Begging, the Guardian, UKIP and Car Crashes

Some general correspondence. First, an admission. Mr ‘B’ is correct in saying that I once ‘begged’ readers to vote UKIP. I got carried away. I was genuinely livid, as I pounded my keyboard that Friday, with the gross dishonesty of the government’s poster vans, then being driven round a few suburbs giving a false impression that our borders were being enforced.I was appalled at the possibility that such crudity might work.  Few things make me angrier than this sort of dishonesty.

 

How can I beg people to do a thing I won’t do myself? Well, I suppose because I have learned over the years that most people regard voting as a duty or a moral act of some kind ( as I most definitely do not). So pleas to them to abstain fall on stony ground and are not heeded.  By all means don’t vote UKIP. Just don’t, whatever you do, vote for the Tory Party, the Guardian’s friend. But I suspect that most of those who want to get their own back on David Cameron’s party will see a UKIP vote on Thursday as the best way to do so, and I will not be sorry if lots of them do it.  This is not, oddly enough, because I particularly want to increase UKIP’s contingent in the European ‘Parliament’( a body so unloved that even the ‘Economist’ has been expressing doubts about it recently).

 

 

I’m puzzled by some of the oblique (verging on the obtuse) responses to my story about the Guardian and the Tories. Let me explain how journalism works. ‘Private Eye’ will often print things that others won’t, because, while it knows them to be true thanks to undisclosable sources, it cannot prove them if challenged. Other publications sometimes use insider columns (usually by-lined with a pseudonym)  for the same purpose, to hint at what they know without saying it outright. This is why astute readers pay a great deal attention to such columns,  which can be an ‘alternative front page’ of major stories which simply cannot be substantiated with on-the-record quotes or documents. It is also why Fleet Street newsdesks carefully scan ‘Private Eye’, which can be obtained in London on the Tuesday of the weeks in which it is published, if you know where to look.

 

Next, many stories are never confirmed, but the responses of those involved are even so a clue to the truth. A straightforwardly untrue story will be vigorously denied and will generally collapse very quickly, as the rivals of the paper which ran it will gleefully tear it to pieces. But a true story will not necessarily be confirmed. The targets of such stories will sometimes issue what are called ‘non-denial denials’, using terms such as ‘nonsense’ which appear to the naïve to be denials,  but are not.

 

The Guardian’s response to the ‘Private Eye’ story, which (as far as I know) was followed up by nobody but me, was not even a non-denial denial. It was a claim (I’ll come to this in a minute)  that the Guardian did not disclose its sources. It wasn’t even an attempt at denial. Do readers here really not see what that means? I will not spell it out. I will just ask them to think for a second.

 

Then there’s the point about Sarah Tisdall, who was found to be the leaker of a state document, and sent to prison, after the Guardian complied with a court order and supplied the document to the government. Various heavyweight epistles were addressed to me asking if I believed in the rule of law, etc, etc. Well of course I do. I was simply stating a fact. It is not true that the Guardian never discloses its sources. It’s a very poor answer to the allegation in ‘Private Eye’, that they have a deal with the Tories to print lots of anti-UKIP stories while seeking to conceal that they get them from the Tory Party. I suspect whoever wrote and authorised the response was unaware of the paper’s own history and didn’t know about the Tisdall case, now 30 years ago. But it’s part of my job as an old codger to remember what others have forgotten or never knew.

 

I also know that Guardian veterans are still anguished about it, as well they might be. They were much-mocked and condemned for it at the time, by the sort of people who generally like The Guardian.  It’s also something of a journey from the campaigning leftist Guardian of the 1980s, forced by a Tory government to cough up a leaked document, to a paper which can now be credibly accused of collaborating with the Tory Party, and which doesn’t deny the accusation when made.

 

But if the story is true, it also confirms something I have been saying ( and to which the rest of my trade have been stopping their ears) for many frustrating years – that the Tories are now a party of the Left, the continuation of Blairism by other means and actually preferred by many Blairites to Gordon Brown and to Ed Miliband. (By the way, I should commend today’s column in the ‘Guardian’ by Owen Jones, in which he speculates rather cleverly about what might have happened to the labour party had the supposedly wondrous David Miliband won the leadership).

 

If I were wrong about this, the accusation could not even have been made.

 

I am urged to complain about the way in which I was misrepresented by the BBC on Radio 4 on Sunday morning. Do such correspondents really think I have not done so already? My complaint (submitted simply through the BBC website) went in at lunchtime on Sunday and has been acknowledged.  I now fully expect a response telling me that nobody did anything wrong,  in my experience the invariable first reaction of the BBC complaints department. But,  being versed in such things, if I do receive such a response,  I will then complain further that my complaint has not been adequately dealt with. This should eventually bring it before the Editorial Complaints Unit, the point at which complaints actually begin to be seriously considered by BBC executives, and the destination  which all complainants to the BBC should strive to reach as an absolute minimum. Beyond the ECU  lie the BBC Trust and (possibly) Ofcom. But persistence is all.

 

I first heard of Nigel Farage’s alleged ‘car crash’ interview on BBC Friday night, when members of the audience at a school debate , to which I was speaking, had somehow learned that Mr Farage had done something dreadful. They knew it was dreadful,  though they could not tell me what it was.

 

On Saturday I watched the whole thing. I don’t think the interviewer’s technique, of incessant aggression and hostile questions (the answers to which he then talked over) would have damaged Mr Farage with any impartial listener. The whole line of questioning seemed to be based on the idea that it is self-evident  that any distinction between British culture and any other culture must be the act of an evil person. Those who believe that aren’t going to vote UKIP anyway.  The only bad moment for Mr Farage was when his media aide foolishly intervened on air, so making his boss look weak. But the immediate claims all over the media that the interview had *been* a car-crash may have damaged Mr Farage among those who will never listen to it. It is easily found on the Internet. See what you think.