During the early part of its run, Jon Stewart’s US Daily Show on Comedy Central used a brilliant Bill Clinton impressionist to do a one-line sketch to camera. The line was, “My name is Bill Clinton, and I am not here”.

At the time it seemed like the lie-gag to end all lie-gags: surely nothing could get more brazen than the immortal Clinton denial in relation to Monica Lewinsky, “I did not have sex with that woman”…..we all thought. But Slick Willy (it doesn’t mean the same thing in the States) was able to make a distinction between cigar-fellatio and full sexual intercourse. So he sort of got away with it.

Two days ago Rebekah Brooks, the CEO of Newscorp in the UK, wrote a letter to MP Keith Vaz. In it, she claimed that, during a 2003 Select Committee session, when saying ‘we’ sometimes pay the police for information, she really meant ‘they’. She must’ve meant ‘they’ – not ‘everyone’ – because ‘she’ then went on to deny knowledge of ever having done any such thing ‘herself’ – as in, ‘me’.

Committee member Chris Bryant declared himself “gobsmacked” on being shown her letter, and one can understand why: the 2003 session was videotaped, and half of Youtube’s output consists of the key clip – in which she very clearly uses the words “we sometimes”. These are equally clearly not the words “I never”. Rebekah’s defence is she said the former, but meant the latter.

If there is a form of devious or incompetent spin that goes beyond bollocks, then this ‘defence’ is it. I have a banker chum (I do, I really do) who five years ago invented the word ‘pollocks’ as a way of saying something was both pants and bollocks. So maybe that’s what her letter is.

The defence gets increasingly anorexic the more one watches the tape. Not only does her minder Andy Coulson literally grab her arm and stop her in mid flow as she makes the admission about bending coppers, he goes on to say “But only when it’s legal”- which of course it never is. But Rebekah blunders on, replying when asked by Bryant, “Would you ever in the future?” with the two crucial words, “It depends”.

Think about that again back here in 2011. You would never dream about bribing policemen in the past, but you might in the future. It’s the sort of brass-neck cobblers that moved Justice Vos two months ago to suggest, in his chambers, that Newscorp barristers “stop taking the piss”.

It’s hard enough to cope with the fact that, having seen this videotape in 2003, no substantive action was taken by the police for eight years. To be sure, it now transpires that the Met was moved to tap Brooks’ phone – but only in pursuit of potentially bent officers. Nobody seems to have been worried about her bungled admission of a criminal offence, and Coulson’s equally unsubtle attempt to gag his feather-brained boss.

————————————

I was moved to wonder today – as I sat reading the Guardian on a long journey – what happens when you’re hacking somebody who’s hacking you: is there an electronic collision at some point? Is it like having a Party Line in the old days: “Get off the line Sir Ian, I’m trying to hack Deputy Commissioner Yates”? Big G’s coverage of this affair has shown exemplary courage at times, but it was while reading its Peter Wilby piece on Hackgate that I remembered why, under normal circumstances, the paper gets on my nerves much of the time.

Wilby was disingenuous in the extreme to claim that it had ‘been left almost entirely to this paper, with a little help from the New York Times’ to bring the hackers ever nearer to some kind of justice. The NYT ran one piece – and then ran for the hills after a single, bumptious legal swipe from Newscorp. I tried on several occasions to interest the paper in running stuff that later proved to be entirely correct, but the owners were far too scared by then. And for the Guardian to give no credit at all to The Independent is mean-minded in the extreme: both the daily and Sunday Indies have run cracking stuff at crucial times – and remained doggedly persistent when standing up even the most unlikely stories. (It’s a dedication and open-mindedness to which  I can attest personally.)

No credit is offered to the Blogosphere of course, but I’m used to that from the Guardian, which wrote off the medium as 100% far-right crypto-Nazi years ago. This too is my main beef with the Group: for a liberal Trust, it is surprisingly intolerant most of the time. It tends to combine this with the classic desire of left-leaning writers to corner the market in piety.

All that said, the saving grace in Wilby’s article – and it was an amazing grace – is the point made in the concluding three paragraphs. I commend it to any reader interested in fairness. His best phrase will resonate with me for a long time: ‘All three main Parties are now the political arm of the organised corporate class’. Spot on.

That sort of rhetoric used to be the stuff of Ken Leninspart. But today, it doesn’t have the class-war undertones of yesteryear.

Although Rebekah Brooks is confused about whether she is me or them, in 2011, we are all us – whatever our class. The them is smaller….but extraordinarily cunning and powerful. Nothing short of constant vigilance will do to keep the buggers in check.