Stephen Glover: can’t think, can’t argue

What’s the matter with Stephen Glover of the Independent? Nasty attack on Nick Davies (one of the Good Guys), whose Flat Earth News about the laziness and corruption of the British press is just out. “Damning allegations that, if true, bring disgrace upon ‘The Observer’” is the headline over a piece (Independent Media, 4 February) so badly argued it must have personal animus behind it.

Glover tells us Davies’s criticism of The Observer, and then writes as though what he’s just written isn’t the case.

His summary of Davies says that Number 10 and Alistair Campbell wanted the Observer on side over support for the Iraq war, because skeptical Labour MPs might be persuaded by this liberal newspaper. So political editor Kamal Ahmed was given a “sneak preview” of the lying “dodgy dossier” of February 2002. Glover then goes berserk, and says Davies is claiming that “the editor and political editor of a great liberal newspaper were suborned by Number 10, and so manipulated that The Observer became a government mouthpiece”. This is “amazing stuff”, apparently.

Then, writes Glover, “One also notices that when two newspapers wrote about Mr Davies’s book last October [Apache missed this], he responded in terms that were virtually misleading: ‘The hacks who have said that the book accuses Kamal Ahmed of helping to write or edit the dodgy dossier are simply wrong’, he [Davies] remarked.” Glover goes on: “Well, no, he does not precisely say that, but what he does say is almost as combustible”.

I get it: Davies was “virtually misleading” about something that Glover admits he didn’t say.

And what was so combustible? That Kamal Ahmed was softened up by being given a “sneak preview” of the dossier. Which is Glover’s own account of the allegation.

Unable to set up a straight argument, Glover turns to innuendo. More than once he remarks that Davies “provides no evidence” for (eg) the suggestion that chunks of Alistair Campbell’s emails were lifted and inserted into The Observer’s “pro-war editorials”. (So Number 10’s policy worked.)

But Glover must know – and he would certainly have known after Davies’s spirited interview on R4’s Today on 5 February – that Davies’s sources were not the lords of journalism, but “the peasants” – working journalists who knew what was really going on, and told him.

Does Glover seriously think that these journalists would allow themselves to be identified, and lose their jobs? And why is Glover pretending he doesn’t know this?

That is why Apache thinks there’s personal animus here.

And just look at what Alistair Campbell in his Diary has to say about Stephen Glover: “a deeply unpleasant man”. Suppose Ali was right for once, and this is true? It would explain a lot.

First question: is The Observer still a “great liberal newspaper”?

Come on Stephen, think straight and be nicer!