Dubious dealing
Sir: If Ferdinand Mount hopes to make a worthwhile comment on the activities of newspapers before and during the Thorpe case, he should attempt to be a bit more reliable than some of the witnesses in that case. His defamatory remarks about the Evening News (whose dealings with Andrew Newton were, he claimed, 'among the most dubious') cannot be excused by his lamentable logic.
Mr Mount says in the same breath that it might have been legitimate for the Telegraph (he means the Sunday Telegraph) to have paid Peter BesseII long before Mr Thorpe's arrest. Why, therefore, was it so dubious for the Evening News to pay £3,000 to Newton (also long before the arrest)?
The fact is that no 'incentive' payment of any kind was made by the Evening News to Newton or to any other person connected in any way with the Thorpe case.
Louis Kirby Editor, Evening News Carmelite House, London EC4 Ferdinand Mount replies: Mr Kirby is being over-sensitive. I did not intend to suggest that the Evening News had made 'incentive' payments to Andrew Newton; and 'dubious' is surely a precise but mild adjective to apply to any payment by a newspaper to a potential witness. But my real purpose was to point out that without such payments this prosecution might never have been launched.
Previous page
