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.

John Walsh: Knicker Man

Sexy John Walsh, journalist and Padel squeeze, has tried to impress us by writing in French (Indy, 23 June). Sarkozy has taken to reading books, apparently, Zola and Céline among them.

Walsh tries to imagine what Sarko would have said to novelist Michel Houellebecq when he invited him to dinner. Walsh’s French goes like this: “Oh, Michel. J’ai lit tout de ton oeuvre”

This is hopeless. Lire (to read) doesn’t go to past tense lit. Un lit is a bed, and the person round here most interested in beds is sexy John himself.

It should be: j’ai lu toute ton œuvre. That’s only three mistakes, John.

But no French person would use this construction in the first place. Sarko would have said: J’ai lu tous vos livres.

Walsh then goes on to mention that Sarko has been reading Louis-Ferdinand Céline, author of Voyage au bout de la nuit, which he says is “savage”. Why doesn’t he also mention Céline’s notorious anti-Semitic tract Bagatelles pour un massacre, published in 1937, just in time for the war?

Walsh does a lot of superficial and tricksy stuff about the Goncourts and Proust and Flaubert. Why doesn’t he say how significant it might be that a very right-wing president is reading a very right-wing author? Why doesn’t he notice that Sarkozy is also reading Zola, a radical of his time, who in 1898 denounced the judgement in the Dreyfus affair in his famous “J’Accuse…!” newspaper article. It was a magnificent statement against state anti-Semitism.

Isn’t this contradiction interesting enough? Walsh doesn’t pick up any of it. Instead he burbles on about the alleged sincerity of Sarko’s new interests (so it’s not Carla), and Alan Bennett – always safe territory.

Instead of trying to make a serious point or two, Walsh is more interested in suggesting some people read Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland because Obama is reading it. I bet he’s met a whole lot of people doing that.

Walsh mentions no less than twenty-two writers in his 750-word piece. He has nothing significant to say about any of them. A kind of literary jeering takes place instead.

On 9 June he made what looked like a similar point, about F.T. Marinetti, the Futurist agitator (tied to the current Tate Modern show). He wrote: Marinetti was a barking mad Fascist sympathiser. Very true of the 1920s. But not when he founded and propagated Futurism before the First World War. There was no Fascism then, and Mussolini was still a socialist. Hopeless, again.

A friend who has read John Walsh with more attention than he deserves says that a year ago he wrote about Edith Sitwell’s underwear, and the chances of her contemporaries making an entry therein. Kitchen-table bonking, le lit, knickers – these are John Walsh’s real interests.

Come on, John: if you’ve read so many books, try and say something thoughtful about them.

Stephen Glover begins to get it

In his Monday Media column in the Indy, Stephen Glover is noticeably less enthusiastic about the Telegraph’s expenses campaign than he was two weeks earlier. Then, he spoke of its “courage” and historical significance. Now (1 June) he is more sceptical, and has realised that the Telegraph may actually be politically motivated.

He points out that the paper has been “softer on some than on others”, David Cameron in particular. He does a rather good analysis. “Only in paragraph three [of the Telegraph on Cameron] was his £680 claim to remove wisteria mentioned in a deadpan way”.

Stephen also points out – what not all of out here would have known – that Cameron does not have a “cottage” (Telegraph), but “a grand house” with a £350,000 mortgage.

Can Glover have been reading M. Apache? We pointed out on 20 May that his attitude to the Telegraph’s operation was naïve and star-struck. We pointed out how the right-wing paper had played verbal games trying to discredit Gordon Brown in ways that didn’t stick. Stephen now finds similar games going on, but pointing in the opposite political direction.

We don’t at all mind you lifting a critical attitude from this blog!

Well done, Stephen – come aboard!

Dave Brown – the worst cartoonist in Britain

Dave Brown does big ugly drawings for the Independent. He is their lead cartoonist, and his work is awful. Worse than that, it is disgusting. Currently, he is obsessed by shit.

Last Thursday it was Obama, sinking up to his teeth in a river of shit, waving a toilet roll, and saying “ASK NOT HOW DEEPYOUR COUNTRY’S DOO-DOO IS FOR YOU, BUT … …. GLUG!” At first glance it looks like an attack on Obama (not a good idea at the moment), but you slowly realize it’s meant to be sympathetic towards his economic dilemmas.

He is shown misquoting JFK (“Ask not what your country can do for you…”.), but this is a pretty irrelevant attempt to put a gloss on the basic observation that Obama is “in the shit”. Since that isn’t any truer this week than it was on Inauguration Day, it hardly counts as a revelation. What is truly disturbing is the way every floating turd is drawn with loving care. And there are dozens of them.

On Friday 27th Brown was back again with the brown stuff – but this time it was virtual. The immense back end of a huge cat towers over Alastair Darling, who is saying “…AND TODAY I CAN ANNOUNCE THE CONSTRUCTION OF A £325 bn LITTER TRAY!” The cat’s arsehole is just above his head, with the word “RUMBLE!” next to it. The cat, labelled RBS, is about to pour shit all over the Chancellor.

Can somebody explain to Dave Brown that this is just not funny? There is nothing in it that makes you laugh. No perception, no new understanding of the crisis. We all know what RBS has achieved. If we must follow the ghastly metaphor, RBS, and that nice Sir Fred Goodwin, has already shat on the country, and everybody understands that. The “idea” of the cartoon is that this is a “fat cat”. That is a dead cliché, and D. Brown lacks the wit to bring it back to life.

Go back a few days, and we find Brown attacking Brown. It’s Monday 23 February, and the Oscars were awarded the night before. So here is Gordon accepting an award for “WORST PERFORMANCE IN AN ECONOMIC ROLE” (D. Brown can only write in caps). G. Brown is made to say – á la Kate Winslet – “LEHMAN BROTHERS…BERNARD…SIR JAMES…SIR ALLEN…OH..OH GOD! WHO’S THE OTHER ONE….” and then the dud punchline: “…OH, IT’S ME!”

Again, can someone explain to this deluded idiot that there is a difference between crooks like Bernard Madoff and “Sir” Allen Stanford, and G. Brown? And a difference between G. Brown’s attempts to save the situation, and the way the Bush administration let Lehman Brothers go under?

Cartoons work in an instant of understanding. Anybody following the crisis will instantly register the difference between crooks and incompetence, even if they can’t explain it all immediately. In that moment, the cartoon dies.

D. Brown draws G. Brown as a huge fat sweating woman in a purple dress, with a vast stomach and thighs. There is a reason for drawing G. Brown as fat.

A little while back D. Brown met G. Brown at some event. G. Brown said that he wasn’t really that fat. (He isn’t, either: it’s true, and D. Brown must know it, since he has seen the PM close up.) D. Brown came back with a self-serving little article in the Indy, in which he said that owing to this slight, he would now always draw the PM as fat.

What a sense of humour! What perception! What intelligence! What ego!
(There was a photo of the great artist at his board. He has that flat-faced inexpressive Kevin Pietersen look.)

His first effort after that was about G. Brown’s appearance before a Commons Select Committee. GB is shown leaving the room with his trousers burned away, and his buttocks huge and bare, with a hot-cross bun effect drawn on them. And why? Because he has been sitting in “the hot seat”! Top left, the ever-literate DB has a line about “buns”. This is American for the buttocks. It’s not a word that has ever taken in this country, any more than “butt” has.

Another little problem with DB is that his drawing is so heavy. It’s like a lead weight on the joke (if there is a joke). Truly great cartoonists, like Gerald Scarfe and Ralph Steadman, had a light touch and a line that’s worth looking at. Steve Bell is heavy, but quirky – and of course he’s funny, unlike poor struggling DB, who draws like those amateur artists who have to get in every boring detail.

Worst of all for the supposedly liberal Indy, DB is taking the Tory line on the economic crisis – that it’s somehow all the PM’s fault. Dave, if you can listen and not call us all fat – it’s not true, and people out here know it isn’t.

And do try to get rid of the awful clichés – “hot seat”, “fat cat” and “in the shit” aren’t going to make anybody laugh. Cartoons are supposed to give the person looking at them a new perception in an instant. You haven’t done this for a long time.

Salut!

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!

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