Watching brief - Amanda Platell wants to pull a Kate Winslet
Published 20 January 2003
Seeing what it's done for Kate Winslet, I would like to digitally enhance John Prescott's arse (too much work there) and Cherie's thighs (that's Carole Caplin's job gone, then)
As Sir Peter Stothard was accepting his honours from Tony Blair for services most supine to new Labour, a former intelligence research specialist for the US Drug Enforcement Administration was being sentenced to 12 months in jail by a court in Atlanta. Jonathan Randel was found guilty of selling the agency's files to a third party, who then sold them to the Times. Randel also received £6,000 from News International for the confidential DEA files, the court heard.
Sir Peter used the files that named the then Tory party treasurer, Michael Ashcroft, to give unjustified substance to a variety of implications - of money-laundering or drug-smuggling. They succeeded only in destabilising an already beleaguered party. Interestingly, Denis Thatcher and the English National Ballet were also named in the stolen files, as was almost anyone who had had the audacity to fly over Central America at the time.
In the end, Rupert Murdoch brokered the peace deal between the Times and the treasurer over Stothard's head. The Times's claims were never substantiated and the DEA said in court that at no time had Ashcroft ever been under suspicion.
Price-cut Pete - whose increased circulation was due largely to the generosity of Murdoch's pricing policy - may have hoped that Ashcroft would be his Jonathan Aitken, a fast track to fame.
While relations between Ashcroft and the new editor of the Times, Robert Thomson, are good, the latest word from the US is that the DEA is planning to continue its investigation in London. Enjoy your knighthood, Sir Pete.
Who would have thought that in the 21st century we would still be saying: "Gosh, it's a female boss"? But gosh, it's a female editor of the Sun. And the first one at that, although Murdoch did appoint the first female tabloid editor when he placed Wendy Henry at the helm of the News of the World in 1987.
Rebekah Wade shares many things with Henry - among them an immense talent and a formidable determination. Unlike many female editors before her, Wade has not become a bloke on the road to the top. She's hard-working, loyal and, most unusually for someone with her looks and position, generous to other women. She's the kind of woman who believes stilettos belong on your feet, not in a colleague's back.
With an established record for campaigning journalism, enviable royal and showbiz contacts and a failed love affair with the Blairs behind her, her tenure at the Sun should give Piers Morgan, the Daily Mirror editor, some sleepless nights.
So farewell David Yelland, outgoing editor of the Sun. The circulation figures alone prove that during his five years, he did a fine job, even at the most difficult of times. Those who gloat over his leaving should stop and remember: there but for the grace of God.
Dancing around the flat to "Night Fever" on Sunday evening, trying to recreate that late-Seventies Bee Gees magic, I spotted Peter Oborne on the television surrounded by pixellated faces and starving black children.
I admire his guts for sneaking into Zimbabwe to expose the way Mugabe is slowly killing his own people, and although the facts were not new, the images were powerful - with the sound off. Mugabe's Secret Famine (Channel 4) filmed the journalist driving down remote roads in Zimbabwe saying things like: "What we're doing is driving down some remote roads."
However, the sight of Oborne chewing on a bit of wood, a Zimbabwean family's only food, screwing up his nose and pronouncing in his finest Oxbridge accent "It's very bitter, isn't it?" was a bit much to stomach. Let us all be grateful that the starving child trekking in search of food could not understand this booming Englishman when he inquired of the guide whether the young chap would get a "square meal when he gets home". I'm sure Oborne's intentions were honourable, but there was something awfully imperialistic about the whole venture, as though it had never really entered his tiny mind that persecution and famine mean that children die hungry in the dirt.
And let's face it, sending Oborne undercover in Zimbabwe as a keen sportsman was about as convincing as sending Tara Palmer-Tomkinson undercover in a fat farm.
Morphing is the new reality. Seeing what it did for Kate Winslet, I am wondering what I would digitally enhance given half the chance - Prescott's arse (too much work there), Cherie's thighs (that's Carole Caplin's job gone, then), Tony's left ear (you know, the big sticky-out one)? I'd give Iain Duncan Smith some hair and some hope, and reduce the size of Ken Clarke's ambition - but then, some things are beyond even the most sophisticated technology.
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