John Ward How Newscorp shopped Vicky Price

Reading the Huhnes

The Huhnes, Hannan, Murdoch and Thurbeck: boy, do they deserve each other

There is a marvellous tweet referring to Dan Hannan’s Telegraph blog today on the subject of Speedster Chris Huhne. It asks, ‘Chris Huhne has lost his family, his name and his freedom. What more do people want?’. When Mr Hannan gets it wrong, he does so bigtime: what we’ll be getting next is that Huhne’s plight shows Britain isn’t open for business.

The simple answers to Dan’s emptily rhetorical question are, “Something better from a Minister of the Crown” (perverting the course of justice) and “Nothing, he’s gone to jail – hurrah” (an MP behind bars at last). At Conference over the weekend, Nick Clegg referred to him as “a fine MP and an effective Minister”, but omitted to remind his audience that Huhne is a bullying, law-breaking, truth-bending arsehole. The next day Huhne himself was boasting to friends that he’d be “out in six weeks”: plenty of contrition there, then.

As it happens, in classically Cruel Britannia egalitarian-mad style, both he and Vicky Pryce got eight months each. This struck me as an odd sentence: he initiated the perversion of justice, she carried it out trying to protect him. He then showed his loyalty by dumping her for another. If she hadn’t blown the gaff to the Sunday Times in revenge, she wouldn’t have been in the dock at all. Neither of them come well out of this tawdry microcosm of British ‘life’, but I’d have given Chris three years and Vicky three months.

The issue of Pryce being in turn shopped by the Sunday Times is the subject of an excellent piece at The Spectator by Nick Cohen. As he rightly points out, The Murdoch’s Chimes political editor Isabel Oakeshott was so full of drivelling sympathy for our Vicky at the weekend, you’d never have guessed that she turned in the source of her story. Why? Because Pryce ‘had the impertinence to talk to the Mail on Sunday as well as the Sunday Times. “She had double-crossed me,” wails the poor victimised thing. “While I was busy protecting her identity, she had been busy revealing all to a rival newspaper…This was an extraordinary betrayal and deeply underhand after everything we had been through together. Our relationship had been based on trust. I had kept my side of the bargain; she had broken hers.”

Here we see portrayed for all to see the Newscorp desire for a monopoly at all times, and the right to defend it via complete bollocks. “You give us the storwee roight, or we git ya”. The first law of journalism is “Never betray a source”. Newspaper content is a free market like any other: Pryce didn’t get a fee for the story, and so where was the bargain here? No, what happened was that a bitter and ruthless Murdoch management (aka her editor John Witherow) broke the golden rule, as a result of which she’s now in prison. She deserves to be, mind – but whatever the Sunday Times did, it wasn’t journalism.

Still, the final dump on Chris Huhne’s pompous head was the revelation that the deeply unpleasant Neville Thurbeck – another ex-Murdochian still at large on his personal blog – says he hired a private investigator to follow Huhne’s new squeeze Carina Trimingham, but the News of the World (deceased) spiked its story on Chris Huhne’s relationship with his press adviser because he was “not famous enough”. I love it.

So let us depart this everyday story of ghastly folk by turning full circle on, sorry, back to, Dan Hannan. Admitting openly that he loathes Huhne (does anyone not?) at the end of his blog today, Hannan the Cannon sums up the logic of his sympathy for Huhne – as he so tediously often does – with a literary quotation: ‘ ‘Ah, but Hannan, can’t you see that he deserves everything he gets?’ Deserves? God’s bodykins, man: use every man after his desert, and who should ’scape whipping?’
Well Dan, hopefully nobody would. That’s the general idea of equality before the law. But this is as high as Conservative moral aims get these days: ‘Everyone’s at it really, so it’s sad that Huhne got caught’. Dear oh dear oh dear.