MEDIA STUDIES
I rather think Mr Will Hutton, the editor, is to blame for this Self-inflicted wound on the Observer
S TEPHEN GLOVER
Any rising young novelist with children and an ex-wife plus new girlfriend is almost bound to seek extra income from else- where. Journalism is the natural port of call. Will Self, the self-anointed enfant terri- ble of the modern novel, has followed the route where, in this century, Wells, Waugh, Greene, Powell all went before and, in the last, Thackeray, Trollope and Dickens. Daniel Defoe, whom we are told at school was the first English novelist, was first a journalist.
So far so good. At any rate until he was sacked by the Observer last week for snort- ing heroin in the lavatory of the Prime Min- ister's plane, Mr Self had not yet reached that level of notoriety — as, say, Martin Amis has done — where he could hope to support himself merely by way of what he puts between hard covers. Thus it was that he undertook to write a restaurant column for the Observer. This was a novelty, in as much as young novelists are usually expect- ed to turn their hands to more intellectual pursuits than the description of food, but the assurance of a couple of free square meals a week was not to be gainsaid, least of all by a hungry young writer.
But the Observer may have felt that it was not getting its money's-worth from Mr Self, who had made his name writing novels pour epater les bourgeois — perhaps the most notorious being Cock and Bull, in which a man grows female sexual organs on the back of one leg. You can only go so far in writing about the joys of tagliatelle; the finer points of cream sauces do not offer the ideal platform for revolutionary ideas. So the Observer recently promoted Mr Self to the culturally more seminal role of tele- vision critic. It was in this guise that I began to notice him.
Mr Self would surely have found his feet in time, but his early television reviews are unlikely to find their way into many anthologies. They were extraordinarily long — about 1,500 words each, I would say and often featured no more than a couple of rather obscure programmes which had somehow attracted Mr Self's notice. He was oddly incapable of bringing these alive — so much so that one sensed that he was bored by the whole enterprise, and was per- haps harking after those little bistros to which his former calling had taken him. His prose had a listless quality which occasional arcane words and clanking imagery did nothing to lighten. The Observer had still greater ambitions for Mr Self, and when the campaign proper began he was sent out on the road to write a political column. As things turned out, he wrote only one. He implies in an interview in the Independent on Sunday (which news- paper has, perhaps rashly, just offered him an unspecified job as a columnist) that he was rather pushed into his new duties against his will. 'I'd recently been under stress for personal reasons and had fallen into a trough of using heroin again,' he told the paper, in one of his least solipsistic pas- sages. He had been feeling 'so low' that `two weeks beforehand I'd asked for time off. I was told I had to file; their whole line was that I was their star writer.'
Their star writer? What can Will Hutton, the Observer's editor, have been thinking of? Mr Self may have been at home amid the tagliatelle — I do not know — but, to judge by his one political column, he seems to have been bored stiff by politics. It is a long, meandering affair, full of Mr Self's not par- ticularly interesting feelings, including (this is a fatal error in any journalist) ennui. He seems to have the barest knowledge of recent political history. His images continu- ally just miss their mark. He writes of the Tory faithful 'whipping up the froth on the flat lager of their Little Englander ideology'.
I am inclined to think that Mr Self was more sinned against than sinning. He was known to have been a heroin addict. He had not been in the best of spirits. His tele- vision column was practically unreadable. He had demonstrated no grasp of politics. Yet in blind defiance of these facts Mr Hutton insisted on harnessing him up and setting him on the road for the simple rea- son that he is supposed to be a 'celebrity'. It was a piece of showbiz, not journalism, on Mr Hutton's part, and he is very fortu- nate to have been rescued from his own folly by Mr Self's indiscretions in the Prime Minister's lavatory.
`Come a bit closer to the microphone.' Neil Hamilton wrote to The Spectator last week complaining that I, among oth- ers, had stated incorrectly that he had admitted in his oral evidence to Sir Gor- don Downey that he had lied to Michael Heseltine. Mr Hamilton denies that he ever made such an admission. To say so is `merely repeating one Guardian lie'. He writes that 'the Guardian published select- ed extracts of my evidence, and deliberate- ly distorted it'.
I wonder. On 21 March the Guardian published lengthy excerpts from evidence given to Sir Gordon Downey, the Parlia- mentary Commissioner, which he has not yet seen fit — or, if you prefer, not been allowed — to publish. The relevant evi- dence is a verbatim report with occasional obvious omissions represented by dots. Mr Hamilton is asked by Nigel Pleming, QC, the inquiry's counsel, why he had given Mr Heseltine an absolute assurance in 1994 that he had not had a financial relationship with the lobbyist Ian Greer.
According to the Guardian's account, Mr Hamilton replies: 'I did not mention the commission payments when I spoke to Mr Heseltine . . . Politics is a rough game . . . I knew that if there were to be another cause for adverse media comment against me . . . it could be used as a very big stick with which to beat me and cause my resignation to take place . . . ' Mr Pleming then says, `What you are saying to me is that you deliberately decided to keep back that which you had remembered . . . ' He draws the conclusion that an admission of a rela- tionship with Mr Greer 'would have put you in a very different light before a jury action'. Mr Hamilton replies, 'Yes, it cer- tainly would have been a difficulty. There is no disguising that.'
As presented by the Guardian, Mr Hamilton admits he did not tell Mr Hesel- tine about his relationship with Mr Greer. Whether that amounts to a 'lie' may be a matter of opinion, but it seems to me an untruth. If it transpires that the Guardian has doctored this evidence, as Mr Hamilton suggests, then we should never let the newspaper or its editor, Alan Rusbridger, rest. But if it turns out, when Sir Gordon finally issues his report, that the paper has given an accurate account, then Mr Hamil- ton equally should not be allowed to escape. Amid all the bewildering claims and counter-claims, I propose to home in on this single fact.
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