Jonathan King: time to review his case?
The Met & Newscorp: who’s feeding who?
By John Ward: When the world is crawling with badhats, the main difficulty involved
in writing about them is maintaining a focus. A continuing one for me
since the arrest of Stuart Hall has been the mass distraction involved
in Plod arresting the famous of yesteryear in a blaze of publicity
sufficient to make the Met look like addictive pyromaniacs.
Spookily, the accused all have the letters ‘BBC’ tattooed onto their
cvs. Well – almost all of them: the Met arrested Max Clifford in order
get at his files….but not necessarily for the reasons you might imagine.
A clearer shot of what’s really going on here is gradually developing
– or at least, it is for me. Until a week ago, my view was merely that
the Met has been supplying Newscorp
with an endless supply of mud with which to splatter those it has
plucked from the BBC ranks as examples of the broadcaster’s appalling
depravity. Now I’m less sure that it’s quite that simple.
I am picking up evidence that this is a two-way traffic flow. You may
think the only commonality here is the BBC, but there is another: with
the exception of Max Clifford, all the defendants have at one time or another been threatened with career-ending revelations by Newscorp titles -
primarily The unlamented News of the World, but also The Sun. In almost
all the cases, as far as I can tell, the victims rebuffed the tabloid
involved.
When people don’t want to play Murdoch’s game, they go fairly swiftly
onto the naughty step….and are entered into the vindictive Digger’s
little black book.