Ones that got away

In the days when the Army understood the meaning of PR (press AND public relations), and in the days when Britain had something called ‘industry’ they – the Army – organised a conference for ‘foremen’. Nowadays they would call it a seminar. But, since nowadays it wouldn’t occur to them to organise it in the first place, that bit of incidental intelligence is irrelevant.

Perhaps I should explain for younger readers… ‘Industry’ is an old English expression, now lost to the vocabulary along with ‘manufacturing’ which, loosely, involved making things. Long before the UK hived, or ‘outsourced’, this responsibility to the third world, industry was what Britain did for a living.

I write of an era when Britons more or less made everything, from shoes to aeroplanes, and even cars. We actually made and sold refrigerators to Eskimos (even before they, the Eskimos not the refrigerators, were called Inuits) and prayer mats to Arabs. We sold instant curry to Hong Kong and ice (it was actually Scottish water – you had to freeze it yourself) to the Japanese to add to their Scotch whisky. I know, because I wrote stories about all those things.

This was all before we became a ‘service economy’ which, given a rapidly evolving language, I should also probably explain used to mean a system in which you could sort of at least half expect to get served.

A ‘foreman’, in those distant days, was the top man on the shop floor of a factory or mill. Perhaps, some other time, I should explain the meaning of the words ‘shop floor’, ‘factory’ and ‘mill’. Not part of management, but not exactly one of the workers, these people were most importantly the link between the executive and the workforce.

The foreman ran the industry from the bottom up; men in suits stayed in their offices and smoked cigars. The foreman was typically in a brown smock coat to distinguish him from the workforce that generally dressed in overalls or dungarees. He drank industrial-strength tea with three sugars, and usually smoked a pipe.

What had this to do with the Army? Well, they had foremen, too: they called them sergeant-majors. They had the brilliant idea that they could share knowledge of man-management with industry, each learning from the other, and discussing the pivotal role between management (officers, directors) and man-power (a word that included women, no argument).

What had this to do with newspapers? The Army, no slouch in those days, invited the press along. And I rolled up at Catterick Camp to listen, in case there was a story.

One came from an early speaker from ICI. It wasn’t where I’d been expecting it, in the stories about management versus man, or bosses against trades unions; rather – as happens most often at such events – it came when he wandered slightly off track.

It was this: ICI on Teesside had secured an impressively big export order, selling tons of chemical fertiliser to Chinese farmers. A triumph for British industry. This was the 1960s, and we were all Backing Britain in those days.

Just how much it was worth in sterling matters nothing now – but it was millions of pounds in today’s money.

In fact its sterling value mattered even less to the Chinese at the time, because they had no foreign currency with which to effect purchase.

They opted to pay ICI… in alarm clocks. And negotiation was not an option.
In the coffee break I interviewed the speaker, who told me the world’s biggest chemical empire now had more alarm clocks than it could find storage for. They couldn’t give them away, even to staff – for how many alarm clocks does a household need, at the end of the day? Or even at the start of one? They gave them away with every four gallons of ICI petrol. Then with every two gallons, and they still had clocks to spare.

So I did the story.

ICI’s press department, when asked for an official quote, asked me not to run it at all. They said it would damage international trade. I said trade seemed fairly pointless if it earned only alarm clocks. They said it would damage our relationship with China; I asked what sort of relationship was it that was repaid in bloody alarm clocks. Then I realised that I was arguing with a PRO, which was always a waste of time. I said I would pass on his message to my boss, but that we should expect to see the story in the Daily Mirror next morning.

The news desk told me it had duly ‘noted’ the misgivings of the PR guy in my attached note and that, thank-you, it was already an early page lead.
Oh no: it wasn’t.

The PR guy rang his chairman, Sir Paul Chambers, who immediately rang Hugh Cudlipp and convinced him that such a story would have an adverse effect on the industrial health of the nation.

Well, I was nobbut a kid then. I could not comprehend that the Mirror, of all papers, through Cudlipp of all journalists, could be so easily talked out of what anybody with a hole in his bum could see was a page lead.

If Cudlipp didn’t agree with that, how could I be so wrong?

It was the first story I’d had spiked, and – fairly obviously – it still rankles, 40-odd years later.

The second one followed fairly quickly.

For some reason I needed to ring George Brown (of immoral memory). We were still Backing Britain in those days and Our Harold, with his fortnight in the Scillies, was exhorting everybody to spend their holidays, and more importantly their holiday money, in the UK.

George, his office told me, was in Ibizia.
Well, that was a story. Wilson was telling everybody to stay home while his foreign secretary and deputy PM had gone off with the missus to Spain.

‘We can’t run this,’ said the news desk when my memo – did London want to handle this (and maybe check on the whereabouts of other members of Cabinet): if not, I would write it myself – bounced back up the line from London.

‘George Brown used to write for the Daily Mirror. Our policy is that we never attack our own.’

Bollocks, I argued. I knew George Brown quite well, I said. I had actually caught him when, pissed out of his brain, he’d tumbled down a full set of steps while disembarking from an aircraft. Many were the times I’d helped manhandle him into his official car. I could ring him and guarantee either a funny or a pompous quote to explain his choice of foreign holiday destination.

‘No,’ said the desk. ‘You’ve been told.’

This was the Daily Mirror, for God’s sake. We couldn’t attack any politician that used to write for us?

Barbara Castle, when she was Barbara Betts, had been our agony aunt and had married Ted Castle (who’d been our picture editor, before becoming editor of Picture Post).

Now she was Minister for Transport. We couldn’t criticise the Transport Minister because she used to be Marje Proops?

‘Put it that way and, no, we can’t,’ said the desk.

Staggering, because the so-called Cudlipp Edict, which every member of staff was required to read, and then sign in front of a witness to show that it had been read, said that we were even allowed to criticise the company that owned us – provided only that it was fair and accurate. But nowhere did it say we couldn’t censure politicians who used to write for us. Explain that, if you can.

I don’t know whether newspapers still have such loony loyalties.

But I suppose it’s unlikely that Boris Johnson lives in much fear of being panned by the Daily Telegraph when he becomes Lord Mayor of London.

#

Last day in the office

There was a second phone on my desk. It didn’t go through the secretary or the Mirror switchboard. It was an external number that only Maxwell, the editor in chief (who’d been fired) and the three editors knew. It was ‘the hotline’ – part of Bob’s paranoia about security.

Sixteen people had these phones; in the event that the shit hit the fan and the company folded, 13 of us (ie, not the editors) would be the ones kept behind to close it down, and hopefully to resurrect it. It never rang. But now it was ringing.

When I answered it, a familiar deep brown voice asked: ‘Who’s that?’

Between jabbing the button on a console with his fat finger, and the time it took me to reach over and pick up the handset, he had forgotten who he was calling.

‘Aw, for fuck’s sake…’

‘Ah… Revel… please pop up and see me. Now.’

He told me to get myself a drink, and there was a delay because there was no bottle opener, so I asked for his driver to be called, because I knew that he had one on his key ring.

While we waited he said that he had received my memo. It had amounted to a character reading, reminding him that in July 1984 he had said that he never told a lie, but would sometimes allow his mind to be changed, and that on that basis he had reneged on every promise he had made to me or in my presence in the seven-year interim, from ‘journalists will be on top, management on tap’ by way of ‘would you like to edit The Sporting Life?’ to ‘I am going to let Stott and you buy the Sunday People’.

When he’d looked at the first memo I’d written him, what seemed like a lifetime ago, he’d said: ‘Get one of those yellow markers from the secretary and just highlight the important bits, the bits that I need to read.’ And I’d said no, because I wrote only the important bits; if I sent him a note I expected him to read it all.

This one, he had obviously read word for word. It wasn’t on his desk, but he was able to quote from it. It listed the broken promises, the last one being his failure to inject any money into the People which was as near as it had ever been to being in the black. My last line was ‘Enough is e-fucking-NUFF.’

It came from the heart. I had written and sent it before lunch. Mike Molloy, to whom I had shown a copy after sending, described it as a potential suicide note. ‘But he’ll probably just ignore it,’ said Mike.

But when the driver had been and gone Bob asked how many times I had told him I wanted to leave, and I said there were five occasions that I could remember, and probably more, when I’d been pissed.

And on each of those occasions, whether pissed or merely pissed off, said Bob, he had persuaded me to stay. Now he said: ‘Don’t misunderstand what I am saying. I am not asking you to leave. But if you are adamant that you want to leave, what I am saying is that I will no longer stand in your way.’

‘Great,’ I said. ‘That’s easy. I want to leave.’

He shrugged. ‘If that’s what you wish. Now I want you to go back to your office and write out your terms for leaving this company, and bring them back for me to sign.’

‘On the other hand,’ I suggested, ‘you could just sign this.’ And I produced a folded piece of A4 from my inside pocket and laid it flat on his desk.

Bob stared at the dog-eared, slightly crumpled, sheet of typing. ‘How long have you been carrying this in your pocket?’

‘Since Friday, July 13, 1984. Only I have retyped it, revising the figures, from time to time.’

‘Honestly, I had no idea that you were so unhappy all those years. I thought it was just you being awkward and obstinate.’

That as well, I told him. But I didn’t see how I could possibly have made my feelings more clear to him.

He worked his way down my bullet points, quibbling briefly about the deal on the office car because it was new, and asking why I wanted to take what I described with intentional vagueness as my ‘computer equipment’. I explained that it was because all my personal stuff was on it, and anyway the PC was old. I didn’t say that there was also a laptop, and a new ₤1,500 printer. But I bought the car and the technology for a quid each, and handed him two pound coins, which he pocketed.

When he got to the bit about a pay-rise, backdated to January, he said: ‘I will increase your salary, as you suggest, but from April.’

No, I insisted: from January.

‘There’s a problem in doing that, because it will affect your pension.’

I told him that thought had also occurred to me.

‘When you’re dealing with pensions,’ he said, ‘you are taking money from widows and orphans.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But we are talking about my widow and my orphans.’

[Now I know… with benefit of hindsight, this was a weird conversation. But only with hindsight. At the time it meant absolutely nothing, to me – although, possibly, it meant quite a bit to him.]

‘OK,’ he agreed. ‘We’ll leave it as January.’

The deal was that I would leave on December 31 (this was October 31). He initialled the paragraphs of the document with his strange pen stroke which, years earlier, I had pointed out to him was actually the Pitman’s shorthand outline for ‘charge’.

It was unusually, eerily, quiet in the office. Nobody came in; the phone didn’t ring. He told me to get another drink. His driver had left the bottle opener with me.

He looked down in the dumps. I asked him if he was ok. ‘Don’t tell me you’re suddenly depressed at the thought of my leaving.’

‘It’s not that,’ he said. ‘I think maybe I am going down with flu. But I mustn’t get flu. The doctors told me that one day flu would kill me, because of the lung thing. [Diagnosed with TB, he’d had a lung removed, but the surgeons removed the wrong lung and then discovered that the diagnosis had been mistaken in the first place.] So I’m going off shortly to the boat, to get some fresh air. I’ll be ok after that. Look… come back next week and we’ll go over your paper again. Maybe we’ll round up the figures a bit. Don’t make an appointment. Don’t tell the secretaries, just come straight in on Wednesday morning and we’ll do it.’

Business completed, we chatted about other matters, and other people. I helped myself to another drink while he called Ian and reminded him that he was standing in for a couple of his appointments while he’d be on the boat, and told him what to say, and to whom, on his behalf.

Finally he stood up. ‘Come on, I’ll walk you to the lift.’ Bob never walked anybody to the lift. He pressed the button and as we waited he put his hand on my shoulder and said: ‘You know, you’ve been a good friend to me, and you’ve never given me anything but good advice, even if I haven’t always taken it. But anyway… come and see me next week and we’ll take another look at those figures. And have a good weekend.’

He had no other appointments that evening. He left very shortly afterwards to fly off to his yacht, Lady Ghislaine.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

Read what you like into it. But that's how it was.

When it was announced that he was lost at sea, the Stock Exchange had his office sealed. When it was eventually unsealed, so the records show, the only piece of paper on his desk was my departure deal.

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Bog Standards

.

The Times newspaper (August 25) described my weekly web magazine http://www.gentlemenranters.com/ thus:

The Gentlemen Ranters site is a brilliant compendium of reminiscences of the great days of Fleet Street.

.

It is perhaps not best form to bite the hand that feeds your website with new readers, but for evidence of the difference between my generation of newspapermen and the current lot, or between ‘the great days of Fleet Street’ and the present day, you need look no further than your TV screen which is regularly showing an advertisement for The Times, even in the former colonies.

If you’re fortunate enough to have missed it, you might like to finish your breakfast before reading on because it focuses on a reader of that newspaper sitting on the lavatory with the sports section in his hands…

When he reaches for the bog roll he finds it empty. No perforated Andrex. So he has a dilemma, cleverly acted out by staring first at the exhausted cardboard tube, and then at his newspaper.
A decision has to be made.

The verdict is obviously that the sports section of The Times is too precious to use for wiping his arse so… he hoiks up his trousers, and departs.

Tasteful advertising? Or crap advertising?

Whatever, this is presumably the accepted view of the newspaper’s readership in the minds of the advertising company that produced the ad, the promotions or publicity department that presented it to the editor, and the editor who (presumably) approved it.

These days, presumably, it is ‘clever’. Yes: Times readers need to crap too, but while the working classes always allegedly used pages of the broadsheet News of the Screws or The Sporting Life, torn into neat squares and hung on a nail behind the door of the outside lavvie, the sports section of The Times is no contest.

Its readers would rather… well, you can work it out for yourselves.

They used to be called the Top People. Now apparently they’re bottom people. Dirty bottoms, at that. Must be information that emerged from one of those focus groups. You’d think they might have wanted to keep that sort of reader information to themselves.

IT’S ALSO interesting how a definition of what’s funny can change overnight – literally.

Simon Hoggart was chairing The News Quiz (BBC Radio 4) before an audience ten years ago when Alan Coren said: ‘I don't know anything about landmines or Princess Di, but I do know you'd be mad to poke either of them.’

Bad taste? According to Hoggart, writing in the Guardian the other day, ‘there was a moment's stunned silence, followed by a huge howl of delighted laughter.’

However, the programme was recorded on a Thursday night. The show went out on Saturday lunchtime, and Coren’s joke – slightly to Hoggart’s surprise, he says – stayed in.

‘That night there was the fatal crash. The producer came specially in to Broadcasting House to lock the master tape in a safe so that it could never, ever, be broadcast again.’
#

’tis the season to be silly

It’s summer (on the calendar, if not at the Met Office) and as Parliament and the courts go into the long holidays newspapers perforce have to lower the definition of news, in order to fill all those potentially embarrassing gaps between the adverts.

One method, considered rather radical on some newspapers, is to ask reporters to think up ideas for stories.

The best that the Daily Mirror news desk could come up with recently was: ‘I know – let’s see how easy it would be for a terrorist to plant a bomb on a train.’

OK. Let’s get my declaration of interest out of the way from the start. For more than a quarter of a century the three English and two Scottish titles of the Mirror Group funded my lifestyle, either individually (at various times the Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror and Sunday People) or collectively – those three plus the Daily Record and the Sunday Mail – and it would have been more lavish if it were not for the losses incurred by the Sporting Life.

Now for my declaration as a journalist and sometime editorial panjandrum: if anybody had come to me and made that suggestion, I would have sent him – or had him sent - home, with instructions to stop at his GP’s surgery on the way.

If I’d heard that a news editor had taken up the idea, I would have made the same recommendation about him to his editor, his boss: that he follow the reporter on the way out and for an immediate medical examination.

If you bend over backwards – and it would need to be beyond the horizontal – to look at the newspapermen’s point of view, you may accept that they were not actually going to plant a bomb, but merely a ‘device’ that could have been one.

If you listen to the paper’s defence for its action it goes like this: They were testing security in a time of heightened terrorist alert, therefore it was ‘a legitimate and justified journalistic exercise.’

Journalists, you see, have a God-given right to ensure that the people responsible for our security are doing their job efficiently.

And up to a point, Lord Copper, that last bit is true.

But you might think that, fully understanding that the security services are currently more than over-extended in uncovering and prosecuting real terrorists, to add to their burden with a time-wasting stunt was the height of irresponsibility. Not to say stupidity.

And if it works, what’s the message exactly?

It is exactly this: ‘Hey Ahmed – your idea of driving a jeep into the entrance of Glasgow Airport to blow it up and kill lots of people didn’t work… have you thought about just putting a bomb on a train, maybe one going through the Channel Tunnel?’

There are millions of separate passenger journeys on the trains every day. Most people carry some form of luggage. Last time I travelled by rail there was no personal or baggage checking – nor would it be practical for there to be any. Imagine the chaos it would cause.

So to get a device that’s not a bomb onto a train doesn’t sound like much of a challenge, to me.

But now here’s the good news.

Railway staff at Stonebridge Park depot (towards the end of the Bakerloo line in north west London, where Chunnel freight is loaded) spotted the journalists – dressed as railway workers in high-visibility yellow jackets and hard hats - carrying their fake ‘bomb’ and called British Transport Police before the guys had even planted it.

And they were immediately arrested under the Terrorism Act.

They were held for 12 hours while their homes were searched and their personal computer and photographic files examined. The Mirror described the police reaction – which many sensible people might think was the least that should have been done – as ‘heavy handed’.

The ‘midnight raids’ on their homes were ‘at best disproportionate and at worst intimidation of the most sinister kind.’

Nothing, then, disproportionate, intimidating or sinister – obviously – about pretending to plant a bomb on a train.

Gary Jones, the paper’s head of news, said: ‘You have to ask in whose interests the police are acting, and why.’

Perhaps I can help him, there. They were acting in my interests.

If anybody who isn’t a legitimate railway worker dresses up, trespasses on the railway, and pretends to be one, it is greatly in my interest for him to be arrested.

If he is planting a bomb I want him banged up for life, preferably in Guantanamo Bay with only a copy of the Koran as reading matter.

If he is pretending to plant a bomb, I want him locked up for pretending to plant one and for wasting police time, and for intentionally trying to scare travelling members of the public.

The Mirror, scratting around for some form of legitimate grouse, says the arrest of the two – at least one of whom, photographer Roger Allen, is an old Fleet Street hand and ought to have more bloody sense – ‘raises questions over whether the authorities can be trusted with new powers under Gordon Brown’s 56-day detention proposals’ [for suspected terrorists].

Well, I’d say that the answer to that one is a resounding ‘Yes – they can be trusted’, for the simple reason that they could have been locked up 28 days (and at some future date for up to 56 days), but were allowed to go home after only 12 hours. The system therefore clearly works, and it is excellent news that they appear to have proved that there is little fear of the jailing of innocent people.

Even if these two were not actually innocent.

Now for a reality check, lads.

Security systems need checking regularly, and that’s the job not of journalists looking for an ‘Oh what a clever boy am I’ story, but of the police and security services.

It happens, and it happens often. And it often happens that they find flaws in the system.

What happens then? Well (you’ll have to trust me on this one) they do not always report the security lapses – because it totally pisses off the people who are responsible for them.

The people with the awesome responsibility of performing checks at airports, for example, are not entitled to pick people out of a queue who they think look suspicious nor, incredible though it may seem, even to ask an Arab woman to show her face in order to check it against the photo on her passport. They have to be seen to be working without any visible sign of ‘discrimination’, which is why old ladies are siphoned off to one side while bearded mullahs who walk as if they might have something stuck under their thoub or dishdasha are allowed to pass through.

When a policeman manages, in a test, to get a gun through the screening and the security staff are called to account for it they therefore react angrily. Instead of deeply screening, say, one passenger in ten, they make a point of examining one in five – with the effect that the queue to get into departures stretches thrice round the terminal and out onto the taxi rank.

The Mirror has had its wrist slapped. It should have had its head whacked. And its Ed, too.

But at least it has proved that, on this one occasion at least, the railway staff was fully alert, the police reaction was prompt, and the Terrorism Act with its planned 56-day detention of suspects is nothing that the fully innocent need to fear.

The Mirror has done us all a service – like it used to – even if it was actually trying to put the fear of God into its few remaining readers. Now it should stop bloody whining and start looking for a proper story.
#

Campbell's Soup

I haven't read the Campbell diaries, nor in all probability will I bother, not least because on the evidence of the lifted quotes I have read in the newspapers (on-line) the grammar is so sloppy, the writing so unstructured, that I would find it irritating. True, they are supposed to be extracts from a diary written late at night: but they are "edited", even "sanitised", extracts, edited by Campbell with the assistance of his old boss at the Mirror, Richard Stott. Both of them can write a bit. The least they might have done is clean up the syntax.
If, on the other hand, the fault is down to inadequate retyping, at speed, under pressure to meet the newsprint or agency deadline, heads should roll. Shorthand is long gone out the window, but typing - in a new world devoid of competent (or any kind of) subbing - is nowadays more important than it ever was.
It's fairly common, among our Old Farts' group, to say what would have happened "in our day". Nothing would have happened because even the lousiest copy typists (and on the Mirror we had one who didn't speak any recognisable form of English) were protected unto death by SOGAT. But now there is no such bodyguard system for the inept. Typists who press Send or Submit without reading their own copy or having it checked should be fired.
On the spot. These days it would be allowed. It doesn't happen, because editorial management is also incompetent and idle and, if its internal memos are any clue, similarly grammatically challenged.
As to the much-advertised revelations of the diaries themselves, within an hour of publication the Press Association reported that there was "nothing new" in those 816 pages. Possibly their reporter could reach that conclusion with such impressive speed - though I doubt it.
A day later the Daily Telegraph's Rachel Sylvester [who she? -Ed] writes that "politically, the diaries are not particularly revealing."
Oh really? Rachel and her chums knew all that stuff all the time then, did they?
Then why is everybody going on at such length about the political equivalent of those "Not many dead" stories?
"There was nothing to report from last night's speech," the meeja-trained reporter tells his news editor, "because somebody shot the speaker..."
But what - the chattering political classes kept all that information for cosy discussion in the Press Gallery, perhaps sharing it with their dinner guests at home in Islington without bothering hoi polloi readers with such trivia?
What the extracts that I have read do not reveal (possibly with good reason) is the total idleness of that most pompous group of scribblers - self-inflated far beyond the normal run of Fleet Street hack, or even of typical modern editor - the Parliamentary Lobby Group [their caps].
This is a club more elitist and exclusive than the Lords.
They do not see themselves as other men, which is a pity, not least because their role in life is supposedly to hear what is going on in the corridors of power - the rumour and the innuendo, the shared back-of-the hand confidence - and report and interpret it for the rest of the world, rather than to rely on official statements (those being the province of the foot soldiers, the parliamentary reporters).
But how do they set about this task under a new regime created by Campbell, a man most of them protest to despise?
They troop along to meetings that he calls so that he can brief them. They take notes, although these days - such is the level of "secrecy" and of "confidentiality" (and of Pitmans prowess) within the Lobby - they are also allowed to take tape recorders with them. Then off they go to their lap-tops in pleasant privileged rooms in the Palace of Westminster and file it back to the office. They quote Campbell (occasionally, if they'd been good, he would trot out "TB" as a special treat for them), apply their own... er, spin to the story and that's it. Back to Annie's Bar for a drink with the lads and with the MPs to whom they - out of touch with the reality of the world beyond SW1 - alone suck up.
So you get Campbell's spin (about which they complain), amended by the Lobby man's "expert" and "interpretive" spin. And the public pays through the nose for the sheer joy of being allowed to share it.
In my day (here we go) the Lobby man - he was the Political, rather than the Parliamentary correspondent - was the top job on any newspaper. It went only to an established reporter who already had the contacts in place, who could ferret out stories, could pick up gossip and interpret it as news. And additionally, he could usually write it well.
MPs with something to get off their chests could talk to them individually or in small groups in the certain knowledge that the source would remain confidential. The understanding, on both sides, was that the information was sound, and its basic truth was the only quid pro quo for the guarantee of total confidentiality.
When Joe Haines did the Downing Street job for Harold Wilson, he understandably had his own friends within the Lobby to whom he would drop stories that he wanted to get out. Bernard Ingham, in a similar role for Mrs Thatcher, did much the same. At different times in my childhood I ran up against both of them.
Neither thought twice about calling in commentators through the awesome door of Number Ten for a bollocking if he felt the hacks had let the side down, or strayed from the party plot. Being cut off from this innermost source would be a severe punishment for the wayward reporter.
But the difference was that those two men, even at their most belligerent, respected journalists.
Campbell, having been in the Lobby himself immediately before taking up the job, despised them.
For the plain truth is that - with the possible exception of so-called Crime Reporters who do no more than sit in the press room at Scotland Yard and feed back to the office official statements that have just been "released" to them by the Met's spokesmen - there is no more idle job in Fleet Street than that of a Lobby Correspondent.
Nor, given the fact that these days the Downing Street briefings sometimes appear in full on TV, is there a more useless one.
When I heard that Campbell was accused of "sexing up" the government's position, even on something as important as the threat imposed or implied by Saddam Hussein, I thought: Yes; that is what a press officer is paid to do. He takes the brief and he sexes it up.
Stories, in Fleet Street terms, are either sexy or they are boring. As a general rule, boring fails to make the paper. Derek Jameson once said that news was something with a CFM factor. If you read an article and said Cor, Fuck Me! It was a story. Andrew Marr described the same thing as FMD - Fuck Me Doris.
If nothing else, Campbell's diaries have exposed the system. Exposed it even for those readers and editors who didn't know how it worked.
Will it be reported among the acres of space being devoted to the Diaries?
I suspect not. For newspapers are putting their own censored and censorious spin on what appears in their pages.
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