Tabloid hacking scandal exposes Britain’s very own golden circle

I HAVE only met Rebekah Brooks once, in the proper sense. We have fleetingly shaken hands a couple of times at News International receptions at party conferences in Britain which I have blagged my way into as she has glided on to schmooze important political personalities — but that scarcely counts.

I’m sure she wouldn’t know me from Adam. She, on the other hand, is hard to forget with that huge mop of curly flame-coloured hair.

The lunch party where we chatted was at a mutual friend’s home in London. She was Rebekah Wade then, the editor of The Sun, a striking woman in a man’s world. Now, it would be very convenient if I could write that I knew from the very instant we were introduced that she was a witch (or something like that), that I could pick up some malicious vibe that emanated from deep within her. The truth is, I haven’t the faintest idea what we discussed: social small talk, I guess, nothing important. It was a boozy kind of a lunch on a glorious summer’s day.

She was still married to the EastEnders star, Ross Kemp, back then. What I do remember is thinking how much shorter and less fearsome he appears in the flesh than he did as Grant Mitchell on screen. A few months later, she popped into my head again when she was arrested and released without charge for allegedly assaulting Kemp.

Presumably, some of the staff at the News of the World who found themselves out of jobs on Saturday night when the paper was abruptly closed down could think of even ruder words to describe the woman who was editor when the mobile phone of a schoolgirl murder victim was allegedly hacked into and messages deleted misleading the girl’s parents into thinking she was still alive.

Brooks describes the allegation that she knew phone hacking was routine practice at the paper as “inconceivable”; others have suggested she needs to buy herself a dictionary and look up the meaning of the word.

Now the CEO of News Corporation, Brooks, who has subsequently married a one-time jockey and mail order sex toy salesman — their wedding, staggeringly, was attended by both then Prime Minister Gordon Brown and then leader of the opposition David Cameron — is facing police questioning. Bent journalists and the bent policemen they paid off to cover their traces face jail. You couldn’t make it up. By Brooks’ own account, the worst is yet to come.

Meanwhile, News Corporation is facing legal action from shareholders accusing it of corporate governance failures and shares in BSkyB, the satellite TV company the Murdoch family is trying to buy, have lost billions in value since the scandal broke.

Normally, when a newspaper makes a big mistake, a few resignations and some corporate self-flagellation are called for and then the title moves on. In this case, even shuttering the News of the World does not appear to have staved off disaster.

In fact, it appears to have been a massive over-reaction when all that was required, journalistically, was Brooks’ head on a plate. The platoons of Murdoch cynics, who are being proven unusually correct at present, suspect it is all part of a larger game plan to cut costs by making The Sun a seven-days-a-week operation. The strong rumour is that The Sun on Sunday is not far away.

In a glorious coincidence, Rebekah Brooks hails from the same tiny village as Lewis Carroll who gave literature the Alice books. Whether Brooks is more like the furious Queen of Hearts always demanding “Off with their heads” or the Red Queen who notes “It takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place” is unclear. Perhaps she is a bit of both, arrogant with a taste for executions and at the same time having to launch new products to replace failed ones.

The overall effect of the hacking scandal has been to highlight in the British political system all the worst features that the Irish system sometimes exhibits. Being a small country has many advantages but some say, plausibly, that one of Ireland’s weaknesses is that too many people, regulators and regulated, know each other too well. Brian Cowen denied he discussed the bailout of Anglo Irish while playing golf but the sense that cronyism thrived under FF is strong.

Now, how small does the British media-political elite look and how far removed do their lives appear from those of ordinary folk? Apparently, when she isn’t jetting to Venice for lunch at Harry’s Bar, Rebekah Brooks is horse riding with her Oxfordshire neighbour, the Prime Minister.

It is said that the British Labour leader, Ed Miliband, has been reluctant, until very recently, to make political hay out of phone hacking: his chief spin doctor is Tom Baldwin, lately Labour’s authoritative voice on the news pages of The Times, another Murdoch paper. Cameron’s own spin doctor, until he was forced to resign, was another News of the World editor, Andy Coulson, who has now been arrested.

It all looks, as Cameron has as good as admitted, all very incestuous and sleazy. Police investigations and political inquiries there will be aplenty. Some of the more ridiculous figures in this farce will get their heads metaphorically chopped off; some of the “little people” whose names are not familiar have already gone to prison and others will follow.

The News of the World’s own “name and shame” campaign against paedophiles in the year 2000 demonstrated how quickly vigilante journalism can turn people’s anxieties into outrage.

Preying on the public’s fear of so-called predatory paedophiles, the paper’s campaign successfully provoked groups of anxious parents into organising vigilante groups. It showed that the systematic cultivation of outrage can turn fear into something like mob rule.

The News of the World turned the cultivation of outrage-from-below into an art form. And paradoxically, some will say that its demise is largely due to the outrage-from-above directed against it by its opponents. The sadness is that a once-great newspaper has closed. Press freedom — but not the freedom for the press to do whatever it likes — has been diminished a little bit in Britain and Ireland.

The spectacle of government officials investigating the press is disconcerting. The press is supposed to investigate the government. So while I share the widespread desire to see Rupert Murdoch and his minions held accountable for any crimes they have allegedly committed, I cringe when Cameron announces an official inquiry into “the culture, the practices, and the ethics of the press”. It was, after all, an inquiring newspaper — The Guardian — which has been largely responsible for unearthing all the recent sordid facts.

But if everyone wanted a responsible, high-minded press they probably wouldn’t consume avidly papers devoted to exposing dirt about major and minor celebrities. The truth is, if the public were generally outraged by the “culture” of the tabloid press they would simply stop reading it.