The Telegraph and the crisis – and Stephen Glover (again)

Stephen Glover’s wide-eyed admiration for what the Telegraph newspapers have been doing gives us a chance to assess what he calls their “triumph”. The story will become part of history, Stephen says. And: “It will become part of journalistic lore”. He criticises the Times for not being hard enough on the MPs – one in the eye for you, Daniel Finkelstein. It “required some courage” to publish a few of the two million documents for which it paid an intermediary businessman either £100,000 or £300,000. That’s hard research.

Hero of the hour is Daily Telegraph editor Will Lewis, whose reputation will be “burnished” by the “hundreds of connections” his staff have made. There is even a photo of Lewis, looking up into the camera like the golden-haired visionary he is.

Yet Glover’s own paper has shown that Will Lewis is corruptible. The Independent on Sunday pointed out – at some length and on page 3 – that last Friday the Telegraph played down the sins of Yvette Cooper and Ed Balls because Lewis and Balls are friends. They both like karaoke, apparently. The story was “hidden” downpage on page 8.

The real scandal of the Friday the 15th paper was surely the front page coverage of Justice Minister Shahid Malik. Two huge photos, trimmed to the ears to maximise weirdness, showed Malik on the left and his landlord on the right. A sullen off-centre Malik contrasted with a smiling Tahir Zaman, who is conveniently wearing an “Islamic” beard. There is a racist undertone to this conjunction. The photos of both men are larger and more unsettling than the photos of white-skinned males that the Telegraph has been running.

Perhaps this is what Stephen Glover means when he says that “in some respects” the Tele looks like “a pale shadow of the Daily Mail”. A bit of apparently-justifiable reporting which just happens to have a racist component would, we think, be one of those “respects”.

Stephen also thinks that the BBC was slow to see the serious side of things. He recalls hearing on Sunday 17th “the joyous assertion on a Radio 4 news bulletin that the The Sunday Telegraph had been forced to eat humble pie”. But what did this relate to? Was it not the STel’s abject withdrawal of imputations against Gordon Brown? In its editorial the paper wrote about the cleaning bill shared with his brother Andrew (because the cleaner wanted a single bill for tax purposes) that “There has never been any suggestion of any impropriety on the part of the Prime Minister or his brother” (page 26, and again not easy to find).

This sounds like “humble pie” to us, and did to other commentators. Stephen Glover hears what he wants to hear.

The Brown story was meant to damage him. It featured as the first item on the first day of the “revelations”. On 8 May there is a photo (moderate size) of him under the heading “Brown paid his brother more than £6,000 for ‘cleaning services’”. Do you notice those quotation marks? They imply that the payment was not really for cleaning services, but for something else. (They are also accurate, but that’s not how it was meant to be read). In Saturday’s paper (9 May) there is a story headed “Cleaning cash for brother was legitimate”. Friday’s story implied that it was not legitimate. Way down in Saturday’s story we find a Downing Street spokesman saying that “The Daily Telegraph was ‘wrong to have claimed that Mr Brown “appears” to have paid for little of his own living costs since moving into No 10’.” So Downing Street was on to the paper’s little verbal tricks.

The Friday report keeps coming back to Brown, making different points each time, and giving the impression cumulatively – but never with decisive evidence – that there was “something” wrong about Brown’s cleaning services claim.

The paper wrote that Brown’s statement “is likely to give rise to questions as to why the PM did not simply lodge receipts directly with the cleaner”. This would be an example of the “hundreds of connections” that according to Glover the Telegraph reporters have been so courageously making. But they fail to make connections when it suits them!

Other examples: why headline Sinn Fein MPs when the real story of the day was downplayed just underneath – Hazel Blears avoiding CGT on the sale of a home? That was atavistic anti-Irish Telegraph stuff coming through.

We’re not convinced Barbara Follett was in the wrong to claim for security when she had in fact been attacked near her Soho home – it was a weekend patrol costing £4882.32 a year for five years. Only well into the story do we read that her former husband – both were anti-Apartheid –was shot dead in South Africa “in front of her two daughters”. In other circumstances this could have been a sob story of personal danger arising from political conviction. But not when you want to score a point against a Labour MP.

For star-struck Stephen Glover this is no doubt more “pale” shadowing of the Daily Mail – but for us out here it looks like insensitive political malice.

Even Stephen faults the Telegraph on its refusal to say that it paid for the 2 million-item CD. This “seems a bit coy”. This is itself a coy reference to Andrew Porter, the paper’s Political editor, who has been touring the studios saying – when asked what they paid – that he isn’t going to “reveal his sources”. It’s nothing to do with sources: we know the source is a nicked CD. This makes SG look distinctly naïve, despite his air of worldly judgment and his discovery that the Telegraph is a great paper after all.

Come on, Stephen, don’t be naïve – this is political, right-wing, opportunist stuff. It’s not a “great” newspaper at work.