I can make you hate (34 page)

Anyway, after posing several questions only to receive oblivious identikit responses from Miliband, Green says: ‘I began getting twinges of what I can only describe as existential doubt.’ By the end he wanted to ask him: ‘What is the world’s fastest fish?’, just to throw him off-stride. (Kudos to Green for a) being funny and b) describing how weird the Miliband encounter actually felt. Not usually a political correspondent, it was a new experience for him.)

The reason for the Speak-and-Spell tactic is obvious: in all three cases (Miliband, Osborne, Darling) the PR handler responsible must have figured that since the interview would be whittled down to one ten-second soundbite for that evening’s news bulletins, and since they didn’t want to risk their man saying
anything
ill-advised or vaguely interesting, they might as well merely ignore all the questions and impersonate an iPod with just one track on it. What’s unusual is that it’s taken until now for one of these unedited interviews to go a bit viral. The Darling interview took place at least two years ago. The BBC News site often plays host to what amount to unedited rushes, which are sometimes more instructive than a final packaged report. As far as I can tell, the ‘Miliband loop’, as it shall now be known, first materialised
there (despite being conducted by an ITN reporter, it was a ‘pool’ interview for all channels to use). The BBC site is also where the Osborne and Darling clips ended up. In all three cases they were unaccompanied by any comment about the repetitive lunacy contained within. No
‘WARNING: WATCHING THIS MIGHT MAKE YOU FEEL A BIT MAD
.’ None of that.

What this tells you is that many people working in TV news have grown so accustomed to seeing tapes in which politicians blankly replicate a single phrase as if they’re summoning Candyman, it no longer strikes them as unusual.

But it is unusual: bloody unusual. You might say it symbolises everything that’s wrong with everything. The modern world suffers from a cavernous reality deficit. You know it, I know it. Even ‘they’ know it. Reciting the same line over and over like a
Countryfile
presenter practising a piece to camera, Miliband must have felt twice as mad as Green. Two men locked in a shared hallucination while the camera rolled.

It’s no surprise that politicians gabble pre-scripted taglines in order to dodge awkward questions and avoid having off-the-cuff comments inflated into a full-blown gaffe. And it’s no surprise the media routinely colludes in this surreal pantomime. But it’s only when you stand back and watch the rushes that you see how crazy the situation has become. Honestly, it gives you vertigo.

Clearly an intervention is necessary. Next time you pass an MP being interviewed on the street, set off a party popper. Jump in and shriek. Get your bum out. Anything. Just to prompt some kind of authentic human reaction from either side.

Because we can’t go on like this. It’s just too damn weird.

Today I bought the
News of the World
. Last week I’d joined in with the obligatory Twitter hashtag-boycott-pass-the-parcel, but now I had a brilliant excuse for scabbing out: I’d been asked to read the final edition for this paper. Having fashioned a disguise from dirt and wool, I cycled to the newsagents at 7.30 a.m., to find they were already selling fast. Clearly the boycott was having an effect. Having secured a copy, I made my excuses and left – after hiding it inside a necro-zoophiliac porn mag, so any
passersby
outside wouldn’t judge me too harshly.

I’ve bought the ‘Screws’ countless times before. I used to buy it almost every week, bundled alongside a less ‘embarrassing’ purchase (i.e. a broadsheet). Over lunch I’d lay the papers out in front of me and invariably find myself reaching for the Screws first. I’d read about shagging chefs, chortle at a gaudy Franklin Mint ad for a souvenir Princess Di porcelain windmill collection, and feel vaguely superior for about ten minutes. That’s liberals for you.

Sometimes I’d be revolted by the way it casually vandalised human lives: exposing some hitherto unknown woman as a ‘vice girl’, say, just to fill half a page. But a few weeks later my disgust would fade, and I’d pick up another copy. Bad for me – but I didn’t stop buying it, just as I didn’t stop buying cigarettes. It was the nineties, and I was young and dumb enough to view the world as a big cartoon. I smoked with the force and frequency of a man hell-bent on turning his lungs into a pair of charcoal slippers, in the belief that cancer couldn’t catch me. In much the same spirit I’d read the
News of the World
‘ironically’, like an arsehole.

I can’t remember when things changed (my
NoW
habit that is, not my arseholery – that’s permanent), but at some point around the millennium I tired of laughing at the novelty plate ads and began to find the rest of the paper too grim to eat.

But never as grim as the past week, in which the paper (or more accurately, the paper’s past) leaked diseased pus by the bucket: another litre of scandal every day. By Monday evening, former editor Rebekah Brooks’s reputation was in tatters. By Wednesday those tatters had been tattered again. By the time Brooks was telling staff that they’d fully understand the closure ‘in a year’s time’ (presumably because it’ll take 365 days to explain the full horror), her reputational tatterettes were shredded yet further: they currently exist in an unstable sub-atomic state visible only to her mind’s eye.

The final edition is downright odd. If I were editor, I’d have scrawled nobs all over the front and plastered a cut-out-and-keep effigy of Brooks across the centre pages. Instead, the front page mumbles ‘
THANK YOU AND GOODBYE
’ over a collage of previous headlines.

Inside is an account of the paper’s history so rose-tinted you can smell the petals, focusing on its scoops and ignoring ghastly low points like the 1988 story about the actor David Scarboro (who played
EastEnders
’ Mark Fowler before Todd Carty), in which it printed images of the psychiatric unit where he was receiving treatment. He later killed himself.

In 2009 a
NoW
editorial attacked this paper’s phone-hacking coverage as ‘inaccurate, selective and purposely misleading’. ‘
NO INQUIRIES, NO CHARGES, NO EVIDENCE
’ it thundered. ‘Like the rest of the media, we have made mistakes … When we have done so, we have admitted to them.’

Yet today, apart from a brief mention about the paper ‘losing its way’ on page three, the closest the final edition gets to addressing the scale of the scandal comes in Carole Malone’s column: a page that has previously functioned as a rectangular bin full of tutting, spite and rabble-rousing lies about illegal immigrants being given ‘free cars’. This week she bemoans the paper’s demise, but also says the relatives of murder victims have been ‘blighted by the actions of this newspaper’, describes the hacking as ‘indefensible’,
and says she’s ‘sorry for the sins of people who’ve hurt you and who shame us all’.

The centre pages consist of a gallery of their ‘greatest hits’: curiously underwhelming when it’s all laid out. The Profumo scandal and Jeffrey Archer are in there, but so are three ‘gotcha!’ snaps of celebs snorting coke – one of whom, Kerry Katona, was captured by a camera hidden in her own bathroom. Call me squeamish, but I’d say concealing a lens in a woman’s bathroom is worse than hacking her phone. At least voicemails can’t reveal which hand she wipes her arse with.

Also nestled amongst the roster of glorious front pages – ‘
JACKO’S DEATHBED
’: a photograph of the rumpled sheets on which Michael Jackson died. Yum! Proud of that, are they? Why, yes: hence its inclusion in their farewell souvenir. At least they didn’t include a little collectible square of his skin.

The rest of the paper includes beach snaps of Gwyneth Paltrow, and some jovial bibble about footballers’ haircuts, but also a strong investigative piece exposing a sex trafficker. Across other pages, bite-sized tributes from readers are scattered like croutons. ‘Britain will never be the same again,’ claims one. (Spoiler: yes it will.)

There’s also a gracious sign-off from Ian Hyland, and a
self-indulgent
final edition of Dan Wootton’s XS showbiz column peppered with snaps of a grinning Wootton crushed against a series of celebrities as though trying to physically graft himself onto them, accompanied by messages from stars assuring him of his award-winning brilliance. A galaxy of anxious neediness compressed into one double-page spread.

Still, if the edition’s overall tone is more sentimental than apologetic, it’s hardly surprising, given that it was assembled by a team who – whatever you think of them – didn’t hack a murdered schoolgirl’s phone. Regardless, they lose their jobs; the woman who was editor at the time keeps hers. Thank you Rebekah. And goodbye to your staff.

You know the liberating feeling when someone unpopular leaves the room and everyone breathes a sigh of relief before openly discussing how much they dislike them? I don’t. What’s it like? What do people say? I only ever catch the odd whisper as the door shuts behind me. I’d love to hear the full conversation. Fortunately, watching Britain’s politicians queue up to denounce Rupert Murdoch has given me a taste of how such talk might play out.

A few weeks ago, Murdoch, or rather the more savage tendencies of the press as a whole, represented God. Fear of God isn’t always a bad thing in itself, if it keeps you on the straight and narrow – but politicians behaved like medieval villagers who didn’t just believe in Him, but quaked at the mere suggestion of a glimmer of a whisper of His name. You must never anger God. God wields immense power. God can hear everything you say. You must worship God, and please Him, or He will destroy you. For God controls the sun, which may shine upon you, or singe you to a Kinnock. Soon he will control the entire sky.

Furthermore, like all mere humans, you are weak. And God knows you have sinned. Chances are he even has long-lens photographs to prove it. But even as he chooses to smite you, God is merciful. You can do this the easy way or the hard way. Confess your sins in an exclusive double-page interview, or face the torments of hell. Have you seen what happens in hell? It isn’t pretty. Rows of the damned having buckets of molten shit poured over their heads by someone who looks a bit like Kelvin MacKenzie, for eternity.

But then suddenly everything changed. The revelations over the hacking of grieving relatives’ voicemails were the equivalent of a tornado ripping through an orphanage. ‘What kind of God would allow such a thing?’ asked the villagers, wading through
the aftermath. And they started to suspect He didn’t exist.

They thought about the hours and days they’d spent in church, saying their prayers, rocking on their knees, whipping themselves with knotted rope, or flying round the world to address one of God’s conferences, and they grew angry.

One by one they stood up to decry God. ‘He’s a sod,’ said one. ‘No he’s not, he’s a monster,’ said another. Eventually they formed the consensus view that he was a sodmonster.

These protests grew so loud, God abandoned his bid to command the sky, issued personal apologies, and even seemed to wither – to physically wither before our very eyes, a bit like Gollum. (Although Gollum was never snapped in the back of a car in a baseball cap and running shorts, cocking his leg slightly in an apparent bid to stop one of his nuts dangling free, which is a crying shame.)

The danger now is that the villagers, shorn of their belief in God, might abandon their fear of divine retribution altogether, muzzle the churches, and grow hopelessly decadent. I realise as I type this that I don’t fully understand my own metaphor any more. So here’s a new one: the ceaseless parade of MPs openly disparaging everything they used to slavishly revere has left recent news coverage resembling the finale of the science-fiction movie
They Live
, in which a perception-altering alien transmitter is destroyed and humankind suddenly awakens from a
decades-long
trance. (Mind you, that’s nothing: one day a politician will launch an open and sustained assault on the
Daily Mail
, which will probably culminate in scenes identical to the opening of the ark of the covenant at the end of
Raiders of the Lost Ark.
)

Likening the saga to an existing movie seems fitting, given the online speculation regarding who’ll play who when it inevitably becomes a 180-minute Bafta-winning motion picture – Nicole Kidman as Rebekah Brooks, Nick Frost as Tom Watson, Hugh Grant as himself, Steve Coogan as both himself and Paul McMullan etc., etc.

The trickiest role to cast is surely Andy Hayman, the former Metropolitan Police assistant commissioner whose appalling delivery of a key line managed to turn the select committee hearing into an unconvincing TV movie version of itself while it was actually happening. ‘Good God! Absolutely not! I can’t believe you asked me that!’ he spluttered, like a man hell-bent on failing an
Emmerdale
audition. It was excruciating enough on television. Imagine having to sit there and watching it live. Keith Vaz probably clenched his buttcheeks so hard they tore the fabric off his chair seat.

How, precisely, is the actor who eventually plays Hayman supposed to convey the ‘Good God! Absolutely not!’ moment with any degree of authenticity without destroying his career in the process? Emulate it perfectly and the entire audience will assume you’re useless.

Perhaps it’d be better to discard the movie idea altogether and instead turn the saga into a video game, with Brooks as one of the end-of-level bosses. After all, the phone-hacking pile-on is the equivalent of the moment where the player discovers the conspicuous glowing nodule just under its tail and concentrates his fire on that weak spot. As its life gauge starts to fall, the embattled monster desperately sheds blameless
News of the World
staff in an attempt to draw fire away from itself, but to no avail. Two-thirds of the way through, the weakened beast flashes red and starts tossing fizzing bombs in your direction – the day the
Sun
printed the pugilistic ‘
BROWN WRONG
’ front page roughly equates to that bit. Finally, it explodes in a shower of scarlet locks. Or resigns and leaves Wapping in a car.