news since his new salary was as No 10’s head spinner was revealed a month ago.
Not for long.
Coulson’s spectacular stonewalling, sidestepping and truth economy that we witnessed last year in front of the Commons Culture Committee are about to turn round and bite him (and his trusting boss) in the arse.
A lot of hard-working journalists on both sides of the Atlantic have been working on this important revelation of the truth since Nick Davies of the Guardian, a year ago today, revealed that The News of the World had paid off Gordon Taylor for hacking his phone.
However adept the Screws people have become at covering their tracks and misleading their interrogators, when up against investigative reporters of quality, they are bound sooner or later to stub their toes.
So far, the only head among the foul-smelling cabal that has run the country’s most shameful Sunday paper to have been sacrificed is that of former managing editor Stuart Kuttner – ignominiously sacked after twenty years of journalistic malpractice.

Who will follow?
Among those who are having difficulty keeping their breaklfast down since an unexpected visitor at Wapping from New York last month are Tom Crone, Les Hinton and, most significant of all, Andy Coulson.

The Prince & What the People Want

Peter — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 11:59:26 +0000

A High Court Judge was reported by the Guardian to have described Prince Charles’ intervention in the redevelopment of the Chelsea Barracks site as “unexpected and unwelcome”.
    I was surprised; Mr Justice Vos is a judge who is careful about expressing his own views. Then I find that the Guardian got it wrong – the judge said that the developers “regarded this intervention, no doubt, as unexpected and unwelcome.”
    I don’t doubt it was unwelcome; a lot of money down the line, they didn’t want their plans turned over now; but I frankly doubt that it was unexpected.
    Prince Charles has frequently and famously expressed his views on architecture; it was unlikely that he would overlook the treatment of a key site in central London, adjacent to the C18th classicism of Chelsea’s Royal Hospital, more especially when he had been approached by a large group of the public who feared the imposition of an unsympathetic, uncompromisingly modernistic structure, on a huge scale.
    If the prince has a function, passing on the views of many thousands with less scope for influence seems an entirely supportable one, especially in the face of the solipsistic arrogance of the architect involved. Lord Rogers had often displayed his intolerance of those who don’t share his vision of a landscape that belongs to and effects us all.
    His loudest objection to Prince Charles’ expressed concerns is that it is undemocratic, but there is distressingly little democracy behind deciding what buildings will fill our landscape.
   Take the beautiful town of Ludlow, where I live.
   There is a deep, immensely uplifting charm to a place that has retained 800 years of varied and developing building styles, which escapes very few visitors and is treasured by the more civilized inhabitants. However, when it was decided to put up a new library, the developers in conjunction with county council planners produced a scheme for a huge, industrial looking building, vastly out of scale with every edifice around it (apart from an already disastrous redbrick supermarket).
    There was, of course, a “consultation”, in which a host of individuals and organisations expressed their profound objections to the great modernistic shed that was proposed. These “consultations” are the “democratic process” behind which arrogant architects, bull-headed, big-spending council officials and profit-motivated developers hide.
    In a poll conducted by Building magazine, in which readers were asked to choose between Richard Rogers’ plan for Chelsea Barracks, or an alternative drawn up by traditional architect, Quinlan Terry and based on a classicism which has recurred and given great satisfaction and pleasure since the Greeks first created the concept, it isn’t at all surprising that Terry’s plan drew 60% of votes cast.

Disgracefully, there is no voting, no obligation on the part of planning hearings to take any notice of the views and wishes of the people who live in a town – who own their landscape. So I find myself now working in a library which is a cavernous, noisy space, which seems to function as a meet and chat venue, where large quantities of higher space are unused, and commercial activity occupies a proportion of the charmless lump of a bulding. The planners also bequeathed the town an ugly, useless little open space in front of the hulk, “perceived” by the County Council, “to attract people, thus benefitting nearby traders.” It is nearly always empty, occupied by discarded chewing gum and lager bottles.
There are countless towns and cities throughout Britain that have been ruined in this way, and there have been many occasions when the public have yearned for someone of sufficient influence to raise a voice in support of their objections.
The almost compete vandalization of the once lovely city of Gloucester, of which only the sublime cathedral and its immediate close remain, wouldn’t have happened if there had been a Prince Charles to suggest to the culprits that they should consider not just the wishes of their rate payers, but also the longer lasting qualities of traditional, vernacular and less aggressively modernistic building design.

Giving the Sun a leg up.

Peter — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 14:29:17 +0000

I’d like to help the Sun subs a little as they grapple for the pithiest headline tommorrow.

I offer them…….

rhymes with Fabio:

Grabio

Flabio

Slabio

Crabio

Shabio

Blabio

Labio

Rabio

Jabio

Drabio

Stabio

Scabio

Rehabio

Prefabio

Nabio

Dabio

We anticipate a work of great creativty, as usual.

Mark Lewis, solicitor, sues Baroness Peta “Betty Buxom” Buscombe (+ the PCC and the Met)

Peter — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 17:12:48 +0000

After quite a search last year, Baroness Betty Buxom turned out to be the only individual desperate enough to take on the chairmanship of the tainted Press Complaints Commission, from erratic wind & waffle wallah, Sir Christopher Meyer. She has done little since to dispel the sense of toothless futility which prevailed under her predecessor.
In one of her first big public pronouncements, to the Society of Editors Annual Conference last November, she told them that in the light of new evidence recently presented to the Commons Culture Media & Sport Committee, the PCC had re-examined the facts relating to the News of the World phone-hacking scandal. They had concluded, she said, that none of this evidence altered their previous conclusion – that Clive Goodman (Royal editor, jailed for his admitted phone-hacking) was a one-off, a rogue reporter and that only he, of all the other hacks on the Screws, had used this illegal method to invade privacy and acquire stories.
Nick Davies of the Guardian (who unearthed fresh evidence last year) had presented irrefutable evidence that the Screws’ senior Shag’n’Brag reporter, Neville “Onan the Barbarian” Thurlbeck had been using Mulcaire’s phone hacking services.
On 2 September 2009 Mark Lewis, the solicitor acting for Gordon Taylor whose extraction of some £700,000 in damages from the paper had sparked the story, was questioned by the committee. He told them that whilst conducting Mr Taylor’s claim he had attended court in order to make an application for the disclosure of documents from the police. Outside court he had spoken to DS Mark Maberly.
Lewis told the committee, “DS Mark Maberly said to me: “You are not having everything but we will give you enough on Taylor to hang them.” Those were his words: “to hang them”. . . He also mentioned the number of people whose phones had been hacked. Whether that was an aside . . . but they said that there was evidence about, or they had found there were something like 6,000 people who were involved. It was not clear to me whether that was 6,000 phones which had been hacked or 6,000 people including the people who had left messages.”
This evidence and the blatantly mendacious delivery of Screws management when trying to explain away these inconvenient facts, left no one in doubt that phone-hacking had been systemic within the paper across a wide range of reporters, and that it was very unlikely that any members of the management would not have known of the practice.
In her statement to the editors, however, Baroness Buxom claimed new further contrary evidence had come to light.
“Those of you who are familiar with the case will recall the significance that was attached to the apparent evidence of a then Detective Sergeant from the Metropolitan Police called Mark Maberly. It was he who was alleged to have said that around 6,000 people had had their phone messages hacked or intercepted.
The allegation was made in oral evidence to the Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport, and has also been published in the press. It was repeated just last Monday in some coverage questioning our report.
Since the publication of our report last Monday, the PCC has heard from Detective Inspector (as he now is) Maberly through lawyers for the Metropolitan Police.
This letter says that Mr Maberly has in fact been wrongly quoted on the 6,000 figure. The reliable evidence, we were told in an e-mail confirming the contents of the letter, is that given by Assistant Commissioner John Yates to the Select Committee, who referred to only a “handful” of people being potential victims.
In light of this, I am doing two things.
First, I am of course putting this new evidence to my colleagues in the Press Complaints Commission, because they will want to update our report to take account of this development.
Second, I have just spoken to the Chairman of the Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport, John Whittingdale, to draw this to his attention. Any suggestion that a Parliamentary Inquiry has been misled is of course an extremely serious matter.”

When Guardian reporter Chris Tryhorn asked whether the letter from the police “had effectively withdrawn Maberly’s evidence”, she replied:
“Maberly has been wrongly quoted in saying that 6,000 people were involved. He didn’t say it. He is said to have said it.”

This claim by the baroness was widely reported and, not surprisingly, Mark Lewis was incensed. He’d nothing to gain by appearing before the Culture Media & Sport Committee, other than the satisfaction of doing a public service, and now he had been widely branded a liar. He has now issued a claim against the Baroness, the PCC and the MPS for damages inrespect of a clear libel.
The PCC, in response to a critical reference in the Committee’s report last February, decided to backtrack from this clearly articulated position by issuing a statement in April in which they attempt to eat the Baroness’s words…..
“Baroness Buscombe has never suggested – and does not believe – that Mr Lewis misled the Select Committee and her statement, which made no reference to Mr Lewis, was not intended as a criticism of him or the evidence which he gave to the Select Committee. Baroness Buscombe regrets that her statement may have been misunderstood and that this has been of concern to Mr Lewis. Baroness Buscombe and the Commission therefore wish to make the position entirely clear.”
Oh dear. That’s very clear – she said it, but then she didn’t say it.
I think Mark Lewis may succeed in his suit.

RUPERT RATTLED BY HINTON INDISCRETIONS.

Peter — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 16:32:01 +0000

After the News of the World phone-hacking scandal climaxed at the Old Bailey in January 2007, two scapegoats – Screws reporter, Clive Goodman and Private Investigator, Glenn Muclaire – were sacrificed to save the reputations of their bosses – Andy Coulson, (editor), Stuart Kuttner, (managing editor) and Les Hinton (Chairman of News International).
For the next two years a 3-cornered defensive barrier, composed of News International, The Metropolitan Police Service and the Press Complaints Commission, stood firm around these other culprits.

But in 2009 one of Mulcaire’s admitted victims, Gordon Taylor, sued the paper for invasion of privacy, and they settled – very privately – for a sum at least ten times greater than would have been awarded by a High Court judge. The disclosures that Taylor’s solicitor sought, if they had proceeded to trial, would have been not only embarrassing for senior management at News International, but positively incriminating for those who have always claimed to have had no knowledge of what Goodman and Mulcaire had been up to. This settlement was very thoroughly and properly uncovered by the Guardian’s Nick Davies, and (no coincidence) the day before the story appeared (July 9^th 2009), it was announced that Stuart Kuttner had been sacked, as he later admitted to the Culture, Media & Sport Committee.
Since then, the barricades protecting the Screws men – Kuttner, Coulson and Hinton – have slowly been crumbling, and those who predict the imminent sinking of this once inviolable Titanic (and don’t want to be held to account) are beginning to let it be known that they have tales to tell of the systematic, endemic use of voicemail-hacking by Screws staff.
Kuttner, wily old workhorse that he was, is completely dispensable although he’d been in the job at the Screws for 20 years; no doubt he’s still getting enough from them to keep up the subs at an Essex golf club or wherever he seeks his recreation.

But the other two are in more sensitive places.
Les Hinton is overall boss at the Wall Street Journal, jewel in the crown of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire. That he should, quite recently have been involved in the smutty, illicit dealings of a dirty little rag back in England must really rattle Rupert, and thrill the New York Times.

Andy Coulson is the Prime Minister’s chief spinner. (He should have been dropped a long time ago, after he was seen on national TV stonewalling the members of the CMS Committee, making a laughing stock of himself with absurd, impossible denials.)

Recently the police, who had previously been obstructive to anyone seeking information about those who were targeted – and hacked – by Mulcaire, have been more forthcoming. Perhaps Assistant Commissioner John Yates, who was pretty guarded in his evidence to Parliament, now doesn’t want to be seen to be part of whatever arrangements existed between the former head of the investigation, Andy Hayman and the Screws (who now employ Hayman from time to time).

There is a long history of co-operation between the Screws and the Police, both the Met and the City of London forces. “Investigations Editor” Mazher Mahmood has called in their help on several occasions when setting up arrests in bogus criminal scenarios he has created exclusively for the front page of his newspaper, with arrests being timed for late Saturday, so as to preclude any rival Sunday papers from getting a line on them in time for the next day.

With several lawyers – some acting for multiple claimants – moving in, it’s a matter of time before one of the many lurking icebergs prevails, and truth starts pouring in to sink the old hulk.

Meanwhile, Gordon Taylor’s solicitor, Mark Lewis, who extracted over £700k in settlement from the Screws for his clients, is obliged to sue the Metropolitan Police Service, the Press Complaints Commission and their hopeless chairperson, Baroness Peta Buscombe for damages after they publicly stated that he had lied to the CMS Committee.
That he would have had nothing to gain in doing so, and the other parties had a great deal to lose if he was right, suggests that he has a solid case.
More follows.

Will Osborne pursue the guilty?

Peter — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 11:04:12 +0000

At the Mansion House yesterday the Chancellor spoke reassuringly and – to be fair – convincingly about his plans to disband the FSA and return powers of bank regulation to the Bank of England.
His current stance would have inspired more confidence if, at a key moment in the international banking crisis, after the Tory Conference in September ’08, he had conceded what was obvious to most observers, that as Shadow Chancellor he had done far too little (actually nothing) in opposing the Labour Government’s laissez-faire, “light touch” policy on banking regulation. He had an opportunity, in an interview after a good performance on the podium to own up to this; but he didn’t. http://www.peterburden.net/archives/585
He had certainly not at that stage proposed the abolition of the toothless, footling FSA.
It is extraordinary to most intelligent observers that politicians do not understand that the thinking punters really appreciate honest self-appraisal in their political leaders, and a sincere acknowledgement of their failures – in opposition as well as in Government. It wasn’t until nearly a year after (in July ‘09) that Osborne first hinted at the idea of abolishing the FSA.
And in March ’09, he had called for a full investigation into any possible criminal activity behind the almost incredible losses ramped up by our banks and paid for by us – in spades – right now and for the next umpteen years – according to the Prime Minister.
No more has been made of this zeal to investigate and prosecute, despite the committing of what has been the biggest white-collar crime in the City of London since the Lloyds Insurance debacle of the ‘80s, when thousands of private individuals were deliberately defrauded of vast sums, leading to many personal bankruptcies and misery for innocent dupes. And not one collar has ever been felt for it.
I hope the new Chancellor shows more balls in pursuing and punishing the guilty men who are now costing us all so much.