Press
Copy rights
Bill Grundy
I remember as a boy being frequently puzzled by that newspaper column known vulgarly as 'Hatched, Matched, and Despatched' — Births, Marriages and Deaths to you. For after the sad news that I ta, 3 Jone aged ninety, ,_aving hole that nothing could fill, has gone to fill a hole of his own, there quite otten occurred the mysterious message 'Other papers please copy'. I noW know that request was superfluous. Newspapers do nothing else but copy. But sometimes it doesn't work.
Take last week for instance. I picked up the Daily Express on Wednesday, and there was a picture of my old chum Mr HarrY Chapman Pincher, ace reporter and one time winner of a What The Papers Say award for his skill in snatching stories from under the empurpled noses of his fellow workers. Beside the block of Mr Pincher's homely mug there was a slogan saying that he was "first with the news again". Well, normally you'd accept that as a pretty safe bet; Mr Pincher makes a habit of getting there first. But something niggled away at the bottom of what passes for my memory and I decided to look through the files. The story was the one about the land deal involving people close to Mr Wilson. The Express ran it very big on page one, heading it 'Wilson man in land deal row'. Various names were mentioned in the story, among them Mrs Marcia Williams, the Prime Minister's right-hand woman; her sister Miss Peggy Field; her brother Mr TonY Field; a gentleman called Victor Harper; and another very clever fellow who seems to have been able to mgke oil and water mix in so far as he was recently a Salvationist ar d is presently a millionaire. The name was Ronald Millhench and it was that which jogged the old grey cells. Sure enough, going through the files, I came across a Daily Moil of mid-March which revealed that Mr Millhench had been negotiating for more han a year for the purchase and re-sale of ninety-five acres of industrial redevelopment land, and it named, and mentioned the involvement of, Mrs Williams, Mr Field and the others. So the Express hadn't go_ there first after all. But since the Mail had sounded the alert nearly a month earlier, the indefatigable Mr Clincher had clearly had time to dig up a related, but different story. His was about a letter to Warwickshire County Council on Mr Wilson's official notepaper and Signed H. A. Field, Private Secretary. Despite the size of the Express's banner headline 'Wilson Man in land deal row', the bricks in the story underneath seemed to me to be decidedly deficient in straw.
As an attempt to compete with the Mail it failed miserably, for the Mail's front page that same day was headed 'Who forged Wilson's signature?' They gave us some extraordinarily interesting quotes from a letter to the Mysterious Mr Millhench, purPorting to be from the PM, and „showed us both the real and the
forged Wilson signatures. •
Well, as we all know, the Prime Minister decided to slap a writ on both papers, an honour trumpeted all over the front page of the 4xpres5 next day: 'WILSON SUES THE EXPRESS,' but coolly ignored by the Mail.
And there the Matter should have rested, if the more timid interpreters of the law are to be believed. But a short paragraph on the front page of Friday's Daily Telegraph explains why all the Papers stuck at the story, refusing to be gagged by legal process. The Paragraph read: "The mere issue of libel writs by Mr Wilson against two newspapers need not prevent further reporting, comment and discussion over the property deals of his friends. LordJusticeSalmon, now Lord Salmon, the Lord of Appeal, made this principle clear in a case in 1969 when he said it Was a 'widely held fallacy that the issue of a writ automatically stifles further comment'."
If Friday's papers were anything to go by, the fallacy is widely held nO longer. There were yards of stuff in every one. Most of it was highly characteristic — my edition of the Times, for example, contained facts that other papers had Printed the day before (is it true, I Wonder, that the Times newsdesk still has trays labelled Tomorrow"?); the Express leader broke into Old Testamentese: "Reclamation is indeed a noble aim. But what shall it avail the land developer to speculate and !tot make a profit?" This was the laSt sentence of a superb tongue'fl-Cheek account of the virtues of land reclamation, which Mr Wilson had been defending passionately in the Commons the day before. I don't often find myself, Praising the Express for the subtlety of its leaders. I do now. The age of miracles is not yet past. But one or two questions remain. Why has the press leapt °n to the Daily Mail's bandwagBon so enthusiastically? Because I ,,It's a good story? Of course. I ttecause a Labour Prime Minister's associates seem to be involved? Labour: Ay, there's the rub. Would they have been quite so enthusiastic if it had been a PM of a different political colour? Cjnicism tempts me to say 'no'; fairness forces, me to say that I think they still would have dug, but perhaps with a rather smaller
spade. However, whatever the size of shovel the boys are using, I can't wait to see what turns up next.
And, more relevantly, as far as newspaper investigations are concerned, does the activity of the last week mean that the press has had a new access of courage? Will the dreaded words 'sub judice' be heard with less of a shiver than they used to be? Will the issue of a writ no longer automatically kill all further reporting and comment?
I'm not sure. The last sentence of the Daily Telegraph note on Friday read: "But the question of at what point comment or criticism is 'gagged' by the issue of a writ is still unclear for newspapers." You can say that again. But how nice if one result of it all is that some of the fog that surrounds us is blown away for ever. I don't suppose it will happen, but there's no harm in hoping.
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