ON SUNDAY LAST the newspaper that bought John Prescott’s bubbly ex-diary secretary’s eight-page overshare seemed to justify its expensive decision by reference to the public good. The story was worthy of its emphasis because Mr Prescott had “abused his position” by exercising a proletarianised
droit de seigneur with the hired help. Among other sex crimes alleged by
The Mail on Sunday was that Mr Prescott had attended a memorial service with the Queen and “then went straight back to his grace-and-favour flat in Admiralty House and had sex”. Actually it’s hard to tell which part of this is supposed to be shocking — having sex shortly after seeing the Queen (some kind of obscure
lèse-majesté), or having sex in a grace-and-favour flat (as opposed to a flat that you have paid for). Perhaps the author of this piece, the political editor of
The MoS, Simon Walters, could advise our more anxious readers on the correct interval between sharing a space with Her Majesty and having an orgasm.
You can see the need. In these fallen times we may ask, so what if Prescott has had an affair? Do Mail on Sunday employees occasionally also have affairs? But if our interest can be dignified by citing some rule that the Deputy Prime Minister may have infringed, then all this stuff is worth running, worth reading and worth building up towards that most desirable of all climaxes — the delicious moment of resignation. On cue we get an interview with Sir Alastair Graham, chairman of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, obligingly available on a Sunday, floating the possibility — even before any complaint has been made — that Mr Prescott may have breached the ministerial code. Presumably by not keeping the office door closed.
It’s a sly and inevitable progression. Prezza, whose adultery is no one’s business, becomes by degrees Prezza the serial predator (the Daily Mail) and then Prezza the Unprofessional. It’s the way David Mellor — a good minister if an occasionally unlovely man — was forced from office a decade ago. He’s doomed, say the media, if we go on about it. He will look too ridiculous to carry on. So let’s go on about it. I thought it was wrong and hypocritical then and I think so now.
Labour, who offered Mr Mellor little support that I can remember, are in a weaker position to make this complaint. As they are in arguing to maintain Charles Clarke at the Home Office, when they pushed so vociferously for Michael Howard to be sacked after his various difficulties in the same department.
That is not, however, the voters’ problem. The voters’ problem is how well they are being served by the present self-perpetuating media firestorm. I’ll give an example from the Clarke imbroglio. Several newspapers have featured the call for Mr Clarke to resign, from a woman who was raped by a man who had been released from prison after serving a previous sentence — but who had not been considered for deportation. The details of the case were shocking, but somehow the fact that Mr Clarke was not Home Secretary at the time either of the man’s release, nor of the subsequent rape, passed the papers by. Readers were left with the clear impression that all this had happened on Charlie’s watch. It hadn’t.
I can’t account for the failure to consider released prisoners for deportation, though the notion that the country was awash with foreign rapists seems exaggerated to say the least. One, of course, is too many.
Perhaps Mr Clarke was spending too much time on the aftermath of the London bombs, or on anti-terror measures. Maybe, as Sir Bernard Crick has argued, the Home Office is just too big, too full of firestorm issues such as asylum, to be run as a single entity. I suspect that Mr Clarke took action and pulled levers as soon as he was aware of the problem, only to discover that his levers were attached to thin air.
And again, as with Prezza’s Admiralty affairs, the story is given new twists. Yesterday’s “revelation” that Mr Clarke hadn’t told the PM about the problem till three weeks after he was himself told, is — I would suggest — when looked at calmly, not that much of a revelation. But even this, by yesterday afternoon, was being reported as Mr Clarke “withholding information”. Ratchet ever up.
This form of story inflation gives rise to such phenomena as Ming Campbell’s phantom escaped Nigerian, raised as a second-bite embarrasser at Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday, and withdrawn with apologies when the Home Office showed that the man was still in custody. (For Ming to call on the multitasked Clarke to resign when his own office can’t even get an accusation right is a bit rich.) The same excitable process created the false impression, some months ago, of a teaching profession awash with convicted paedophiles.
You can see what happens, in newspapers, on telly and on the radio: everything that fits the arc of the story is in, or bent towards inclusion. Anything else is out. I heard Sir Ming’s main pre-local election interview on radio yesterday. Prezza was there, Clarke was there, there was a bit on poll ratings and how many seats the Lib Dems might get. There was not a single question about, or reference to, local Lib Dem policies or the record of local Lib Dem councils. They aren’t the story. They never are.
Right now the only permitted story is of Labour’s implosion for being (or being thought to be) sleazy, mendacious and incompetent. Consequently there is no discussion — even in the lead-up to important elections — of whether things in Britain are generally good, generally bad, whether the Government is largely doing the right or the wrong things, and whether other parties would be better or worse. To take an example, who knows that murder in London, even allowing for the deaths in the bus on 7/7, was revealed last week to be significantly down in 2005? When I told a friend of mine about this, he asked why the Government didn’t do a better job of getting its message across. This article is part of the reply.
Just before the weekend, when the Prescott tale first broke, the BBC’s political editor Nick Robinson — displaying his usual candour and good humour — commented that the Government might be thanked for offering journalists such a selection of good stories. It was clear that Nick was having a wonderful time, as have we here at The Times. I’m glad for all of us. But it is important to realise that stories are not the same thing as the truth. Modern media stories, with all their dramatic requirements, exclude far more that is important than they include, and are of limited use in making big decisions about how countries should be governed.
Now, you can argue that Labour may deserve to suffer in this way because of the party’s various media sins, not least in exploiting the anti-Major firestorm of 1996-97. But that doesn’t mean that we citizens deserve to suffer too. A mature democracy badly needs more than media frenzy.
Read David Aaronovitch’s weblog here
