AND ANOTHER THING
What Maggoty Mac and the feculent Pharaoh are up to
PAUL JOHNSON
Then in addition there are the various wild cards who, for one reason or another, would like to see the Conservatives retain office. Mohamed Al Fayed, the owner of Harrods, widely known as 'the man who brought the honourable name of wog into disrepute', is supposed to be anti-Tory because they would not give him British citizenship. That certainly was true but is now out of date. Fayed no longer has any realistic hope of citizenship. Since he has accused the Tory Home Secretary of tak- ing a bribe of a million pounds, a fantastic charge which has persuaded a lot of peo- ple that Fayed has finally lost his marbles, for Michael Howard to oppose further any renewed application for citizenship could look vindictive. But Jack Straw should be under no such inhibitions, and the wily Oriental gentleman knows it. So he is cur- rently engaged in feeding anti-Labour material to his many creatures in the media.
Significantly, Fayed and Tory Central Office both operate through the same out- let: the gossip columns. These are by defini- tion the most corrupt element in the media, and of course will get their quietus when a Labour-dominated parliament quickly pushes through a Privacy Bill. This now looks like being a severe one, with an offence of criminal privacy invasion in extreme cases which will enable not merely the gossip columnist but his editor and pos- sibly also his proprietor to be sent to Wormwood Scrubs. So the fight is on to keep Labour out at all costs, and the Paul Slickeys are hard at it. One of their objects is to discredit the Referendum party, now thought likely to lose the Tories a dozen marginals. It is said transcripts exist of Cen- tral Office briefings of two editors, showing how they can `gee Jimmy Goldsmith through their gossip columns. Certainly the minions of Brian Mawhinney — and they don't come any lower — regularly feed sleaze to the more depraved journos. And Maggoty Mac, as I call him, has now been joined in this operation by Fayed.
Fayed is a phenomenon new to these shores, though common enough on the Continent. He uses the enormous wealth to which he has access not only to shower gifts and hospitality on MPs, keeping care- ful records of their weaknesses which can later be used, but also to influence other sectors of society, notably the media. The number of journalists who have, as it were, got into bed with this oleaginous Oriental is striking. During the disastrous final years of Peter Preston's editorship of the Guardian, the paper became his instru- ment, and some of the details which will emerge when Jonathan Aitken's libel action finally comes to court will be elec- trifying, though I have a horrible suspicion the Guardian will cut its losses and settle. Another paper where people who share Fayed's hostility to Sir James Goldsmith are thick on the ground is the Evening Standard, and it is no accident that some of the choicest anti-Goldsmith smears sur- face in that journal.
Then there is the case of Peter McKay, a man begrimed by the sewage of Private Eye and every other London cesspit, so that his entry into a room — and, amazingly enough, there are houses which will admit him — can be not only seen but positively inhaled. McKay was on Fayed's payroll not long ago as editor of Punch. To my aston- I only smoke for the fresh air . . ishment he was recently taken on board the Daily Mail, a respectable paper for which I write myself, where he not only produces a column under his own name but another with the byline 'Ephraim Hardcastle', in which he prints his more dubious insinua- tions. What people like Lord Rothermere and Paul Dacre, who in many ways try hard to raise the standards of British journalism, think they are up to by harbouring such a man I cannot imagine. Moreover, the con- nections between certain gossip columnists, some of whom take in each other's dirty washing — a mixed metaphor but to hell with it — enable orchestrated campaigns to be conducted.
So it was last week when Fayed was entertaining the media with the results of one of his nastier devices — hidden video cameras which secretly film visitors to his offices and hospitality chambers. The tapes were greedily goggled at by journalists who still naively believe Fayed's claim that he is trying to raise the standards of British pub- lic life. Imagine the chorus of outrage from the press if the police or Home Office or MI5 were found to be secretly filming unsuspecting members of the public! But if Fayed does it in order to supply the media with gossip it is not only OK but positively meritorious. Thus last week we had the charmingly innocent Stephen Glover — and in the unsullied columns of The Specta- tor, ye gods! — hailing Fayed's tapes as `extremely amusing' and 'most entertain- ing', and then proceeding to deliver exactly the message the old fakir wanted him to serve up. The campaigns being waged by Fayed and Central Office are only one aspect of the current collapse of the British media s residual standards. What is going on, and can assure Spectator readers that the law prevents me from telling them the worst of it, persuades me that the new parliament must not just enact a statute making inva- sion of privacy a civil tort and in extreme cases a criminal offence, but another one obliging all media outlets to keep a register of employees' interests and enact enforce- able codes of conduct. Journalists must be obliged to declare all retainers they receive and all gifts and hospitality they enjoy above a certain minimum cash value. An to show it is in earnest, I want to see Labour, as soon as it takes office, have out feculent Pharaoh frogmarched onto a plane at Heathrow.
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