When it comes to its own, Fleet Street turns coy
Published 30 October 2000
Media - Bill Hagerty
In the national newspapers, all's fair in love and war, except in love. When it comes to affairs of the heart, or even cases of good old-fashioned illicit nooky, there is one rule for the great, the good and hoi polloi, and another, quite different precept for those working in the press. Call it a conspiracy of silence, call it looking after one's own, call it "there but for the grace of God go I" nervousness, but the fact remains that Fleet Street, as was, does not like to wee on its own doorstep.
Indeed, without Private Eye and, on the rare occasions when it gets it right, Punch, the public would know nothing whatsoever of any naughty goings-on in the newspaper industry. Because, between them, these two publications sell only just enough copies to wallpaper the inside of an errant proprietor's or editor's pied-a-terre, such revelations amount to no more than whispers compared to the rampant bellowing of the tabloids.
It has always been thus. The marital minefield occupied by the late newspaper proprietor Lord Rothermere and his social butterfly of a first wife, "Bubbles", was potentially as rich in salacious detail as any of the marriages of politicians and show-business personalities that periodically explode into print.
More recently, the turbulent sexual history of David Montgomery, the one-time editor of the News of the World and, subsequently, Today, went largely unreported. This is despite the industry apparently overflowing with people harbouring real or imagined grievances against a man whose unpopularity rivals that of Peter Mandelson in politics.
Ostensibly busy 24 hours a day or more running Mirror Group Newspapers, as its chief executive, Montgomery was also busy romancing - if "romance" and "Montgomery" are not a contradiction in terms - a married woman who, shortly afterwards, became pregnant. What's more, his paramour, who became the third Mrs Montgomery after her and her lover's marriages were dissolved, had a title: Sophie, Countess of Wooton. Rich journalistic pickings for the Mirror's rivals, one might have thought, but the hush was, as they say, deafening.
Surely those at the very top of the national newspapers pyramids are public figures just as significant as many of those whose extramarital extravagances spill from the tabloids and often from the broadsheets, too? Most working journalists are no more influential than your average cook or bottle-washer, but, in this high-profile age, those who control or edit newspapers can be considered bona fide celebrities.
Such is the public visibility of Piers Morgan, the youthful editor of the Mirror, that he has been the subject of a question on a television quiz show. The contestant was asked to name the editor of the Mirror, but failed - proving, perhaps, that the public is nowhere near as obsessed with the press as the press appears to think. But you can bet a pound to a sheaf of share options that the name of the chief executive of a major cooking and bottle-washing concern will at no time trip from the lips of William G Stewart on Fifteen to One.
Morgan, a talented journalist who is popular with most of his staff, has proved during his spectacular career to be rather accident-prone. He walked into the bearpit of Have I Got News For You on television and was badly mauled. Then came the share-buying scandal, with the Press Complaints Commission coming down on him with a ton of bricks disguised as a damning condemnation of his behaviour.
You cannot keep a good man down, however, and nor can you Piers. Soon he was back on television, on Question Time, giving what I thought was an excellent account of himself (and apologising for being so soppy as to have dabbled dubiously in stocks).
That Morgan is a celebrity, there can be no doubt. Rival papers revelled in reporting his financial embarrassment. So why, apart from a few references veiled to the point of impenetrability, has it been left to Private Eye to reveal his most recent newsworthy escapade, which involves a female gossip writer for the Sun, a number of intriguing e-mails that shuttled between the two and the departure of the Mirror editor from his marital home?
Even journalists used to sorting the wheat from the daft must have been baffled by the enigmatic lead story of 15 September in their trade paper, Press Gazette, which reported that one Marina Hyde had made a hasty exit from the Sun because of "inappropriate" e-mails sent to Morgan. The story contained more "no comments" than the entire shadow cabinet could muster over drug use. It was not until after Morgan's pal Kelvin MacKenzie had publicly made a couple of risque remarks at a party - well, he would, wouldn't he? - that the Private Eye of 20 October revealed the "close friendship" between the editor and the hack.
One national newspaper, I am reliably informed, has subsequently "doorstepped" the Morgan family home. But it remains doubtful that the story will receive the tub-thumping treatment reserved for - to take last weekend's examples - the infidelity "outings" of Andrew Morton (himself a humble-ish hack until his Lady Diana book boosted both his profile and his bank balance) and the TV "watchdog" Lord Holme.
Morgan's private life is no business of mine, nor of anybody else's, other than those involved. But neither are the private lives of the wandering-eyed, second-division celebrities and sports stars who get busted, mostly in contravention of the PCC's "public interest" clause, by the tabloids. How long will it be before those pilloried in the press for their indiscretions, and the millions of punters who like nothing better than "love triangles" with their breakfast cereal, cotton on to Fleet Street's secret rumpled sheets?
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