Media
We should all be so persecuted
Published 19 March 2007
A tale of David and Goliath, in which the part of Goliath - representing the ruthless left-wing intelligentsia and media - is taken by Lorraine Kelly
Is your heart chilled? Apparently it ought to be. According to Melanie Phillips in the Daily Mail, the sacking of Patrick Mercer from the Tory front bench "should chill the heart of every single person of any colour or creed who cares about truth, justice and decency". Why? Because it shows that the Tories "are running scared of a venomous media and left-wing intelligentsia" bent on smearing the party with "the toxic taint of racism".
In case you missed this story of towering moral significance, Mercer (of whom most of us had never heard) was the Tory spokesman on homeland security (a job most of us did not know existed) until he was fired by David Cameron for saying some dazzlingly ill-judged things about black soldiers in the army. Phillips takes his sacking as the final proof that anti-racism has become the McCarthyism of our age, and she goes so far as to say that its assault on our values is not just an evil in itself, but is also giving assistance to the attack on this country "from without" (in other words al-Qaeda).
Trevor Phillips abetting Osama Bin Laden: that's quite a charge. As so often with Melanie Phillips, though, the tone distracts from the argument - not just the apocalyptic alarmism but the air of victimhood. Right-thinking people, it seems, are as puny flyweights confronted by the mighty Mike Tyson that is the venomous media, the left-wing intelligentsia and the new McCarthyism. Phillips feels bullied.
Amanda Platell warned about these same dark forces in her Mail column a couple of days earlier. "As a former spin-doctor to William Hague", she knew the terrors of a world where "a whiff of racism can provoke hysterical reaction". And Peter Hitchens had a similar message in the Mail on Sunday - calling us to take up arms against a "project aimed at dismantling Britain and replacing it with a multicultural, amoral nowhere".
Simon Heffer was no less angry in the Telegraph ("Freedom of speech is clearly going straight out of the window"), and he had support there from Lord Tebbit. Then there was Rod Liddle in the Sunday Times, who professed himself "clueless" about the reason for Mercer's sacking. And for good measure, Carole Malone of the Sunday Mirror complained: "If we've now got to the stage in Britain where people cannot speak freely . . . then our so-called democracy is a sham."
Add them up and that's quite a lot of column inches for an underdog. Nor could this be called a group of lightweights. Phillips, Heffer, Hitchens and the rest wield the loudest megaphones atop the most prominent soapboxes in Fleet Street and, week in, week out, they say whatever the hell they like. We should all be so persecuted.
And who is the Goliath to their David? The only regular columnist to raise two fingers to Mercer, the only one to suggest that he deserved all he got, was Lorraine Kelly in the Sun, alongside her items about Heather Mills and Richard Madeley. True, the Mirror and the Sun ran critical leaders about Mercer and his comments, as did the Independent papers and (interestingly) the Express. On the whole, though, the other commentators, where they referred to the case at all, showed great sympathy for the ex-officer with the big mouth, even if they could not argue with his sacking.
It certainly doesn't look like a venomous, McCarthyite, left-wing intelligentsia at work - that would be a new take on Lorraine Kelly. So perhaps this is just a paranoid fantasy of the right-wing intelligentsia. It wouldn't be the first, after all: aren't these people always telling us that the climate-change doubters can't get a fair hearing, even though the same doubters never seem to be off our screens?
Smooching on the slopes
There was a mood of satisfaction at the hearings of the Commons select committee on the media earlier this month, when they reached the subject of Kate Middleton, and it wasn't just because Sun photographer Arthur Edwards announced that Prince William had promised him the couple would marry.
No, Middleton's new-found privacy was proof that self-regulation of the press was working. It took only four days of harassment by photographers last January before sense prevailed and the pack was called off her. I'm sure that even the young woman herself would agree that that was simply marvellous.
Much credit was given to Les Hinton, chairman of News International, for eventually ordering the Times and the Sun (which were leading offenders) to stop buying the paparazzi's pictures. "Thankfully, others followed," Hinton told MPs modestly.
Just two days after the hearings, then, which paper spread five long-lens photographs across two pages under the banner "Wills and Kate smooch on slopes"? The Sun, of course. No doubt the select committee remains impressed by the magic of self-regulation.
Brian Cathcart is professor of journalism at Kingston University
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