Knaves and fools: edifying acquittals and convictions in Britain

“My client's a moron,” says Tom Cruise, “that's not against the law.” 

As well as being an unforgettable line in an outstanding film, A few good men, the statement makes an important point, not just on legal issues, but on society generally and the people we inexplicably choose to run it for us. 

For instance, ever since he appeared on the scene, I’ve wondered whether David Cameron was a knave or a fool. In the last couple of years, it’s a question I’ve asked myself repeatedly about Rebekah Brooks, to whom Cameron used to send text messages which he signed off “lol”. Like a teenager, except that no teenager would think that “lol” meant “lots of love”.

I also had my doubts about Andy Coulson, sometime lover of Ms Brooks, and her successor as editor of the News of the World when Rupert Murdoch, its proprietor, promoted her to be Chief Executive of his European operations. That was before David “lol” Cameron appointed Coulson his spinmeister in Downing Street.

Brooks seemed so bright and acute – the first female editor of the Sun, the youngest editor of a national newspaper in this country, Chief Executive of a significant element of the Murdoch empire – that I couldn’t believe she could possibly be a fool. So when she went on trial for allowing phone hacking by her journalists while she was editor, I thought she could only be a knave: after all, the trial made clear that the practice was widespread and some of the papers’ most significant stories were obtained by hacking, so how could she not know about it?

How wrong I was. The court has now pronounced her no more than a simple fool. Her acquittal means one can only conclude that, as she claimed, she really had no idea of what was happening at the papers she headed. Being a moron is legal, as we’ve seen, so she walks free.

Rebekah Brooks:
all the relief of being found a fool and not a knave

Andy Coulson, on the other hand, has been convicted and therefore officially found a knave. Which takes us back to our fine “lol” Prime Minister. He appointed Coulson to a key position, in Downing Street, privy to all kinds of information and channels of influence. He did it against the advice of many, but on the recommendation of his Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne. So it has to be said that the jury’s still out as to whether they’re fools or knaves. They can’t be anything else. 

Actually, the jury’s only out on Cameron if you ignore other evidence. For instance, take the latest Euro-spat Britain has become embroiled in. There’s been most noise about the far right’s wins in the recent elections: UKIP in Britain, the Front National in France. But when the dust settled, what emerged was a clear victory for the Centre-Right grouping, the European People’s Party. Now I didn’t vote for them, but I can count, and it’s clear to me that 221seats are more than 192, the number of seats won by the second strongest grouping, and by the kind of logic that has become traditional in these circumstances, that makes the EPP what is technically known as “the winners.” 

Now it’s not unusual for the leader of the winning party in a parliamentary election to become the leader of the organisation to which the parliament belongs. It’s annoying when the party in question hasn’t actually won an overall majority, but is just the single biggest party, and has to line up with others, as the EPP leader, Jean-Claude Juncker has done. But none of that should be unknown territory for David Cameron, who emerged from the last British General Election as the leader of the biggest single party but with no overall majority in parliament. He came to an agreement with the Liberal Democrats, a pact with the devil some on each side might say, and as a result he became Prime Minister.

I suspect he’s noticed.

Despite the similarity of their positions, he has decided to go out on a limb to oppose Juncker’s becoming the next Commission President. And he’s done so on the grounds of democracy: it would be much better to decide the next President in a meeting of Ministers. Because as we all know, meetings in back rooms are much more transparent than elections for a Parliament.

To get his way, he’s threatened to call an early referendum in Britain on EU membership, which would probably go against staying in. Given how much we all love a blackmailer, you can imagine how his stance has won him friends and influence in the EU.

Why, even the Polish leadership has called him stupid, as we discovered yesterday from secretly taped conversations.

No, the jury’s back in on him, as it is on Brooks and Coulson. We know where we stand on all three now, with official confirmation: Cameron and Books are legal and morons; Coulson’s the knave and about to be jailed.

All three are part of a pretty vile crew. The trick now is to make sure none of them ever gets anywhere near the levers of power again.

Tony Blair: place in history, place in soap opera

Few Prime Ministers can have been as preoccupied with their place in history as Tony Blair. 

Sadly, he’s rather torn that one. He still thinks that history will exonerate him, but then I suppose we all need our comforting illusions just to get through life. My view? His name will be as indissolubly linked to catastrophe in Iraq as Anthony Eden’s is with debacle in Suez.

Still, if an honourable place in history is rather beyond him these days, at least he can aspire to a significant supporting role in soap opera.

Let’s set the scene. For over a decade and a half, Blair’s been a close friend of Rupert Murdoch, the Berlusconi of the English-speaking world. People in Murdoch’s circle like to put it about that he more or less put Blair into office, and the two of them pretty well ran Britain together for the best part of a decade. Sadly, rather a lot of us think that picture wasn’t terribly far from the truth.

Even after he left office, Tony remained close to Rupe. Tony even became godfather to Grace, one of Murdoch’s daughters by his then wife, Wendi Deng. The baptism took place in the river Jordan, as though Murdoch (or possibly Blair) was a kind of latter-day John the Baptist and Grace, or possibly her sister Chloe, baptised at the same time, was the Messiah returned in female form.

Good taste of the kind we’re well used to from Murdoch’s papers.

Within his media empire, Murdoch was in the meanwhile promoting the career of one of his finest editors, Rebekah Brooks, who eventually became Chief Executive of his News International corporation.

When David Cameron became Prime Minister, he decided to appoint a former BBC journalist, Guto Harri, as his Communications Chief at Downing Street. When Brooks learned that this was about to happen, she rang Cameron and told him that he should do no such thing, but appoint Andy Coulson instead. Coulson had been her successor as editor of the News of the World.

Cameron in those days thought that ‘lol’ meant ‘lots of love’ and used to text Brooks with ‘lol’ as his sign off. All that love – he could hardly deny her wish to see Coulson in the Downing Street role, and he was duly appointed.

Sadly, the News of the World, the paper that loved to break scandals about other people was about to face its own: the accusation that it had been hacking the phones of celebrities and victims of crime to feed its ravenous craving for sensational, or salacious, news. The paper eventually closed and both Brooks and Coulson were arrested, Coulson having to resign from the post Brooks had arranged for him to be given.

And Blair? Well, just before Brooks was arrested he apparently gave her advice to stand firm and tough things out. So she had the incumbent Prime Minister and an illustrious former one as close and personal friends. She must have taken comfort from such protection.

Today, though, she’s had to take the stand in her own trial, and what emerged? That she had a ‘car crash’ of a private life, as her marriage to actor Ross Kemp fell apart. Among other things, this involved ‘periods of intimacy’ with the very Andy Coulson she’d done so much to promote. Not an affair, you understand – just intimacy. 

Rebekah and Andy
Good friends, good colleagues and periods of intimacy

See what I mean about soap opera? The femme fatale with two powerful men at her beck and call, and working for a third, arguably more powerful than either of the others. She’s in a failing marriage with a celebrity. She seeks consolation with a subordinate whose success she promotes. It’s the first season or two of – what shall we call it? Perhaps We Make the News.

But, I hear you cry, what about Blair in all this? Surely he has only a walk-on part, not a major supporting role as you claim.

Not so. For as in all successful soap operas, season 2 has seen new plot lines added. Now it seems that Murdoch and Blair are themselves involved in what looks, on the surface, like another love triangle. It’s around that Wendi Deng, mother of Tony’s goddaughter Grace.

Bright and feisty, she intervened in defence of her husband when he was attacked with a cream pie within the hallowed precincts of the Palace of Westminster. She was there even before the security guards whose job it was to ensure – well security. Tough lady.

It seems she has a softer side too.

‘Oh shit, oh shit, whatever why I’m so missing Tony … he has such a good, body and really, really good legs …’ she wrote on one occasion, and it’s hard to deny the sentiment even if one might question the English. 

Wendi, Rupe and Tony. The love triangle for season 3?

Did they have an affair, or even ‘periods of intimacy’? Who knows. It seems that Murdoch thinks so, and to justify his divorce, latched onto the times Blair and Deng spent alone together in his house – his house, just imagine – while Rupe was away. It seems Tony can’t get Rupe to take his calls any more and has given up trying.

Well, there’s plenty of smoke around, and who knows what fire is smouldering away underneath it? Sounds like a great theme to explore in season 3 of We Make The News.

You might say it’s a bit grubby, but then so was the whole Iraq affair. And at least the soap opera’s unlikely to leave some hundreds of thousands of civilian dead in a devastated nation.

Unlike the history.

Better to be a fool than a knave in a World deprived of its News

So, it seems I won’t be reading the News of the World next Sunday.

In itself that won’t represent a huge change: not reading the News of the World has been a settled part of my Sunday morning routine for a great many years. The only real difference is that I wouldn’t be able to buy a copy even if I wanted to, since Rupert Murdoch’s News International corporation has decided to bring an end to that particular scandal sheet’s 168-year history.

The last front page

For those who may not have been following the recent enthralling developments in the NoW saga, this is the culmination of a decade-long controversy of which, for once, the paper was not the purveyor but the subject.

In their commitment to investigative journalism, some people on the paper (I’m picking my words with care: nothing has been proved against those who edited the paper at the time and they deny knowledge of any wrongdoing) had employed the services of a private investigator, Glenn Mulcaire, now in prison, to hack into the voicemail of celebrities’ mobiles. The more was dug up, the longer the list of hacking victims became, until it recently reached 4000, extending far beyond actual celebrities to include the parents of child murder victims, the relatives of soldiers killed in Afghanistan, even and most notoriously a murdered schoolgirl, whose voicemail messages the fearless investigators deleted so more could be left for them to listen to. The deletion of the messages gave the parents the hope that their daughter was still alive some time after she had in fact already been murdered.

What of the know-nothing editors? One was Andy Coulson who later headed Conservative Party leader David Cameron’s communications unit. After his boss took office as Prime Minister, Coulson became Director of Communications at 10 Downing Street on a publicly-funded salary. Eventually, in the face of the growing scandal, he resigned in January of this year. However, he continues to maintain that he knew nothing of hacking during his editorship and, since he’s a PR man, why should we question his credibility?

Come to think of it, Cameron too cut his teeth in PR, and I’ve always found him just as trustworthy as Coulson.

The other editor was Rebekah Brooks. She’s had a personal history that would make her a perfectly appropriate subject for some lurid column inches in the paper she ran. The youngest ever editor of a British national newspaper, she’s now Chief Executive of News International in this country. All this suggests that she’s outstandingly able, although she denies it: she claims to have been completely unaware of what NoW staff were doing while she was editor.

Rebekah Brooks: picture of innocence

Fortunately, there is more than one way of getting to the top of an organisation and indeed of staying there, and some only require skills that are generally available throughout the population. The belief that she rose to prominence by such means is certainly preferable to the alternative, which would be that she actively colluded in reprehensible and possibly illegal behaviour by her staff. If that were the case it would reflect unfavourably not just on her but on the News International corporation and even its top figure, Rupert Murdoch. And who of us living in Britain would want to accept that such a huge proportion of our communications media was in the control of a man without principle and with such scant respect for civilised standards?

Being thought a fool isn’t good, but probably better than being shown to have been a knave. Especially if the knavery may have strayed into criminality.

In any case, whatever else Brooks didn’t know, it's clear that she was aware of one of the most interesting operations run by staff at the NoW on her watch. The Guardian has stated, and she hasn’t denied, that she was informed by no  less an authority than Scotland Yard that the paper’s staff and resources were being used to target a senior Detective, David Cook, on behalf of two murder suspects he was investigating. Such was their commitment to investigative journalism that these people dug out personal information about Cook and his wife in their efforts to support the suspects.

I’m no lawyer so I don’t know if this was actually illegal, but I suppose I have the same grasp of basic morality as most people, and I have to say that this feels like something that is at best in a bit of a grey area. Ethically speaking.

And Brooks’ response when she was told that this was happening? That it was basic investigative journalism: they were checking out allegations that Cook had been having an affair with a presenter of the BBC Crimewatch programme, Jacqui Hames.

Now, it is certainly reprehensible for a married man to have an affair with a married woman, and that’s just the kind of thing the NoW liked to expose. However, when the man and woman are married to each other, as Hames and Cook were, surely it’s not quite as questionable? This is probably a piece of information that a fastidious observer might regard as relevant to such a line of enquiry. And without wanting to be hypercritical, I can’t help feeling that an organisation that prides itself on its investigative reporting might have been expected to discover it.

Thinking about that kind of incident makes it less difficult to believe Brooks’s protestations of incompetence.

It also makes it a lot easier to come to terms with the idea that I’m going to have to do without the News of the World next week.