MEDIA STUDIES
Would that someone could expose the hypocrisy of Montgomery of the Mirror (perhaps I have)
STEPHEN GLOVER
Some readers may have missed two recent issues of the Daily Mirror which attempted to destroy the reputation of Rupert Allason, the Tory MP for Torquay. On Thursday of last week the paper `splashed' with the headline 'Tory MP And His Mistress'. Inside there were many details, supported by photographs, which established beyond all possible doubt that Mr Allason had recently spent five days in the South of France with a young lady who was not his wife. The next day the Daily Mirror again led with the story, concentrat- ing on Mr Allason's statement that it was `well known' that he and his wife had gone their 'separate ways a long time ago'. The paper interviewed a number of locals in Torquay who were blissfully ignorant of Mr Allason's marital arrangements.
Boredom contended with mild distaste when I first set eyes on the Mirror story. The distaste, I have to say, was initially directed at Mr Allason. A little voice in the back of my mind, coarsened by long expo- sure to downmarket tabloid newspapers, whispered something along the lines that Mr Allason looked a bit of a spiv, and if he took a young woman who was not his wife to the South of France he should jolly well accept the consequences. But quite soon the little voice was overborne by a bigger one. It questioned the premise that Mr Allason was a spiv, since I have never met him and never spoken to anyone about him. And it said that even if he were a spiv, what business was it of the Mirror's to invade his privacy during his jaunt in St Tropez? The paper produced no evidence that he has ever preached about the sancti- ty of family life, and for all its protestations he seems not to have contrived a false pic- ture of marital harmony.
Even by debased tabloid standards, this was not a proper story, let alone a 'splash' on two consecutive days. Mr Allason is politically speaking of little or no conse- quence and he can't, as I say, easily be con- victed of hypocrisy. So why did the paper attack him? The Daily Mirror recently fought and won a legal battle against Mr Allason. Two weeks ago a High Court judge threw out a claim for malicious false- hood which the Tory MP had brought against the paper. But the two parties have had other skirmishes in the past and Mr Allason, who is an indefatigable and gener- ally successful litigant, has collected a large amount of money off the Mirror. Whatever motives the paper may have had, a settling of old scores was surely foremost among them. Editorial policy was influenced by the personal feelings of some executives.
The chief executive of Mirror Group Newspapers is none other than our old friend David Montgomery. He is a former editor of the News of the World who takes a great journalistic interest in the newspapers for which he is responsible. He must have been told about the Allason story by Piers Morgan, another ex-editor of the News of the World, appointed as the Mirror's editor last September. Whereas it is possible to acquit Mr Allason of hypocrisy, it is not easy to get Mr Montgomery off the same hook. After the Mirror's intrusion into Mr Allason's privacy last week, the Guardian's diarist Matthew Norman amusingly revealed that his paper had been tele- phoned by a lawyer acting for Mr Mont- gomery. This person had warned that Mr Montgomery might be obliged to sue the Guardian if it wrote about his separation from his second wife. Such a story would amount to a breach of his privacy.
One law for Mirror Group executives, another for Tory MPs — and maybe the rest of us. The contradictions of Mr Mont- gomery's position were defended on the Radio Four programme Medium Wave by David Walker, a leader writer on the Inde- pendent. This newspaper is half-owned and in effect controlled by Mirror Group. According to Mr Walker, Mr Allason is `not some bespectacled, scholarly MP devoting his life to legislating for the coun- try's interest' (how many of them are there?) but a man who 'finds time enough to write spy novels in which voluptuous women, doubtless in the South of France, get up to all sorts of hanky-panky'. Mr Alla- son, said Mr Walker, is 'not a pure catego- ry. If we're looking at the question of whether newspapers should be looking at private lives, Rupert Allason is not a pri- vate individual and not even a mere MP. He is a [word indistinct] novelist. As such, I think he's fair game.'
Aha! So it is all right to be beastly to novelists but not, it seems, to chief execu- tives. Mr Walker explains that it is unrea- sonable for a newspaper such as the Guardian to be interested in the private life of David Montgomery. There is a 'real dis- tinction between the corporations who publish and people who are actually responsible'. To say that 'David Mont- gomery's private life is up for grabs is to make a categorical error'. There is 'surely a world of difference' between the responsi- bilities of a moralising columnist 'guilty of a bit of hanky-panky' (Mr Walker seems to have that on the brain) and 'the corporate executive'. In a daily newspaper, decisions are made 'on a split-second basis' and 'you cannot hold someone ultimately in charge of the commercial operation responsible for the detail.'
The intellectual rigour of leader writers on the Independent may have slipped since my days on the paper. I had never previous- ly heard of Mr Walker. I am told he has had something to do with the BBC and has the distinction of having written leaders under Charlie Wilson's editorship of both the Times as well as the Independent — Mr Wilson being now a bag carrier for David Montgomery. Mr Walker strains so hard to defend Mr Montgomery, and employs such ludicrous arguments, that one cannot but wonder whether Mr Montgomery does not have something to hide after all. I wouldn't normally raise the matter, of course, but after what has been done to Mr Allason I feel bound to. I recall how Jonathan Hol- borow, the editor of the Mail on Sunday, brilliantly dispatched a reporter to track down dear old Kelvin MacKenzie, then edi- tor of the Sun, who was discovered in some sun-kissed paradise in the company of a woman who was not his wife.
Who cares? The less I know about Mr Montgomery's private life, the happier I shall be. It's just that he runs a company whose papers thrive on poking their noses into other people's private business, and when another newspaper thinks about turn- ing the tables he threatens it with a lawyer. He does not, pace Mr Walker, find himself almost by accident in commercial charge of a group of newspapers over which he exerts negligible editorial control. He transforined those newspapers, infused them with his own brand of yellow journalism, deprived them of whatever residual sense of propri- ety and ideological conviction they still had. It would be a glorious day for journalism if someone could illuminate more clearly this man's double-standards.
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