Watching brief - Amanda Platell winces at new Labour's acne
Published 18 November 2002
"There were three in our marriage, too," said the wife of Paul Burrell, Diana's butler. By the end of a week of revelation and counter-revelation, there were 33
I was on the phone to a tabloid editor the day Princess Diana died. "What will we do without her?" he cried. "What will we write about now?" Five years on, that woman is still filling and selling newspapers.
By the end of the second week of revelations from her former butler Paul Burrell, the Daily Mirror had sold an extra two million papers: up 350,000 with the dark "powers at work" warning from the Queen; and up 350,000 with the attack on Diana's family under the front-page quote from Burrell: "The Spencers found Diana unacceptable in life. But after her death they found her very acceptable at £10.50 a ticket."
Burrell's is a textbook case of chequebook journalism. The moment he sold his story, he placed himself in a different moral territory, a place where normal rules no longer apply. As Ulrika Jonsson demonstrated after kissing and selling, constraint and fair play cease to exist, whatever the merits of your case.
Every person Burrell has ever flirted with appears to have crawled out from under a rock to make a fast buck off the back of the butler. It started on Sunday, with his wife saying of Diana: "There were three in our marriage, too." By the end of the weekend, there were 33.
Still, rumblings of a constitutional crisis are disingenuous. The last thing Tony Blair wants to do is abolish the monarchy. These days, if the royal family doesn't get him off the hook and out of the media spotlight, then the Tories do.
Days before it began, leaks suggested that the new drama which blew the lid off new Labour had Blair and Alastair Campbell in a cold sweat. The Project proved to be four hours of television that rocked the world - to sleep.
The only authentic aspect to the BBC's dramatisation of the early new Labour years was the pre-pubescent skin of the Millbank mafia. With actors straight out of acne central casting, it was duller than, and about as politically relevant as, an early episode of Neighbours. Not since have I seen such stolid sex scenes or such spotty backs.
Having just seen Mike Leigh's film All or Nothing, I was struck by how Leigh could create such drama from almost nothing. The Project managed no drama at all from what ought to have been a marvellous story.
OK, so John Humphrys is a hard act to follow, and Jeremy Vine has already got the job, so any attempt to fill temporarily the BBC's On the Record seat was always going to be a tough call. But the Observer columnist Andrew Rawnsley looked so nervous last Sunday that he gave me heartburn just watching him.
It is too soon to tell whether "Rennie" Rawnsley will adjust to the role of solo television presenter - he had, after all, co-presented A Week in Politics with the late Vincent Hanna. He turned On the Record into On the Ropes and anyone who manages to make the Secretary of State for Defence, Geoff Hoon, look like a contender ought to hang his head in shame. With arms gesticulating wildly, Rawnsley did a good impersonation of a castaway who had spotted his first plane in six years.
It does make you ask the question: why, with the dearth of first-rate political presenters in this country, the BBC allowed one of its most talented operatives, Nick Robinson, to defect to ITV? Especially when he told everyone who would listen, including the Beeb's house magazine, that he was desperate to stay.
Given his impressive start on ITV, I doubt they will ever let Robinson return.
In a leading article at the height of Butlermania, the Guardian wrote: "When the house organs of the royal family - including the Times, the Mail, the Telegraph and the Spectator - enter the fray with such deadly relish - you know you're in trouble."
The Times is about as much an "organ" of the monarchy these days as that grocer Al Fayed is. Don't Guardian leader writers read the Times?
Could this be the same Times that called, in a recent leader, for a complete overhaul of the Queen's Speech, unchanged since the 14th century? The same Times that is owned and now edited by a couple of Aussies not known for their monarchist sympathies?
Guardian hacks may fail to read the Thunderer, but, according to the editor of the Daily Telegraph, Charles Moore, the Times columnist Mary Ann Sieghart doesn't read much, either. She described Moore as the "one man who [has] the power to remove Iain Duncan Smith". Moore took umbrage, and took the unusual action of writing to the Times to complain that she implied his paper "wants to hold back the modernisation of the Conservative Party".
I'm with Moore on this one, given his recent form. I can assure you that the Telegraph's current progressive tendencies have been giving true-blue Tories a purple fit.
Post this article to
We want to encourage people to comment on our content and to exchange views with other readers and hope this will be done on a courteous basis. However, if you encounter posts which are offensive please let us know by emailing comments@newstatesman.co.uk and we will take swift action where necessary.
