AND ANOTHER THING
`When he tells a lie, it's perjury.
When I tell a lie, it's funny'
PAUL JOHNSON
What is the Rusbridger affair about? It is about humbug: it is about journalists accusing others of wrongs they commit themselves. The essence of the Guardian's case against Neil Hamilton and Jonathan Aitken is that they accepted freebies and told lies about them. In the pursuit of these charges, the paper used up more column inches, by far, than it did in cover- ing the collapse of Soviet communism, the most important event of the entire second half of the 20th century. So what, then, is a freebie?
Last week I walked with friends in the Swiss Alps. We covered over 120 kilome- tres. I was wearing Brasher boots. How did I come by them? In March, Christo- pher Brasher, who runs a sports goods firm, asked my permission to reprint an article of mine on walking in his annual catalogue. In return he would send me a pair each of his new brand of walking- boots and shoes. I accepted and I am glad I did so: the gear is excellent. I hope Brasher is pleased too with his part of the bargain. This was not a freebie but com- mercial barter, and the value of the boots will be entered in my next tax return. Again, on 8 July, the Guardian accused me of going on a freebie to Korea in 1992. Not so. My accounts show I went on a commercial speaking engagement, at world competitive rates, and was hand- somely paid for doing so; and my fee was duly reported to the Inland Revenue and tax paid on it.
I regard going on freebies as a mug's game, best left to self-important editors. The nearest I came to it in the last decade was when my wife and I attended the annu- al Anglo-Spanish get-together last autumn. As the meeting serves a useful purpose, as I was a hard-working member of the British delegation and as I paid my wife's air fare, I don't regard it as a freebie. But it was a marginal case.
Now let us look at Mr Rusbridger and his boss/subordinate Hugo Young. They both went on the spree to Hong Kong which cel- ebrated the most disgraceful episode in modern British history. Everything was laid on, on the grandest possible scale. They charged their share to the Guardian. The total cost, for both of them, must have been well over £5,000. What percentage is that of the paper's weekly editorial travel budget? I would like to know. So would humble Guardian foot-soldiers. Rusbridger and Young say it was a 'normal journalistic assignment'. I say, phooey. True, Young wrote a 'think piece', but he could have done it just as well, or badly, from London. The fact is they went out as official mem- bers of the 'Accompanying Party' to the Prince of Wales and the government. They were on an ego-trip as pseudo-VIPs and they got the Guardian to pick up the tab. So it was a freebie — for them, not for the paper.
These issues can be argued about, but you would think that, in view of the Guardian's freebie accusations against Aitken, Rusbridger at least would take care to keep his own nose absolutely clean. That would not occur to him. Is he not the great- est investigative editor who has ever lived? Has not the Guardian devoted literally scores of pages to his forensic triumphs? Is not his entire editorship a gigantic celebra- tion of his genius? And is it not also a nau- seating exercise in humbug? Rusbridger ran tabloid-style front pages accusing Hamilton and Aitken of being liars. Repro- ductions of one were used to wrap up the chips. at a Rusbridger-Guardian self-con- gratulatory celebration (paid for by the paper, naturally). But what is Rusbridger's recent record in the matter of truth?
I speak only for myself and of my own experience. I have lost count of the num- ber of falsehoods Rusbridger has pub- lished about me, for daring to criticise himself and his paper. They are numbered in dozens, indeed in scores. He has plenty of gossip columnists to do his dirty work, as well as the Observer, of which he is executive editor (not editor-in-chief as I earlier stated, though the distinction is unimportant, Rusbridger being the ulti- mate boss). In the week beginning Sunday 6 July, for instance, Rusbridger printed falsehoods about me in the Observer- Guardian on five successive days. He was obliged to publish a series of corrective letters. But he offered no apology. Rus- bridger apologising for publishing untruths? You must be joking.
A favourite lie he prints about me is that I am mad, criminally insane, fit only for a padded cell. But perhaps it is not a lie. Maybe he believes it, on the assump- tion that anyone who says Rusbridger is less than perfect must, by definition, be crazy. Earlier this month one of his min- ions challenged me to submit to an inde- pendent psychiatric report. I replied: cer- tainly, provided Rusbridger took a lie- detector test. That was the last we heard of it. When challenged about calling a sane man a certifiable lunatic, Rusbridger says it is a joke.
Now this is a very convenient new way of running a newspaper. You publish a falsehood. When exposed, you say: oh, but it was only a joke. When Aitken lies it is perjury, and the wretched man must be prosecuted. When Rusbridger lies, it is funny and we are all expected to laugh. But then the Guardian is adept at treating its more shameful episodes as jokes. When one of its senior members had his connec- tions with the Soviet secret police, includ- ing a nice line in freebies, exposed, the paper's then editor tried to laugh it off. Well, he said, the man was just 'a free spirit' (he sounds a rather expensive one to the rest of us). When the same editor was exposed forging a letter and a signa- ture on stolen writing-paper, the Guardian treated that as a joke too. It was not a forgery, it was 'a cod fax'. All the nasty, contemptible and despicable things Rus- bridger's Guardian does — recently it pub- lished a savage attack on a distinguished old man just coming up to his 89th birth- day — are riotously funny in the eyes of Rusbridger and his pals. How those fel- lows cackle and slap each other on the back! It is all a scream. Except, of course, when one of them is criticised. Then it is an outrage.
Rusbridger expressed his outrage at my remarks on his conduct by dispatching to The Spectator's proprietor a vast quantity of 'evidence' in the hope of getting this column suppressed. He was dignified by a courteous, detailed and reasoned brush- off. But what can I do if I want to com- plain about Rusbridger? That is the biggest Guardian joke of all. I would have to write to the chairman of the Scott Trust, which owns the Guardian and the Observer, and who is none other than wait for it! — Hugo Young, Rusbridger's employee. Now that is really funny, isn't it? The system of control of what was once Britain's most upright and truthful newspaper — 'Comment is free but facts are sacred' — is a closed journalistic cir- cle of cronies. In the midst of the general problem of what needs to be done about Britain's appalling newspapers, there is the particular problem of how the Guardian is run and supervised.
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