Watching brief - Amanda Platell watches IDS get a good kicking
Published 20 October 2003
Charles Moore wonders whether it's possible to find anybody better to serve as Tory leader. That's as good as it gets for IDS in the right-wing broadsheets
There was a time when, however bad the press got, the Sunday Telegraph could be relied upon to give the Tory leader some respite over his full English breakfast. Now all he can be sure of is a good kicking.
While not running the actual allegations which surfaced a week later, that Betsy Duncan Smith had been paid from the public purse for little or no secretarial
work, it none the less gave over huge space
the weekend before the party conference to the Newsnight exclusive that never was. Not since John Leslie had so much coverage been given to a story about which so little was actually being said.
It had the effect of increasing the already febrile atmosphere among the disenchanted Tories at the seaside and gave hope to the plotters who had planted the story in the first place, in an attempt to destroy Iain Duncan Smith's leadership.
The coverage in week two, after the conference, was explosive, across four of the first seven pages of the Sunday Telegraph. Vitriol towards IDS oozed from the pores of every columnist: "a weakened man desperately buying time" (Matthew d'Ancona); "snarling and puerile" (Bruce Anderson); "We must dump IDS or say farewell to power" (Max Hastings the previous week).
If IDS can't convince Dominic Lawson, the Sunday Telegraph editor, that he is a prime minister-in-waiting, then he will convince no one.
Back on the Daily Telegraph, Charles Moore, the departing editor, had only this comfort for IDS: "Can they [Tory MPs] be sure that ousting Mr Duncan Smith would result in a better replacement . . . not just better, but sufficiently so to justify the upheaval of a leadership contest?" That's as good as it gets in the right-wing broadsheets. Now we wait to see where the new editor, Martin Newland, who started last Tuesday, will take the Torygraph.
Many were surprised that it fell to the deputy leader, Michael Ancram, and not to Theresa May, the well-heeled party chairwoman, to defend IDS through the media storm the day after the Betsy allegations were published. But those who have worked with the Tories know that Ancram is the safest pair of hands in the business. He has that rare ability to be loyal to the leader without being branded a loyalist. May's problem emerged when she was interviewed by John Humphrys on the Today programme. She has pinned her entire political personality on her size 11 Russell & Bromleys, but shoes don't give good radio.
The Betsy allegations centre around a leaked e-mail. When I worked at Conservative Central Office there was only one rule about e-mails: never write them. The place leaked like a bunch of footballers' groupies, and it still does.
Those at Central Office who plot against the leadership, whether it be William Hague or IDS, are like The Blob - unstoppable alien goo hell-bent on destruction. Just when you think you've killed the sods off, another bit of slime appears, creeping through the doorway.
The woman who rubs mud into Cherie Blair's butt has used the more amusing of her two Mail on Sunday columns to attack journalists who have variously described her lustrous, long, dark locks as "guru hair" and "nylon hair". She writes: "It's like being back in kindergarten!" I didn't realise Ms Caplin was that well educated.
Michael Portillo swaps his £2m London home, £220,000-a-year salary and refined life with his City wife, Caroline, to become a single mum to four teenage kids in Liverpool for a week.
Yes, it's When Michael Portillo Became a Single Mum, the latest offering from reality TV and quite a coup for BBC2. It appears to have captured the real Portillo. Jenny Miner, a real single mum, said: "I used to think what a sweet kind of guy he seemed." But then she criticised him for some of his parenting techniques.
Jenny was not to know, but Portillo does not do criticism.
"He suddenly seemed very aloof and arrogant, almost like he was thinking: 'How dare this person tell me how to do things?'" You just got Portilloed, love. It's happened to the best of us.
Now Jenny says she's in two minds about the man who has given up all ambition of leading the Tory party, honest. Which is appropriate, as that just happens to match his two faces perfectly.
Young love can be so painful. The 25-year-old model Jamelah Asmar discovered that her boyfriend, a footballer - who she said had previously cheated on her with other women, including her best friend - had been arrested over the alleged rape in a lay-by near Leeds. She told the Sunday Mirror: "I want to erase him from my memory - his tattoo must go."
Amanda Platell is former head of media relations for William Hague
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