Watching brief - Amanda Platell has a go at Popbitch
Published 09 December 2002
How strange that the founder of Popbitch is Neil Stevenson, editor of The Face - a magazine that regularly features the very stars that Popbitch smears
Edwina Currie in skin-tight leathers, thrusting cleavage, astride a grey, fiftysomething legend - no, not John Major: it was a Harley-Davidson this time, groaning under the ego of the kiss-and-sell merchant. When the photographer John Swannell told Currie he wanted her "in leathers on a Harley-Davidson", she thought her luck was in. Alas, all he actually sought was a photo shoot for the cover of the Sunday Times Magazine. But you could see from the look of sheer abandon on her face that Currie was, in her own words, hot and sticky for it. Few can question the wisdom of his using a long lens.
It was the week for thrusting Tory has-beens. Without even lifting a finger, another embodiment of all that is repulsive about the Conservative Party was again centre stage with BBC1's Jeffrey Archer: the truth.
Cover and headline of the week must surely go to the Times's Saturday Play section. Archer was pictured rescuing Margaret Thatcher from the flames, holding her tenderly in his strong arms, their lips only inches apart. Headline: "Gone with the wind-bag".
The cyber-gossip website Popbitch - its proud motto "Unfounded rumour peddled as truth" - has set the newspaper business back years. The industry has worked hard at self-regulation, but the dilemma over whether to print what has now become known as the Beckham Rumour, the very same that first appeared on Popbitch, has thrown the whole process badly off course.
The tabloids had a field day, either running the rumour - claiming it was utterly untrue - or running the story of the rumour without the details, which in many ways is worse.
My phone rang constantly with people wanting to know the truth about the Beckhams. One former newspaper executive shared with me his rather sinister speculations about the rumour (I will spare you the details). No newspaper would have run the story unless it had appeared on the website, so Popbitch has enabled some newspapers to get perilously close to breaking their own codes and others to succumb to their baser instincts.
Although the laws of libel for the internet are the same as for newspapers, they are much more difficult to enforce. Tracing the source of a rumour can be almost impossible and, if found, there is little chance of them having the funds to fight a legal action. Closing a website is a lot easier and cheaper than closing a newspaper. A few thousand pounds later, the culprits are up and smearing again in cyberspace with the same audience of 20 million people. We may just have witnessed the death of privacy.
It is ironic that the website's founder, as revealed in the Daily Mirror, is Neil Stevenson, editor of The Face magazine, a publication that regularly features the stars Popbitch smears. Talk of a celebrity boycott of the magazine comes as no surprise.
Simplistic, silly, dogmatic and a bad historian - that's the verdict of the Telegraph proprietor, Conrad Black, on his former editor Max Hastings. In what is being hailed as death by a thousand consonants, Black demolished the reputation of his former employee under the guise of choosing Editor as his book of the year for the Sunday Telegraph, in less than 200 words. Charges that Hastings has a 15-second attention span, that he was easily manipulated by the Tory wets and that he lacks intellectual rigour will harm him less than the implied criticism that he is a poor historian with scant respect for the facts, because this is how the former editor now chooses to make his living. When Hastings responded in the Evening Standard Londoner's Diary: "I'm tremendously flattered that he chose Editor . . . but I'm a tiny bit sad that he didn't see the joke," it left us all wondering who the joke was on. The only surprise here is that they managed to work together at all.
When I first saw the picture of Hari on the front cover of the Guardian Weekend magazine under the headline "The love that changed my life", I could hardly bring myself to read the story, written by her partner, Martin Jacques, of her death.
In a world of confessional journalism, where personal tales of love and loss come cheap, this piece was extraordinary in its restraint and as a result all the more powerful. I cannot begin to imagine what it must have taken for him to write it.
I bumped into Martin a few weeks ago in the high street. He stumbled out of the Tube exit like a man momentarily blinded by the light. In truth, he was blinded by the absence of it - and has been since Hari died in January 2000.
I knew him years ago on the Independent. Anyone who met Martin also met Hari. They were the kind of couple who made you believe in love.
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