Clearly an intervention is necessary. Next time you pass an MP being interviewed on the street, set off a party popper. Jump in and shriek. Get your bum out. Anything. Just to prompt some kind of authentic human reaction from either side.
Because we can’t go on like this. It’s just too damn weird.
The end of the News of the World
10/07/2011
Today I bought the News of the World. Last week I’d joined in with the obligatory Twitter hashtag-boycott-pass-the-parcel, but now I had a brilliant excuse for scabbing out: I’d been asked to read the final edition for this paper. Having fashioned a disguise from dirt and wool, I cycled to the newsagents at 7.30 a.m., to find they were already selling fast. Clearly the boycott was having an effect. Having secured a copy, I made my excuses and left – after hiding it inside a necro-zoophiliac porn mag, so any passersby outside wouldn’t judge me too harshly.
I’ve bought the ‘Screws’ countless times before. I used to buy it almost every week, bundled alongside a less ‘embarrassing’ purchase (i.e. a broadsheet). Over lunch I’d lay the papers out in front of me and invariably find myself reaching for the Screws first. I’d read about shagging chefs, chortle at a gaudy Franklin Mint ad for a souvenir Princess Di porcelain windmill collection, and feel vaguely superior for about ten minutes. That’s liberals for you.
Sometimes I’d be revolted by the way it casually vandalised human lives: exposing some hitherto unknown woman as a ‘vice girl’, say, just to fill half a page. But a few weeks later my disgust would fade, and I’d pick up another copy. Bad for me – but I didn’t stop buying it, just as I didn’t stop buying cigarettes. It was the nineties, and I was young and dumb enough to view the world as a big cartoon. I smoked with the force and frequency of a man hell-bent on turning his lungs into a pair of charcoal slippers, in the belief that cancer couldn’t catch me. In much the same spirit I’d read the News of the World ‘ironically’, like an arsehole.
I can’t remember when things changed (my NoW habit that is, not my arseholery – that’s permanent), but at some point around the millennium I tired of laughing at the novelty plate ads and began to find the rest of the paper too grim to eat.
But never as grim as the past week, in which the paper (or more accurately, the paper’s past) leaked diseased pus by the bucket: another litre of scandal every day. By Monday evening, former editor Rebekah Brooks’s reputation was in tatters. By Wednesday those tatters had been tattered again. By the time Brooks was telling staff that they’d fully understand the closure ‘in a year’s time’ (presumably because it’ll take 365 days to explain the full horror), her reputational tatterettes were shredded yet further: they currently exist in an unstable sub-atomic state visible only to her mind’s eye.
The final edition is downright odd. If I were editor, I’d have scrawled nobs all over the front and plastered a cut-out-and-keep effigy of Brooks across the centre pages. Instead, the front page mumbles ‘THANK YOU AND GOODBYE’ over a collage of previous headlines.
Inside is an account of the paper’s history so rose-tinted you can smell the petals, focusing on its scoops and ignoring ghastly low points like the 1988 story about the actor David Scarboro (who played EastEnders’ Mark Fowler before Todd Carty), in which it printed images of the psychiatric unit where he was receiving treatment. He later killed himself.
In 2009 a NoW editorial attacked this paper’s phone-hacking coverage as ‘inaccurate, selective and purposely misleading’. ‘NO INQUIRIES, NO CHARGES, NO EVIDENCE’ it thundered. ‘Like the rest of the media, we have made mistakes … When we have done so, we have admitted to them.’
Yet today, apart from a brief mention about the paper ‘losing its way’ on page three, the closest the final edition gets to addressing the scale of the scandal comes in Carole Malone’s column: a page that has previously functioned as a rectangular bin full of tutting, spite and rabble-rousing lies about illegal immigrants being given ‘free cars’. This week she bemoans the paper’s demise, but also says the relatives of murder victims have been ‘blighted by the actions of this newspaper’, describes the hacking as ‘indefensible’, and says she’s ‘sorry for the sins of people who’ve hurt you and who shame us all’.
The centre pages consist of a gallery of their ‘greatest hits’: curiously underwhelming when it’s all laid out. The Profumo scandal and Jeffrey Archer are in there, but so are three ‘gotcha!’ snaps of celebs snorting coke – one of whom, Kerry Katona, was captured by a camera hidden in her own bathroom. Call me squeamish, but I’d say concealing a lens in a woman’s bathroom is worse than hacking her phone. At least voicemails can’t reveal which hand she wipes her arse with.
Also nestled amongst the roster of glorious front pages – ‘JACKO’S DEATHBED’: a photograph of the rumpled sheets on which Michael Jackson died. Yum! Proud of that, are they? Why, yes: hence its inclusion in their farewell souvenir. At least they didn’t include a little collectible square of his skin.
The rest of the paper includes beach snaps of Gwyneth Paltrow, and some jovial bibble about footballers’ haircuts, but also a strong investigative piece exposing a sex trafficker. Across other pages, bite-sized tributes from readers are scattered like croutons. ‘Britain will never be the same again,’ claims one. (Spoiler: yes it will.)
There’s also a gracious sign-off from Ian Hyland, and a self-indulgent final edition of Dan Wootton’s XS showbiz column peppered with snaps of a grinning Wootton crushed against a series of celebrities as though trying to physically graft himself onto them, accompanied by messages from stars assuring him of his award-winning brilliance. A galaxy of anxious neediness compressed into one double-page spread.
Still, if the edition’s overall tone is more sentimental than apologetic, it’s hardly surprising, given that it was assembled by a team who – whatever you think of them – didn’t hack a murdered schoolgirl’s phone. Regardless, they lose their jobs; the woman who was editor at the time keeps hers. Thank you Rebekah. And goodbye to your staff.
Murdochalypse Now
17/07/2011
You know the liberating feeling when someone unpopular leaves the room and everyone breathes a sigh of relief before openly discussing how much they dislike them? I don’t. What’s it like? What do people say? I only ever catch the odd whisper as the door shuts behind me. I’d love to hear the full conversation. Fortunately, watching Britain’s politicians queue up to denounce Rupert Murdoch has given me a taste of how such talk might play out.
A few weeks ago, Murdoch, or rather the more savage tendencies of the press as a whole, represented God. Fear of God isn’t always a bad thing in itself, if it keeps you on the straight and narrow – but politicians behaved like medieval villagers who didn’t just believe in Him, but quaked at the mere suggestion of a glimmer of a whisper of His name. You must never anger God. God wields immense power. God can hear everything you say. You must worship God, and please Him, or He will destroy you. For God controls the sun, which may shine upon you, or singe you to a Kinnock. Soon he will control the entire sky.
Furthermore, like all mere humans, you are weak. And God knows you have sinned. Chances are he even has long-lens photographs to prove it. But even as he chooses to smite you, God is merciful. You can do this the easy way or the hard way. Confess your sins in an exclusive double-page interview, or face the torments of hell. Have you seen what happens in hell? It isn’t pretty. Rows of the damned having buckets of molten shit poured over their heads by someone who looks a bit like Kelvin MacKenzie, for eternity.
But then suddenly everything changed. The revelations over the hacking of grieving relatives’ voicemails were the equivalent of a tornado ripping through an orphanage. ‘What kind of God would allow such a thing?’ asked the villagers, wading through the aftermath. And they started to suspect He didn’t exist.
They thought about the hours and days they’d spent in church, saying their prayers, rocking on their knees, whipping themselves with knotted rope, or flying round th
e world to address one of God’s conferences, and they grew angry.
One by one they stood up to decry God. ‘He’s a sod,’ said one. ‘No he’s not, he’s a monster,’ said another. Eventually they formed the consensus view that he was a sodmonster.
These protests grew so loud, God abandoned his bid to command the sky, issued personal apologies, and even seemed to wither – to physically wither before our very eyes, a bit like Gollum. (Although Gollum was never snapped in the back of a car in a baseball cap and running shorts, cocking his leg slightly in an apparent bid to stop one of his nuts dangling free, which is a crying shame.)
The danger now is that the villagers, shorn of their belief in God, might abandon their fear of divine retribution altogether, muzzle the churches, and grow hopelessly decadent. I realise as I type this that I don’t fully understand my own metaphor any more. So here’s a new one: the ceaseless parade of MPs openly disparaging everything they used to slavishly revere has left recent news coverage resembling the finale of the science-fiction movie They Live, in which a perception-altering alien transmitter is destroyed and humankind suddenly awakens from a decades-long trance. (Mind you, that’s nothing: one day a politician will launch an open and sustained assault on the Daily Mail, which will probably culminate in scenes identical to the opening of the ark of the covenant at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.)
Likening the saga to an existing movie seems fitting, given the online speculation regarding who’ll play who when it inevitably becomes a 180-minute Bafta-winning motion picture – Nicole Kidman as Rebekah Brooks, Nick Frost as Tom Watson, Hugh Grant as himself, Steve Coogan as both himself and Paul McMullan etc., etc.
The trickiest role to cast is surely Andy Hayman, the former Metropolitan Police assistant commissioner whose appalling delivery of a key line managed to turn the select committee hearing into an unconvincing TV movie version of itself while it was actually happening. ‘Good God! Absolutely not! I can’t believe you asked me that!’ he spluttered, like a man hell-bent on failing an Emmerdale audition. It was excruciating enough on television. Imagine having to sit there and watching it live. Keith Vaz probably clenched his buttcheeks so hard they tore the fabric off his chair seat.
How, precisely, is the actor who eventually plays Hayman supposed to convey the ‘Good God! Absolutely not!’ moment with any degree of authenticity without destroying his career in the process? Emulate it perfectly and the entire audience will assume you’re useless.
Perhaps it’d be better to discard the movie idea altogether and instead turn the saga into a video game, with Brooks as one of the end-of-level bosses. After all, the phone-hacking pile-on is the equivalent of the moment where the player discovers the conspicuous glowing nodule just under its tail and concentrates his fire on that weak spot. As its life gauge starts to fall, the embattled monster desperately sheds blameless News of the World staff in an attempt to draw fire away from itself, but to no avail. Two-thirds of the way through, the weakened beast flashes red and starts tossing fizzing bombs in your direction – the day the Sun printed the pugilistic ‘BROWN WRONG’ front page roughly equates to that bit. Finally, it explodes in a shower of scarlet locks. Or resigns and leaves Wapping in a car.
Available: Q4 2011 on Xbox 360, PS3 and Wii. £39.99. Pre-order now to guarantee abject disappointment.
Bad news from Norway
24/07/2011
I went to bed in a terrible world and awoke inside a worse one. At the time of writing, details of the Norwegian atrocity are still emerging, although the identity of the perpetrator has now been confirmed and his motivation seems increasingly clear: a far-right anti-Muslim extremist who despised the ruling party.
Presumably he wanted to make a name for himself, which is why I won’t identify him. His name deserves to be forgotten. Discarded. Deleted. Labels like ‘madman’, ‘monster’, or ‘maniac’ won’t do, either. There’s a perverse glorification in terms like that. If the media’s going to call him anything, it should call him pathetic: a nothing.
On Friday night’s news, they were calling him something else. He was a suspected terror cell with probable links to al-Qaida. Countless security experts queued up to tell me so. This has all the hallmarks of an al-Qaida attack, they said. Watching at home, my gut feeling was that that didn’t add up. Why Norway? And why was it aimed so specifically at one political party? But hey, they’re the experts. They’re sitting there behind a caption with the word ‘EXPERT’ on it. Every few minutes the anchor would ask, ‘What kind of picture is emerging?’ or ‘What sense are you getting of who might be responsible?’ and every few minutes they explained this was ‘almost certainly’ the work of a highly organised Islamist cell.
In the aftermath of the initial bombing, they proceeded to wrestle with the one key question: why do Muslims hate Norway? Luckily, the experts were on hand to expertly share their expert solutions to plug this apparent plot hole in the ongoing news narrative.
Why do Muslims hate Norway? There had to be a reason.
Norway was targeted because of its role in Afghanistan. Norway was targeted because Norwegian authorities had recently charged an extremist Muslim cleric. Norway was targeted because one of its newspapers had reprinted the controversial Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.
Norway was targeted because, compared to the US and UK, it is a ‘soft target’ – in other words, they targeted it because no one expected them to.
When it became apparent that a shooting was under way on Utoya island, the security experts upgraded their appraisal. This was no longer a Bali-style al-Qaida bombing, but a Mumbai-style al-Qaida massacre. On and on went the conjecture, on television, and in online newspapers, including this one. Meanwhile, on Twitter, word was quickly spreading that, according to eyewitnesses, the shooter on the island was a blond man who spoke Norwegian. At this point I decided my initial gut reservations about al-Qaida had probably been well founded. But who was I to contradict the security experts? A blond Norwegian gunman doesn’t fit the traditional profile, they said, so maybe we’ll need to reassess … but let’s not forget that al-Qaida have been making efforts to actively recruit ‘native’ extremists: white folk who don’t arouse suspicion. So it’s probably still the Muslims.
Soon, the front page of Saturday’s Sun was rolling off the presses. ‘“Al-Qaeda” Massacre: Norway’s 9/11’ – the weasel quotes around the name ‘Al-Qaeda’ deemed sufficient to protect the paper from charges of jumping to conclusions.
By the time I went to bed, it had become clear to anyone within glancing distance of the internet that this had more in common with the 1995 Oklahoma bombing or the 1999 London nail-bombing campaign than the more recent horrors of al-Qaida.
While I slept, the bodycount continued to rise, reaching catastrophic proportions by the morning. The next morning I switched on the news and the al-Qaida talk had been largely dispensed with, and the pundits were now experts on far-right extremism, as though they’d been on a course and qualified for a diploma overnight.
Some remained scarily defiant in the face of the new unfolding reality. On Saturday morning I saw a Fox News anchor tell former US diplomat John Bolton that Norwegian police were saying this appeared to be an Oklahoma-style attack, then ask him how that squared with his earlier assessment that al-Qaida were involved. He was sceptical. It was still too early to leap to conclusions, he said. We should wait for all the facts before rushing to judgment. In other words: assume it’s the Muslims until it starts to look like it isn’t – at which point, continue to assume it’s them anyway.
If anyone reading this runs a news channel, please, don’t clog the airwaves with fact-free conjecture unless you’re going to replace the word ‘expert’ with ‘guesser’ and the word ‘speculate’ with ‘guess’, so it’ll be absolutely clear that when the anchor asks the expert to speculate, they’re actually just asking a guesser to guess. Also, choose better guessers. Your guessers were terrible, like toddlers hypothesising how a helicopter works. I don
’t know anything about international terrorism, but even I outguessed them.
As more information regarding the identity of the terrorist responsible for the massacre comes to light, articles attempting to explain his motives are starting to appear online. And beneath them are comments from readers, largely expressing outrage and horror. But there are a disturbing number that start, ‘What this lunatic did was awful, but …’
These ‘but’ commenters then go on to discuss immigration, often with reference to a shaky Muslim-baiting story they’ve half-remembered from the press. So despite this being a story about an anti-Muslim extremist killing Norwegians who weren’t Muslim, they’ve managed to find a way to keep the finger of blame pointing at the Muslims, thereby following a narrative lead they’ve been fed for years, from the overall depiction of terrorism as an almost exclusively Islamic pursuit, outlined by ‘security experts’ quick to see al-Qaida tentacles everywhere, to the fabricated tabloid fairytales about ‘Muslim-only loos’ or local councils ‘banning Christmas’.
We’re in a frightening place. Guesswork won’t lead us to safety.
Blue-sky timewasting
31/07/2011
If you can judge a man by the company he keeps, David Cameron is a pinball machine. Look at the random bunch of advisers he hangs – or in one case hung – around with. Just look at them.
First, Andy Coulson, the Essex-boy ‘man of the people’ who rose to become editor of the nation’s foremost grieving-relative surveillance unit. At the other end of the spectrum, George Gideon Oliver King Rameses Osborne, fourteen-year-old novelty Chancellor and future baronet of Ballentaylor and Ballylemon – a man so posh he probably weeps champagne. And finally, at the opposing end of the spectrum to the other end of the spectrum – thereby hopelessly triangulating the spectrum – we have ‘blue-sky’ policy guru Steve Hilton, who apparently wanders around Downing Street barefoot, ‘thinking outside the box’ like some groovy CEO.
I can make you hate Page 26
