AND ANOTHER THING
Why Tony Blair should give the
Guardian a wide berth
PAUL JOHNSON
The issue in the 1979 election, which began nearly two decades of Tory rule, was whether the unions were to continue to make good government impossible. The issue which is emerging in 1997 is whether the media, like the unions in the 1970s, has got too big for its boots. I argue that it has, and I am looking forward to a large Labour majority to cut the journalists and their paymasters down to size. Like the unions, they have abused their enormous power. So it must be reduced and they themselves hauled back within the law.
The two prime offenders, which have brought matters to a head, are the Sun and the Guardian: the Sun by its entrapment of a perfectly decent MP, the Guardian by its unscrupulous vendetta against Neil Hamil- ton. This has been even more vicious than the Daily Express's witch-hunt of John Stra- chey in the late 1940s. Indeed, it is the worst abuse of press power I can remem- ber. Everyone knows that the Sun is rub- bish, and its iniquities are not worth dwelling upon — it will do anything for a story, including create it. The Guardian is a different matter because it once had the reputation of being Britain's leading liberal quality daily. It is still technically a different kind of paper to the Sun, in that it has a broadsheet format, uses longer words and still employs good writers. But in the way in which it sets about getting material and using it, there is little difference between the Guardian and any downmarket tabloid. Morally there is no difference at all.
Essentially, the Guardian has become a gossip-column paper. Its editor is a former gossip columnist. Not only is it riddled with gossip columns, but its news stories increas- ingly betray gossip-column values — inac- curacy, scant regard for truth, malice and the pursuit of personal grudges. Its hound- ing of Hamilton is a case in point. The Guardian hates Hamilton not because he is corrupt — he admits he has been foolish and greedy, but the charge that he corrupt- ly accepted money for services is probably an invention of Mohamed Fayed's; why the Guardian is determined to 'get' Hamilton is because he dared to sue it for libel. When the case became more complex, he ran out of money and the Guardian now thinks it has him at its mercy and can print what it pleases. That is where abuse of power comes in. It is outrageous that a newspaper should use the power of the press to print falsehoods about a man because it knows he cannot afford to go to law. Of course the Sun and the News of the World often do this when they are destroying the lives of penni- less nobodies. But that the Guardian should get in the gutter beside them shows the extent to which it is now morally indis- tinguishable from a Murdoch scandal sheet.
The Guardian's tone of outrage in pursu- ing Hamilton is humbug. Consider what it has done during its campaign against Tory MPs. It has stolen an MP's writing-paper and forged a letter purporting to come from him as well as the signature of a senior civil servant. That was done at the request of Fayed, after the Guardian had got into bed with this man. The extent of the Guardian's collaboration with him is demonstrated by the revelation, in the Sun- day Telegraph, that a draft of the key article had to be submitted by the Guardian to Fayed for his approval. Whether anyone from the Guardian was in receipt of gifts or hospitality from Fayed — the paper is notorious for freeloading — remains to be seen. If the Guardian has a clean bill in this respect, it has nothing to suffer from an independent investigation and should invite one.
That the Guardian as a newspaper has few scruples is proved by the fact that it broke its undertaking on the Downey tran- scripts and published a tendentious and misleading partial summary, relying on the fact that the dissolution makes it unlikely that it will be punished for contempt of parliament. But are individual Guardian people corrupt as well? Only Fayed can tell us that — and he is keeping quiet for the moment, as the paper is still useful to him.
`Let's hope there's not a landslide.' If we do not yet know the full nature of the Guardian's involvement with Fayed, we know for a fact that a man who was for many years a senior member of its staff was in receipt of what he himself termed `Moscow gold'. His paymaster was the KGB, an organisation which made the Gestapo seem small beer, and which was responsible for the murder, execution and starvation of literally millions of people. Whether this man was the only Guardian journalist who took from the KGB we do not know, as the Guardian did not hold even an internal investigation. The man was not sacked, he resigned, and the then editor — Fayed's friend — tried to laugh it off.
The Guardian never came clean with its readers about the details of the affair, or apologised to them, or breathed the small- est mea culpa. Far from having a code of conduct or register of interests of its edito- rial staff, so far as we are aware it takes no systematic steps to ensure the probity of those who write for it. Yet some individual Guardian writers probably exercise more personal power than most MPs. Is it in the public interest that they, and other influen- tial journalists, should have none of the supervision to which MPs are now rightly subjected?
In the case of the Guardian, there is a supervisory body in the form of the Scott Trust, which ultimately controls the paper. But instead of being run by high-minded outsiders of impeccable principles who could take a disinterested view of how the paper was living up to its supposed princi- ples, the Trust is in fact controlled by its editorial staff, since its autocratic chairman, Hugo Young, is an editorial writer who is up to his neck in the 'corruption' campaign. It is suggestive that Young, who has tried to destroy Hamilton, has never gone for the man who actually supplied the alleged bribe — Fayed.
The truth is, these trust systems for papers do not really work in practice (I have experience of one). All the more rea- son, then, why the new parliament should not only introduce a privacy law, but should look into the way in which the media is owned, controlled and behaves itself. We may need legislation to curb its powers, just as in the 1980s we needed to subdue the unions. In the meantime, Tony Blair should keep his moral distance from the Guardian and all its sleazy activities.
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