Secret History: The Truth behind the News Of The World Closure

Opprobrium has lost half its value since the phone hacking scandal went thermonuclear. Those who’d invested in sentimentality, indignation and hypocrisy before the crisis, also suffered tremendous losses, as more of each was created to satisfy demand.

Milly Dowler reached out from the grave and began to strangle Rebekahhhh Brooks. The Murdoch twins, James and Rupert, the latter artificially aged when he was subsumed into a time bubble, with a cover story circulated in the family press that they were in fact, father and son rather than brother and withered brother, had sought to extend their lives by inseminating Bekah B with their life force; a ceremony that made former News of the World editor Colin Myler “infertile” according to a News International source.

As Brooks grew weak, so too did the ‘dochs, culminating in their appearances before the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee this week; an unedifying spectacle punctuated by an attempt to murder Rupert with a dessert made from flesh-corroding foam.

The highest profile casualty of these extraordinary events was the closure of the News of the World. Many felt sympathy for the 200 staff axed in consequence, though they really shouldn’t have. The NOTW was a tawdry rag; a comic book smeared with soft porn, degenerate chat, sub-penny dreadful sensationalism and ignorance, its enormous readership assumed to be either lacking in intellectual curiosity or incapable of the same. It failed to deliver either news or coverage of events outside Britain and consequently it was a lie from the masthead down. Those that worked for it were complicit in its base principles and the calcification of British culture it engendered.

I wouldn’t mourn it any more than the passing of the tramp that used to urinate on the staircase at Embankment Tube Station in full view of commuters. Had he relieved himself from the platform he’d have been killed as the stream would have acted as a conductor and caused lightning to be channelled into his cock.

That, metaphorically, was the NOTW’s fate.

That the paper is now an antique is a fact, but why did it close? Rupert Murdoch told the committee hearing that the paper had let down its readers, but that seems unlikely given their penchant for intrusive, life lacerating bullshit. Many more, including the newly redundant hacks, thought they’d been sacrificed to save Rebekahhh. This theory had plenty of currency, not least because wizened members don’t orally stimulate themselves. However, Opinionoid, forever eschewing nonsense for truth, has learned the real reason for the closure. It will shock you, though only initially. Soon you’ll realise you knew all along.

Word Virus

Robbie Collin’s film reviews had been causing consternation at Westminster for some time. In the tearooms John Whittingdale, the chair of the Culture, Media and Sport Committee had been heard to refer to the hack’s weekly column as “cultural vandalism”. A 2009 report, including a foreword by Whittingdale, entitled An Audit of the Arts in Contemporary British Life, found that his witless puns and non-existent critical faculty was “symptomatic of an attitude, all pervading, and consolidated in the mainstream media, that film is simply junk entertainment, just product, and that a frivolous, juvenile and insight-free approach befits the material.”

The same report concluded that film criticism was “in the doldrums” and “the net effect, is the infantilisation of the discourse; tastes likely to be transmitted to middle age, with the strong probability that serious film consumption will cease to exist within a generation.”

You may think that sounds alarmist but thanks to the reach of Collin’s sponsoring organ, seven million people got their impression of the week’s releases from his reviews. The NOTW’s ubiquity on the Sabbath guaranteed that his puns, generated without pity, appeared in full page ads found in rival publications, on billboard advertising and, perhaps most prevalently, on the sides of buses, where perhaps two years of hard work on the part of the filmmakers was condensed into a solitary, unfunny soundbite.

Various pressure groups had been lobbying hard to solve the NOTW film problem for years. Whittingdale’s predecessor received up to 7,000 letters a week from members of the Use Your Brain Society, Hawkeye: The National Cinema Patrons Alliance, Culture Watch, The Popcorn Posse, Rear guard: Protecting Engagement from Abasement and High Brow. A demonstration by The Graham Greene Society in 2008 caused £2.4 million of damage to preview cinemas in Soho Square. Three people were killed, including a pregnant woman.

The difficulty, agreed MPs, was that Collin’s column was popular and as a consequence, getting News International to dismiss him would be nigh on impossible. The glaze-eyed gawp merchant had inherited his position from Paul Ross, brother of Jonathan; the man responsible for popularising clichés like “The best movie of the year” and “a non-stop, action packed, rollercoaster thrill ride”.

Ross, an unapologetic poster whore, reviewed 879 films during his stint as the NOTW film critic, using the same 500 words. He still holds the record for the lowest attendance of any film critic at screenings, relative to the movies he claims to have seen. Of those 879 movies, Ross had only verifiably attended 15, all of which were red carpet premieres. Analysis of his back catalogue by a research team at Sheffield Hallam University concluded that there was a “99% probability” that Ross worked with three pre-written templates, changing only the name of the film, the actor’s names and his star rating, ahead of publication.

From this acorn grew Collin’s tower of waste tree matter. Ross had taught Collin everything he knew about film, a process speculated to have taken anywhere from 45 to 50 seconds. Collin, no drone, tweaked the formula but crucially kept the content free portion intact. There were more blunt attempts at humour in his reviews, less conversation about the film itself and more intrusive egocentrism. He was a natural successor to Ross, selling the public’s own one note film conversations back to them for just £1 a week.

This sub-literate ballsack fill might have seemed, to those that brushed past it en route to the week’s football stories, a harmless waste of characters, but MPs had evidence that the effect on the social and intellectual life of the nation was profound.

At the end of May 2011, The Office of Bullshit Statistics (OBS) published data that showed suicides up by 340% during Collin’s tenure. Statistics from schools painted an even bleaker picture. Kids that had read Collin’s column for more than a year had half the vocabulary of those that didn’t. His reviews were also having an effect on Higher Education. Buoyed by the notion that getting a review published in a national newspaper required no formal education and no expertise, applications to Film and Media courses had decreased by two thirds. The loss of revenue forced the closure of many departments of traditional academic subjects, the subsidy from the more popular courses no longer forthcoming. The OBS estimated that the subsequent brain drain was costing the economy hundreds of millions of pound per year.

Collin was also changing the type of people that chose to go to the cinema. The OBS monitored 300 multiplexes for 12 months. Attendance amongst those deemed to be “quiet and unassuming” had dropped by half. In the same period, reports of disruption, attempts at illegal recording, ejections, scuffles amongst patrons, in auditorium violence and walkouts, shot up by 500%. Exit polling indicated that 88% of those thrown out for disorderly conduct were only there because they’d read the film was “f**king amazing” in the News of the World.

On the day John Whittingdale read the report, Labour MP Chris Byrant told colleagues that “John’s got his murder face on.” Bryant told Opinionoid, “I asked what happened. Diane Abbot turned to me and said “John’s read the Collin report – that’s what they were calling it. He was distraught at the damage that this one newspaper column was doing to social cohesion in the country. It was retarding children and young adults, turning the arts into a joke. Abbot said that John had rung Colin Myler and demanded Collin be sacked. He’d refused (possibly thinking that Whittingdale was referring to him in the third person). No one knew what to do.”

Decisive action

“Short of persuading Murdoch to close the paper, I’m not sure what you can do about it.” This glib aside, attributed to Chris Byrant and vomited at John Whittingdale in the Commons Bar on June 1^st, would have profound consequences.

Friends of the MP said it “got him thinking” but as a Conservative he had no imagination and consequently it wasn’t until June 23^rd, the day that morbidly obese wheel clamper Levi Bellfield was convicted of Milly Dowler’s murder, that the solution was spelt out to him in a bad taste exchange with fellow Tory and culture committee member, Louise Mensch.

Mensch, in frivolous mode, had lamented that “the police never found Milly’s phone. Her voicemail would have been a goldmine for the News of the World.” The Corby MP told a friend, who’s asked to be identified as Pancetta Fielding, that “John leant toward and suddenly touched my clitoris. ‘Lou, that’s it!,’ he said, ‘that’s the answer!’ Then he ran in the direction of his office.”

Whittingdale now had the constituent parts of a plan so audacious, so sublime, that he doubted his ability to pull it off. The mechanics were simple, predicting the outcome less so. Whittingdale rang his friend, Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw, and asked him to speculate on how amenable editor Alan Rusbridger would be to making up a story in the public interest. When Bradshaw asked for details, Whittingdale simply said “Milly Dowler – the News of the World – Robbie Collin”. Bradshaw’s reply was the de facto green light, “John, that’s absolutely brilliant.”

Rusbridger was in contact that evening and the two men spent three hours brainstorming the detail. The Guardian editor suggested that the best chance of success was to piggy back the story onto an existing scandal – the conflation of fact and fiction giving the piece the air of authenticity it would require in order to succeed. Whittingdale replied, “Good, because it’s not enough to make the public angry – they must be incandescent. I don’t want a temporary boycott of the paper, I want closure. I want everyone associated with that rag hounded for life.”

“Nick Davis has been trying to keep the phone hacking story alive for years,” Rusbridger told Whittingdale. “The problem is that no one cares about an actor being hacked, or an MP, but Dowler would be different. It’ll be the tipping point.” The two men agreed that Davis would write the story and that it would appear, for maximum effect,  in “just a few days time”, while the Dowler murder and the subsequent treatment of her parents at trial were fresh in the public mind, and in the same week that a decision was due on Murdoch’s BSkyB bid. Rusbridger concluded the conversation, telling Whittingdale, “Nick will be only too happy to do this. He fucking hates that column. We all do, especially poor Peter [Bradshaw].”

The Guardian had given Whittingdale ten days grace and the race was now on to use the time in order to manufacture the evidence and retcon it into the phone hacking story. The actor Hugh Grant, who Collin had once dismissed as “the dithering toff from Four Weddings”, was only too happy to give the MP his privately recorded conversations with a former NOTW hack. Grant recorded new material, a single sentence asking “did anyone hack into the phone of Milly Dowler?”, which M15 audio specialists integrated into the pre-existing interview. Former NOTW employees were contacted and offered cash payments of up to £25,000 if they’d swear, on the record, that Dowler’s name was on Glen Mulcaire’s hacking list. On July 3^rd Whittingdale, satisfied that all the pieces were in place, signed off on Nick Davis’s final draft article. “Five stars” he joked, in his final reply.

Milly Dial Her

The Davis story broke on July 4^th. As Whittingdale hoped, the subsequent storm, the most wrathful and decisive since the one Denholm Elliot described in Raiders of the Lost Ark, turned the News of the World into the most hated rag in Britain. Its journalists became pariahs. On July 7^th, with advertisers who’d yet to buy space pretending to pull out, and public indignation, once the engine of the paper’s circulation, threatening to make it commercially less viable than a male tampon, James Murdoch decided it would close the following Sunday. 168 years of war on the intellect were over.

Robbie Collin, who unbeknownst to him had triggered his paper’s demise, authored a typically poor collection of his “reviews” for the final, self-congratulatory edition. In an address to his soon to be liberated readers, he denied taking bungs from studios, countering a long standing suggestion that his general enthusiasm for big-budget, mass marketed blockbuster releases was due to bribery, rather than his own poor judgement. He might have told them about the review templates or his lack of critical faculty, but instead he enjoyed stroking the idea, for one last time, that his verdict might be important enough to buy.

“Thanks for reading,” he concluded, or something. It didn’t really matter. No one cared anymore. Collin was ended, the News of the World gone, and Rupert Murdoch’s stranglehold on the political culture of the country, broken. It was glad confident morning once again in Great Britain.*

*Since the publication of this article, Robbie Collin has become the Telegraph’s chief film critic.

The Considered Judgement of Joan Smith on the Milly Dowler Murder Trial

Joan Smith, not to be confused with the dead Labour leader John Smith, is an occasional columnist for The Independent. Her personal website, politicalblonde.com, hints at a self-deprecating tendency. She’s consciously subverting that stereotype of a ditzy fem with haystack hair who doesn’t know her arse from a shallow grave in the woods. But this is a disastrous miscalculation, because Joan Smith is an imbecile and today she left us without a reasonable doubt.

Her Sunday column tackled the incendiary question of whether Jeffrey Samuels QC, was right to interrogate the father of Milly Dowler with the zeal of a defence barrister (which he is). Samuels, obliged to provide the best defence for Levi Bellfield possible, went to town on the murdered girl’s family, just as his sadistic client had instructed.

Bellfield, already serving two life sentences for murder, might have concluded that there was nothing to gain in denying the charge he’d abducted, raped, killed and dumped Dowler in woodland, leaving her to the elements. He’d never be released after all, and the circumstantial evidence against him was compelling. He’d lived 50 yards from where she was last seen alive – a walk from a railway station that took her along the adjoining main road. A camera at the junction at the end of said road conspicuously failed to pick Milly up, proving someone already had. Bellfield’s home backed onto the Road. A line of hedge separated the cul de sac from passers by on the main thoroughfare. Pulling someone through the hedge was easy for a man of Bellfield’s bulk, and once done, the foliage shielded the abduction from public view.

Any man can live close to the site of an abduction of course, but the case against Bellfield wasn’t built on circumstantial geography. He turned his mobile off on the day, disposed of his mattress and bedding, and his car, never found but glimpsed on CCTV a few hundred yards from where Milly was last seen, was notably weighed down at the back. This suggested his guilt so strongly that forcing an already bereaved family to relive it all and face questions about their parenting skills and personal morality, would compound the cruelty he’d already shown.

Yes, Bellfield might have thought all that, but he didn’t, and subsequently the Dowler family found themselves as the unlikely key plank of their daughter’s killer’s defence.

That defence centred on the sexual behaviour of Bob Dowler. Milly’s Dad liked pornography you see. This was 2002 so not everyone consumed it online back then, some employed old school methods like stockpiling fetish magazines, keeping a bondage kit in the loft and occasionally, when the mood might take them, stopping at a service station to thumb through the latest issue of Latex Wives, before going home to what passes for normal family life in this deeply hypocritical society of ours.

It was Bob Dowler’s initial misfortune to do the latter on the day his daughter was snatched and killed. Murder detectives are trained to look closely at a victim’s family. This isn’t because they’re cynical bastards, it’s because statistical evidence tells us that it’s the people you know that are most likely to kill you. That’s right, contrary to your Crimewatch fuelled fantasies, few are just offed on a whim by strangers. That this can happen, rare though it is, was the Dowler family’s tragedy.

When the Surrey force’s finest, or something like it, asked Mr Dowler where we was during the time his daughter vanished, he was shamed into lying about his whereabouts. That understandable knee jerk reaction, informed by those sympathetic to Joan Smith’s worldview, briefly made him a suspect. When police uncovered further evidence about his taste for sadomasochistic intercourse and the, with hindsight, uncomfortable revelation that Milly had discovered the magazines earlier in the year, causing some upset, it became a legitimate line of inquiry for the plods.

Bellfield’s defence team used this, plus notes from the dead girl confessing to some small measure of personal insecurity and the odd dark mood, somewhat uncharacteristically for a teenage girl, and conflated it all into a noxious counterfactual; after all, it was the only sliver of doubt they could present to a jury. Milly, distressed by her Dad’s preference for a gag in his mouth and a knee in his crotch, had bolted. Thereafter she came to some unknowable misfortune. Bob Dowler had created the circumstances of his daughter’s death.

Joan Smith, taking great pains to express sympathy for the family, which I’m sure will be a huge comfort to them, argued that Bob Dowler’s sexual tastes made him a legitimate target for the defence. Technically, given the evidence, she’s correct and had she left it at that all would be well. Of course, Samuels had to use this material, his client’s not guilty plea left him with no choice. The prosecution’s case was overwhelming. His job was to do the best he could and it’s all he had.

You may hate that, it might leave a bitter taste in your gullet, but it’s a fundamental principle of the judicial system and if you were on trial for murder, you’d demand no less. Evidence must be tested and it must be tested aggressively, because a charge of murder is rather serious.

Smith, however, didn’t leave it at that. Her politics wouldn’t allow it. She saw something rotten in Bob Dowler’s no longer private life and she wasn’t going to let something as trivial as the murder of his daughter put a stop on self-righteousness and making a leap of Richard Littlecock proportions.

Littlecock, a hero to Daily Mail readers, has a trademark tick that separates him from more moderate hacks. He starts with an observation about something, a reasonable proposition, and just when you might be inclined to agree with him, takes a leap into the maelstrom of right wing madness – the politics of intolerance and hate, from which there’s no return.

Immigration, he’ll say, is putting pressure on national infrastructure. Well Richard, that might be true, tell us more, ‘so,’ he’ll continue, ‘we should only let in 200 people a year and deport half of those already here.’ Ah, and there’s the leap.

Joan Smith, the political blonde, who was doing so well and striving for a considered assessment of the defence strategy, finally snapped when her fear of Bob Dowler’s sexuality became too much.

“Even if Milly hadn’t disappeared,” she wrote, “it is hard to see why possession of such material by the father of two teenage daughters should ever be treated as an entirely private matter.”

What? Under any circumstances, Joan? That’s a bit of a sweeping judgement isn’t it? Would it have been better if he’d had sons? They’re less vulnerable aren’t they? Oh, and it’s entirely legal. Still, sorry, you were saying?

“Looking at extreme pornography and acquiring restraints for use during sex are worrying behaviours, and it isn’t hard to imagine circumstances – a custody battle for example – in which they might be interpreted as potentially abusive.”

That’s true, if a legal team were trying to make mischief, as Smith was now doing, they could appeal to the prejudices, indeed latent hypocrisy of most judges and jurors, by wilfully conflating a private sexual fantasy and parenting skills, inferring that anyone who liked to dress in latex and be whipped was causing his children harm, irrespective of how he’d brought them up and the efforts he made to keep it in the bedroom.

“Indeed,” she continued, righteous ire building to body bursting proportions, “what is so extraordinary [my italics] about the outpouring of sympathy for Bob Dowler [the father of a murdered 13 year old] is that so many commentators have been willing to overlook what this might imply [again, my italics] about his feelings toward women, while rightly denouncing Bellfield’s misogyny in the strongest possible terms”.

Not so extraordinary Joan, you see many commentators took the view that Bob Dowler hadn’t committed a crime, that he was in fact, a victim of crime, as his daughter had been abducted, raped, murdered and left to rot in a wood, and that subsequently, his fondness for porn wasn’t strictly relevant.

In fact, one could argue, and I hope Joan wouldn’t consider this to be vomit from the mouth of patriarchy, that contrary to her contention, what Bob Dowler did in his own time was entirely a private matter. That’s right, absolutely none of our fucking business. You see Joan, if the Dowlers are an unhappy family now, that’s got a little something to do with Milly Dowler’s murder, not Bob Dowler’s back issues of Cockring.

Joan, whose blonde hair must have had extra shine as she typed those words, lives in a strange parallel world in which people cease to have unusual or extreme sexual desires because they have children. Perhaps in Joan’s household growing up, she imagined her parents, because they were parents, were inherently conservative in the bedroom. Being tied to a bed, having your willy wrapped in sandpaper or your balls bitten, that was something that deviants and hedonists alone enjoyed, not respectable lower-middle-class families who settled down to have kids.

This la la land of the imagination aside, it’s appalling that Bob Dowler should be judged by anyone, least of all a chattering class prig like Smith. Did she imagine that poor Milly was forced to watch her Father have his scrotum dipped in wax, or listen as her Mother consensually slid a mousetrap under his glans, asking the question, ‘does Mr Mouse want to go for the cheese?’

Bob Dowler, it’s clear, kept his taste for BDSM private. Milly was upset because she was surprised when making the chance discovery of some stashed magazines. She was surprised because it had been hitherto hidden from her and her sister Gemma. Oddly enough, it wasn’t something Bob Dowler made a show of. Everything he did was legal and discreet.

The implication that his taste constituted “worrying behaviours” and that consequently he was a bad Dad, exposing his kids to potential harm, seems especially cruel in light of what subsequently happened. Still, that’s not the worst of it. By conflating his taste in sex with deep-seeded misogyny, Smith consciously and deliberately placed the murdered girl’s father on the same spectrum of deviance as the man who’d killed his daughter.

Of course, there are many gradations between porno mag and rape, fetish mask and murder, but how could we all judge Bellfield, a serial rapist and murderer of women in isolation, while ignoring the gateway deviance indulged by Bob Dowler? Sure, all the evidence suggests that Milly and Gemma were happy kids with two loving parents, but can we really take that on face value now we know that Bob endorsed the objectification of women for the purposes of arousal? Like Joan says, if his daughter hadn’t been murdered, it would have been necessary to call social services and have her removed from the family.

So pity poor Bob Dowler. Not because his daughter was killed you understand, I’m sure he’s sick to the back teeth of being on the receiving end of our cloying sympathy; no, pity him for falling victim to a thoughtless hack who imagined she had something to add to his distress.

Joan, though already an expert on male sexuality, may need some additional information on a few points so I’m going to write to her. I’m going to point out that sexuality is complicated. It’s possible you see, for a man to hold more than one idea about sex in his head simultaneously. No, really. Sometimes we refer to these different spheres of interest as reality and fantasy. I hear that women do that too, though that might just be feminist propaganda.

What counts, I’ll suggest, is how Bob Dowler treats the real women in his life – his wife and surviving daughter. I’ll put it to Joan that having an outlet for his fantasies, complexed fantasies that clearly centre on being dominated, in contrast to Bellfield’s hatred for and desire to brutalise women, was harmless. Women also consume this material of course. In Smith’s mind, they must loathe their own sex. I mean, I know Freud thought sexuality was complicated and rooted in all sorts of childhood antecedents but it isn’t, is it? Sexuality is simple. We’re lucky to have experts like Joan Smith out there to remind us of this fact.

I’ll finish my letter to Joan by making the most important point of all; Dowler’s sexuality was based on the principle of consent. He enjoyed what he enjoyed without feeling the need to hurt anyone else. Pornography may be harmful to society as a whole – yeah, thought I’d toss that in there as a bone to delicate readers, but that’s a different argument and it doesn’t make Bob Dowler a bad Father. To draw any sort of moral equivalence between the poor man and Levi Bellfield, who drugged, raped and murdered women, is morally reprehensible and shows the same lack of consideration for him and his family as Bellfield did when he made his not guilty plea. You like that Joan? That was a Littlecock leap. I’ve just said you and Levi Bellfield are the same. You see how easy it is? Hurtful I’m sure you’ll agree…and he hasn’t even murdered your daughter!

Ah fuck it, maybe I’ll save a stamp and just blog all of that instead.