Waiting in the niteries of St James with a smoother sort of courtier
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Guest blog by Tom Rowland
It is an evening in late November 2011 and I am to be found glass of champagne in one hand, a catalogue in the other, in the amiable surroundings of The Chris Beetles Gallery in London’’s St James. If you are fortunate enough to have £300 spare and an eye for a bargain it can still be a happy hunting ground.
But not that night. James Harding, then editor of The Times, has just given an amusing speech introducing the latest work of Peter Brookes; describing how the sexagenarian cartoonist trotted into his office most mornings like a child seeking parental approval and, once an idea is agreed, how Brookes spends a happy afternoon on what Harding described as “colouring in”.
The gallery charges £1,450 these days for even a mediocre Brookes and the nature of the calling on a daily newspaper means there are bound to be off days; partly why people go to the shows to spot the good ones – although I was not there to buy.
Mine was an edgier mission. I was wondering what the reaction was going to be from the other guests, some of who I had known for over 25 years, at bumping into me at a social gathering hosted by what still passed as the smarter end of News International.
Despite the public outcry surrounding the phone hacking scandal, the closure of The News of The World and the odium and revulsion poured on the company over the Milly Dowler affair, most of them still didn’t really get it.
Their sheepish little grins and protestations of bafflement over what had apparently been going on showed they had no idea of the scale of the maelstrom that was about to engulf their newspapers and the rest of the industry as the evidence of the Leveson Inquiry started to come out over the following days.
Barely a month later Harding himself would be running in circles worthy of Inspector Clouseau, the hapless detective played by Peter Sellers in the Pink Panther films, and trawling his own records trying to discover how his paper came to be employing a notorious ex-Oxford student hacker who had illegally accessed the e-mails of the then anonymous blogger, NightJack, the police officer Richard Horton, and to compound things The Times’s own lawyers then misled the High Court.
His sheepish grins and protestations of bafflement in front of Lord Justice Leveson’’s Inquiry were scarcely more credible than those of the procession of tabloid lowlifes that proceeded him.
I even got to play my own small part in this unfolding drama as in 2005/6 The News of the World had hacked my phone. When I found out I had started legal proceedings against News International that I later won and I had been invited to become a core participant in the Leveson Inquiry.
A procession of meetings with Cameron and other leading politicians followed at which the PM and all of the other politicians looked me in the eye and pledged that they would take decisive action at the first opportunity to ensure that such abuses could never happen again.
And then…well what? Slowly the whole process of long-overdue reform has been shrouded in the robes of bowing courtiers and the opaque proceedings of a Royal Charter. Leveson is consigned to the royal long grass for the summer.
But it will be autumn soon, bringing a scattering of flame-red leaves and a procession of hugely politically embarrassing public trials flowing from the scandal, some featuring striking flame-red defendants with close links to the great and the powerful.
Those promises will come back to haunt any politician who believes the ermine and purple of the land of Royal Charters will deflect public anger then. Chris Beetles also sells 18th Century drawings that show what happens to those in their trade in a state of undress who fail to duck when the merde really starts to fly.
Tom Rowland is a writer, journalist and broadcaster. He was on the staff of The Daily Telegraph for 10 years and has written extensively for The Times and The Guardian.
2 Comments
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Dear Tom
I enjoyed that.
New PB show soon. I will have a glass standing by for you.
Best wishes
Chris
Dear Tom,
Thanks for your contribution to the warnings of Leveson.
Any of us may become ‘persons of interest’ to illegal hackers.
Invasion of privacy (trawling or commissioned) is now even more in the news, with confirmation that (as must be natural) ‘protection of the people’ may extend to state evasion of supposed ‘safeguards’, a situation of colossal danger – for people and planet – given lack of agreed equal-partnership, meaning lack of true democracy, our only real protection.
The vast apparatus of the state may of course be tapped by private hackers.
Just as the actions of officials may be courageous or corrupt (seen misguidedly or not as in the public interest, or frankly motivated by money, whether as cash or in political reward), so the actions of private investigators may span a morally varied range, from ‘public interest investigation’, through taking sides in ‘no holds barred’ personal or business disputes, to frank complicity with intent to harm or silence political opposition and / or legitimate commercial competition.
You are of course right to suspect that political pledges may be regretted, under ever more pressure from the usual sources.
Any ’embarrassment’ in forthcoming court appearances will anyway be skin-deep, comfort taken in the view of ‘half of the law’ (so paid) on merely excessive zeal, and in the mind of a 20-30% public hard-core (so educated) seeing their fault mainly in ‘getting caught’.
Today we read that our first choice for factual news-scan and often analysis – BBC online – is under threat, its value either unappreciated, or all too well ‘appreciated’. Like successive governments, of both main parties, the main failing of the BBC has been in its timid ‘political correctness’, leaving us the public uneducated and vulnerable under a sham democracy that cloaks dictatorship.
We should allow ourselves NO illusions. Our defence will be for us to mount.
The older will know, and the younger may guess: there is – even with the best of physical upbringing – NO limit to the folly and potential evil of individuals; and – in the lack of agreed equal partnership – NO limit to the folly and potential evil of gangs and societies.
As and when pain builds to desperation amongst the poor, the fate of our loved ones, of our society, perhaps now of our planet, will depend on the coming choices of the rich – afforded leisure for intelligence – whether for fear and greed, or for conscience as our guide.