The Desmond story has it all: politics, sleaze, pornography. But the BBC seems hardly to care
STEPHEN GLOVER
Another cash-for-favours scandal, another escape for New Labour. The Richard Desmond story seems nearly dead. Some may say this is because it never had much life in it. I don't agree. Surely this was sensational by any standards. The very least you can say of New Labour is that it took £100,000 from a man who has made a fortune in pornography which, in the view of some, is by no means all 'soft'. Readers may remember 'Anal Annie', who hails from Mr Desmond's stable. The worst you could say of New Labour is that it accepted a douceur. In return for the relatively paltry sum of £100,000, Stephen Byers, then trade secretary, declined to refer Mr Desmond's bid for Express newspapers to the Competition Commission, as he was urged by some to do, on the grounds that Mr Desmond was not a 'fit and proper' person to own a national newspaper group.
New Labour comes out of this story either badly or very badly indeed, according to which interpretation you prefer. Why, then, has it not suffered more opprobrium? One possible explanation is the inability or reluctance of the Tories to land a blow. Perhaps they are frightened of Mr Desmond qua newspaper proprietor. If so, they should not be. The circulation of the Daily Express is collapsing before our eyes — 902,772 in April, down nearly 8 per cent over the past year. Moreover, many of its readers seem determined to vote Tory, however much New Labour propaganda is thrust down their throats. According to MORI, at the last general election 43 per cent of Express readers voted Conservative, 33 per cent Labour and 19 per cent Liberal Democrat. This, incidentally, makes a mockery not only of the Tories' fears but also of Tony Blair's relentless courting of Mr Desmond — the invitation to Chequers and cosy chats at No 10. The great pornographer is being buttered up for no purpose since, whatever he does, his elderly, largely Northern Tory readers are not going to vote Labour.
Some newspapers were also soft on the government. On Sunday the 'red-top' tabloids more or less ignored the story, but the other papers were full of it. The Observer's coverage was notably sharp and extensive, though, oddly, the headline on its first edition — 'Porn baron's cash mires Blair in new favours row' — was toned down in later editions to 'Labour faces auger over press chiefs cash gift'. On Monday, the Sun, Daily Mirror and Daily Mail gave the
story only moderate coverage, while the Desmond-owned Daily Express predictably judged that there was no scandal at all. The broadsheets were more worked up, with the Independent splashing on Desmond, and the Guardian devoting a lot of space to it, including a leading article. No one could say that the Blairite or left-of-centre press gave New Labour an easy ride.
If some newspapers never got to grips with the story, vast tracts of the BBC did not even acknowledge it. I exempt radio news programmes such as Radio Four's Broadcasting House, the Today programme and the World At One, all of which offered forensic coverage. But BBC 1 television news almost entirely ignored it, as, more unexpectedly, did BBC 2's Newsnight on Monday evening. On the same day the Six O'Clock News and the Ten O'Clock News on BBC 1 did not mention Mr Desmond at all. Nor did any ITN bulletins that I saw. While the parts of the BBC that appeal to the chattering classes took the story seriously, those programmes which reach out to a mass audience found no time for it.
How can this be? Either it is an important story or it is not. The editors of BBC 1 news bulletins apparently believe that their viewers are not interested in New Labour sleaze. Indeed, it is very unusual for the dumbed-down Six 0 Clock News to run any political stories at all. According to these double standards, the chattering and political classes are permitted to know about New Labour sleaze, while the population at large need not worry their little heads. This may be good for the government, but it is not at all healthy for democracy. The BBC is not fulfilling its responsibilities as a public-sector broadcaster.
Newspapers reflect the interests of their readers. To many of us, the pre-World Cup party of Posh and Becks was one of the more gruesome events of modern times, which we would much rather not read about in painstaking detail. But we must accept that there are others who do not accept this view. Millions of people do enjoy breathless, non-ironic accounts of such things. They lap up pictures of 'celebrities' such as Mick Hucknall, Sir Elton John. Cilia Black, Ant and Dec (whoever they may be), Dale Winton and the rest of the crew. We may wish it were otherwise, but it is not. These days,
readers of popular newspapers want to read about the trashocracy, and are probably unaware that there ever was an aristocracy about whose goings-on their grandparents were once fascinated to learn.
So it would be pointless to criticise the Sun and the Daily Mirror for devoting so much space to this event. They did what you would have expected. The Daily Mail's account was somewhat barbed, as again you might expect. The Guardian devoted no more than a few paragraphs, which is what its readers would have wanted. The Independent pushed the boat out a little further than was strictly necessary, but I'm not going to get worked up about that. Which brings me to the Daily Telegraph and the Times.
In the dying days of the editorship of my old friend Peter Stothard, page three of the Times was cleared for a piece about Posh and Becks. There was speculation, baseless as was obvious even at the time, that Becks might be off to a Continental club, and so the differing delights of four great cities, as they might affect Posh and Becks, were exhaustively considered. I like to see this piece as the defining moment of late-period Stothard. His successor, Robert Thomson, is trying to keep the old traditions alive as best he can, and gave over page seven, rather than the more prominent page three, for a blow-by-blow account of the Beckhams' knees-up. If there was a trace of irony in this piece I did not detect it. My ironycounter also remained pretty static on reading the Daily Telegraph's version of events, for which page three was cleared.
My point is not that these two august publications should have totally ignored the party. It was a news story of sorts, partly because money was raised, and deserved a little space. But not as much as it got. It seems to me that both newspapers underestimated their readers. Can they not see that even now most people with half a thought in their heads regard Posh and Becks and their celebrity hangers-on at best as a bit of a laugh, and at worst as an affront to civilisation? There is a lack of understanding here between those who produce newspapers and those who read them. I don't believe that even the new readers of the dumbed-down Times — those who have been lured by the lower cover price — want as much Posh and Becks as they are being offered. As for the old readers, they don't understand what is being done to them.
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