Mlle Apache, bienvenue!

We welcome Jane O’Grady as Mademoiselle Apache, evidently an enthusiast for headbutting violence. Writing in The Observer in May 2008, she describes some of the things she likes to do:

Feeling yourself observed, concentrating on your headache, using your head as a weapon with which to butt someone, transforms it into a thing or a tool separate from you, the agent and observer.

This detachment has indeed been M. Apache’s experience in these circumstances, head down on the Boulevard Raspail. We hope Mlle Apache will become a true headbutter, in every sense of the word. Our only fear is that she may turn out to be too intelligent for the pages of The Observer.

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

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!