Watching brief - Amanda Platell enjoys Hillary's rewriting of history
Published 16 June 2003
Dick Morris, adviser to Clinton, describes the Bill-Hillary marriage: "For putting up with Gennifer Flowers, she got control of healthcare policy. For Monica, she got a Senate seat"
Dick Morris, adviser to Bill Clinton for 20 years, does a spectacular demolition job in the National Review of Hillary's account of the Monica Lewinsky affair in her new book, Living History. He argues that Hillary must have known all along, but that her priority was keeping her husband in office and her own political ambitions alive. Morris describes Clinton as a serial adulterer and their marriage as being based on a cycle of accusation-denial-admission-reward. "For putting up with Gennifer Flowers . . . she got control of healthcare policy. For Monica, she got a Senate seat. Some guys give necklaces, some give Senate seats."
Most intriguing is that Hillary believed Bill's explanation that he was "ministering to a troubled young girl". One normally thinks of "ministering" as attending to the needs of others. As far as I am aware, troubled women do not go around saying: "God, what I really, really want now is to give some bloke a blow job."
Hillary's £5m literary rehabilitation, more aptly named Rewriting History, may be storing up trouble for her future ambitions; but, despite the self-delusion, the Sunday Telegraph's extracts provided us with the read of the week.
Hillary made her marriage to Bill sound like a real love affair, although how you can truly love a man who can't keep his trousers zipped is beyond me.
I understand the original fee, a large five-figure sum, was negotiated down by the paper's editor, Dominic Lawson, to something more like a modest four-figure sum after the story of the moment Bill came clean over Monica was leaked. Great value indeed, and partly down to the skills of Anna Murphy, editor of the Sunday Telegraph's Review section.
Rumours that the serialisation was sold for £300,000 were wide of the mark. Once again, we see a publisher place a property not with the highest bidder, but with a preferred partner.
This was not dissimilar to events surrounding the placement of Edwina Currie's demolition job on John (I'm too sexy for my big pants) Major, which went to the Times.
I understand Hillary would have liked more attention given to her attempt to save Rwanda rather than her marriage, but who'd buy a paper to read such self-serving rubbish?
It was only a matter of time before someone used Article Eight of the Human Rights Act to sue a newspaper successfully, and the Radio 1 DJ Sara Cox now has that honour. Plummeting sales do funny things to editors and the Sunday People's drop of around 15 per cent year on year must have been a factor in the former editor Neil Wallis's decision to buy pictures of Cox and her husband naked on honeymoon.
Even a healthy paper would wince at the £50,000 damages awarded - in addition to its own and part of Cox's costs. Most importantly, celebrities will be watching the way she is now treated in the tabloids.
Will there be a revenge-fest? Many celebs saw how Naomi Campbell's reputation was almost destroyed after she took on the Daily Mirror. Now we must wait to see who will be brave enough to follow in Cox's footsteps.
Whenever a particularly malicious story appeared about me - like one written by Michael Gove in the Times before the 2001 election - my mother would always ask: "Why don't they ever write about your charity work, Mandy?"
And the answer is, that would be viewed as a cynical attempt to manipulate hearts and minds off the back of little kids and sick people.
Enter Cherie Booth's charity work, paraded across 16 pages of the Mail on Sunday's magazine Night and Day. One detects the tender hand of The Dresser in the procurement of no fewer than 14 eulogies of the Prime Minister's wife.
Carole Caplin, a columnist for the magazine, reminds us not to forget about the work Cherie does with, you guessed it, "sick, disabled and disadvantaged children". Fergie asks: "How does she do it?" What, get worse press than you? Geri Halliwell: "Hey, this chick is down-to-earth." Alastair Campbell and his partner Fiona Millar (now departing from No 10), pushed out by the pushy Dresser, must have read and wept. It was captivating stuff, but for all the wrong reasons. And as for the media deliberately using unflattering pictures of Cherie, the hard truth is that some women take a good picture and some don't. It is not in the interest of editors to frighten their readers.
British Tourism Day, and the royal family travels the country promoting all that is great about Britain. What a pity that does not include the Windsors. The sight of Prince Edward opening a caravan park in Wales is enough to set the tourism industry back a decade. With nine members of the family on parade, it would have been more aptly named National Bludgers Day.
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