Non Fiction

Is Google God?

2006-02-22T00:00:00+00:00

This is an edited version of my contribution to a conference and debate about the impact of the Internet on Literature, held in Barcelona in 2006: some of the thoughts have been rendered redundant by history: but not all of them.

What a great subject for a cafe@europa. Thanks to the internet, I am replying immediately, with my unmediated thoughts late on a Friday night/Saturday morning. I only do this because the subject is so provocative and stimulating. Otherwise I would be sleeping! I think the internet is part of the ongoing ‘electrification of the word’.

The word, the logos, is such a fixed and profound part of Hellenic thinking. It required education, expensive vellum and the social organisation of the monasteries to develop. In the age of mechanical reproduction, to be ‘published’ to be official, required either the apparatus of state or commercial capital investment.

But what do you need today? For the means of production, just a printer and a computer. And for the means of distribution and exchange? A blog site.

My personal feeling is that the age of the word – the hieratic, priestly, authored word – is the exception. For most of history, language has been oral – fluid, shared, unrecorded. The paradox of the information age is that the written word, thanks to this computer, and this internet connection, has become as fluid as the spoken word. Literacy has returned to orality. As Mikhail Bakhtin said – it’s all just dialogue.

***

So I agree there has been a desacralisation of the word in the information age, but I would also agree that this process began with Gutenberg, with the mechanical reproduction of text.

As Walter Benjamin explained, in mechanical reproduction text loses its direct connection with handwriting, its aura or physical residual contact with its creator.

I suppose it’s not surprising that our notions of divine creation are shaped by changes in human creativity. With mechanical reproduction, human creators became more distanced from their works, and I’m sure it’s no coincidence that the rise of information technology was accompanied by the theology of a ‘hidden god’ at work in nature, a deus absconditus, who employed intervening processes of gravity or evolution to express himself.

Flaubert draws on the same analogy when he says that an author should be in his work as god is in the world, invisible but all powerful.

So to me, this information age begins in the early modern period, sometime around the late 16th early 17th century – appropriately for us, around the time of Cervantes and Shakespeare – when there was a sudden shift in what I’ll call the ‘technology of knowledge’.

The question is whether the last twenty or so years are just a part of the same process of speeding up mechanical reproduction, or if something else more profound has taken place.

I would also add that mechanical reproduction didn’t mean the death of god, or the death of the author, but both creators became more distant from their works and their audiences.

About ten years ago I wrote an essay for the New Statesman, updating Benjamin for the information age. I called the brief piece the work of art in the digital domain. Some of these issues were explored there, but one paradox did strike me.

Thanks to digital technology, it was clear even then that, working alone on our computers, we could edit video, music and sound, compose and tamper with images. To me, this represented the revenge of the writer. Sound and image had also been turned into code, and could be manipulated like text. In effect, digitization turned everything into literature, ecriture, and more people into authors.

***

I think that is the danger in all discussions of technological innovation- the idea that the printing press, or the telegraph, or the internet, came along one day and changed everything for good.

History is not a succession of innovations, it is fragmented, parallel, and discontinuous…Nothing need ‘replace’ anything else. Every new medium has its practical constraints, and ultimately its human limitations

One common complaint i often hear about these new information technologies is that texting, emailing, and blogging are somehow undermining our standards of grammar, spelling and punctuation.

It’s certainly true that my kids ‘txt’ all the time, and message me weird coded messages on chat ‘soz dad l8 – brb’. Sorry dad i’m late for school. Be right back. However, both my msn/txt children are gr8 at school, and just as they shift their accents from the argot of the playground to the politesse of family dinners, they seem very adaptable when it comes to the rigours of exams against the acronyms of text messaging. Two styles can co-exist simultaneously, often with great wit and vigour from the cross fertilisation.

When it comes to rules of grammar, punctuation and spelling, i always remember that Britain’s most creative period of writing, and the birth place of this modern English now spoken and written throughout the world, was during the age of Elizabethan Jacobean theatre and poetry – a time in which ‘Shakspeare’ spelt his name in ten different ways, and the rules of spelling and grammar were in flux.

That’s one way that the new knowledge technologies are affecting the physics of our textuality (and no doubt our sexuality). But when it comes to ‘hypertextuality’, I always feel we are straying into areas of’ metaphysics’, indeed theology, as I pointed out in a previous intervention.

So perhaps one way of looking at hypertextuality is to go full throttle for this quasi-religious approach, and since literature and the arts have classically offered some kind of substitution for religion, then it may be germane to ask… how does the internet affect our idea of immortality?

Years ago, as a tense teenager, I longed to have a book published. I was reading the canon of famous writers, and then books about these writers – Eliot, Lawrence, eckett – and my idea of salvation was to become famous enough that someone would write a book about me. In the years since then, many things have happened – not least a realisation of the limits of my own literary talent – but I wonder if a broader cultural shift has taken place: i.e. the decline of the book, the printed page, as an emblem of social approval, legitimacy and authority.

In the era of Hola! magazine, the National Enquirer, and in literature of intrusive scandalous biographies, probably the last thing now I’d want is to be ‘immortal’ in this way – like Primo Levi or Elvis Presley. But I wonder how the internet changes our notions of fame, immortality and Parnassus.

About five years ago, I explored with an entrepreneurial friend of the idea of setting up soul.com, in which people could upload their lives to a web space memorial, complete with architecture, music, photos, poems and songs, which would act as a repository of their soul.

We imagined it a bit like the Sims or Sim City, the difference being everyone would build their own mausoleum or utopia. 700 years ago, Dante’s image of paradiso was firmly based in the hypertextuality of books; he saw every redeemed sinner as a page in god’s library. Oddly enough, with more and more people having access to publication, we all have a chance to be at least a ‘web page’ in the library of mankind, and have our fifteen minutes of fame. We have got our place in the library in the absence of god.

This seems to be the crucial problem. In this electronic era of information technology we can all be visible. The biggest anxiety is not expression, but the lurking realisation that nobody may be watching. There is presence, but no judgement. Who is going to ‘editorialise’ this mass of human expression? We don’t have a god anymore. But we do have google. Has google replaced god?

Even Longer Form

2014-10-29T00:00:00+00:00

I've written three books, the two most recent about the phone hacking scandal, trial and power of media monopolies. Both of these can be found on Amazon.

Longer form...

2014-10-28T00:00:00+00:00

I don't just write tweets though: this New Statesman profile of Rebekah Brooks is an example of my longer form journalism...

All his materials - Philip Pullman Interview

2014-01-06T00:00:00+00:00

An excerpt from my interview with writer and Novelist Philip Pullman: you can read the whole thing on Aeon Magazine

In a rare interview, Philip Pullman tells us his own origin story, and why the great questions are still religious ones

This battle between authority and self-authorship is a major tenet of Pullman’s narratives. For example, the young heroes of His Dark Materials, Will and Lyra, are ordinary people trying to reclaim an imaginative world that’s been monopolised by the gnostic Magisterium. Pullman readily concedes: ‘This is a perpetual obsession of mine.’ But when I ask if he really is in control of his fictional worlds, or whether, surely, his characters take over sometimes, he confesses: ‘I’m a very imperfect tyrant, because occasionally they do that. You can’t really make them do what they don’t what to do. It’s a complicated, confused business.’ So much for the absolutism, or absolute anti-absolutism.

‘I think religious questions are the big questions. Where did we come from? What is life about? What is evil? Those are questions I do think about’

Pullman has been simultaneously accused of making his fictional worlds too morally simplistic, and of being morally confused, allowing good characters to do dubious things. Lord Asriel, for example, the main protagonist of Northern Lights (1995) (published as The Golden Compass in North America), sacrifices a child. But, compared with his Oxford forerunners — Tolkien, Lewis and the other ‘Inklings’ who met at a pub down the road half a century ago — Pullman is happy not to be on the side of the angels. ‘Nothing in The Lord of the Rings is overtly Christian,’ he says, having explained to me how Tolkien was a ‘cradle Catholic’ who believed in the authority of the church. ‘But you can see a sort of absolutism in the way the bad characters are very, very bad, and the good characters very, very good, and the only interesting character is Gollum, who is good and then bad.’ He contrasts this with Lewis: ‘For the children in the Narnia books, the temptations they face — should we eat these marshmallows or not? — are real temptations. This is why I feel more akin to Lewis than Tolkien… I respect the struggle.’

Nearly all the influences Pullman has cited so far have a religious background, and so, inverting Blake’s comment on Milton, I ask him: ‘Aren’t you really of the believer’s party without knowing it?’ He’s amused by the thought. ‘I probably am,’ he says. ‘I’m religious, but I’m an atheist. I think religious questions are the big questions. Where did we come from? What is life about? What is evil? Those are questions I do think about.’

Often billed as a key figure of the ‘New Atheism’ movement, Pullman says that he met the writer and polemicist Christopher Hitchens only a couple of times, and that he admires Dawkins’s writings on science — although he completely disagrees with him on fairy tales, which Dawkins described in a TV interview in 2008 as ‘anti-scientific’.

Pullman’s own retelling of Grimm Tales for Young and Old was published in 2012, and he subscribes to Einstein’s dictum: ‘If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.’ ‘It’s all about thinking by analogy,’ says Pullman, ‘and analogy is an enormously powerful tool in science. Einstein, when he was thinking about light, imagined himself riding on a beam of light.’

‘I like to say I’m a complete materialist but…’ Pullman allows himself an English teacher’s dramatic pause, ‘matter is conscious. How do I know that? Because I’m matter and I’m conscious.’ Once again, Pullman opts for complexity and nuance, and you can hear the same dislike of hierarchies in his critique of some popular science. ‘What you often get in people of this stripe (and Brian Cox — the TV physicist — goes in for it as well), is a sentence of the formula “X is no more than/just/merely/nothing but Y.” For example: “The world is nothing but the action of molecules” or “Love is merely the movement of electrons in the brains.” Sentences of that sort are nearly always mistaken,’ says Pullman. ‘I would prefer they were put in the form of “Love is a movement of electrons in the brain, among other things.”’

‘Among other things’ would be a great motto for Pullman’s ambivalence (or should that be multivalence?) about matters of belief, fiction and science. He is of the old school of secularism which holds that faith should be kept out of the public sphere, but still refuses the kind of inquisition that seeks to root out mistaken beliefs: ‘What you feel and believe are private to you and belong to nobody else,’ he counters. ‘What you do in the public sphere is what’s important.’

Nigel Farage, England’s Foremost Anti-Establishment Politician

2013-03-11T00:00:00+00:00

By Peter Jukes / March 11 2013 4:45 AM

Alex Robbins

It was one of the most memorable images of the last election. On the morning the polls opened in 2010, Nigel Farage, a British member of the European Parliament, was photographed in the wreckage of a small aircraft, which had crashed soon after takeoff when a banner for his UK Independence Party tangled with the plane’s tail. Though he suffered cracked ribs, a broken sternum, and a punctured lung, Farage soon bounced back, in the manner of Mr. Toad, a character from The Wind in the Willows who is ever-bumptious, misguided but irrepressible.

Three years on, that energy is paying off. In a recent by-election, caused by the resignation of Liberal Democrat Chris Huhne, the former secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, who had to give up his seat after he admitted to lying about traffic offenses, Farage’s Independence Party increased its vote from 4 percent to 27.8 percent—what Farage immediately declared a “national political earthquake.” And certainly Prime Minister David Cameron and his Conservative Party, which was beaten into third place, have felt the tremors.

That Farage, with his private-school background and Home-Counties golf-club swagger, should become England’s foremost anti-establishment politician is largely a symptom of conservative discontent with the prime minister’s attempt to detoxify and modernize his party. In 2006, the year he won the leadership contest, Cameron tried to marginalize the party Farage helped to found by telling a radio station that “UKIP is sort of a bunch of ... fruitcakes and loonies and closet racists mostly.”

Farage defied that stereotype, and in the 2009 European parliamentary elections steered his party to the second-highest share of the popular vote, his 2 million votes exceeding those won by Labour and the Liberal Democrats. Though Euro elections have famously low turnouts, and mainly animate voters who are avidly anti-EU, UKIP is currently predicted to come first in next year’s elections.

Therein lies the paradox. Farage’s main platform is in the Strasbourg-based Parliament where, a few years ago, he famously described Herman Van Rompuy, the Belgian president of the European Council, as possessing the “charisma of a damp rag and the appearance of low-grade bank clerk.” The colorful personal attack delighted the British tabloids, and Farage’s call for complete withdrawal from the EU continues to appeal especially to older Brits who view the continent with suspicion. (A tell-tale sign of a UKIP supporter is the use of the phrase “EUSSR.”)

UKIP has never won a seat in the British Parliament, however, and still looks unlikely to do so. But while the U.K.’s electoral system tends to default to two main parties, third parties can play a crucial role, as evidenced by the last election, when the Conservative Party needed the Liberal Democrats to govern. However, since they entered the coalition government under the leadership of Nick Clegg, support for the Lib Dems has halved, giving the UKIP a play at the “none of the above” voter—at least in the Tory heartlands.

The threat to Cameron is palpable. But while the prime minister has tried to outflank Farage by promising a referendum on EU membership, this rightward turn seems to have done little to quell rebellions from Tory backbenchers on other issues such as gay marriage. Farage cleverly foments these divisions. His parliamentary candidates target Tory modernizers, bleeding them of support, and he has recently expanded his policy commitments to zero immigration, flat rate tax, and minimizing the government budget—except for military and prison expenditures.

Railing at wind farms from his perch in his favorite pub in the Kent countryside, Farage tries to articulate the fading voice of the English shires. Tilting at windmills may be a quixotic, outdated quest. But, when it comes to Cameron’s political future, Farage may still do considerable damage.

The Flame-Haired Martyr

2012-05-22T00:00:00+00:00

By Peter Jukes / May 21 2012 1:00 AM

Brooks: Trying out for a role in The Crucible? Christopher Furlong / Getty Images

The dress she arrived in told it all. When Rebekah Brooks, former CEO of News International, posed on the steps of the Royal Courts of Justice two weeks ago, it was a red-carpet moment. The Leveson Inquiry into press standards taking place in London had already become the best show in town, with a glittering cast including Hugh Grant, Sienna Miller, and James and Rupert Murdoch—but Brooks was bound to take the starring role.

Presumably her lawyers had helped her with her lines. And her outfit would have been discussed with her PR adviser from Pottinger Bell, a company that has represented a host of potentates and their kin, including the first lady of Syria, Asma al-Assad; the deposed president of Yemen, Ali Abdullah Saleh; and the late Chilean dictator, Augusto Pinochet. When the fallen Queen of Fleet Street turned up in a simple $800 black dress with a white Peter Pan collar, it was the carefully crafted image of maligned innocence.

Four days later, in a less polished performance, after she had been charged with three counts of perverting the course of justice, the victimhood strategy was still in place. Standing outside the offices of her lawyer, Brooks looked shaken. “I am baffled by the decision to charge me,” she said. Her husband, horse trainer Charlie Brooks, also arrested on two counts for allegedly hiding evidence from police, gallantly stepped forward. “I feel today is an attempt to use me and others as scapegoats ... to ratchet up the pressure on my wife,” he said, “who I believe is the subject of a witch hunt.” Suddenly that Peter Pan collar took on another dimension. The satirical magazine Private Eye immediately picked it up—it was 17th-century Salem, with Brooks as Goody Proctor in The Crucible. Last week in Cannes, it was announced that she was about to get the film treatment.

For Brooks, out on bail but still being investigated, aggressive victimhood has become the core of her legal case. Brooks’s lawyer, Stephen Parkinson, a specialist in human rights, maintains that because “so much prejudicial material has come into the public domain,” it is impossible for his client to get a fair trial in England. But a fair treatment was rarely afforded those who landed in her pages. Brooks was one of the youngest editors of the world’s best-selling English-language News of the World, and presided over the paper while phone hacking was rife. During her reign, the paper pursued victims aggressively for headlines, particularly for stories involving pedophilia, child murder, and child abduction. The obsession with such stories led one of her employees to hack the cellphone of murdered schoolgirl, Milly Dowler, in 2002. The exposure of this intrusion by The Guardian newspaper last summer shuttered the Sunday tabloid, and Brooks’s reaction to the closure of the 168-year-old paper was telling: as she told a gathering of journalists who had been fired—she was a victim, too.

After editing News of the World, Brooks became the first-ever female editor of the bestselling daily tabloid The Sun, which likewise thrived on celebrity scandals and salacious political exposés. Brooks complained to Lord Justice Leveson that much of the coverage about her was “gender-based” but by then the inquiry had heard plenty of other testimony: from the actress Sienna Miller, who had been pursued down the street by a pack of paparazzi and who thought her family had betrayed her because her phone was hacked; from the singer Charlotte Church, whose teenage boyfriend was offered hundreds of thousands of dollars for a kiss-and-tell, and whose mother was forced to tell Brooks’s tabloids about her suicide attempt, in part prompted by the News of the World’s exposure of her husband’s affair; from Gordon and Sarah Brown, who Brooks had called herself, telling them to go on the record about their 4-year-old son’s cystic fibrosis, because she was running the story on the front page of The Sun. Even Brooks, whose career was premised on privacy invasion, had to admit to the lead counsel of the media ethics inquiry, Robert Jay QC, that it was the “height of hypocrisy” to complain of being under the spotlight.

For Brooks the personal and political have long been indistinguishable, as she implicitly acknowledged when she observed that her relations to Rupert Murdoch and senior British politicians were “gossipy” and “personal.” During the late ’90s, she came to know the family through Matthew Freud, the PR scion, and his wife, Elisabeth Murdoch, Rupert’s daughter. Rapidly promoted by Les Hinton, one of Rupert Murdoch’s longest-serving lieutenants, Brooks became almost a family member of the media dynasty, working in tandem with James Murdoch when he launched the ill-fated $12 billion takeover of the lucrative satellite broadcaster BSkyB—his project to cement his status as heir.

A former senior member of News International told Newsweek how Brooks was “brilliant at the networking thing,” with a tremendous ability to charm and captivate. A Labour Party adviser who observed her working a conference party when Gordon Brown was still leader of the party says, “She goes towards the next whiff of power.” When Brown’s potential successor, David Miliband, turned up at the party, “suddenly Rebekah was at his side, leading him around the room. It was like ‘Gordon Who?’”

However, it’s Brooks’s relationship with the current prime minister in which the personal and the political collide fatally. What the inquiry has revealed is the depth of that relationship, with more meetings between the two than previously acknowledged. During just four days over Christmas in 2010, when News Corp.’s BSkyB bid should have been impartially adjudicated, the prime minister met with Brooks twice and talked about the bid. Her revelation that Cameron regularly sent her text messages signing them ‘LOL’ (which he thought meant ‘lots of love’ until she corrected him) caused much public mirth. But, like the disclosure that the prime minister used to ride a retired police horse loaned to Brooks by the metropolitan police, it was another damaging anecdote that painted the picture of a magic circle of power. According to a senior Labour Party source, “the court of Murdoch and the court of Cameron had become totally enmeshed.”

confidenceThe victim strategy might still work. For all her ruthlessness toward others, Brooks nevertheless displays a redoubtable ability to charm even would-be foes. Gordon Brown still turned up when she married Charlie Brooks, though her paper had painfully exposed his son’s medical condition. Even Rupert Murdoch, on the weekend he shuttered his first big foothold in the U.K. newspaper market, the News of the World, was more worried about his protégé’s confidence than the 200 journalists he had just sacked.

These days, though, Brooks can’t dictate the headline—and neither investigators nor courts are moved by self-pity. Though Brooks gave birth to a baby girl via a surrogate early this year, she is scheduled to appear in court on June 13, alongside her husband, her former assistant, her former chauffeur, and her former head of security. She faces a lengthy trial and possible jail time, and that’s just for the offenses she’s been charged with so far. Three major police investigations have been launched to look into alleged criminality at the two tabloids she used to edit. Though Britain has no explicit plea-bargain system, cooperation can be taken into account during sentencing by the presiding judge. But with a reported $3 million severance package from News International, plus the use of a chauffeur-driven car and a Mayfair office, the urge to stay loyal to her employer must be high. As a source close to the family told Newsweek, “When you’re facing charges, your loyalty is tested.” Her loyalty will indeed be tested, but Brooks is a wild card, capable of immense compassion, particularly for herself. Which leaves the question: how long will she play the martyr?

Charles Saatchi: From Saatchi & Saatchi to Allegedly Choking Nigella Lawson

2013-06-18T00:00:00+00:00

By Peter Jukes

June 18th 201310:46 am

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Charles Saatchi built up the world’s largest advertising firm and became the face of the swinging ’80s in London—only to be ousted from his own company. Peter Jukes on the reclusive man who now has been accused of choking his wife in public.

It makes Mad Men’s depiction of admen look tame. The backstory of Charles Saatchi, who was cautioned by police Monday night for allegedly repeatedly grabbing the throat of his wife, celebrity TV chef Nigella Lawson, during dinner at an exclusive London restaurant, is far more extraordinary than Don Draper’s—and he remains even more enigmatic and elusive.

Born in Baghdad to Iraqi Jews who fled to London in 1947, Charles and his brother Maurice built up the world’s largest advertising company, with over 600 offices, before they were 40 years old. Having turned modern advertising into an art form, the self-confessed “artoholic” Charles went on to establish himself as the most influential art collector of the last 25 years, creating the Young British Artist phenomenon—and launching the careers of Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst. For someone who has radically altered the visual perceptions of the public, Charles studiously avoids the limelight and has given only a couple of newspaper interviews. Compared with him, Svengali is an attention seeker.

But those who worked with Charles in advertising say that his avoidance of contact was not shyness, but a deliberate campaign. There are dozens of stories—some of them no doubt apocryphal—about his legendary dislike of his corporate clients in advertising, including that he had a special room to hide when in whenever they turned up and reportedly deliberately placed his office near some back stairs to make emergency escapes. After the brothers were ousted from their own company Saatchi & Saatchi and created a new agency, M&C Saatchi, in 1995, taking many of the previous clients, Charles didn’t even come into the office for five years, but would have campaigns and artwork biked over to his house. Some attribute this reclusiveness as his collector’s eye: Charles likes to see but not to be seen. Others put it down to a deep-seated dislike of social contact, somewhere between Molière’s Miser and his Misanthrope.

“He was the best adman of his generation,” is the general view, offered again and again by those who worked with him. From early iconic campaigns such as the pregnant-man ad for the Health Education Council, to the “Labour Isn’t Working” photomontage that helped Margaret Thatcher win the 1979 election (and was chosen as the best billboard ad of the 20th century), Charles created a new visual grammar in commercial art. Many of the campaigns drew on 20th-century surrealism, minimalism, and conceptual art: a famous campaign for Silk Cut cigarettes featured oblique images of slashed silk in the brand’s color scheme. But it was his younger brother Maurice who did the important work of wooing and schmoozing the clients. “Maurice could never have created the ads without Charles,” is how one industry insider explained it, “but Charles could have never created the agency without Maurice.”

During the ’80s, well connected through their work for the Conservative Party election campaigns and turbocharged by junk bonds and heavy leverage, the brothers began gobbling up other advertising companies and consultancies at a phenomenal pace. For Brits, and anyone working in the cultural industries, the name Saatchi became synonymous with high-octane acquisitive ’80s culture, our equivalent of the fictional character Gordon Gekko, played by Michael Douglas in Oliver Stone’s 1987 movie Wall Street. The company employed the best creative talents of the era and, during Conservative Party conferences of the time, threw the wildest and most enviable parties, where cabinet ministers rubbed shoulders with celebrities—rock and roll meets politics. However, the agency began to overstretch its finances and suffered heavy losses in the 1987 crash. Its prestige (if not its income) waxed and waned as Thatcherism died and the Blair era arrived.

It was then that Charles began to focus on his art collection and reinventing the image of British art. He’d begun collecting in the late ’60s under the influence of his first American-born wife, Doris Lockhart, and much of the profits of his burgeoning business went into purchasing American minimalism. According to employees at the time, much of the art on the office walls was actually marked on the back with “Bought by Doris Saatchi.” When he divorced Doris in 1990, Charles abjured the New York art market, sold most of his existing collection, and began to speculate on up-and-coming British artists. He launched the career of Damien Hirst in 1991 by funding his first big artwork: a shark in a glass tank of formaldehyde, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, a combination of caption and image worthy of any creative and copy writer.

The name Saatchi became synonymous with high-octane acquisitive ’80s culture, our equivalent of the fictional character Gordon Gekko, played by Michael Douglas in Oliver Stone’s 1987 movie Wall Street.

But the cross-fertilization of advertising and art also worked the other way. While Hirst still reveres Saatchi for giving him the opportunity, other critics complain that Saatchi’s sharp eye created speculative bubbles rather than real artistic achievement. Careers rose and fell like ramped-up stock prices, and 20 years on, many of the works of the Brit art era look overpriced and overrated. Key works from the Saatchi collection, including Emin's “tent,” Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995, were destroyed in a warehouse fire in 2004. In 2010 Charles donated his collection to the British nation.

To the non-art-buying public, Saatchi was best known for his wife, the celebrity cook and writer Nigella Lawson. Lawson, daughter of Margaret Thatcher’s chancellor of the Exchequer, Nigel Lawson, was known for her flirtatious manner, which won her the title “Queen of Food Porn.” But that fun, sensuous persona concealed a history of tragedy. Both Lawson’s mother and sister had died of cancer in her youth, and the father of her two children, the popular columnist and journalist John Diamond, died in 2001 after she had nursed him through four years of a very public—but also very poignant—attempt to recover from throat cancer.

Lawson’s relationship with Saatchi drew some public comment, partly because she moved in with him only nine months after Diamond’s death (and they married shortly thereafter, in 2003), but also because she was a liberal leftish icon and he represented the Thatcherite ’80s. No doubt there was also some jealousy, because Lawson was (and remains) one of the most attractive and friendly figures in media and literary circles. During the decade they’ve been together, she remains the socialite, whereas his “reclusiveness” has only increased.

Sometimes opposites attract; sometimes they repel. Sometimes they do both. Rumors of angry rifts in the marriage have surfaced only in recent years. Last year at the London restaurant Scott’s, Saatchi was pictured pressing his hand over his wife's mouth. But the graphic images revealed by the Sunday People over the weekend (actually taken at the same restaurant) show Saatchi forcibly gripping his wife’s throat several times and have been accompanied by reports of her distress and the shock of fellow diners. In the Evening Standard, Saatchi claimed the incident was a “playful tiff” and that his wife’s “tears were because we both hate arguing, not because she had been hurt." The police clearly didn’t agree and interviewed Saatchi for several hours Monday afternoon, issuing him an official caution.

Though Saatchi is reported to be worth over $150 million, Lawson is independently wealthy in her own right, with around $20 million in assets accrued mainly through her bestselling books and successful TV cooking series. She was recently seen leaving the family home with her teenage children, though Saatchi claims he “told Nigella to take the kids off till the dust settled.” She has made no comment since. Unlike a work of art or an ad campaign, the image of a happy couple—the outgoing wife and the quiet husband—will not be so easy to reassemble.

Daniel Morgan Murder Inquiry

2013-05-13T00:00:00+00:00

In light of the recently announced public inquiry into the murder of Daniel Morgan, I've copied below the MS portion of the chapter from my book The Fall of the House of Murdoch to aid the resource page set up by Jack of Kent. It could be a useful summation of events up to July 2012.

The Murder of Daniel Morgan: from "The Criminal Media Nexus" pp

Of all the many ‘falls’ in the fall of the House of Murdoch, Coulson’s is one of the most precipitous. Apart from editing the country’s most successful Sunday paper, his recruitment to head up communications for the Conservative Party in 2007 was celebrated in Tory ranks, with Matthew d’Ancona writing in the Sunday Telegraph : This is an unalloyed coup for the Tories, as Mr Coulson is one of the most formidable journalists of his generation, combining a sharp tabloid eye with a keen political intellect. When the New York Times refuted the ‘rogue reporter’ defence in 2010, the prominent conservative blogger Iain Dale wrote ‘Coulson’s Accusers can Go to Hell’:

“Andy Coulson is bloody good at his job. That's why the likes of The Guardian, Alastair Campbell, Prescott and Johnson are doing their best to jump on the back of the New York Times story about an ex News of the World journalist who was sacked by the paper for persistent drug and alcohol problems. You don't think he might have a grudge, do you?.... They all want Coulson's scalp. Well, sod 'em… Coulson took responsibility for the episode at the time and resigned. What do they want him to do - resign a second time from a job which has nothing to do his previous incarnation?”

Coulson had famously been given a ‘second chance’ by David Cameron after his resignation from the News of the World and as if to show this generosity was a virtuous circle, two years previously Coulson had himself given a ‘second chance’ to someone else who had fallen from grace. He hired Jonathan Rees, private investigator, on his release from prison after serving five years for conspiring to fit up an innocent woman with cocaine in a child custody case. Rees was actually heard planning that crime while the police were investigating another – the bloody murder of his business partner in South London a decade earlier.

Coulson’s direct connection to a second private investigator thereby took the criminal associations of Senior News International management well beyond privacy intrusion. As a “close ally of the Prime Minister” admitted to the Guardian, senior Tories knew some things but not others - "hacking yes, axe murder no."

The axe murder in question was that of Daniel Morgan who has – in the words the authors of Dial M for Murdoch - one of the Britain’s biggest unsolved crimes (Watson & Hickman, 2012, pp. 107-10, 167-181). Daniel’s case has undergone no less than five separate police investigations over the last quarter century at a cost of between £20-£40 million but still with no resolution for his brother, mother or children. The most recent murder trial of Rees and his associates collapsed in technicalities and the backlog of three quarters of a million pieces of paperwork as recently as March 2011. Daniel’s family now accept that the entangled and knotted history of his case may now never be solved in a way to satisfy any criminal courts, but they still want a public inquiry at least to separate some threads. Of those threads the combination of News International involvement and extensive police corruption in South London are salient enough to justify the term ‘criminal media nexus’.

Daniel Morgan’s Southern Investigations was a small but successful private security company that investigated car theft by organised gangs. Work would often take him on travels abroad to investigate corporate fraud. As he got busier, Daniel formed a partnership with Jonathan Rees in the mid-eighties. However, tensions soon built up. According to his brother, Alastair Morgan, Daniel had always avoided jobs involving cash transits, and fell out with Rees when he undertook such a job and a large amount of cash went missing. (Morgan A. , 2012) By spring 1987, Daniel was even more concerned. The private detective told his brother how he’d discovered a network of corrupt police officers in London, led by a senior officer. A colleague of Daniel’s now claims Daniel planned to sell this story of police corruption to a newspaper, and was negotiating with the News of the World. Under Parliamentary privilege, the MP Tom Watson alleged that Daniel approached the tabloid’s crime reporter Alec Marunchak, who offered him £40,000 for the story. Marunchak has vehemently denied this.

On 10 March 1987, half an hour after he was seen drinking with Rees at the Golden Lion pub in Sydenham, Morgan was found dead in the pub car park next to his BMW with a large fatal axe wound to the back of his head. His trouser pockets were ripped, and notes that he had earlier been seen writing were missing. Gone too was his watch, although Daniel’s wallet, containing a large sum of money, was still in his jacket pocket.

One of the first detectives assigned to the murder case, DS Sid Fillery stationed at Catford police station, turned out to have been moonlighting for Southern Investigations. In April, he, Jonathan Rees and two other police officers were arrested on suspicion of murder, along with Rees’ brothers-in-law Glenn and Garry Vian. All were then released without charge. By the time the inquest into Daniel Morgan's death took place the following year, Fillery had retired from the police, and replaced Daniel as Rees’ partner in Southern Investigations. The coroner heard claims that police officers were involved in the murder, and had tampered with evidence and interfered with witnesses: Hampshire police then launched their own investigation. In 1988 they arrested Jonathan Rees and charged him with the murder, but charges were dropped again soon because of a lack of evidence.

Meanwhile, Rees was pursuing a lucrative career working for Fleet Street, and soon was claiming the News of the World alone paying him more than £150,000 a year. All this emerged through the surveillance of Southern Investigation in a third secret police inquiry into the unsolved murder. But the third inquiry was interrupted when Rees was overhead planning to plant cocaine on a mother in a custody battle. Rees was arrested and in December 2000 sentenced for seven years imprisonment for attempting to pervert the course of justice.

While Rees was in prison, a fourth inquiry was launched in 2002-2003, led by David Cook. As his wife, Jacqui Hames, a former police officer, explained to the Leveson Inquiry, News International – who had unbeknownst to the police employed Rees extensively before his emprisonment - took an acute and disturbing interest in the case. Hames broke down as she told Lord Justice Leveson how her family was followed and their phones were hacked in a News of the World operation she claimed was led by Alex Marunchak. Coincidentally, Marunchak, with a Ukrainian background was also revealed in 2011 to have had a side line as translator for Scotland Yard for 21 years.

Marunchak’s boss, Rebekah Brooks, then editor of News of the World, was confronted about this surveillance both by Scotland Yard’s chief press officer, Dick Fedorcio, and Cook himself. On both occasions Brooks said the surveillance was only initiated because she believed Cook and Hames were having an affair. This was an “absolutely pathetic” justification according to Hames who went on to explain: "We had by then been married for four years, had been together for 11 years and had two children!" Hames contends that the real reason was to scupper the police inquiries: "I believe that the real reason for the NoW placing us under surveillance was that suspects in the Daniel Morgan murder inquiry were using their association with a powerful and well-resourced newspaper to try to intimidate us and so attempt to subvert the investigation."

After his release from prison in 2005, Rees began to work almost exclusively for News of the World where his main point of contact is reported to have been Alex Marunchak. The relationship was alleged to have been so close that Marunchak registered his company at the same address.

By the time Andy Coulson’s connections to Rees emerged, the former editor was Director of Communications for the Conservative Party, and the private investigator could not be named because of a new murder trial that had begun in 2008 and would continue for another three years. When Andy Coulson entered Number Ten Downing Street in May 2010, the Guardian editor, Alan Rusbridger, made a personal call to a Cameron senior staff member to warn him of Coulson’s connection to Rees. It took until March 2011, when the case collapsed through failed disclosure and doubts about two supergrasses, for the truth to be made public. Nick Davies, who described Fillery and Rees as building an "empire of corruption" after getting away with Daniel Morgan's murder, wrote with Vikram Dodd in the Guardian:

“Rees, now aged 56, worked regularly for the Daily Mirror and the Sunday Mirror as well as for the News of the World. His numerous targets included members of the royal family whose bank accounts he penetrated; political figures including Peter Mandelson and Alastair Campbell; rock stars such as Eric Clapton, Mick Jagger and George Michael; the Olympic athlete Linford Christie and former England footballer Gary Lineker; TV presenters Richard Madeley and Judy Finnigan; and people associated with tabloid story topics, including the daughter of the former miners leader Arthur Scargill and the family of the Yorkshire Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe.

Jonathan Rees paid a network of corrupt police officers who sold him confidential records. He boasted of other corrupt contacts in banks and government organisations; hired specialists to "blag" confidential data from targets' current accounts, phone records and car registration; allegedly used "Trojan horse" emails to extract information from computers; and – according to two sources – commissioned burglaries to obtain material for journalists...”

Looking back on Jonathan Rees’ proven criminal acts and allegations they dwarf in depth of criminality (if not in scale) any of the activities of Glen Mulcaire: yet, for reasons of their own, Operation Weeting team has excluded a large quantity of Rees’ material from their investigation. Just as the rogue reporter defence was never credible, the known facts about Rees prove that Mulcaire was not the sole private investigator hired by News International, let alone other Fleet Street papers. But the press’ reliance of covert and illicit sources of material has made them masters of selective disclosure – happy to reveal other people’s secrets, adamant about keeping their own. News International was certainly the market leader in this kind of criminal activity, but certainly – as both Steve Whittamore and Jonathan Rees demonstrate – not alone.

For the family of Daniel Morgan, however, a quarter of a century has passed with no resolution, and none in sight. Alastair Morgan is still campaigning for some kind of justice for his brother, and seeks a full judicial inquiry, hopefully to reach some kind of conclusion while his mother is still alive. He still remembers one his last meetingss with Daniel at his office. Rees came in and took Daniel outside for 'private word'. When Daniel returned ten minutes later, he walked up to the window. Alastair asked if anything was the matter, and Daniel replied, concerned but not frightened: "Bent officers. They're all over the place down here." He then mentioned to his brother the name of a police officer at the heart of the corruption in the south London police. Alastair has wracked his brains many times to remember the name – it was very bland and unmemorable. He has heard several names since which sound familiar and though he wishes he could be sure what Daniel said, the passage of time has clouded his memory.

TV Pirates

From the grim used-car lots and pub car-parks of South London, the taint of complicity in the bond forged between the police and News International during the Wapping conflict would continue into the blue skies of satellite broadcasting and the new frontiers of cybercrime. ....

First Review of Fall of the House of Murdoch

2012-07-31T00:00:00+00:00

WHEN Peter Jukes let it be known last year that he was writing a book called The Fall of the House of Murdoch, a senior Sun editor emailed him to say: "Is this a joke?"

But with Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson both now facing charges over phone-hacking, and Rupert Murdoch slowly stepping back from his British newspaper holdings, it looks like a prescient title.

The old adage – "Never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel" – no longer fits. Much ink has been expended on the Australia media baron, from Michael Wolff's acidic biography to Tom Watson's plodding account of the phone-hacking scandal. The Fall of the House of Murdoch is refreshing as it examines the ideas that have driven the modern western world to its current crisis.

Referencing widely, from Adam Smith and George Orwell to the author's mentor, historian Tony Judt, Jukes argues that Murdoch managed to elide two seemingly uncontroversial ideas, those of freedom of the markets and freedom of the press, to toxic effect.

The early signs of his freedom-loving spirit were there in 1969. Just after buying the News of the World, Murdoch printed the diaries of Christine Keeler, the call girl at the centre of the Profumo scandal. It marked out Murdoch as an outsider, happy to push the boundaries, in this case to embarrass the Establishment. With the British elite on the wane by the Eighties, he found another closed shop to take on the print unions – and so became a standard bearer for the neo-liberal agenda of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan and, as his international holdings grew, a poster-boy for Tony Blair's globalisation project.

In an ambitious argument, it is suggested that Murdoch's brand of news even mirrored the expansion of the financial sector. Stories about politicians and celebrities were akin to derivative markets in which futures could be ramped or dumped for one's own ends, as John Major s government and stars such as Charlotte Church found to their cost, and David Cameron perhaps to his benefit. (What's a little phone-hacking and horse-riding to achieve these goals compared with Libor manipulation?)

Capitalism was indulged up until the 2007-8 financial crisis. Murdoch-style journalism took a bit longer to break because, as Jukes puts it neatly, "News International is not only too big to fail but also, with its government connections, too big to jail".

Many an economic liberal still admires Murdoch's business style, but this is part of the ideological mist. While he presents himself as a free marketeer, Murdoch's newspaper and television interests in Britain and Australia have verged on monopolies. And despite his republican stance, Murdoch runs News Corporation as a dynasty, with three children, Lachlan, James and Elisabeth, all at one time groomed as potential successors.

The Fall of the House of Murdoch was written in haste to catch the tail-end of the Leveson Inquiry and, as a result, is a little unpolished. Yet it is an impressive treatise on how media, money and power in the past 30 years became so locked into mutually supporting agendas that they failed to interrogate each other. If that's not enough, it is worth reading just for Jukes's account of Rebekah Brooks's flirtation with him at a party in 2006

Scotsman 11th August

26 Jul 2012
London Evening Standard (West End Final B)
JOY LO DICO

A Year On: How Milly Dowler Shook the World, and Ended a Media Dynasty: FOTHOM XLIV

2012-07-05T00:00:00+00:00

It's hard to believe, but at 4pm BST today it will be exactly a year since Nick Davies and Amelia Hill published online a leak from Operation Weeting, the newly recreated (third) investigation into phone hacking, and revealed that the News of the World had hacked the phone of a missing 13 year old schoolgirl, who was found dead six months later, murdered by Levi Bellfield.

That headline changed the political scene here in the UK. Within days the News of the World had closed, and New Corp were forced to withdraw their takeover bid for Britain's most lucrative broadcaster, BSkyB. Within two weeks James and Rupert Murdoch were summoned to appear before a Parliamentary select committee, and David Cameron was forced to set up the Leveson Inquiry.

Over the next year, the hacking scandal expanding to a corruption and bribery scandal at the News of the World's sister paper, the best selling Sun. Over 50 people have now been arrested. An internal News Corp inquiry, the MSC - set up under pressure from the FBI, SEC and DOJ - has now handed over thousands of emails suggesting bribery of public officials. The scandal expanded to include allegations of TV piracy at News Corp's pay-TV encryption services in Australia, the UK, Italy and the US.

But more than anything, for the UK, the Leveson Inquiry has shone a light into the dark corners of the political media class, and revealed such extensive back door lobbying between the Murdochs and the last five prime ministers, that it was almost like discovering a state within a state. And of course, with Rebekah Brooks, Andy Coulson and James Murdoch meeting virtually every day with David Cameron, George Osborne and Jeremy Hunt, the convergence over the last few years has been almost seamless. As a senior News International journalist expressed it to me:

The Court of Cameron and the Court of Murdoch have become almost totally enmeshed.

This last year has been an amazing journey for our country, and for me personally, as I became inextricably caught up in the coverage of the affair. My book, which explores those 14 days in July which ended a media dynasty - and the 50 years leading up to it - is in the final stages and due for publication at the end of the month.

Below I might share some of the book, particularly the reality of the Milly Dowler story, but mainly this diary is to share YOUR memories, to hear your thoughts about this momentous year

This is from an unedited, unproofed section of Chapter One; The Fall of the House of Murdoch

Accessing mobile voicemail messages without permission has been illegal in the UK since the Computer Misuse Act 1990, which carries a two-year prison sentence as a maximum penalty and has no ‘public interest’ defence. However, throughout the early nineties when mobile phones became ubiquitous, several newspaper scoops were derived from some kind of interception and recording of analogue phone signals. The two most famous are a six-minute bedtime ‘Tampon’ conversation between Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles on a mobile phone (recorded December 18 1989 and published by the Sunday Mirror and the Sunday People in 1993) and the Squidgygate tape of a private conversation between Princess Diana and a close friend (published by the Sun in 1992).
In 2000 the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) made intercepting a message while ‘in the course of transmission’ illegal. Around this time mobile telephony shifted from analogue to digital and intercepting encrypted signals required expensive technology, generally only available to the security services. However, a back door was left open: voicemails could be accessed remotely through a pin number. Much like the default admin passwords left on computers in the eighties, these pins were often left unchanged from their defaults. One of the first to discover this loophole was Steve Nott who alerted various newspapers to the security breach. As he claimed under oath to the Leveson Inquiry, the newspapers decided to use the security breach for ‘their own purposes’ rather than publish the story. Even phone users who changed their pin codes were still vulnerable to simple password attacks, with data such as dates of birth culled from other sources. If that failed, a bit of social engineering could solve the problem; dedicated investigators could ring the mobile phone service provider, either pretending to be the customer or an employee, and get the pin code set to default.

On the evening of 21 March 2002 after their thirteen-year-old daughter Milly failed to return from school, Bob and Sally Dowler rang the police. Within twenty-four hours a nationwide search for Milly was launched, and soon videos and photos of the missing teenager were broadcast on prime-time television. The News of the World which, under the editorship of Rebekah Brooks and her deputy editor Andy Coulson, had built a reputation for covering child murders, began a furious campaign.

Three weeks after Milly’s disappearance, in the first edition of NoW on Sunday April 14th, a major story by-lined by Robert Kellaway, has some interesting details.

To any casual reader the details of the messages, not only their content, timing and more importantly the tone of the callers, indicate that these have been listened to by the journalist. It’s not even concealed. There’s no suggestion of a police source. The News of the World, arrogating command of the investigation and trying to sell up a scoop, seems to know more about Milly than the police.

We now know that Milly was already dead, murdered by Levi Bellfield and dumped in Hampshire woodland where her body would not be found for two years.

We also know now that senior editors of the News of the World were at that time ‘110 per cent’ convinced they knew where Milly was on the basis of hacking her voicemail. One of these was a message from a ‘recruitment caller’ offering a job and (according to the Wall Street Journal) the Sunday paper had sent out eight reporters and photographers to stake out an ink-cartridge factory in Epson for three days. When Milly failed to turn up, and investigations proved that Milly wasn’t even on the factory’s books, the News of the World – stumped for any story – came up with a new scandal: that some hoax caller had rung the factory impersonating a recruitment agency.

Later editions of the News of the World changed the original story, removing some of the more incriminating detail, adding some minimal fact checking. The recruitment company wasn’t a hoax caller, they’d just come up with the wrong number for a client seeking work. But still the tabloid persisted in churning the non-story into a lurid smear: someone mentally disturbed had now called the recruitment agent impersonating Milly.

The hunt for missing Milly Dowler took a shocking twist last night when it emerged a deranged woman has been posing as the missing youngster.

Police believe the sick hoaxer called into a recruitment agency pretending to be Milly.

Staff at the Midlands bureau failed to recognise the name as that of the missing girl and took the woman on their books.

It is thought the hoaxer even gave the agency Milly's real mobile phone number. Police believe she may have got it by gaining the trust of people who knew the schoolgirl.

The agency used the number to contact Milly, real name Amanda, when a job vacancy arose and left a message on her voicemail AFTER the 13-year-old vanished at 4pm on March 21.

It was on March 27, six days after Milly went missing in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey that the employment agency appears to have phoned her mobile.

News is a rough draft of history and a breaking story is like a series of jotted notes, but this scribbled nonsense covers old errors with new: the paper had missed the simple explanation of a wrong number call. A police investigation of this would have quickly discounted the red herring. But the News of the World wanted its sensational exclusive and didn’t want to divulge its illegal source, so clumsily tried to cover its tracks. It would continue to pepper its pages with useless speculation for the next two weeks. When their persistent interference with a missing person investigation failed, and they were eventually ignored by Surrey Police, the newspaper sought retribution by suggesting in print the investigating officers were incompetent.

In the past, tabloid newspapers have been accused of acting like judge and jury during criminal trials, but here we have them acting like the leading investigators during a major murder inquiry (the concatenation of errors, followed by bluster and threats toward the police are forensically documented by Tim Ireland on his Bloggerheads site). Most disturbingly, the paper used its access to illegal information to encourage Milly’s parents that she was still alive and even pressure them into delivering an exclusive interview.

For those who have eyes to see, it’s clear that even ten years ago the Sunday tabloid considered itself better than the police and above the law, which of course they were in more ways than one. It also must have been blindingly obvious to any journalist, police officer or senior News International management at the time that Milly’s voicemail had been hacked by News of the World.

snip about 20 pages of the non-reporting of this story over 9 years

How a family’s grief over their missing daughter could become the stuff of ‘entertainment’ is the subject of the next chapter, but forgetting the near obscene outcome, depraved motives, or illegal means of the News of The World’s hacking, the inescapable fact is that journalists will always intrude and that the reality for any individual involved in a big story will nearly always be a form of misrepresentation and intrusion – at least on a personal emotional level.

There has always been, and always will be, an element of callousness in journalistic investigation. To paraphrase one the first great British press barons, Lord Northcliffe, news is public information which usually someone wants to keep private. Depending on the story, this may involve deceiving witnesses or targets, or indeed threatening them with non-accuracy if they don’t disclose. Such were the tactics of Woodward and Bernstein, and any legitimate journalist covering a big important story will tell you this. Most journalists protect their sources for reasons of trust, loyalty and continued information, but ultimately you’re just a piece in a jigsaw – a ‘source’ – and if you’re more than that, then the journalism is compromised. The individual has to be subordinate to politics in this instance. In the words of Peter Mandelson, ‘You can be friendly with journalists, but journalists are never your friends.’ If a story is in the public interest then the private relationship is always secondary.

The clear difference between the News of the World and the investigative discoveries of the Washington Post in the seventies, the Guardian in the nineties, or indeed the Daily Telegraph when it revealed the scandal of MPs’ expenses, is precisely this justification of a wider public interest: the bigger political picture is the exposure of unseen corruption and – eventually – an assurance of more accuracy and transparency in public life.

Just looking at the three different versions of the News of the World’s coverage of Milly Dowler on 14 April 2002, you can see very little public interest in terms of informing the public, or indeed helping the police. Instead there are several degrees of obfuscation and obstruction. Not only did News of the World journalists (ineptly) try to conceal the hacking of Milly’s phone, they consistently lied to witnesses about their identities. Having got the initial story of a runaway wrong, they first blamed the recruitment agency and then whoever called the recruitment agency as a ‘sick hoax’. This is not ground-breaking journalism. This is clumsy and bullying covering of tracks.

The same habits of intrusion, deception and bullying counter accusation would characterise the attitude of many News International journalists for the next decade. Right up to the Leveson Inquiry in 2012, News of the World’s former senior reporter Neville Thurlbeck suggested – until refuted by a Surrey Constabulary investigation – that the Surrey police had given his paper access to the Dowler messages.

Two senior officers in charge of the original missing person probe at the time – one of whom is now the deputy chief constable of Surrey Police – were placed under investigation by the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) in June 2012 for allegedly failing to explore the News of the World’s blatant phone hacking.

In this instance of phone hacking the contrast with Watergate journalism couldn’t be clearer. During Watergate the Nixon administration blocked Woodward and Bernstein wherever they went. Faced with a wall of silence from those in power, the two American journalists had to occasionally dissemble and divert to secure a bigger story in the public interest. But behind the walls of fortress Wapping, the News of the World journalists pulled rank and power, dissembling and diverting in order to conceal the bigger story from the public interest.

The book is partly about the decline of the press, the hollowing out of the main stream media, and of course gives big thanks to my fellow Kossacks and Murdochgate investigators who have helped to end the media dynasty. As an example of the great collaboration I've had - especially from illustrious illustrator ericlewis, edifying editor and fact-checker Bluestateredhead - here's a version of Ceebs database on 'Leveson Forgetfulness' which forms appendix One of the book.

Just so you know, the median amnesia of politicians and senior News International execs in module 3 of the Leveson Inquiry was around 4 per cent

For the victims of the press in module 1, the median amnesia was 0.3 per cent

7:51 AM PT: Great. Got the dummy of the book cover - in full tabloid style