The Daily Novel

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.