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• 14 July 2011

  The smell worsens around the Metropolitan Police

  I have said repeatedly that the really disturbing element in the News of the World scandal is the behaviour of the Metropolitan Police. But even I did not foresee quite how disturbing this would prove to be.

  Published in: Melanie's blog

  
  

  14 July 2011

  The smell worsens around the Metropolitan Police

  Published in: Melanie's blog

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  I have said repeatedly that the really disturbing element in the News of the World scandal is the behaviour of the Metropolitan Police. But even I did not foresee quite how disturbing this would prove to be.

  We know that – for reasons which still remain opaque – in July 2009 it chose not to reopen and widen its investigation into the full extent of the paper’s criminal activities in hacking or ‘blagging’ untold numbers of mobile phones. We have also read the deeply disturbing claims, so far unsubstantiated, of corrupt payments running to tens of thousands of pounds made by the newspaper to unknown Met police officers.

  This morning Neil Wallis, who was deputy editor at the News of the World under Andy Coulson, was arrested by the Metropolitan Police in connection with the hacking scandal. Astoundingly, however, it turns out that last year the Met actually paid Wallis as a public relations adviser to provide ‘strategic communication advice’ to the Met Commissioner, Sir Paul Stephenson.

  Channel Four News reported earlier:

  It is estimated that Mr Wallis earned £24,000 for his two-day consultancy work for the force from October 2009 to September 2010.

  The Met today put out this statement:

  Chamy Media, owned by Neil Wallis, former Executive Editor of the News of the World, was appointed to provide strategic communication advice and support to the MPS, including advice on speech writing and PR activity, while the Met's Deputy Director of Public Affairs was on extended sick leave recovering from a serious illness.

  In line with MPS/MPA procurement procedures, three relevant companies were invited to provide costings for this service on the basis of two days per month. Chamy Media were appointed as they were significantly cheaper than the others. The contract ran from October 2009 until September 2010, when it was terminated by mutual consent. The Commissioner has made the Chair of the police authority aware of this contract.

  Pick yourself up off the floor. There’s more. It turns out that Assistant Commissioner John Yates, the Met officer who has been failing convincingly to explain exactly why he decided in 2009 not to re-open and widen the police investigation in to the News of the World even though thousands of pieces of evidence were languishing unread in bin bags, dined with Wallis on a number of occasions this year -- afterthe Met did finally re-open its investigation with Operation Weeting.

  On his blog today Tom Watson, the Labour MP who has been making much of the running in uncovering this affair, records an exchange last March at the Commons Culture, Media and sport select committee when Yates admitted to meeting Wallis after Operation Weeting had begun. Last April, Watson wrote to the Metropolitan Police Authority thus:

  I am particularly concerned that Mr Yates appears to have had private lunches with an individual at News of the World who was line managing an employee now subject to a criminal investigation.

  That letter, of course, was sent well before today’s arrest of Neil Wallis himself.

  Wait – there’s more. It was also reported today that the Metropolitan Commissioner himself, Sir Paul Stephenson, also had dinner with Wallis -- during the first police investigation into the NoW scandal back in 2006, and only a few weeks after the paper’s former Royal correspondent Clive Goodman (who went to prison over the scandal) had been arrested. Sir Paul now says:

  I do not believe that on any occasion I have acted inappropriately. I am very satisfied with my own integrity.

  In fact, this contact was actually noted some time ago; the Guardian’sNick Davies recorded it on his own blog last February. But theTelegraph is now reporting that Sir Paul had no fewer than eight meetings with Wallis while he was an executive at the News of the World. And this evening the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, summoned Sir Paul to what Sky News described as a ‘massive showdown’ over these revelations – following which it was announced that Sir Paul would, at the Mayor’s suggestion, ask Lord Justice Leveson to include consideration of the circumstances surrounding the employment of Neil Wallis by the Met as part of his inquiry into the scandal. Now there are calls for Sir Paul to resign.

  So let’s get this clear: a police force which strangely refused to re-open an investigation into a newspaper's alleged criminal activity, while concerns were still being raised three months later employed as an adviser on improving its own public relations the former deputy editor of that very newspaper, a man who has now been arrested in connection with those allegations – and who had repeatedly dined with both the very officer who had failed to re-open the inquiry as well as with the officer who was eventually to go on to head the force.

  In the light of all this, how can anyone have any faith at all in the Metropolitan Police? And is not this gathering crisis in Britain’s most important police force of rather more importance for the country than the fate of one media organisation?

Recently published

• 14 July 2011

  Murdoch Derangement Syndrome

  Not since the death of Princess Diana has there been a Robespierrian moment like this one.

  Published in: Melanie's blog

  
  

  14 July 2011

  Murdoch Derangement Syndrome

  Published in: Melanie's blog

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  Not since the death of Princess Diana has there been a Robespierrian moment like this one. In the space of just over a week, what started as a scandal over alleged criminality and corruption involving the News of the World and the Metropolitan Police (where I have always thought the really important scandal lies; more on this later) has developed the kind of insurrectionary frisson that we last saw in the wake of Diana’s death in a car crash, when for a moment the monarchy itself seemed to be in danger at the hands of those who believed the Royal Family had effectively (and in the minds of not a few conspiracy nuts, actually) killed her.

  This time round, the frenzied mob consists not of the public but members of Parliament, the BBC and the left-wing media baying for the blood of Rupert Murdoch. That difference aside, the similarities with the Great Diana Derangement are very striking. It’s not just the hysterical delirium, the loss of proportion and rationality in depicting Murdoch as a figure of diabolical power – of which Gordon Brown’sspeech to Parliament, as deludedly selective as it was viciously enraged, was an all-too apt encapsulation rather than the weird aberration that it has been painted.

  No, the really striking similarity with Diana Derangement is the toxic combination of the cult of the victim, mass credulity and pathological projection and displacement neurosis that is fuelling the frenzy.

  After all, no-one cared when it was only celebrities who were thought to be in the frame. The explosion was detonated only when it was revealed that the News of the World hacked or ‘blagged’ the voicemail of the murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler. That was indeed awful, not least because it cruelly raised her family’s hopes that she was still alive.

  But since then, it has almost seemed as if someone was methodically and cynically going through a list of the most emotive targets possible for the demon hackers of Wapping – families of soldiers killed in Afghanistan, Gordon Brown’s sick child (though the Sun has pretty convincingly demonstrated that that one was a lie; whoops!), the victims of the London 7/7 bombings and now even the 9/11 victims in the US. The felling of Murdoch is the moment when victim culture was armed with rocket launchers.

  Credulity because the hysteria is being ratcheted up with every fresh allegation regardless of whether or not it is true (see again Gordon Brown’s sick child, for example). People are waving their fists with every claim -- which they know must be true purely because they want to believe whatever fits their own prejudices. And so the irony is that they are assuming that what the media is claiming is by definition what actually happened -- just as they believed the myth of Diana and the alleged flinty-heartedness of the Royals that she had managed to convey through her manipulation of the media, that very same media whose collective neck the mob now want to place on the block.

  As for psychological projection and displacement neurosis, this is on an epic scale. Murdoch is being treated with an infinitely greater degree of fury than, say, war criminals on trial at The Hague. Yet he has actually done good things for the media, as William Shawcross has bravely pointed out in the Spectator.

  For sure, if the allegations against his organisation are true then it did very bad things too, and he must take the rap for that. But for heaven’s sake, many other newspapers -- including some which are currently burnishing their haloes -- have done similar things. The hypocrisy and humbug here are really quite staggering. It will be interesting to see if Lord Justice Leveson, who has been entrusted with the judicial task of cleansing the Augean media stables, lists all those newspapers and journalists who have made use of private investigators who employed dubious or illegal means to obtain information.

  For many MPs, of course, this is actually payback time against the whole of the media for having exposed their institutionalised corruption over stealing large amounts of public money through the expenses scandal. But Murdoch’s real crime, and the real reason for the hypocrisy and double standards, is not that he may have presided over criminality or corruption, to which MPs are hardly strangers.

  No, Murdoch’s real crime is to have exercised power at all. Just look at them, these MPs working themselves up into a tsunami of sanctimony – treacherous, unprincipled, dishonest, corrupt and above all powerless, as they suck up to party patronage and thus surrender the powers that reside in Parliament to curtail the government of the day, and even surrender the powers of self-government of the nation itself with their supine acquiescence to the EU.

  And so because Murdoch does possess power, these powerless MPs invest him with truly demonic qualities. Thus the pathetic Ed Miliband tells the Spectator that Murdoch’s ‘spell’ is now broken. Hisspell? You’d think this sorcerer personally had lobotomised half the country and conjured away the free will of the rest. Those politicianswho fawned on him chose to do so. And they fawn on other powerful media figures too. Didn’t David Cameron remake the Conservatives, after all, as ‘not-the-nasty-party’ in order to neutralise the BBC and the Guardian?

  Similarly, Murdoch has been blamed for driving down standards throughout the rest of the media. But no-one forced those papers to spiral down-market and pander to the cult of celebrity. That cult most certainly was not the work of Murdoch alone but derives from a profound cultural malaise, a shallowness and narcissism rooted in a loss of certain essential values. I recall when in the eighties the Guardian introduced what I considered to be malicious trivia in its new section, G2. I thought that was a shocking repudiation of the journalistic values in which I had been trained. But the prevailing view was that it was a work of genius because it so perfectly caught the zeitgeist-- and its prime architect was a gifted chap by the name of Rusbridger, who went on to become the paper’s editor. Was that Murdoch’s doing? Hardly.

  In other words, this is all classic displacement activity -- blaming a scapegoat for things you yourself have done or characteristics of which you yourself are ashamed. Britain is currently going down with all hands – loss of self-government to Europe, collapse of belief in itself as a nation, destruction of education standards, implosion of family life, loss of moral compass over dependency and victim culture, and so on.

  The left hate Murdoch because he alone managed to thwart its hegemony over western culture and its agenda to undermine it. Maybe he has been a source of corruption in public life. If so, all responsible should be brought heavily to book. But the corruption goes far wider and deeper. It is a culture that has rotted from the inside out, and the Murdoch empire was merely a scavenger on the carcass. The frenzy against him is the rage of Caliban at his own reflection.