The Daily Novel

We shall probably never know. Not least because her assassination happened in the middle of the Christmas holidays, when western news organizations operate on a skeleton staff, so that most of their trusted journalists can spend Christmas with their families. At the time of writing this blog there is not even agreement as to how she was killed.The Daily Mail proclaims that she was killed not by the gunman who shot her, nor by the explosion of the bomb immediately afterwards, but by striking her head on a lever attached to the sunroof of her car as she fell. This information came, not from one of the hundreds of mostly experienced and professional Daily Mail journalists, but from the official spokesman of the Pakistan government. President Musharraf had told the nation immediately after the killing that it was the work of terrorists. By today he was providing tape ‘evidence’ that it was the work of Al Qaeda and the Taliban. But the BBC, who have been talking to lots of people, report that the surgeon who treated Bhutto when she arrived at the hospital thinks she may have been killed by shrapnel wounds.There is no agreement amongst the news organizations either about whether the gunman was also the ‘suicide bomber’ who detonated the explosion or whether that was someone else. The coverage of this murder demonstrates the difficulty of doing decent journalism in the age in which we live. On the spot eye witness reporting cannot be what it seems when a public figure like Bhutto is addressing a mass rally in a public park. No journalist was near enough to be sure what happened, though a Guardian photographer was near enough to be able to say that the gun shots preceded the bomb explosion.The Washington Post reporter, however, did manage to find a Butto aide to interview who was standing next to Bhutto in the car. He was told that the shot caused her to fall. Which is good evidence about the sequence of events. But does not help to point the finger at who did it.In trying to make sense of this the analysts, including the experienced journalists, are in more agreement. No-one suggests that Musharraff ordered the killing, but most agree that he is desparately trying to find ways of staying in power. So the killers might have been men from the Pakistan military or intelligence services, aiming to please Musharraff, or bring to power another military leader. Equally likely as suspects are the Taleban supporters in their many different guises.Musharraff’s government has made it impossible to establish the facts. Bhutto has been buried without an autopsy, which would at least have proved whether she died from a gunshot, from shrapnel or a blow to the head. The huge emotions released by the murder makes it impossible to have the democratic election scheduled for 8 January. The future of Pakistan will be decided largely in Washington, where Bush will have to decide whether to stay with Musharraff, or begin to foster some other leader who might be more credible as a democratic leader, or go with another military figure.To anyone who has followed the history of Pakistan since its formation in 1948 that is nothing new. The partition of India was intended to resolve the conflicts by creating two nations, one mainly Muslim and one mainly Hindu. Pakistan’s democratic rulers, including Bhutto’s father, have failed to unify the many conflicting voices, so that Pakistan has mostly been governed by the military, despite British and American preferences for democratic rule.Both Britain and the US have gone with the army. Not least over Afghanistan and Iraq, where Musharraff has been a key friend of the West. Pakistan’s tragedy provides a major headache for the Bush and Brown administrations. Over these last few months they have been trying to salvage their policies by encouraging Bhutto to return to Pakistan and forge an alliance with Musharraff.They have been left with no clothes by this Christmas murder. For Brown this may prove far more serious than cash for honours or losing records. His problem now is not whether to take action to try and stop Iran making nuclear weapons, it is what to do about the leadership of a nation that already has nuclear weapons.

In Gospel Oak, which I now realise, Christmas is a doddle. I can take the bus to Oxford Street or take the car to Brent Cross and get everything I need. In the Dorset countryside it is not so simple. I thought I would get everything I needed at the last minute in Lyme Regis, a few minutes drive away. So I have failed to get the Dubonnet. They did not have any, mainly because most of the shops have been converted into souvenir shops. But at least I enjoyed listening to the town band playing Christmas carols which is a distinct improvement on the recorded stuff blaring through the loud speakers at Brent Cross. And I paused to sit on a bench and watch and listen to the sea and admired the view of Golden Cap.

Not wanting to be defeated I zoomed off in the late afternoon to Bridport and found a Threshers. But no Dubonnet. Only the Queen drinks Dubonnet these days, the shopkeeper informed me. Whereas I am now in the heart of Prince Charles country, within a stone’s throw of Poundbury and River Cottage, where the fix is organic fruit juices and Hugh Fearnley Whithenstall’s superior yogurt. So we will have to make do with tonic to blend with the gin.

There are many compensations, however. We could have had one of the turkeys Rosie Boycott rears on her farm, where she now lives the pure life after having survived her rebellious youth. Instead we decided to get our turkey from the local butcher in Charmouth to encourage him to stay in business. Charmouth has a minute population compared to Hampstead whose sole remaining butcher has just closed down despite a protest movement from the not un-influential inhabitants.

Writing this now the wind is getting up. I can hear the noise of the waves and am reminded that King Canute had to acknowledge that his own power was puny by comparison. Likewise, even the Hampstead chattering classes are powerless to halt the onward march of he supermarkets.

But that does not stop them trying. So I am passing on here my favourite Christmas card, from Kipper Williams, one of my London neighbours and also a Guardian cartoonist. They may be losing but they have not lost their sense of humour.

Happy Christmas all.

Calamity Clegg, as he was so memorably named by his opponent in the Liberal Democrat leadership battle, by his opponent Chris Huhne, may have more gravitas than most of the political commentators give him credit for. The contest between the two men grabbed no headlines and attracted little comment elsewhere in the newspapers, preoccupied as they were with the series of blunders which beset the Prime Minister. One of the main problems was that the two men agree about most things and seem to be good friends. The only occasion when either candidate indulged in the robust attack on the other candidates which usually happens in contests for political leadership was when Huhne, who started a long way behind in the contest, lost his normal cool, and attached the calamity label to his opponent. Clegg did not hit back at Huhne. Perhaps he was secretly quite pleased. He has been labeled by the commentators as Cameron lite, the man who can get all people to love him. More Blair than Brown and supposedly as guilty as them as bending his beliefs to grab votes. But Calamity Jane, was you will remember a crack shot with a gun, but totally lacking in what it needed in those far off days, to win the love of a man.But underneath the glib persona there may be some steel. When asked shortly after his election whether he believed in God, he gave a clear ‘No’. Although Brits are way below the Americans in church attendance most repeatedly they tell survey questioners that they do believe in a God. Additionally the most of the increasingly important Muslim voters, far from wanting to start a crusade against Christians, know the reality of the fact there is a huge overlap in the teaching of Jesus Christ and Allah. Clegg has not got a mandate to reshape the party in his own image. But the message from the Liberal Democrat voters is that they don’t want such a leader. They see the different merits of both men, who have far more in common than they have differences. And they want them to work together as part of a cabinet, which will also include at least two of the former leaders, Mengies Campbell and Vince Cable. Much has been made by the commentators of the junking of Mengies Campbell, allegedly because he was too old. In my view there was much more to it than. Although Campbell’s analysis of political events was cogent and often trenchant, he did lack the spark to ignite an audience, which Charles Kennedy had (when he was sober) and which other party leaders like David Steel and Jo Grimond had. Vince Cable, showed in his short spell as acting leader, that he had that spark. He blends cogent analysis with a keen sense of humour and his ability to use that humour to bring ridicule on his opponent. Brown as Mr Bean will remain in the Parliamentary book of humourous quotations for many years to come.The next two years offer the best chance the Liberal Democrats have had to make an impact on the electorate. The chances of neither Conservative or Labour getting an overall majority at the next election are very high. And the Lib Dems are well placed to lambast Labour on their erosion of civil liberties, new Labour’s Thatcherite tendency to fail to regulate big business which has led to Northern Rock and many irresponsible mortgages to people who cannot afford them, and the privitisation of essential public services, which leads to such absurdities as computer disks containing private information about British citizens being sent to Iowa.My advice to Calamity Clegg is to gather your posse together and when the time is ripe bring them down from the hills, with all guns blazing. Whip crack away.

Now that John Darwin has been charged and Anne Darwin is in police custody and is likely to be charged very soon, most of the newspapers have been covering the canoe story today by printing what the police said at a press conference and printing the picture the police supplied of Darwin posing for his John Jones passport, complete with a beard to rival that of W. G. Grace. Not the Daily Mail.

They publish an excellent story by one of its journalists, Natalie Clarke, who spent four days with Anne Darwin and was one of those on the plane which brought her back to the UK. In the best journalistic tradition she tells it how it was, including how Darwin behaved on a shopping expedition. She gives ample direct quotes from Darwin. But she also discloses her own feelings about her. She believes she is mostly telling the truth. But not the complete truth. As she writes, Darwin could scarcely have gone through the last five years of helping to conceal her husband’s return from the dead without learning to be a more than half decent actress.

Clarke explains how she tried to explain to Darwin the likely legal consequences of what she telling her, and what the Daily Mail was going to print. And how she did not fully take it in. She tells of her sense of shock when the police arrived on the plane to take her into custody. Where after all she may get a stiffer sentence than her husband because it is entirely probable that she will be charged with perjury.

So full marks to Clarke, who is honest enough to say that she does not know when her source is telling the truth or not, though she has had the advantage of four day’s contact.

But only five out of ten for the Daily Mail, which headlines the story, ‘The day a Mail girl took Anne Darwin shopping’. The Mail has the largest number of female readers of any national daily but does not seem to have realised that most of these women do nor relish being called ‘girls’.

But the Daily Mail web page, on this story and on many other stories, gives its journalists the opportunity to write at length for the web page, so that my guess is that there is far more detail available on the web than in the printed newspaper. And most of it is worth reading, when you are interested in the subject matter, because the Mail still chooses its journalists carefully. That is one of the reasons why the Mail is highly rated by most journalists. And why it is certainly ‘news’ when the Mail gets a story spectacularly wrong.

The story of the canoeist who faked his own death is one of those human interest stories which proves the old cliché that fact is stranger than fiction. Millions have been reading about the story of John Darwin, who was thought to have drowned in his canoe five years ago. Probably far more than watched the fictional Reginald Perrin series on prime Sunday night television. And, of course, the Perrin story was itself inspired by the real life story of the Labour MP, John Stonehouse, who faked his own death when his life was running into the buffers.

John Darwin has spent most of his life doing not very exciting jobs like school teaching and prison officering. But at heart he was a real Walter Mitty. He had dreams of something much more exciting. And moreover he was clever enough to go some way towards achieving those dreams. By playing the stock market and investing in houses in the north-east he built up assets worth hundreds of thousands. And even after he got into massive debt, he successfully faked his own death, resumed his marital life by knocking a hole on the wall of two adjoining houses he owned. He got away with this for several years, benefiting from the life insurance his wife was able to collect, and vesting the proceeds in new ventures in Panama. He was near his dream of establishing a canoeist’s dream hotel there under the name of John Jones, when, for reasons none of us yet know, he decided that he wanted to be John Darwin again. So he turned himself into the British police saying he had lost his memory.

The way the story has unfolded tells us quite a lot about the workings of the British media. The story has been told in great detail by all the British newspapers and been given prime time by the radio and television news bulletins. But so far as I have been able to glean no reporter has yet spoken to John Darwin (although several have got some information from their police contacts, and the police have been asking him quite a few questions in the last few days). All the hard information has come from his wife, Anne Darwin, and she, as far as I can gauge, has only spoken to two newspapers, the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror. The other newspapers and the broadcast media have in effect been rehashing what the Mail and Mirror have been discovering, and publishing as direct quotes by Anne Darwin.

Both papers included the name of David Leigh on the by-lines of their scoops. Thanks to some sleuthing by reporters on The Guardian we now know who he is. (By total co-incidence the leading investigative reporter on The Guardian is also called David Leigh.) David Leigh, according to The Guardian, is a former Daily Mirror reporter who works for the Splash news agency based in Miami. He tracked Anne Darwin down in Panama, took her back to Miami and sold his story to the Daily Mail. But the Daily Mail lost touch with him and it was the Daily Mirror who found out where he was.

So the two tabloids agreed to share the story (which does not stop either of them describing it as an ‘exclusive’!). Both newspapers have said they have paid no money to the Darwins. But both newspapers are presumably paying David Leigh or Splash or both. And not peanuts. I don’t know whether Leigh or Splash has paid money to the Darwins, but my guess is that it is 90 per cent likely that they will have paid them or their companies. That is for the Press Complaints Commission to discover.

Whatever, when I checked the web this morning the Daily Mail proclaimed that it was the Daily Mail who brought Anne Darwin back to Britain. The detailed Mail story proved that their reporters were on the plane, including such gems as this:

Before the plane took off from Atlanta, Mrs Darwin - who takes medication for blood pressure problems and poor circulation - put on her flight socks.

As the packed Delta aircraft taxied towards the arrivals gate at Terminal 2 she fought back tears as she looked out on a bleak, grey Manchester morning.

We also know that when the plane hit the tarmac at Manchester airport no fewer than six policemen, some armed with sub-machine guns, boarded the plane and escorted Anne to a waiting police car.

The mind boggles that this was necessary to arrest a 57 year old woman. The only reason I can think of for such a display of police strength is that the police wanted to make sure that they arrested her before the Daily Mail or the Daily Mirror spirited her off to a hotel in the country!

Even while I was writing my last blog, asking whether all British newspapers were now tabloid, the arch-fiend Rupert Murdoch, by far the most powerful British media owner and possibly now the most influential in the world, was plotting the next phase for his own empire. He has bumped up his own second son, James, 34, to be boss of his European and Asian businesses, making it highly likely that he will take over when Rupert, now well into his seventies, joins the ultimate boss in the sky, with whom, apparently, he is already on good terms. At the same time he has brought in a new editor of The Times, James Harding, 36.

So what does all this mean for the British press? It is easy to argue that Murdoch has been the dominant force in the tabloidisation of the British press. Certainly it is he who has made The Times so different from the paper I worked for in the late 1960s and early 1970s, which was edited by the high-minded patrician, William Rees Mogg, and owned by the Canadian Lord Thomson, who venerated British traditions, loved to be a Lord, and believed in leaving his editors alone to decide editorial policy and conduct the day to day running of his papers.  

Murdoch, from his first week as boss, showed he would be a hands-one proprietor, visiting the newsroom when the deadline approached and making cogent criticisms of the following day’s newspaper. He managed to become the scourge of the British left and attract the hostility of the British establishment, thanks to his anti-monarchy stance. He has used his financial power to weaken the competition, cutting the price of The Times, and threatening the survival of the other broadsheets, particularly The Independent. The Independent fought back, trying to beat Murdoch in the chase for new readers, by being the first broadsheet to go tabloid in shape.

They gained readers initially but their advantage was soon vanished, because Murdoch, a few weeks later, managed to compress the vast Times into the tabloid shape. In terms of content The Times, in its front page news priorities, began to look more like The Sun. They tended to lead on stories like the back from the dead canoeist, John Darwin, as they did a few days ago.

But if you think you are about to read another rant about the decline of the British serious press, you will be wrong. It is easy to lambast Murdoch for the zeal he shows in pressing his own beliefs, to which I should now add his anti-European convictions on top of those mentioned above. But to do so would be a gross under-estimation of the man. And it would not take account of the changes in Murdoch himself. He is no longer the brash young Australian who shocked the then-editor of the News of the World, by grabbing his paper which was ‘as British as roast beef’.

He has accumulated a huge understanding of both the newspaper and the television business not only in Britain but in the United States and the Far East. He has shown several times a capacity to learn from his mistakes, notably in making up by his initial disdain for the internet, but pouring money into Times Online. He has been extremely skilful in managing his relations with politicians. Prime ministers alter their diaries to meet him when he telephones.

The clue to the latest Murdoch changes is that they reflect a global strategy and when you examine there is very strong evidence that Murdoch, far from encouraging further tabloidisation, has demonstrated that serious news is now his main priority.

The latest changes are driven by Murdoch’s concern to make a success of his latest coup, which is his acquisition of the Wall St Journal, against the fierce opposition of the ruling family and many other Americans. He is changing the editor of the London Times because he needs its present editor, Robert Thomson, to spearhead the editorial thrust of his latest acquisition. Not because Thomson is a fellow Australian, but because his professional experience has mostly been with The Financial Times, and because he knows New York well thanks to his spell as the FT’s American editor.

The US has no national newspapers and the Wall St Journal was in fact the first US newspaper to make a bid for national coverage by establishing printing plants in several parts of the country. But the Journal has been far less successful than the FT in establishing its influence beyond the business world. It has nothing like the same quality in terms of political and arts coverage, which has made the FT must reading for highly influential readers not primarily interested in the stock markets. So in the US Murdoch will be challenging the New York Times and the Washington Post, which although their circulations are dominantly in New York and Washington have the most national and international influence in the American press. (Their only serious competitor is Time Magazine, which arguably is much less influential than it was. Although it has a much bigger national circulation both the New York Times and the Washington Post are able to reach many more millions via their web sites.)

Thomson is the sixth editor of The Times during Murdoch’s ownership and his priorities have always been serious news. In retrospect I paid too much attention in my tabloidisation blog to the canoeist lead. The Times still devotes most of its coverage to serious matters. And my guess is that it will continue doing after Thomson leaves for New York in early January. (When Murdoch acts he acts quickly!).

The new editor, like Thomson, has had most of his professional experience on the Financial Times. James Harding’s experience has all been as a business journalist. This is a disadvantage in the view of many journalists, who still believe that to learn the trade properly you need to start with local papers and do your apprenticeship following the mayor and covering weddings and funerals, and making your mark later in the parliamentary lobby.

Murdoch has long since realised that business corporations are quite as important as countries in the world we live today. And that journalists schooled in the business specialism acquire an understanding and vast contact book that is far more useful to them in national and international journalism than what can be learnt in those years in Wolverhampton or Darlington.

It is no accident that The Daily Telegraph, the main competitor of The Times, is also edited by a business journalist, Will Lewis. Lewis first made his mark by doing business stories for the Mail on Sunday. But the bulk of his experience was at the Financial Times, where, reportedly he became a firm friend of Harding’s.

I should not end this blog without a declaration of interest. Both Harding and Lewis did the City University post-graduate course in journalism when I was in there every day. And I myself began my career as a business journalist. And I even retain a soft spot for Rupert Murdoch, although I disagree with most of his opinions, simply because he granted me an exclusive interview when I was working for The Times, which gave me a decent scoop to further my journalistic career.

 Today is a wonderful day for examining news priorities in the British press because there is a plethora of good stories according to the news criteria which journalists use. A huge contrast to some of those Sundays I spent working at The Times, when you were still scratching around for a story weighty enough for the Page One lead when the final deadline was hours away.

Consider the rich possibilities facing journalists yesterday when they prepared today’s newspapers. (This analysis is done on the newspaper web sites this morning but mostly the web choices are precisely the same as those available last night when the printed versions went to bed.)

There was an entirely fresh coming back from the dead story that is even better than the highly popular television fiction story of Reginald Perrin. John Darwin, 57, who was last seen paddling out to sea in his canoe in 2002, turned up alive and well in the north of England. He was arrested by the police, because according to several newspaper reports, his life insurance had just been cashed in, and his wife had recently sold her house and emigrated to Panama. Again, according to newspaper reports, he has spent the intervening years living with other women. This information is not in the official police statement and I have no way of knowing whether the newspapers got their stories from police leaks or talks with the couple and their friends.

Also new was a video shown on Arabic television of British hostages who have not been heard of for several months and are now under a death threat from their captors. And a report from the American intelligence services that Iran was nowhere near to developing a nuclear weapons capacity. This story was given extra legs later in the day when President Bush went on television and told the nation that, despite what his own spooks told him, he still believed that Iran was still a nuclear threat, leaving us all to go on worrying lest he start another major war before he leaves office.

Then there was the publication of the official enquiry into the crash of the Nimrod aircraft in Iraq, which caused the biggest loss of life in the British military in one incident since the Second World War. The report blamed a fuel leak which raises important questions about this was due to a fault in the plane or cost cutting exercises which have reduced the frequency of inspections.

Added to this were new developments of varying degrees of importance in stories that have been running for some time. The most recent of these was the story of Gillian Gibbons, the British teacher jailed in the Sudan for naming a teddy bear ‘Mohammed’. The tearful reunion with her family yesterday was the lead item on BBC Television news last night. But no space was found for her on today’s front pages. The hard news that she had received a presidential pardon and was on a plane back to the UK had been in yesterday’s papers.

What does appear on some of the morning front pages are much longer running stories, like the disappearance of the McCann child on a Spanish holiday. For months now the newspapers have been speculating as to whether she was abducted or whether she was accidentally killed by her own parents. The Spanish police still do not know the answer, but apparently they have warned the parents that they might be called in to answer more questions. Then there is the problems in the British mortgage market which have led to the multi-million bail out of Northern Rock by the Bank of England. And of course the running story of the illegal contributions to Labour Party funds, and who knew about it.

So what did the British newspapers choose from this embarrassment of rich stories?

Starting with the tabloids.

The Sun led with the now-alive canoeist, with the McCann follow-up in second place and the Iraq hostages in third place. The Daily Mirror made exactly the same first two choices, but chose the Iran nuclear story as number three. The Daily Express led on the McCann story with a very weak follow up on Labour Party funds in second place. The Daily Mail led on the canoeist but chose a story about the love life of one of the contestants in the television programme, ‘I’m a celebrity get me out of here’ for number two. Their number three choice was about a sperm donor to a lesbian couple who is now being asked to support the child, because the lesbians have separated. All one can say about this story is that it fits in with the Daily Mail love of traditional marriage and its dislike of gays and lesbians.

So now for the interesting part of this analysis, what did the other papers who claim to prioritise on the serious business of what news is in the public interest, rather than slavishly follow what interests the public, do?

The Times led with the canoeist which by any stretch of the imagination is human interest rather than hard news. In second place it chose a story about GPs involved in ’secret’ tests performing their own abortions. This is a serious story but whether it rates front page scare treatment is highly doubtful. I cannot see anything wrong with GPs doing abortions though it will obviously be upsetting for any  Christian fundamentalist who is against any abortions. So maybe in highlighting it The Times was seeking at bow to the Almighty or to owner Rupert Murdoch, who is one of the Christian faithful.

In number three place The Times has the hostage story, strong on human interest, but which also has weighty implications since it relates to the war on terrorism and the war in Iraq. In fourth place was the Iran nuclear story, which is serious news by any yardstick. Likewise their number five story on mortgages, which although it is a ‘boring’ money story relates to fears about house prices and the economy and which, if the Government does not get it right, will lead to downfall of Gordon Brown and his cabinet.

The Daily Telegraph, which has been accused of dumbing down under its new young editor (now editor in chief) Will Lewis, actually led with a mortgage story. The number two story was the tabloid classic canoe story, but the next two were equally heavy, Nimrod and Iran nuclear.

The Guardian was out on its own with a story based on some digging by its own journalists into charitable trusts into which the banks have channelled £234 billion but which apparently have given nothing to charity. This story is necessarily highly complex but it suggests, what many economic commentators have been saying, that the Northern Rock debacle is only the tip of the iceberg in mortgage story. Northern Rock is one of many banks which have encouraged many house purchasers to take out much bigger mortgages than they can afford.

The next three stories, hostages, Iran and abortions, were all totally serious, but in The Guardian was guilty of tabloidisation by putting the canoeist in the number five slot.

The Independent, which devotes the whole of its printed front page to one story, chose to do a think piece on the state of the British economy, examining the likely effect of the mortgage crisis amongst many other factors which are causing economists to worry that we are due for a quite serious recession. But even The Independent has to take account of what interests the public (to survive someone has to buy the paper!) and it gives the canoeist the number two slot.

For the record I should include The Financial Times, although it is primarily a business paper. It leads on mortgages and has the Iran nuclear story second.

Equally interesting is what the heavy newspapers did not prioritise, the news that Andy Hayman, 49, the head of the police anti-terrorist squad. He resigned yesterday because of an investigation by the intrepid journalists of Channel 4 News, which carried the story in detail last night. They had discovered that Hayman had sent 400 text messages to a female member of the Independent Police Complaints Commission, while it was investigating the shooting of  Charles de Menezes, the young Brazilian who was shot by police in 2005 after the July 5 bombing.

From what I have learnt from this morning’s reports it seems that Hayman was guilty of love sickness rather than an attempt to improperly influence an investigation but there are still many unanswered questions. Which journalists, as well as the IPCC and the government, will want to find answers for. And these questions will create even more pressure on the head of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Ian Blair, who has steadfastly refused to resign over the Stockwell blunders.

Which is not good news. Because the nation is waiting with baited breath for the Metropolitan police to get on with enquiry into the legality of the behaviour of Labour Party officials and ministers over the money given them by the colourful Newcastle businessman, David Abrahams.

The police have a difficult job to do. And so do the journalists. Fleet Street’s finest could not do much with the Hayman story last night, because they had not got all the information which Channel 4 Television had unearthed. But I hope some of them are working on it today. Who runs the Met and how they go about their work is near the top of the scale on my yardstick for serious public interest stories.