Why has much of the press given Labour an easy ride? Fear and jealousy are only part of the answer
STEPHEN GLOVER
Last week the Daily Mail serialised Tom Bower's new book, The Paymaster, which is about the Labour MP and former minister, Geoffrey Robinson. (Let me remind readers that I write a column for the Mail. I know Mr Bower slightly.) The allegations were sensational. and I shall repeat them for the benefit of readers who have lost the plot as threats of libel action cannonade around Fleet Street and Whitehall.
Mr Bower first alleges that, contrary to repeated assertions to Parliament, Mr Robinson received a cheque for f200,000 from a company called Hollis which was owned by the late crook, Robert Maxwell. He produces an invoice which adds credibility to this allegation. Second, he says that Stephen Byers, the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry. 'deliberately buried' the DTI report which uncovered this payment. Third, Mr Bower claims that Geoffrey Robinson browbeat the then permanent secretary at the Treasury, Sir Terence Burns, into saying that he had given his personal approval for an offshore tax-free fund to be exempted from a blind trust set up by Mr Robinson. He also alleges that the Chancellor, Gordon Brown, colluded with Mr Robinson in producing a misleading press statement on this matter.
So there we are. These are serious allegations. The first thing to say is that no one in government has yet attempted to deny that Mr Robinson received the cheque for £200,000. This is very significant. The second thing to say is that although Stephen Byers (or Alastair Campbell acting on his behalf) has threatened to sue the Daily Mail, no writ, nor even a threat of a writ, has yet been received by the paper.
What interests me is the reaction of the media to Mr Bower's allegations, and the events that followed their publication. With a few notable exceptions, newspapers have underplayed the story to an amazing extent. One possible explanation is the conduit. Because the allegations emanated from the Daily Mail, other newspapers, out of feelings of competitive jealousy, did not want to be seen running too energetically after them. This might explain the reaction of the Daily Express, the Mail's chief rival, which could barely find the time or space to consider what Mr Bower had to say.
Another possibility is that some newspapers were cowed by the government's announcement that Stephen Byers was going to sue the Mail. This certainly seems to apply to Radio Four's Today programme, which withdrew an invitation to David HeathcoatAmory, Mr Byers's opposite number, to appear on the programme, and also pulled the plug on Mr Bower himself. Yet BBC 2's Newsnight carried a robust report on the affair by the admirable Michael Crick, and received no writs for its pains. As the week wore on, newspapers and news programmes must have become aware that Mr Byers's threats were pretty bogus, and that at all events they could repeat and discuss Mr Bower's allegations with impunity.
So jealousy and fear provide only a partial explanation for the limp-wristed response of the press. This is all about politics, and in a pre-election period some newspapers wanted to afford as much protection as they could to New Labour. To a large degree they divided on party lines. The Daily Telegraph overcame any feelings of pique it might have had against the Mail, and gave prominent and generally sympathetic coverage to Mr Bower's allegations. The Guardian was in a quandary, unhappy that the Daily Mail was the provenance of the allegations and, deep in its heart, sympathetic to New Labour. But, to its credit, the paper eventually conceded that Mr Byers and Mr Robinson have a case to answer. On Wednesday its columnist Francis Wheen took Mr Byers to task.
On the other hand, the Labour-supporting Mirror suggested that the story was virtually 'a total fabrication'. The Sun, trying to toe the party line after recently coming out for New Labour, had almost nothing to say. The Independent was scarcely more voluble, though Anne McElvoy wrote a column which seemed to suggest that Mr Byers was not the Archangel Gabriel. The Labour-supporting London Evening Standard, whose editor Sir Max Hastings has all the zeal of a Blairite convert, as usual gave practically no support to its sister paper. the Daily Mail. Indeed, David 'Blinker' Aaronovitch, reputed to be Cherie Blair's favourite columnist, a preference that says much for her stamina, was given a book review to pour cold water over Mr Bower. The most egregious performance was that of the New Labour Times, which almost ignored the drama. Its media pages last Friday 'spiked' an anti-Byers piece written by Magnus Linklater which was subsequently recycled in his Scotland on Sunday column. Fair-minded people may find it dif ficult to believe, in view of the Times's general treatment of the story, that Mr Linklater's article was canned for reasons of space.
My point is not that newspapers were required to give a complete bill of health to all Mr Bower's allegations. But surely they warranted a wider airing. Mr Bower is a highly respected investigative journalist who doesn't have a Tory agenda. His evidence about Mr Robinson's payment seems pretty incontrovertible — indeed, no one has controverted it. Some may find his suggestion that Mr Byers buried the DTI report difficult to swallow, but I find it even more difficult to accept that the minister was unaware of its main findings. If he was aware, was he not required by Tony Blair's ministerial code to come clean and reveal that Mr Robinson had misled Parliament when he denied having received any payment from Robert Maxwell?
The allegations about Mr Robinson are being investigated by the redoubtable Elizabeth Filkin, the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, who will present her preliminary findings as early as next week. Will the press then set aside party leanings and remember its deeper purpose? We have a government in which Geoffrey Robinson, who appears to have misled Parliament, once played a leading role. Instead of answering Mr Bower's allegations, it issues bogus threats against the Daily Mail, and then tries to terrify major booksellers into withdrawing his book. Far from being offended by these attacks on free speech, some newspapers say nothing while others even defend the government's conduct. The Daily Mail and one or two other papers aside, this has hardly been Fleet Street's finest hour.
Two weeks ago I wrote that the Observer's consumer affairs correspondent had got her Randolph Churchills in a muddle in a piece about the impending new Dictionary of National Biography. Her name is Sarah Ryle, though I did not say so at the time. I now learn that the mistake was not hers. Ms Ryle, who has a history degree from Oxford, is completely on top of her Randolph Churchills. The error was introduced by a busybody subeditor who does not know Winston's father from his son. Perhaps this person would now care to turn himself in to this column.
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