Tony Blair and Holly Watt….enigmas

How were the Balls documents obtained?

I don’t know about you, but I confess to being a tad disappointed in the Telegraph’s ‘revelations’ about New Labour during the period 2005-6.

They seem to suggest that Brown was constantly briefing against Blair, and plotting with others to bring him down. Frankly, during that period you could’ve sneaked into one of the stalls in the Commons loo for a few hours and picked that much up.

They also allege that politicians in general are nasty people, and Ed Balls may well be something of a psycho. I have Twitter history with Mr Balls, and have therefore been reasonably certain about his mental state for a good two years now. If you watch Ed B after hearing the result in his constituency in May 2010, you’ll see a bloke with pulsating veins and a sweaty upper lip doing a lot of odd nodding. The only things missing were the swastika armband and the moustache.

Also, over the years I’ve met or worked with 30-40 MPs, and I can think of only one – Clare Short – that I both liked and admired. Her politics were potty, but her ethics shone through.

So all in all, I’m still waiting for these revelations to, as it were, reveal something new.

I’ll tell you what I think the Telegraph has got wrong with this find – and let’s face it, they didn’t ‘find’ anything, somebody stole it. The old Seismograph has set out to demonstrate the ‘truth’ of something it believes, rather than what the data show.

This is particularly true of the positioning of Ed Balls as ‘the ringleader’, and Ed Miliband as ‘an active member’. Ed B was Gordon’s gofer, scribbling down notes and Blair critiques he knew his Master would lap up. And Ed M had barely been in the Commons for a year when these events took place. Ask yourself: can you really see the alarmingly limp Edward Miliband MP as capable of plotting the route to his bum in the dark, let alone the demise of his brother’s keeper?

The Torygraph has aggrandized their roles because this Mork and Mindy couple happen to be ‘running’ the Labour Party at the moment. They aren’t of course: Mad Hattie and the Uniters are calling the shots, and firing them at any remaining Blairites – which is why the bullets rarely travel in David Cameron’s direction.

Call me wacky, but I also suspect the dead hand of the Barclay brothers in the interpretation of these disclosures. The brothers (and the son) do, after all, have a well-worn agenda in all this: let’s stuff that little LibDem queer at the Treasury, and let’s tape that Commie turncoat at Business….but let’s spike that bit there, otherwise someone might ask how we got the gen. And let’s stick some constituency fiddle stuff on Nick Clegg, because he should be in the Labour Party anyway; and then let’s show what an evil bunch of gargoyles the Reds are when nobody’s looking.

As I wrote last week, the Telegraph’s obsessive fixation with The Eds Up has left the big question unanswered: how did the plotters do it? What did they have on Blair that suddenly, on September 3rd 2006, left the Prime Minister ashen-faced and hastily packing his bags?

Very few people in Fleet Street want that question answered – and they all know why. But this is old stuff: just to be truly contrarian on this sunny Sunday morning, I’d like to ask another question – raised tangentially earlier in this piece: how did the Telegraph come by property clearly nicked from Ed Balls’ office? Well, there’s a clue about that, in the comely shape of ace-investigative hackette Holly Watt.

We’ve encountered Holly in these columns before. I spoke last year to a West Country journalist who regaled me at length about Ms Watt’s fluttering eyelids, and other less physical aspects of her make-up. It was also alleged by a now retired Murdoch hack that Holly sort of turned up and mooched around in Wapping before she actually had a job, as such. (That remains hearsay, but any substantiated muck about Holly Watt will find a good home at Slogger’s Roost; two of the last 3 Slogscoops were based directly upon reader information supplied privately to wardslog@aol.com).

Holly’s also a bit of a Mata Hari, as she showed by gazing lovingly into Vince Cable’s eyes while taping his anti-Murdoch rant. An act which, after much arm-twisting, earned the Telegraph a severe censure from the Press Complaints Commission, the only watchdog in history to have been born without teeth. (If only Vince had known how false the come-on was…but that’s another story.)

And now here is Holly – on form and true to form – writing about documents she obtained illegally. Allegedly. Just as she shot to fame by writing about MPs’ expense documents that fell from the sky into her ample lap.

Except that there’s a big difference in this case. While I think the public is interested in squabbles and dirty deeds going on in the Labour Party six years ago, I’m not sure that information would be classed as in the public interest if the information required a burglary to get it. A whole Chamber of the Parliamentary system ripping off the British taxpayer is unquestionably in the public interest: a bunch of numbskull incompetents trying to oust their Leader is less so.

For me, it’s the burglary that makes a crucial difference here – that, and the nature of the interest. The interest in this latest case is political, whereas MPs expenses involved embezzlement from the State. And the expenses data documents were leaked to the Telegraph: nobody gemmied open filing cabinets to get them – as far as I know. To harden the point, if the Beastlie Burglar of Basher Balls is caught, he or she will face criminal charges, and almost certainly go to jail. Will Holly Watt, as an alleged accessory who handled stolen property?

The issue is the same one I’ve been banging on about for years: press freedom is a good thing, but archetypal tabloid license is just one among the hundreds of unwarranted, daily privacy invasions we all suffer. Tony Gallagher’s tabloidised Telegraph seems not to have too many scruples about how it obtains dirt. The Mail Boat People Gallagher brought with him also, I’m told, have form in that area: a contention very clearly backed up by the huge number of ‘detectives’ used by the former inmates at the Mail (as recorded in the original 2006 privacy study) prior to their rescue by Tough Tony.

Two Big Questions remain: can the Press control itself, or will it destroy its freedoms by continuing to break the law? And is the press ‘free’ enough now – in terms of its ownerships and agendas – to print the truth anyway?

That’s enough unanswered questions for today – Ed. Once more with feeling: we should all try to control ourselves, otherwise the Establishment will be only too happy to do it for us.