Stephen Glover’s goat

Stephen Glover has just published the latest of his paranoid attacks on the Guardian and the BBC (Indy, 27 July). According to him, these two organisations are conspiring to mislead by improperly promoting the story about massive telephone hacking at the News of the World.

There is nothing new here, he says, because we already know about what he calls “the former eavesdropping techniques” at the NOTW. – “as I pointed out in this column”. A journalist went to prison, and Andy Coulson resigned, and we should all go back to sleep. But the Guardian, “aided and abetted” by the BBC, is conspiring to keep the phone scamming story alive.

But which story? On 9 July the Guardian led with “Revealed: Murdoch’s £1m bill for hiding dirty tricks”. This wasn’t a story about hacking, it was a story about NOTW victims being paid off so as not to cause big trouble in the courts. For a few days, a few stars thought about taking legal action themselves, Max Clifford and Vanessa Feltz among them. If they do, and a lot of other victims join in, we shall see a merry time in the courts. And possibly a massive drain on News International’s finances.

Glover, then, can’t even identify the story correctly.

And this was a genuine story. We hadn’t heard before that Murdoch had made these payments. Behind it was a mass of police evidence never used for prosecutions. Behind that was the feeling that the Met was afraid to act against News International. Right in front was a reasonable suspicion that the NOTW and Andy Coulson were lying about the extent of the scamming, and the extent of what they knew. Mass NOTW-related amnesia at the Culture, Media and Sport select committee on 21 July tended to confirm this.

Now Stephen has his own story – that ten years ago the Guardian itself employed a private investigator to hack into Monsanto (you know – the GM people Tony Blair liked so much). Stephen’s story is, sadly, second hand: it belonged to David Leppard of the Sunday Times, whose own source was “a shadowy accomplice” he had worked with before. While Nick Davies’s Guardian story was properly sourced, the ST can do no better than “shadowy”. After Alan Rusbridger got the director of the private investigators involved to deny that it happened back in 1999 (yes, it’s ten years old, this story), the ST didn’t run anything to counter the Guardian story about Murdoch buying people off.

Funnily enough, Stephen Glover couldn’t get a “nervous” David Leppard to talk to him, whilst the Guardian “passed on its denials to me”.

So what’s going on here? M. Apache has hinted before that he doesn’t find S. Glover to be the sharpest knife in the columnists’ box. It seems he wants to get himself involved in this story, hassling Leppard and Rusbridger, worrying away at unsupported conspiracy theories, and all the while moralising in the dead language of the secular pulpit.

Rusbridger, he says, acts “holier-than-thou” and is on his “high horse”.

Glover insists again and again that the Guardian – sorry, the moralistic Rusbridger – did employ a hacker. He’s very sure of his source, in other words, and though he has no evidence that he can give us, and no known investigative skills, he is right. The ST didn’t run the story, so he will do it – even if “Mr Leppard” (as he calls him) won’t speak to him.

But what is Glover right about? Not about the Guardian story, which was about previously unknown payoffs, and a stack of interesting police evidence.

Let’s just glance at what’s serious about this story.

Andy Coulson is probably lying, and if he goes as Tory party communications director, then he just goes. (And goes to edit the Sun in the autumn.) If he stays, this story will keep erupting as a distraction, and he’ll go eventually.

More important than Coulson is the Met’s trepidation before Murdoch. If there’s good actionable stuff amongst the evidence collected, that’s a scandal.

If News International is discredited in a slow-burn process over the next year or so, then it will become less necessary for New Labour to suck up to Murdoch. Blair’s sweetheart deal will not be repeated, and the unhappy liaison can be wound up. Labour can find its own way.

And then there’s Parliament. (M. Apache feels slightly ashamed to be supporting that venerable and far from anarchistic institution, but needs must.) Central democracy needs to be redeemed after the expenses scandal, and vigorous action from select committees might help. Eventual legislation – such as reform of the libel laws, and a PCC with teeth – would be one way of rescuing something from the shambles.

Meanwhile, we can look forward to more self-centred look-at-me columns from Stephen Glover. What gets his goat, he says, is Rusbridger’s moral attitude, “that he somehow occupies a higher and better universe than the rest of us”, when really he is only another journalist. Stephen (not so brightly) seems to think that all journalists are the same. Trouble is, they aren’t. There is a difference between a Nick Davis with a story, and a David Leppard without one – or a NOTW hack with a Vanessa Feltz phone transcript in his hand.

If Glover is looking for problematic types, how about the crass vanity of Stuart Kuttner? He is the recently-resigned NOTW managing editor, who tried to tell the CMS select committee that certain MPs should not be there – and they laughed at him!

It’s not quite clear what Glover is getting at – his 27 July column is full of non-sequiturs and nonsense – but he does give the rest of us a chance to say something sensible by sorting him out.

Stevie G. is the little boy outside the tent, desperate to see what the big clowns are up to.

Himself, he is just a little clown.

No French dictionary at the Guardian?

Monsieur Apache is again dismayed by bad French at the Guardian (see Laura Barton’s efforts with Deneuve, below).

A photo of a Trafigura ship full of toxic chemicals has the words “L’Europe intoxique L’Afrique” painted on its side by Greenpeace.

The Guardian thinks this means that Europe has been “intoxicating” Africa.

“Intoxiquer” in French means “to poison”.

It doesn’t mean you’re making them drunk.

(See 14 May, pages 12-13 – also for a marvellous account of how Trafigura’s lawyers have tried to stifle facts and comment.)

Well, down at the Coup de Poing, we think Trafigura did it.

Laura Barton meets Deneuve

Awful interview with the great actress Catherine Deneuve by the workhorse Laura Barton in the Guardian (16 January). A biography of Deneuve has alleged that her father, the actor Maurice Dorléac, was a collaborator with the Germans between 1940 and 1944. Barton quotes Deneuve as saying: “I’m going to sue the editor of the book”. Now, why would you want to do that? Editors knock manuscripts into shape. What Deneuve meant was that she was going to sue the publisher of the book – but the French for publisher is éditeur. Barton failed to spot this mistake in Deneuve’s usually good English.

What did Barton think Deneuve meant as she typed up her interview? Didn’t any alarm bells ring? How can you be so dim, Laura?

Equally ignorant was the Showbiz page of the Daily Express, who picked up the Barton effort from the first edition, and ran a story headed “Deneuve to Sue Book Editor”. It was the same ignorance of French. (The quotes were the same – unacknowledged).

Laura Barton is a hopeless interviewer anyway. Deneuve’s new film A Christmas Tale has the death of a child. So Barton– brilliant move! – asks Deneuve (who plays the mother) if it might have something to do with the death of her own sister, Françoise Dorléac, in a car crash in 1967, when she was aged 25. Deneuve is reduced to patiently explaining that the death of a fictional child is not the same as the death of a real person of 25. “She says it quickly, but not crossly”, Barton writes. So she knew very well it was a silly question – in which case, why ask it?

Later in the interview Deneuve mentions her decision not to play in a sequel to her most famous film, Belle de Jour. Barton quotes the actress:
“But I haven’t seen the film yet. Did you see it?” She says it warmly, as if asking after an old friend. “How is it?”
There is no answer, and we can guess why. Barton’s research didn’t run to watching the sequel to a famous film.

Barton is a lazy interviewer who doesn’t do her research. She falls back on dud questions. She doesn’t seem to know much about the allegations against Maurice Dorléac – but what would have been the value of her discussion of the pressures on people to collaborate?

Laura – you have access. Use it properly, and try to think a bit before you get in there with a great actress.

Martin Amis nailed by NYT

Martin Amis’s The Second Plane has been nailed in the New York Times (8 April) in terms that should bring shame to reviewers in the UK. Their reviewer pulls no punches, and says what should have been said over here in January when this book first appeared. Michiko Kakutani starts out by calling the book of essays “chuckleheaded”. Whatever that means, she’s not giving a compliment.

Then Kakutani goes for Amis’s objections to the “9/11” shorthand we all now use, calling it a “pretentious and formalistic argument” that shows Amis trying to deal with a tragedy by means of “preening, self-consciously literary musings”. It should be 11/9, you see.

Kakutani points to Amis’s “nonsensical analogy between terrorism and boredom”. Try telling the families affected “that their relatives and friends died in the opening chapter of the ‘age of boredom’ or ‘the global confrontation with the dependent mind’” she writes.

Where boredom is concerned, notice that the publishers of the US edition changed the book’s subtitle to September 11: Terror and Boredom. The UK edition has September 11: 2001 – 2007, to suggest the enduring significance of the absurd little essays Amis began to write just after the event. The American subtitle seems designed to be insulting.

Kakutani reminds us about Amis’s remarks in the London Times about making the Muslim community “suffer” until they get their children to behave. Amis said: “There’s a definite urge – don’t you have it? – to say ‘The Muslim community must suffer until it gets its house in order’”. He later defended himself by saying this was speculative, thinking out loud. But it wasn’t – as any good fiction writer knows, the phrase “don’t you have it?” is complicit, not opening out to truth. And it doesn’t care if you don’t have it, either.

Then there is Amis falling for a Canadian right-wing nutter called Mark Steyn. Steyn is into birthrates, and Amis goes along with him. Western Europe isn’t fertile enough, but Somalia, Afghanistan and Yemen (Yemen?) are. The culture is threatened. (Weirdly, Stein began his journalism career with our old friends at the Indy, back in 1986 when it was set up – appointed by founding editor Stephen Glover, maybe?)

This criticism by Kakutani is more decisive than anything written on the European side – look at how nice and polite Christopher Tayler was in the Guardian Review. Who knows what links of friendship there are in that corrupt little world – come on Chris, you know Amis is wrong, but it’s time to be a bit more coup de poing.

The negative review of Amis in London Review of Books was by Marjorie Perloff – another American, another perceptive woman.

Kakutani also does well something Brit reviewers shy away from – intellectual indebtedness. She spots Amis’s reliance on conservative academic Bernard Lewis, “the Middle East scholar who influenced the thinking of some members of the Bush administration”. She doesn’t miss the influence of our good friend ex-Trot (but still a Trot), Christopher Hitchens, the authoritarian man of the left who supports the Iraq war. And she spots a name new to M. Apache, Sam Harris, an religious-culture author who has been interviewed for a “Jesus never existed” docu called The God Who Wasn’t There – never mind that you may agree, just keep clear of such junk.

Kingsley Amis, Martin’s novelist father, lost his political common sense over the Vietnam War. From 1968 onwards, he was barking mad about it. The idea that he had once been a Communist – which was not well-known at that time – now seems barely credible. Vietnam sent Kingsley off his political rocker (and the young Apache did have a chat with him at the time – you could feel the danger).

9/11 has done the same for his son Martin.

Come on Martin – get back in touch with the rest of us. There may still be time.

Simon Hoggart, ageing slacker at the Guardian, wrote a kind of defence of Amis against the Kakutani assault in Saturday’s paper (12 April). “I suppose the only way to handle such a review is to regard it as a badge of honour. You can’t be a real writer until you’ve been demolished by Ms Kakutani.” Yes, and ha ha, Simon.

Can you not recognise that the NYT review raised serious questions about Amis and the British literary culture that he is part of? This shrugging-off is not the right response. Nor is the “I made that bit up” suggestion that Ms Kakutani might, in some imaginary past, “have made an idiot of herself by loathing, say, Great Expectations”.

Your father, Richard Hoggart, believed in something. What do you believe in, beyond feeble jokes about nothing much?

Stephen Glover v. Nick Davies (again)

The Indy’s obsession with Nick Davies continues, and Stephen Glover is back with a sermon, advising Nick and nice Sunday Times investigative journalist David Leppard to settle their differences over a drink rather than in the courts. (Leppard is threatening action through libel solicitors Carter Ruck.)

Stephen is careful to say that he has never met Davies (or Leppard): so we know he’s been reading M. Apache, who thought – see 12 February below – that his criticism of Nick was based on personal animus. It’s just that when Glover writes, it sounds like that….

Then Oliver Duff turns up doing the Media Diary (not for too long, we hope), with a story explaining the animus behind Peter Preston’s Guardian review of Davies’s book. This goes back to an unpleasantness in 1984, involving Davies sending a solicitor’s letter – followed by a twenty-three year mutual freeze-out. (Young Apache, learning his trade within sight of Preston all those years ago, rather admired him; not any more.)

And finally Nick Davies himself turns up on the Indy’s letters page, rubbishing Kamal Ahmed’s complaints that Davies hadn’t done proper research into Kamal’s ‘Campbell Ahmad’ years at the Observer. Those complaints were made in an interview with Michael Savage whose effect was to undermine Glover’s earlier attack on Davies. (See Indy, 11 February, and M. Apache, 12 February.)

Nick Davies now reveals it was Kamal himself who spoke into Davies’s tape-recorder, and admitted that Ali Campbell let him have a private view of the “dodgy dossier”. The rest of his case against Kamal was equally carefully researched.

Glover “suspects” that Davies is “mostly wrong” in his criticisms of Leppard. Just as he “suspected” that Davies was wrong about Kamal Ahmed? At the same time he praises Davies and Leppard as among the “depleted guild of investigative reporters”. So which is it, Stephen? Guesswork and suspicion, a tone of animus – or a little bit of investigative work on your own account?

In this tangle, not meeting Nick Davies is not so bright.

What do we have so far?

Stephen Glover is a demented moralist and lefty-baiter incapable of picking up the phone.

Nick Davies supported the Iraq war: ‘for better or worse, I was pro-war’. Worse, Nick, worse.

Peter Preston writes a review skewed by a 23-year feud.

Kamal Ahmed gives a feeble-minded interview that was bound to be found out.

Oliver Duff has a story, but is a grinning prat who can’t quite write a payoff line.

Does all this matter? Yes, because it is these journalists who brought us the Iraq war, cash for honours – and Leppard’s story that Michael Foot was a KGB agent.
And where now is Matthew Norman?

Come back, Matt – we need your plumpness and wit!