Tom Watson, MP, West Bromwich [to Rupert Murdoch]: Your wife has a very good left hook.
Wendi Deng, left hooker: Thank you.
If only the News of the World were around to cover the News of the World trial. I can see the headlines. Crouching pie plate, hidden Wendi. Except in all-caps. And more lurid. Maybe RUPIE’S POOPIE SCUPPERS LOOPY.
Meh, I don’t think I could have been a News of the World headline-writer. It’s a special skill. And something this trial has been calling out for. The Daily Mail is fine, of course. But “Wendi to the rescue”? The Sun, another News International paper that people are speculating will soon morph into the new News of the World in a soon-to-be-announced Sunday edition called the Sun on Sunday, went with MURDOCH ASSAULTED AT INQUIRY. A little heady, that.
But you get the sense, don’t you, as you follow the live coverage of the proceedings (as you did), that reality may be collapsing on itself just a little bit. Minutes after Jonathan May–Bowles launched his cream-filled onslaught, we discover him on Twitter saying: “I’m actually in this committee and can confirm: Murdoch is Mr. Burns.” The Simpsons, as you’ll recall, is broadcast on Fox, which, as you’ll recall, is owned by Murdoch. The man who originally blew the whistle on the phone hacking business is found dead in his home, and police instantly say that, though toxicology reports can take weeks to perform, and despite the fact that the man was less than 50 years old, that there’s nothing suspicious about his death at all. The same police, as you’ll recall, who have apparently been on the take from News International, as well as the rest of Fleet Street, apparently, for years. Nothing to see here. Then, maybe a day later, the Sun’s online front page announces that Rupert himself has been found dead. But that was just a Lulzsec hack. Hackers hacking hackers.
It doesn’t bear looking into really, and I’ll stop before I’m forced to make a Matrix reference.
But the infinite regress is only part of it, and not nearly the most consternating.
Apparently, journalists in the UK have drivers.
I’ve been a journalist in Canada since around the time Rebekah Brooks started popping around to 10 Downing and I’ve never once been offered a driver by any paper. But the drivers are important enough to the News of the World that Brooks made particular mention of them, along with secretaries (they have secretaries?!) as being among the people they were doing the best to find new jobs for.
And editors hang out with prime ministers?
I’ve never been an editor-in-chief myself, but I’ve known a few, and as far as I know, they don’t get invited round to 24 Sussex much (Messrs Cooke, Stackhouse, Meurice and Wallace, please let me know if I’m wrong about this), and almost certainly not the six times a year Brooks did (and more, apparently, towards the end of Blair’s term).
And all this while hacking into Gordon Brown’s voicemail to find out what his child was sick with? If I get nothing else out of these hearings, I will come away with an enormous respect for the sheer energy of these people. Thirteen hundred and eighty-seven transactions with a single private investigator at the Daily Mail. My goodness.
But the best part, for me, is the realization that the English aren’t, actually, very good at English. It’s been a bit of a hang-up of mine, reading the Observer, watching Stephen Fry and generally obsessing over this or that quote from Winston Churchill, that I’ll never be quite as good at it as they are.
But when I heard Rebekah Brooks, with her respectably posh accent, despite the places she hangs out in, say, speaking of some documents she’s not seen, “We have no visibility on it, you have no visibility on it, only the police have visibility on it,” well, I couldn’t help but grin. The grin turned into a smile when she asked to say one more thing, after her grilling in the Wilson Room of Portcullis House was ended, and said this: “I make one request, that when I am free from some of the legal restraints that I’m under today, that you will invite me back to answer your questions in a more fulsome way.”
Now, in the 13th century, fulsome meant just what I think she meant it to, which is abundant or generous. It probably meant that in the 14th century, too, and possible even into the 15th. But these days, it means offensively flattering, insincere, overdone, excessive, gross. She might as well have said she should have paid more attention at work, and that she could care less about journalistic ethics as long as she doesn’t get caught.
Unless she did mean it that way, telling the truth about the fact that she intends to dress up the truth when she talks to the committee again. Hiding her present honesty about her imminent dishonesty between a word’s modern and archaic definitions would be brilliantly, perfectly Sir Humphrey of her.
Dammit.
