Nick Davies bitten – but not very hard…

Down at the Café Coup de Poing there is agreement along the zinc that M. Apache was right to move in on Stephen Glover’s attack on Nick Davies a week ago. In this Monday’s Independent Media there’s more, so someone is obsessing.

Davies’s prime target was Observer political editor Kamal Ahmed.

Under the headline “‘Nick is a Coward’. Ahmed bites back”, Michael Savage allows Ahmad to reply, but it’s a soft bite.

Nick was “a coward” because he didn’t ask Observer editor Roger Alton about the allegations against Ahmed before publishing. Unprofessional. Roger would have put him right.

Reminder: Glover attacked Davies last week for suggesting in Flat Earth News that Kamal Ahmed, recently retired (unh, sorry, moved on to duller things) political editor of The Observer was too close to Ali Campbell, and did his bidding in moving the Obs to a pro-war position on the Iraq war, thereby softening up potentially discontented Labour MPs.

M. Apache wrote last time that Davies made it clear on a Today interview – about as conspicuous as you can get – that his sources were informed but unhappy lower-order journalists who (Apache pointed out) couldn’t be named because they’d lose their jobs. The peasants, Davies called them. He didn’t expect the lords and ladies to answer his questions.

Again close reading is required. Ahmed is quoted as saying that over the pro-Iraq war issue it was editor Roger Alton who made the decision, and it wasn’t he who did the pushing. Then he says: “Of course, there were tensions. And some people, a tiny minority, may have misconstrued that as being because I was too close to Number Ten”. That was indeed the allegation.

Then Savage sinks Ahmed’s boat, writing:

In fact, senior staff at The Observer did approach Ahmed with their concerns. One says he did believe Ahmed had become too close to Campbell, and told him so. “Kamal would go around calling himself ‘Campbell Ahmad’,” he recalls. “A joke’s a joke, but at the same time, never a truer word was said.” And according to one political reporter, Ahmed’s one-to-one with Campbell on that flight [to Washington DC, when Ahmed was talked to and shown a copy of the “dodgy dossier” ahead of anyone else] and his two trips to Chequers to interview the Prime Minister were more unusual than he would like to admit. (Indy Media, 11 February 2008)


Notice anything here? Savage names no sources! “Senior staff…one says…one political reporter.” Nobody thinks this is invalid because there are no names. But the essence of Kamal’s case against Davies is – that he doesn’t name his sources! (“There’s…not one person on the record.”) Savage’s reporting both confirms the truth of what Davies was saying, and repeats the methods he used to say it.

If the Indy can do it, why not Davies?

Ahmed complains that Davies did not ask editor Roger Alton about his allegations. (Alton and Ahmed are close friends, Savage says.) But Davies did “run them all past” Alton’s deputy Paul Webster in a two-hour meeting. What, Apache wonders, is the difference? Did Webster not know how the paper’s Iraq decision was made?

Davies is consistent here – in his probably justified belief that talking to Alton would have got him nowhere. Particularly as Ahmad was Alton’s protégé.

Deliberately or not, Savage’s interview with Ahmad undermines Glover’s view, expressed a week before, that Nick Davies is a journalistic villain. Perhaps there is some tension at Indy Media these days? Just the person to enlighten us would be Good Guy media diarist Matthew Norman, surely? Never mind Gaunty, let’s hear about Glover.

Come on, Matthew – tell us what you know!

12 February