The Countess yielded to blackmail and behaved like a chump; conspiracy theorists are in heaven
STEPHEN GLOVER
Last Sunday the Countess of Wessex gave an interview to the News of the World in which she reassured readers that her husband, Prince Edward, was not gay. She also drew some comparisons between herself and Diana, Princess of Wales, and shared her thoughts about IVF. I don't suppose that a member of the royal family has ever spoken so intimately to the press. She did so because she had been blackmailed.
Step forward our old friend, the News of the World reporter Mazher Mahmood, a master of disguise and impersonation. On this occasion Mazher was playing an Arab sheikh. He met the Countess of Wessex and some of her advisers over lunch in a suite at the Dorchester Hotel. His proposal, which we needn't go into here, had to do with creating a cricket pitch in Dubai. The Countess is a PR Rid, and was supposed to have some role in the affair. When the business was done, and Mazher was cradling a glass of goat's milk in his hand, or whatever bogus sheikhs like to drink, he tempted the Countess into some indiscretions. She spoke ill of William Hague and Cherie Blair, and was less than respectful to some members of the royal family.
Sleepy though they may have been about the deception, the Countess and Buckingham Palace spin doctors soon grasped that they had been duped. Mazher wasn't Mazher. Or rather he was Mazher, and not an Arab sheikh with an interest in cricket. So Buckingham Palace telephoned Lord Wakeham, chairman of the Press Complaints Commission, hoping he might be able to do something. At this point there is a certain divergence of opinion as to what took place.
Lord Wakeham's version, as rehearsed in a letter to the Daily Telegraph on Wednesday, is that he merely outlined two courses of action, as he would do for any member of the public. The Countess could await publication, and then complain to the PCC if she thought the News of the World had breached the newspaper industry code. Or she could approach the paper and make some accommodation with it. Buckingham Palace sources accept that Lord Wakeham offered these two options, but suggest that he was heavily biased towards the second one.
Whether he pushed it or not, Lord Wakeham's suggestion of a deal with the News of the World was disastrous for the Countess of Wessex. She was yielding to blackmail, and forced to give a humiliating interview. At the same time the Mail on Sunday had got wind of Mazher's activities. Though it seems not to have acquired a tape, the paper got the gist of what had been said, and published an account on Sunday. The Countess did not come well out of this, just as she did not emerge from the News of the World interview with any credit. She had behaved in an incredibly silly way, first by confiding her thoughts to Sheikh Mazher, second by agreeing to talk to the News of the World, and third by dispatching letters to William Hague and others, alerting them to the fact that she had said things about them to Masher which she ought not to have said. The moral of the story for some newspapers has been that the Countess of Wessex should not mix PR with her royal duties. A further moral might be that such a woman has no business being in PR at all.
There we might leave it were it not for a theory. entertained by some in Buckingham Palace and elsewhere, that the real sting in this operation was mounted not by the News of the World but by the Press Complaints Commission acting in collusion with St James's Palace. They say that Lord Wakeham gave abysmal advice. Even if we don't accept this, he does seem to have been remarkably laid-back about Mazher's deception, as well as lacking in any righteous indignation. But, if we do accept it, the obvious question is why Lord Wakeham should have sent the Countess of Wessex down such a perilous path.
The answer, according to the conspiracy theorists, is that St James's Palace — Prince Charles's outfit, known to some at Buckingham Palace as the 'Palace across the way' — fitted up the Countess. They point out that Mark Bolland, Prince Charles's spin doctor, is a former director of the Press Complaints Commission. He is extremely close to its present director. Guy Black. Both Mr Black and Mr Bolland are friends of Rebekah Wade, editor of the News of the World. The theorists say that Mr Bolland and the Prince Charles camp are determined to cut minor royals
down to size, and ideally to clear them off the board. Here was a heaven-sent opportunity for St James's Palace to inflict maximum damage on the chumpish Countess.
Well, you will have to make up your own minds. More disclosures, by the way, are intimated. My problem so far is deciding who has behaved worse — the News of the World (I exculpate Mazher; in fact I rather admire him), the Countess of Wessex, her advisers at Buckingham Palace, or the Press Complaints Commission. But why decide? Everyone seems to have behaved badly, and just as badly as you would expect.
How far all this seems from Lord Hartwell, the former proprietor of the Daily Telegraph, who died on Tuesday aged 89. He was from another world, of honour, integrity and straight dealing.
It is possible to see the life of Michael Berry (as he was known until he accepted a life peerage from Harold Wilson in 1968) as a kind of tragedy. The paper he had taken over in 1954 from his father, Lord Camrose, he lost in 1985 to Conrad Black, the present proprietor of the Daily Telegraph, as well as of this magazine. In those final years Michael Berry had overextended himself, undermined by rapacious printing unions on the one hand, and poorly advised by his managers on the other, as his company committed money it could not afford to building new printing plants.
But actually his life was a triumph. For one thing, he founded the Sunday Telegraph, which was a very great achievement. But, even more important, he nurtured the Daily Telegraph, indeed expanded its circulation from 1 million copies a day to more than 1.3 million (and 1.5 million in 1979 when the Times was shut down during a dispute with the print unions). It is perfectly true that he resisted editorial innovations such as longer features, signed columns and lengthy obituaries which adorn the modern Daily Telegraph. This was because he was more interested in news than views. Though the Telegraph was considered right-wing in its leaders, and bound always to support the Tories, under Michael Hartwell it cemented its reputation for honest and exhaustive news coverage. The paper he was forced to cede to Mr Black stood in need of some changes, but it was stronger and better regarded than the one he had inherited 31 years earlier.
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