HACKGATE DAY 102: Wayne Rooney, BSkyB, and Andy Hayman.

Andy Hayman

The news that Wayne Rooney is considering taking legal action against the News of the World for breach of privacy might be a turning point for Newscorp. The Manchester United striker could well be the only man in Britain unable to raise either (a) sympathy for his plight, or (b) interest in what he might or might not say or text on his mobile.

As if to prove the point, this afternoon our Wayne used his Twitter account to confirm that the police had been to see him about potential hacking. The uber-talented footballer tweeted, “looks like a newspaper have hacked into my phone”. Any suggestion that he’d been hacked by several newspapers at once can be dismissed in favour of the obvious conclusion that Rooney is a semi-literate moron.

Meanwhile, financial results from BSkyB released today contained much to encourage shareholders in their desire to seek a substantial increase in Murdoch’s proposed 700p-a-share bid for the satellite broadcaster. An improved financial performance saw its free cash flow rise 60% over the first nine months of the financial year to £615m. Earnings per share were up 30% at 30.5p. None of this will be welcome news to he of the Dirty Digging.

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Another thing which may be giving Rupert Murdoch the odd sleepness night is two apparently Siamese twins called Andy. Somehow – like Claude Eustace Teal and Simon Templar in the famous Leslie Charteris ‘Saint’ novels – Andy Hayman the cop and Andy Coulson the investigative journalist just keep on turning up at the same crime scenes.

Except that this is real life, not a detective novel: timelines are all-important, and we may not be talking coincidence here.

Like Andy Coulson, Andy Hayman is an Essex man. He began his career as a teenage bobby, and gradually worked his way through the ranks until, some twenty years later in 1998, he was promoted to the rank of commander in the Met – responsible for drugs, crime and complaints investigations. Then 2002 saw him appointed Chief Constable of Norfolk Police. He didn’t actually return to the Met until February 2005.

Andy Coulson joined the News of the World as Deputy Editor in 2000. His boss as editor during that period was Rebekah Brooks. My information is that in fact, Hayman probably met them during this first period at the Met.

Hayman has been, throughout his career, a man naturally skilled in his dealings with the media. A press corps member during his time in Norfolk told me six weeks ago:

“Hayman was very personable and frank with the media. He understood the benefits of media coverage for his career – and you were in no doubt that he was a very ambitious bloke. Norfolk was just a stepping stone for him. He stayed closely in touch with his London contacts. He never bought a house in Norfolk, but commuted every day from London.”

That’s one heck of a commute twice a day: but then Hayman is universally described as a 24/7 policeman. Says a former Norfolk colleague:

“He wasn’t someone to get on the wrong side of. But a very effective officer and totally zero-tolerance in his outlook. I remember thinking, ‘he’s quick on his feet, never stuck for an answer, and a total self-publicist’. A 120% good operator, no doubt about that – and fiercely seeking the Main Chance.”

At some point between 2000 and 2005, Andy Hayman apparently met (or was introduced to) a young journalist. Like him, he was a 24/7, driven obsessive, consumed with ambition……a man in a hurry to reach the top. He came from Essex. And he was self-made. The chances are that they got on like a house on fire.

And perhaps – like so many with their eyes on a quick chase up the ladder – they shared an emotion along the lines of ‘do whatever it takes’.

The journalist’s name was Andrew Coulson.

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It seems pretty obvious that the Coulson/Hayman relationship was mutually beneficial: Hayman had ambitions to lead the Met, while Coulson’s newspaper thrived on tips about salacious crime and scandal: this had been the staple diet of News of the World readers for over eighty years. The NotW also had easily the biggest Sunday circulation; it was (and is) something of a national institution.

However, to be more specific about the exact mutual benefits, we need to go back to why Andy Hayman returned to run the Met’s anti-terrorist division in the first place.

Hayman took over from Peter Clark in February 2005, and the reason appears to have been simple: Clark’s botched attempt to ‘sex up’ a police raid on an Ilford flat went badly wrong. Claiming that the much-feared poison ricin was involved, many newspapers splashed the story, which rapidly unravelled. No ricin was ever found, and 8 of the 9 suspects were acquitted. Colin Powell and other prominent Bush aides continued to peddle the ‘story’ for years afterwards, but in reality there was no foundation to the ricin threat.

Hayman’s known media skills made him a natural to take over, but by this time a number of journalists (notably at the Independent, Guardian and Daily Mail) were forming the view that Met anti-terrorist ‘raids’ were motivated by the politics of WOMD. Says one:

“They [the Met] were floating all sorts of alarmist stuff at the time. The ricin case was the most obvious example. The security services here and in the US were involved. It didn’t feel right, and it made me think ‘whatever they brief us to think, I’ll dig behind it’.”

But Hayman may well have found a responsive channel in the shape of News of the World editor Coulson. Because fairly swiftly into the new anti-terrorist chief’s stint – July 2005 – a Met team allegedly headed by Andy Hayman shot dead an innocent Brazilian student, Jean Charles de Menezes. I say ‘allegedly’ there, because one CID source who spoke to me called that description “a matter of opinion, depending on whether you might be Sir Ian Blair or not”. Blair was Hayman’s boss, and the imputation very clearly from the source (and others) is that Hayman wound up being the fall guy for this botched operation.

All the key elements pointing a finger of blame at police sloppiness were covered up. Afterwards, the police complaints commission concluded that ‘the public were misled over the death of Jean Charles De Menezes’. For the IPCC, that’s pretty strong stuff. In more detail, the IPCC report and various news coverage of the time established that:

The Met insisted that De Menezes was a terrorist for 24 hours after they knew he was innocent.

The Met lied brazenly about several elements of the killing, notably that De Menezes had run into the Tube station, vaulted a ticket barrier, dashed onto a train, and worn a bulky jacket with wires protuding. All of this was completely untrue. Objective reconstruction by witnesses showed that De Menezes had in fact bought a newspaper in the station, used a ticket in the normal way, shown no signs of hurrying, and worn tight clothing with no wires (or anything else) protruding.

Media questions immediately began to focus on this. But the CCTV footage of De Menezes throughout the station and at the shooting got ‘lost’ – or corrupted.

The IPCC as good as fingered Hayman for the cock-up, by noting that his actions ‘”led to inaccurate or misleading information being released” by the police regarding the Brazilian. On the one hand, it smacks of a plot to dump on Hayman. But on the other, his desire for complete control of all media relations on his patch was already well-established.

However, one publication alone went out of its way to back up the Met’s original account of events. Just 72 hours after the incident, the News of the World splashed with a centre-spread banner headlined, ‘WHY DID HE RUN?’  The line was reputed to have been personally guided and approved by Andy Coulson. The long article went on to defend Hayman’s strategy and claims, as well as casting doubt on the dead man’s innocence. A classic example is this unfounded assertion from the feature:

‘Jean Charles de Menezes then made the decision that cost him his life: he vaulted over the ticket barrier and ran down the escalator’

Nor was this a one-off.

In July 2006 three Islamic men wound up being tried for attempting to acquire ‘red mercury’, having been arrested by anti-terrorist police following a tip-off…..from the News of the World. The NotW piece described red mercury as “a deadly substance developed by cold war Russian scientists for making briefcase nuclear bombs”. In fact, red mercury is a myth: an invention cooked up by person or persons unknown. The NotW used its undercover reporter Mazher Mahmood to carry out the sting in a Brent Cross hotel room. Andy Coulson was his editor. Andy Hayman was head of the Met’s anti-terrorist section. All the men stung by Mahmood were acquitted.

Astonishingly, Scotland Yard defended the investigation, and said that it would not rule out working with the NotW again. This must count as an official admission (I would have thought) that they had indeed ‘worked together’ on a case involving invention and dishonesty from start to finish. And again, we have to ask: was the release dictated by media-detail man Andy Hayman?

Despite several requests to talk about the case, Mazher Mahmood has failed to return The Slog’s calls. It’s also worth pointing out, I think, that Newscorp’s disappearance behind paywalls doesn’t help to search for relevant articles: however he uses Google, the researcher is sent straight through to a large pair of breasts encouraging him to subscribe to the paper. There’s nothing new in this – but specific examples began to worry me when I signed up for Newscorp’s archive site. For example, the known headline from 9 March 2008 ‘MI5 investigates four Met cops’ is greeted with ‘no articles contain those words’. This is clearly a mistake, or censorship. With the Murdoch Empire, you can never tell for certain which it might be.

What we can be sure about is that not long afterwards, Buckingham Palace made a complaint relating to the hacking of Prince William’s mobile phone. It was a very specific complaint concerning an article written in the News of the World. And it asked why details only known to the sender and the recipient had suddenly appeared in the NotW.

Andy Hayman now found himself in charge of an investigation into people with whom he was almost certainly familiar. The obvious question to ask is why he allowed himself to be put in that role given a potential conflict between personal and professional roles. To the best of my knowledge, this has never been answered.

The following year, Andy Hayman found himself under an extreme media spotlight. With disturbing regularity, stories began to appear of ‘inappropriate relationships’ with women officers, and ‘extravagant expenses claims’. In the mind of one former West End CID Inspector, there was no doubt that the leaks were orchestrated by senior Met officers.

“Hayman was seen by the cabal around [Ian] Blair as dangerous,” says the source, “Bitter about being hung out to dry over the Menenzes case, and a potential loose cannon with close ties to the media. There was definitely a move to get him out. But to be fair, there was also genuine doubt about whether his relationship with certain editors might be improper”.

Whether Andy Hayman’s relationship with the News of the World and its editor Andy Coulson was improper or not, he was obviously not the only senior Met officer wining and dining with senior Newscorp personnel in the middle years of the 21st century’s first decade. Set against this is the reality that, once he had retired from the police force in December 2007, he fairly rapidly gained employment with…Newscorp, as a crime columnist working occasionally with the Sunday Times.

If there is any more to this part of Hackgate than merely smoke, we have yet to hear about it. But it does seem highly likely that sooner rather than later, Andy Hayman will be called to answer questions in one forum or another. I will leave the last words to erudite anti-Murdoch campaigner and MP Tom Watson:

‘Fair-minded people will ask whether it is usual for the police to content themselves with writing to lawyers acting for criminal suspects – and then take no further action when the lawyers reply with a “robust legal approach” and information restricted to matters they themselves choose. Furthermore, it is claimed by lawyers acting for the targets that when asked to provide copies of Mulcaire’s notes with a view to litigation against NOTW, the Metropolitan Police have been uncooperative to the point of obstruction.

The impression of complicity in the concealment of crime is reinforced by the conduct of the NOTW itself. In at least two cases, NOTW has settled privacy actions brought by victims of its phone hacking for figures in the order of 100 times greater than any likely award of damages by a court. In each case, this settlement followed quickly upon a court order for disclosure and included a confidentiality clause and the sealing of court documents…’

WANTED: Guardian bloggers

Preference will be given to candidates demonstrating an unswerving devotion to everything we print.

Sometimes, the only way to deal with rank hypocrisy is to laugh out loud. The Guardian’s Dan Sabbagh – he scion of the Murdoch press, and for some reason in charge of recruiting bloggers for the paper – has posted this piece at Big G today.

It’s all a bit rousing, jingoist and generally Kitcheneresque for my taste: ‘Your Guardian wants you!’ and all that. How deliciously ironic, then, that the last thing I was allowed to post at the Guardian’s blogspot Comment is ‘Free’ was a piece entitled ‘Why the press media need to engage more with the blogosphere’.

I became an unperson in the pro-Brown Stalinist purge following that 2009 post, which went up a week into the Brownonpills saga. The third comment down on the post’s thread was this lovely piece of measured (and carefully corroborated) Left-wing analysis:

‘What’s the Guardian doing giving space to a neo-Nazi blogger?’

Obviously, this entirely inaccurate and Mandelson-inspired ‘observation’ was enough to ensure Gulag banishment for The Slog. The truly disturbing thing about the contemporary middle-class Left is that it has no concept at all of just how obvious a parallel its outlook offers to the Soviet Union from 1928-55. Still, perhaps the G-Men of the Left have seen the future….and are so certain it works, nothing must be allowed to get in the way of its achievement. It is the dictatorship of the luvvietariat.

Either way, there is yet more of an amusing nature. The fact is that Sabbagh has done an excellent job of  nailing Murdoch’s hackers to the floor; and thus two weeks ago I sent him an email with details from these blogs, freely given should he want to use any of the content. Reply was there none. The English suburban-metropolitan Left – like the extreme wing of Republicanism in Eire – remember everything, and learn nothing. This is what Sabbagh says his employer stands for:

‘The open [Guardian] approach means there are no barriers for readers, which (sic) encourages mass audiences – in the Guardian’s case nearly 2.5m uniques a day. It also demands a more collaborative approach to journalism. We like to think we can write a news story or two – but there’s a lot of sharp, informed writing out there, often from experts for whom writing is a adjunct to their main source of income….’

Slog – in the case of this site’s name – is short for Bollockslog. Above, I just logged the most unutterable bollocks I’ve read in a long time.

Related: How did the Manchester Guardian become the Londoner Sturmer?

Bernanke goes for smoke signals, manages only smoke & mirrors

“It’s an up, down, serious, slowing, manageable but growing mess….so probably we won’t help any more”

I always used to think that Alan Greenspan took the biscuit when it came to confusing people. But with Al, it was the twisted-syntax management babble that gave us all so much trouble. Ben Bernanke yesterday unveiled his own media technique: the stream of contradiction.

When The Slog went to bed last night after penning a post-FOMC press release memo, it was very much being billed by the ‘trade’ media sites as ‘things are OK, bit worried about inflation, no decision on when to withdraw QE2′. We all came to that conclusion because, hell – that’s what the press release said. But as I suspected last week, Ben chose to differ from the consensus.

The BBC called Ben’s press conference ‘unmemorable’, a remarkably polite way of saying that it bamboozled pretty much everyone with an analytical dimension to their personality. Beeb politeness turned to generosity as the site continued, ‘that’s just as Mr Bernanke would have wanted’. The FT editorialises similarly this morning with the suggestion that Ben offered, ‘….the Federal Open Market Committee’s collective view (or what [Bernanke] deems it to be) as against the sometimes divergent opinions of its members’. And the press release. Don’t forget the press release.

But for the UK financial media as a whole, it was soon ‘don’t mention the press release’. Then, after more thought, ‘and don’t mention the falling growth forecast alongside the end of QE2 in June’. And finally, ‘don’t mention the continuation of Zirp alongside a doubled US inflation outlook’.

The specialist financial media pull this kind of stuff because they have fallen into the worst trap that can snare any journalist: pretending to understand, by agreeing. There are still very few mainstream titles prepared to come out and call a spade a spade. We all know what spades do: they dig holes. Last night, Mr Bernanke dug the hole slightly deeper, but hinted that he’d start refilling it one day soon. Once he could find some soil.

The Slog called the June end to QE2 earlier than most, but this was based solely on an observation of the changing complexion and opinions of the FOMC members. My hunch now is that Bernanke will do what he and Geithner pulled after QE1: secretly continue to buy seriously toxic crap that the banks want rid of, but just not quite so much of it as before. ‘The Fed has chosen an interesting time to start news conferences. But the news here was more in the fact it happened than in anything that was said,’ opines the New York Times this morning. I think that nails it pretty well.

So let me draw together the strands of Fed strategy ‘going forward’ – if I can use that phrase with any confidence. Ben Bernanke told us he was sure the US would return to its heyday of growth, but it faced a serious debt problem. Both QE’s have of course made that debt worse, as well as devaluing the Dollar. He hinted that QE2 would end within eight weeks, despite falling economic growth. He reaffirmed the lack of need to tighten things fiscally, despite a doubling rate of inflation. He offered no solution to the obvious evidence of sluggish job-creation, the rapidly rising rate of property repossession, and the latest data showing that house prices continue to fall.

Despite recent talk of the UK and US having divergent strategies for dealing with the coming catastrophe, the reality is that it would be hard to get a Dollar bill between where Ben Bernanke and Mervyn King are as of this morning. No more QE, no real signs of a turn-round, no sign empirically of real cuts in central expenditure, and a tendency to say, behind their hands, “It’s all the legislators’ fault really.”

But here’s the really good bit: Ben’s impenetrable logic was given a thumbs-up by the markets, with the Dow Jones index closing up 95.6 points, or 0.8%, to 12,690.96. The Hang Seng was also up 0.4%, and the FTSE rose 0.3% in early trading, back over the 6000 mark again. Such is the attraction of free money.

And to complete the wobbling, elliptical U-bend of surreality, Gold is still forging ahead at $1530. Thank goodness some people can tell poo from putty.

FROM THE ARCHIVES: 2008 anxieties brought forward

The piece below was posted at notbornyesterday  early in 2008

‘If like us you’ve got a tidy sum invested with Icesaver (a subsidiary of one the big Icelandic banks) you may have noticed them playing silly buggers of late – denying access to your account and then pleading changed passwords, not answering the phone, not ringing back and….well, obviously doing the Stonewall Jackson act on your money.

In theory,we have not a thing to worry about….the Icelandic Government underwrites any loss up to 50% of £35,000, and the UK savings compensation scheme the other half – if the guys in the longboats cough up. If they don’t…then the SCS won’t either. Plus one must factor in lost Bond Income during the time it takes to get the money back; as most of us know, theories never work the way they should in practice.

However, a dark thought in a brain-place usually only visited in one’s worst nightmares is beginning to haunt the common-sense folks: what happens if three banks go up the pictures? Or six? I raised this point just prior to last Christmas, as usual to a chorus of ‘oh for heaven’s sake’, but the Doomsayer tendency has quadrupled in size since then. A week later I also wrote that the real bill for baling out Northern Rock would be £70billion – to another round of guffaws. Currently we’re at £110 billion and counting. It pays to know people in The Treasury.

A source in Lehman Brothers told nby last week that the Fed didn’t have to overrule Congress on leaving Bear Sterns to fall into Morgan the Pirat’s hands – the White House knows only too well in private that the US is broke – they simply couldn’t afford to promise help for investors and bankers given the likely scale of corporate fallout. The worrying thing is that we can’t either, but we have.

We’ve been here before I know, but bear with me. There was no commercial reason to bale out Northern Rock. In the end (thanks we suspect to the fix put in by new recruit Tony Blair) JP Morgan snapped up the plum bit – the mortgage book – and we the taxpayers took on the debts. As Vince Cable remarked at the time “This is the worst of all options”. It was of course the best option for Gordon Brown, who thought he was about to face an election, and knew a bankrupt Northern Rock in Labour heartlands would destroy his credibility forever. Greater courage hath no man than he lay down his country for his life.

The British Government has taken on a liability (and whatever the Treasury fantasists say, it is a potentially total liability) larger than the annual NHS budget. The probable write-off is twelve and a half per cent of the Treasury’s already enormous tax income. It wouldn’t take eight Northern Rocks to bankrupt UK plc – the National Debt plus the current account deficit would see us off at half that number. Add to this a tax income slashed by the recession which is now so obviously coming, and…..well, it doesn’t bear thinking about.

Americans don’t like thinking about their situation either, but unlike the Brits these days – while even more reckless in their borrowing – they are infinitely more realistic about the consequences. Last week in the financial centres of the East and West Coast, there was glum talk of a US now so beholden to Arab and Chinese lenders, at best there is no way back, and at worst the nation is exposed to very dangerous international blackmail.

Way back at the start of Not Born Yesterday, I argued that our cultural problems in the West were a completely interrelated set of dominoes: familial, community and social collapse had led to a political class lacking any solutions to the problems they’d created, and the unreality of a life led vicariously through debt and brainless celebrity would sooner or later produce the same mad denial in the economic sphere. The key hypothesis I offered, in fact, was that economic and financial disaster would be the catalyst for the arrival of what I still term the New Zeitgeist.

A large part of me has always wanted this to be a self-denying prophecy. Today, a large part of me still thinks that an adjustment of attitude by ordinary people will be enough to ensure a gradual shift into the next era: one in which, hopefully, people wake up and realise that we cannot all be stars, that most of us don’t have the X-factor, that we can’t all drive Porsches and live in large houses, and that sooner or later bills have to be paid. One day qite soon, I want it now and fuck you and there is no such thing as an obscene profit and nothing has changed it’s all in your imagination and have another drink you miserable old git will be gone, lost in the mists of a mad period our grandchildren will see in much the way as my generation saw The Roaring Twenties – or my kids see The Swinging Sixties.

But one enormous obstacle stands in the way of a peaceful change – our political Establishment. This bizarre one-colour rainbow of grasping, superior and delusional control-freaks (in love with what few marketing principles they can grasp) has wasted £2 in every £5 of tax monies for the best part of a generation, and in this – its latest pathetic incarnation as New Labour – has pushed us to the brink with unwise economic devotion to neo-liberalist cheap credit, and ill-judged purchases of IT and third-rate banks. The replacement of this braindead Government with an equally clueless Conservative administration could very easily spell the end of true liberal democracy in this country. And there is a very good reason for this: our political class – obscenely privileged and laughably out of touch – doesn’t seem to be able to grasp that, if a ruined bourgeoisie is added to a Yob-riddled Underclass, then all the conditions will be perfect for The Strong Man to step in.

Despite the continuing charge that my parallel with Weimar weakness and the rise of Hitler is ‘risible’, ‘ridiculous’, ‘like the plot of a second-rate novel’ and all the other smug assertions of those who have been so wrong about so much to date this century, my Strong Man scenario is as real a possibility as ever. Britain has the following symptomology:

* An apathetic electorate

* An alienated Underclass

* A violent culture

* A generation open to a bribe

* A Rule of Law vandalised by naive politico-lawyers

* A hugely unpopular political elite

* A vetoing Chamber whose power is ebbing away rapidly

* A potential for 24/7 citizen surveillance unparalleled in history

* A looming economic and financial crisis.

* External bogey-man enemies

* A super-rich (and widely resented) top 0.4% of aristocrats enjoying ludicrous levels of tax immunity

A very wise young woman ( a Green as it happens) wrote to me as follows recently:

‘On the whole, people don’t want great riches. They want the next step up in life. They want to be a bit better off, to have a better motor bike, to have new clothes and a good feast to celebrate a wedding’.

For what it’s worth, I think this right on the money. The current generation has been led to expect more. They are about to be given a great deal less. Unless this is done with tact, fairness and clear-sighted common sense, our Pariamentary system will not survive.

What happens when the money runs out? As one of Scott Fitzgerald’s characters remarks, “Then there’s none left”. If only it were that simple.

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Sequel: Northern Rock continues to struggle, and remains a massive taxpayer liability. It was joined in the bailout by RBS, HBOS, and to some extent Lloyds Bank. The eventual bailout liabilities rose to £1.3 trillion over nine times the NHS budget. Lehman Brothers went bust a few months later. The UK economy went into recession that summer. Barclays eventually required refinancing from Arab wealth funds. The US debt with China now costs one in four of all tax dollars to service. 247 of the grasping UK Establishment control freaks were caught the following year in the biggest expenses scandal in our political history. Events suggest that the Yob-riddled underclass is indeed about to be joined by a pauperised middle class….or ‘squeezed’ as the Coalition puts it.

BREAKING….US FED GIVES NO HINT OF END TO QE2

Denial remains in place…along with gratuitous profit

Denial and dogged resistance remained the orders of the day at 17:15 GMT today (Wednesday) as the clipped Federal Monetary Committee press release predictably talked up the recovery, while talking down inflationary pressures. So it looks like Ben is going down with the ship, on the bridge, in the freezing Atlantic waters, and on the wings of a prayer called ‘America is Titanic, and thus unsinkable’.

As I’ve posted in the past, ‘no change’ was always likely to be today’s message. June 22nd (Ben’s next appearance before the media) is the one to focus on.

Meanwhile, take a look at this graph from today’s live gold price at the NYSE opening:

This was quite high-volume trading….and gold fell eight bucks in 22 minutes. Words like ‘leak’  and ‘directionalising’ spring to mind. Now, with that second word in mind, look at the chart some time later:

Fascinating, eh? Profit-takers drove the market down the hill….and then they marched it up again. Thus taking and making a nice whopping profit twice in just under four hours.

Insider trading or what? Nice work if you can get it.

Why Ian Hislop was absolutely right to ‘out’ Andrew Marr.

Andrew Marr’s private life may finally explain why he asked Gordon Brown about prescription painkillers, not anti-depressants.

On hearing the news of Andrew Marr’s exact transgression on Monday afternoon, my immediate reaction was, ‘Is that it?’ Surely Ian Hislop of Private Eye was being unnecessarily prurient to want such a non-story out there in the public domain?

But the ways of ‘public interest’ are many and mysterious. One very important factor in whether a journalist should reveal personal stuff is, and has always been, whether the situation – sexual, mental, illegal, or all those things – might affect a person’s ability to do an important job. It was this that led me to run the original notbornyesterday story in September 2009, speculating about the possibility that Gordon Brown was taking anti-depressants and losing his eyesight. And it’s here that two revelatory stories collide, because Marr then became infamous for asking Brown The Big Question.

Contrary to the version given out to the media by Krishnan Guru-Murthy soon after the story broke, I didn’t just bump into one drunk at a party and then write the piece ‘with no proof’. Of course there was no ‘proof’, but Whitehall (and the senior echelons of the Tory Party) had been aware for years that Brown often displayed, shall we say, manic and obsessively compulsive behaviour over time. Not for nothing did Frank Field say to Blair about Gordon’s possible accession to the Throne, “Tony, please don’t let Mrs Rochester out of the attic”. And the list of Brown’s allegedly proscribed foods was very powerful evidence in favour of him taking MAOI anti-depressants.

The story had been on the boil for just over a fortnight when Andrew Marr decided to interview Gordon Brown on his Sunday show. I watched the session, certain that nobody at the Beeb would dare raise the matter, but suddenly Marr asked the bloke if he took prescription painkillers. Not one person – myself or anyone else in the Westminster village – had ever talked about anything other than anti-depressants. But the question enabled the Prime Minister to give an emphatic denial – and then spout some pompous hypocrisy about ‘the lexicon of political reporting’ – this from the greatest source of below-the-belt leaks in Parliamentary history.

I wasn’t the only one to wonder why Marr had done this: the Daily Telegraph’s religious correspondent Damian Thompson took up the story in his column the following day, but for obvious reasons couldn’t explicitly say what many folk thought: that Marr let Brown off the hook for political reasons, believing the story to be nothing more than a vindictive accusation.

However, the news confirming when Marr took the injunction out against publication of his extra-marital affair – just under three years ago – offers a much more credible explanation of the left-field pill-addiction chosen by the TV presenter. Andrew must, at the time, have felt very raw indeed on the subject of  ‘unwarranted’ privacy invasion by the press: and it strikes me that he felt sympathy – political or otherwise – for Brown as a fellow-human being on the ropes. So he gave Brown an out. Allegedly.

I know for a fact (from one of his production staff) that Andrew Marr’s decision to pop the pill question was taken before he turned up for work that day, and that his crew knew to go for the close-up after his question….but that the show’s anchor asked Brown without discussing it with anyone in the Beeb’s management. I’ve always thought that suspicious: was he in turn fearful of the Beeb censoring the question, or – even worse – insisting he be more searching in the line of questioning? Nobody can be sure: but there is a strong suggestion here that, pretty directly, Marr’s behaviour in his private life adversely affected his objectivity as a high-profile journalist – on a topic that was politically explosive at the time.

Thus, on even a narrow definition of ‘public interest’,  Hislop was entirely justified in continuing to go after Marr – whom, he justifiably felt, wanted one law for himself as a celebrity, but another for those with less money and influence. And Andrew Marr himself was wrong to take out the injunction – as, being a decent egg, he has since admitted.

Objectivity from the media Establishment never, of course, so much as entered the saga anyway. Guru-Murthy’s ‘no proof’ basis for rubbishing the story was so disingenuous, as a rule of thumb it would’ve kept any speculation about anything out of the press forever. Marr himself is on the record anyway as referring to bloggers as “inadequate, pimpled and single”, a claim for which he has no proof whatsoever….but which probably did stop him ever reading the original nby piece. The day after the story broke, both Mandelson and Balls wrote me off as a “far Right extremist”, a ridiculous lie which the BBC dutifully reported in full – and live. Ben Bradshaw then repeated the slander on BBC’s Question Time, but got a rollicking from the studio audience for doing so – and some withering comments from the panel. The gist was that New Labour was being hoist by its own rather grubby patade.

As for the veracity of the piece, it evoked an on the record denial from Number Ten about Brown’s eyesight problems – a denial which later turned out to be entirely false, following a ludicrous duck-and-dive by Brown and his henchmen in and out of Southfields eye hospital. The anti-depressant story descended into farce when a lady in the Number Ten press office offered me an “off the record denial”, which was and remains unique in my experience – rather akin to running a secret front-page lead. But as his mercifully brief Premiership drew to a close, Brown unravelled in precisely the way I’d suggested he would: only a series of spectacularly missed goals by the Cameroons (and one good TV performance by Nick Clegg) stopped Labour being completely routed the following May. It took me five months – not one drinks party – to gather stuff for the article, and I stand by everything in it…including the fact that senior Tories know of Brown’s mental state, and colluded in keeping him where he was.

For me personally, the story was a professional disaster. What had been a good relationship with the Guardian’s Comment is Free page as a blogger was abruptly severed. I have tried under four different identities since then to comment-thread at the paper, but my ‘commenting privileges’ are always removed after a week or so – and I have never been given any explanation for that. The site notbornyesterday.org itself became the target of unbelievably vicious briefing in the ensuing weeks, including a deliberate attempt to ‘confuse’ me with the allegedly neo-Nazi blogger John M. Ward…a ‘mistake’ that five seconds of looking at the site would’ve corrected – to any visitor with an open mind. Not surprisingly, I still get this bonkers slander thrown at me when writing something controversial about the Left: when I’m attacking the Glazer family, Rupert Murdoch, the Barclay Brothers and David Cameron, of course the charge is absent.

Thus after four years of meticulously building up a brand, I moved the site to Blogger, and changed its name to The Slog. There was further jiggery-pokery there when I began writing awkward things about Google….and so here I am today at WordPress, occasionally in the sin-bin – but on the whole once more regarded as reputable. The dishonesty, and vengeance, of those in the public eye, however, means it would never do to be  respectable; too often these days, it’s a euphemism for mouthpiece.

EDUCATION REFORM: The loony Left is alive, thriving, and educating our children

Listening to Christine Blower at the NUT conference today reminded The Slog of  Private Eye’s anti-hero Dave Spart at his unconsciously hilarious worst.

Christine Blower, NUT General Secretary

I hope Michael Gove was watching the Teachers’ national conference on BBCNews this morning. We were taken over live to see some kind of reincarnated 1940s Russian crypto-Communist triumphaliste being wildly applauded. When I say ‘applauded, I mean noisily worshipped as if she might perhaps be Stalin shortly after an especially severe purge. To be fair, there wasn’t much physical resemblance – Stalin had a less obvious moustache – but the auto-Praesidium reaction she got made me realise yet again just how many of the failed Hard Left of yesteryear have survived unscathed.

The lady in question was the NUT’s General Secretary, Christine Blower. In 1973 she took her first teaching post at Holland Park School, a nice middle-class comprehensive in Kensington & Chelsea,which was then part of that paragon of excellence, the ILEA. There she taught French, revelling in the school’s decision to change from streamed to mixed-ability teaching. Ms Blower prefers this style of teaching becasue – she claims – it does not “create the sheep and goatssituation that comprehensives were set up to avoid”. What Blower will never face up to, sadly, is that this ‘style’ of teaching produces the double-whammy of bored clever kids and frightened average kids. This ‘style’ of teaching, in fact, makes the clever lazy and the average alienated. After thirty or more years of it, we now have a State education system that  ranks 24th in the world. As a result of this ‘style’ of teaching, only Mexico, Portugal and Turkey have worse dropout records than us.

Her ‘review’ of the teachers’ year consisted of the following: fighting alongside anti-fascists, crushing the BNP, smashing the English Defence League, organising anti-racist rock concerts for Hope Not Hate, and sending fraternal donations to the Anti-Nazi League of Radicalised Vegans or whatever they call themselves these days. It was like being in Peter Hain’s head during a nocturnal emission.

Now here are some words entirely missing from her review: education, children, schools, standards, training, excellence, professionalism, the future generation, and abject failure across the board to teach children either social or foreign language skills.

I don’t mind Harriet Harman being deranged, because the more power she and Jack Droney have in the Labour Party, the less chance they have of ever forming a government again in any country anywhere with the possible exception of Asbuckishtan which is a place I just invented. But I do mind very much if maniacal fanatics like this woman wind up bending the mind of my grandchildren. People like her twenty-six years ago put me through a paroxysm of social guilt, by instantly making it clear to me that private education for my own kids was the only way to avoid rearing two ignorant but mindlessly radicalised yobettes.

Why did I want my kids to have a State education? Why was I racked with guilt? I will tell you – without an iota of apology. Because my Grammar School education took me to institutions, experiences, foreign climes, stimulating debates, academic achievement, enormous professional satisfaction and an infinitely broader mind, without myself or my parents having to pay a single penny for it. And because I could never have looked myself in the mirror had I inflicted something utterly worthless on my own children through petty polemics or financial meanness. As Dianne Abbot and her fellow hypocrites would I’m sure agree, this is what it means to be a parent. Oliver Letwin said a few years back that he would rather beg in the streets than send his children to a politicised agit-prop inner-city hotbed of mediocrity. Amen to every word of that.

Many readers will write off this piece as the right-wing rambling of a grubby lower middle-class kid on the make. To which I can only answer, “bollocks”. I despise David Cameron every bit as much for his Etonian-grown decision to drop the reinstitution of Grammar Schools from the Tory manifesto. How smug, bloated and entirely cloned are all these public-school Krug Socialists like Harman, Clegg, and Blair; and how right was Graham Brady -  a product of a fine Mancunian Grammar School – to resign from the Opposition Front Bench on the issue of high standards in State Education.

So as I say, I sincerely hope Mr Gove was watching this claptrap, and that he will at last realise the die-hard cadres of bourgeois weekend militancy he’s up against.  Because if either he – or more likely, the ever-obliging Prime Minister – were to start back-tracking on the wholesale reinstatement of excellent free education in our culture, then they will have betrayed the future of all our grandchildren.

CRASHWATCH: Suddenly, the media realise it’s all over.

Bank exposure, oil prices and deficit economics are the bombs in store for those flying global economy

The bad news is, there are no engines. The very bad news is, there’s a bomb on board.

As is often the way with people unable to get real, the banking community seems to have taken lower bonuses after all….and wiped out the loss by simply paying itself more. It’s this kind of behaviour that makes the Vickers Report fairly meaningless, but from a more professional perspective, allowing your staff overheads to rise in that manner – where the discretionary part becomes a contractual fact – illustrates yet again that investment bankers live in Creditland: that place further up from down the road, where everything can be paid for and chickens never come home to roost.

This Easter weekend has seen (largely unnoticed, I suspect) very clear signs that at last the media think the econo-fiscal clock is heading towards midnight. Liam Halligan in the Telegraph – not normally a doom-merchant – wrote a very black piece about the US outlook during the break, and even his usually cheery colleague Jeremy Warner is now having doubts about both the EU and the UK. His piece this morning points out that, ‘It’s now more than two years since the nadir of financial crisis, and despite all the fiscal and monetary support, still UK output remains way below its pre-crisis levels. The economy is failing to show the same “bounce back” capacity it has after most other post-war recessions….’

The same is true in the US, and the reasons are broadly similar: jobs sent offshore, poor marketing, laurel-resting and globalised consolidation have produced structural unemployment throughout the West. So much so, in fact, that The Independent’s Sean O’Grady ran a piece on Sunday outlining ten ways in which Crash 2 might start. There were actually huge gaps in the piece – most notably the relationship between US government bonds and interest rates – but just in case anyone was in doubt, Reuters points out today that 31 US states now have woefully underfunded pension schemes….and the gap has increased by a staggering 26% in the last year.

At least a dozen US states are technically insolvent, and projecting forward from where we are now, there is every reason to expect that our local government units will go the same way – albeit massaged along a little by those with a political motive. The Coalition cancelled the council tax property revaluation, and froze council tax formally, when it came into office. Excellent for votes, but bad for deficit reduction – and catastrophic for local project financing: remember that after 2007, Labour quietly slashed the grant to local authorities from £44 billion to £29 billion. So one day soon, local taxes must go up, and service levels come down. Neither of these are what you’d call moves to stimulate employment and the economy.

The short-term development which may well clobber everyone is the rising oil price. Since January last year, petrol prices in the US have risen by nearly a quarter, and crude oil by a third. The Arab Spring and the Japanese post-earthquake nuclear disaster have reduced the oil available and made its future use likely to rise respectively. However, neither outcome is at all certain in the long term, and as ever there re strong suspicions that oil’s price is being partially hiked by a combo of deliberate under-production and dishonest price-setting.

The Obama Administration has set up a new working group to investigate the accusations already flying around in Washington. Comprising representatives from the agriculture, Treasury, Judiciary, Federal Reserve, Commodity Futures Trading Commission and attorney-general’s office, the group expects the worst. CFTC head Bart Chilton told the media, “I look forward to the group’s work, especially in rooting out fraud, abuse or manipulation in the energy markets. I remain convinced that excessive speculation is a part of the problem, and should be part of the group’s focus too.”

The knock-on effect of higher oil prices is rarely understood by the layman. Apart from being highly inflationary at the factory gate, it also has a direct effect on food prices, as so much of the food we eat today is transported long distances. We should’ve laid more land to cereal production years ago in Britain, but of course we didn’t; so we in particular will be hard-hit by this factor – as will our ageing population in care who need constant heating, and their children paying the residency fees.

With the two main Anglo-Saxon  political elites in the West grossly underestimating (or hiding) the size of these problems, it wasn’t surprising that S&P decided to take a swipe at the bigger of the two – having downgraded the smaller one two years ago. Much more disturbing to me, however, was the way the US elite reacted: either by shooting the messenger, or in Geithner’s case, with a shrug and a “Yeh, whatever”. There is something about Western government at the moment that makes me wonder if its luminaries haven’t already stocked up on beans and gold, after buying secluded estates in the mountains somewhere. Certainly, I don’t buy all this bollocks about S&P wanting its downgrade to be a self-denying prophecy. It looked to me like a perfectly sensible commentary on a nation gone mad.

The business media are billing this as a big week. Tomorrow, the UK’s quarterly gdp figures will emerge from the ONS, while on the other side of the Pond, a little later Bernanke will be giving the world’s first talkie from the Federal Reserve. For myself, I don’t think these numbers matter any more. After all the speculation about where Crash2 might begin, in the end it was S&P which fired the starter’s gun. From now on, the race to the bottom is under way.

AV CAMPAIGN ANALYSIS: Why I’m spoiling for a fight by spoiling my ballot paper.

The only small consolation I’m taking out of politics at the moment is that the British electorate seems about to offer one of its occasional dollops of common sense: it has seen enough of compromise politics over the last year to decide it doesn’t want to become Italy. The problem is, I doubt very much  if our descent into slightly Italianate chaos has anything the do with the voting system on offer: we did, after all, get to here with a system unchanged in its basic form since 1832.

If AV is rejected, I suspect the issue of voting reform will go away for at least a generation – if not forever. That would be an extraordinary disappointment for those of us who did genuinely want voting reform – as opposed to a half-baked majoritarian compromise between FPTP and proper ‘list’ PR. This column was among the first to spot the LibDem retreat from real PR before the last election; it was obvious, once Nick Clegg got the scent of power in his nostrils, that his principles were ‘as a dream that quickly fades at the opening of the day’.

The problem remains that no decision is ever simple for the British electorate any more. Gone are the days of, “Right, they’re for that – I’ll vote for them”. Now everything has to be a calculation balanced by trying to get at least some ‘good’ out of the curate’s egg of legislation, individual, or Party on offer. For example, although guilt by association has characterised much of the campaign, this hasn’t always been irrational. I think Eddie Izzard is the funniest man on Earth after Robin Williams, but the ignorance he displayed while talking about AV on the Marr Show two weeks ago did make one wonder if any system he proposed might be better off confined to his stage act. Like it or not, I see completely wrongheaded people like Kinnock, Clegg, Harman or Eds Miliband and Balls supporting it, and think “Hang on a minute…why?”

But then further assessment yields this thought: suppose the AV camp wins. The effect (I suspect) would be yet more drifting across blurred Party lines by backbenchers eager to flex some muscles at last….and a consequently rapid decline in Whip power. New groupings might well spring  to life. Everything might change. And then I again study the Frankenstein AV on offer, and reality intervenes: the change would be nowhere near radical enough to transform UK politics. I’ve been making a molehill out of a mountain, and that won’t do.

I want a fairer voting system, but not one that gives an arbitrary voting reward to those whose only achievement is being like another Party. I’d like to see consensus on some things, but not endlessly circular and cynical government going absolutely nowhere with no principles – or principals. I don’t want to be given the same old Big Business/Left/Union/Bankrolled/Earth Mother alternatives on my voting slip, diluted only by crazy mixtures of shire Tories and urban activists. I want accountable leadership, not cover-ups, leg-ups and cock-ups.

Ultimately, as I keep repeating, the problem is rooted in the culture. Any system will only ever be as good as the ethics, sense and determination of the people taking part in it. When teachers’ Unions voted for Michael Gove to resign yesterday, I smiled while thinking of a suitable headline. The best I could come up with was ‘Turkeys in shock vote to kill farmer’. And I’m afraid that sums up the AV debate for me: as a matter alleged to be important, I now rate the AV controversy roughly on a par with the fox hunting debate in terms of relevance to Britain’s cultural problems: it should’ve been a new beginning, but Clegg the Kopout blew it – as I always thought he would.

I’ve already spoiled (and what a Freudian Establishment verb that is) my postal ballot paper, using The Slog’s by now trade mark jeu de mot: ‘nota bene’ – or ‘please take note – neither of the above’. The Powers that Be will not do any such thing, of course….and that’s what we really need to change.

REVIEW: Only One United

The Busby Babes line up for their final match, February 5th 1958

Skiing in Zell Am See three years ago, I walked into a bar one Saturday afternoon to watch a live soccer game. The place was heaving with fans, and I turned to one bloke, asking, “What time’s the United game on?”

The chap was a Geordie, and he broke into a broad smile.

“What is it with you f**kin’ Mancs,” he asked, “Where we’re all serpozed ter know yer talkin’ aboot your lot?”

There is only one Manchester United, and last night on BBC2, the dramatic reconstruction of events surrounding the 1958 Munich Crash, United, showed why that is for so many of the club’s longstanding supporters. If you’re a United fan aged over 55, there is a Bible with BC and AD just like the real thing:  we old stagers refer simply to ‘the Crash’ and ‘the  old team’. In our minds, nothing can ever replace the original Busby Babes, because – as the saying goes – age did not wither them. There is a New Testament dominated by Sir AlexFerguson, but the Old Testament remains the basis of the club’s culture.

The facts in a nutshell – brilliantly portrayed in the BBC film – are these: United manager Matt Busby took United into what was then the European Cup – against the insular wishes of the Football League. In order to get back from a Belgrade tie against Red Star in time for the next home game (and avoid a points deduction) Busby chartered a plane to be free of schedules. On February 6th 1958, the plane stopped to refuel at a snowy Munch Airport, but failed to unstick from the runway despite three attempts to take off. It left the airport site and ploughed through an adjoining field into a house. 22 players and officials were killed.

This left the club’s assistant manager Jimmy Murphy (despite his name, a Welshman) to build a makeshift side to complete the league and FA Cup fixtures. In an emotional run of pure adrenalin and not much skill, United reached the Cup Final, losing 2-0 to a far better Bolton side. Fittingly, the film put Murphy and the young Bobby Charlton at the centre of events. David Tennant bears not the slightest resemblance to the Welshman, but he was utterly believable in the role.

For me, the atmospherics of the film – dingy boardrooms, misty days, the players all smoking and drinking, the grief of Mancunians be the Red or Blue – were what made it special. As nearly always with Beeb historical drama, the evocation of an era was outstanding. Old Trafford was not in those days the Theatre of Dreams so much as a grisly, largely-uncovered standing arena suffused with the industrial smells of Trafford Park. Floodlights were an innovation at the time, and European Cup ‘night matches’ were played in what was called ‘the Floodlight strip’ – a slightly shinier red from head to foot, with a silver stripe on the shorts. Very flash for those days – and a typical example of Busby’s instinct for the drama of the game – it added a splash of bright colour to cold Manchester nights, when the thin air made the United roar almost visceral. In a grimy, smoggy world, United were young stars burning more brightly than any others.

What the film couldn’t do was recreate the sense of warmth in Manchester towards the Busby Babes. Sir Matt’s shrewdness was ever-present in nurturing the idea of a club that was rags-to-riches in nature (Old Trafford was a bomb-site until 1950) but still bedded firmly in the everyday community. All the players were obliged to join the Manchester YMCA, and visit boy’s clubs, disabled homes and other causes. There was no arguing about this: as Eamonn Dunphy described so accurately in his 1980s book  United, Busby gave himself a paternal image of softly-spoken Scottish charm, but he was as hard as nails with the playing staff.

The YMCA in the 1950s wasn’t the gay paradise of later years. It was a leisure centre attended regularly by the senior figures in the cotton business. One of these was my father – probably the only Catholic in the trade – but there were many others. After a session in the gym, or just a swim after the day’s training, the team – led by Roger Byrne, already at 23 the England captain – would go into the main lounge and sink more beer than was good for them with these local bigwigs. It may seem bizarre now, but the movers in the Cottonopolis were all on nodding terms with the players.

So when my Dad took me to see a Youth Cup game one Monday evening, and saw David Pegg and Geoff Bent sitting three rows behind us, he smiled, they smiled back – and I was encouraged to ask for their autographs. Ten days later, both players were dead. So too was one of Dad’s friends, the cotton merchant Willie Satinoff; along with Roger Byrne, Eddie Colman, Mark Jones, Tommy Taylor, Billy Whelan, a generation  of sports journalists – and of course, ten days later still, the incomparable Duncan Edwards.

There were just two small errors in the film. At one point, the goalkeeper Harry Gregg is shown with a ’1′ on his back. Keepers in those days never wore a number. And for the league game tunnel-sequence shown, the teams are seen walking out onto the pitch together. This was an innovation brought in by the Premiership in the 1990s. Before then, the normal etiquette (except for ceremonial occasions and internationals) was that the away side came out first – to an inadequate, guttural shout from their travelling fans – and then the Home team to a terrifying noise. In 1957, I attended a Derby Game at the old Manchester City ground Maine Road, with 84,000 supporters crammed in. When City appeared, I literally almost peed myself with fear at the tribal gggrrrrr of their fans.

Much of the United legend will always be tosh. Busby was an inveterate gambler throughout his life (most ex-players were) and there is no question that, at times, his relationship with the then Chairman Louis Edwards was corrupt. As for the ‘they would’ve dominated the game for years’ stuff, the facts don’t bear that out. Over at Wolves, Stan Cullis was putting the finishing touches to a side which dominated the game for two years after 1958, following which Bill Nicholson’s ‘Super Spurs’ eleven were top dog for a good four seasons. Although United did go on to win the European Cup ten years later, the team was getting old by then. If you look at what happened to only mildly injured survivors like Albert Scanlon and Dennis Violet, they drifted into lower divisions of the game quite quickly after the disaster. Then along came Liverpool, and everything was changed by yet another Scot, Bill Shankly.

What nobody can ever deny, however, is that with a maximum wage of £20 per week, players were in the game for love and glory, not money….and the BBC2 drama captured this plebeian aspiration with unerring skill. The dead hand of Rupert Midas has surgically removed all that, and replaced it with foreign players, petulance, indiscipline, greed, corporate boxes – and an English side so poor it cannot compete on the World stage. One day the Premiership Bubble will burst – as will the Glaser family carpetbaggers at Old Trafford – and some features of the old sport will return. But then and now, there will only ever be one United.

ANALYSIS: How the Human Rights Act led to super-injunctions

“That’ll be three times I’ve blocked it, then”.

New Labour created the Human Rights Act, failed to live up to its strong points – and thus landed us with super-injunctions.

An MP blithely remarked to me last week that, “Everyone knows who the injuncting footballers are – it’s all over the internet”. Well, she’s wrong – but then, the lady isn’t a soccer fan. There is quite definitely much assertion about the two players involved – but it covers a dozen names….and each opinion is followed by “and that’s definite”. The fact is, lots of journalists know, but most other people don’t.

As for the ‘prominent AV campaigner’ involved in some kind of love-tryst-rat-horror, it could be anyone from Eddie Izzard to Neil Kinnock. Neither of those two have a sex life in the public interest,  but Nick Clegg does – as does Ed Miliband. The trouble is, we don’t know – because some Judge has decided, on an entirely gratuitous (perhaps even political) basis, that the celeb’s interest is more important than ours.

The latest cases follow a plethora of other court actions by actors, footballers and television personalities bagging draconian court orders preventing revelations about extramarital affairs, and much worse. Judges (and the unscrupulous silks appealing to them on behalf of feckless, overpaid idiots) are applying gagging orders using legal instruments originally designed for child murder cases. Some of the justifications are risible – one bewigged twerp last week, for example, declared that the order “was necessary to protect the star’s children from playground bullying”. Maybe the star should’ve thought about his kids before having sex with somebody quite obviously not his wife.

But it’s not just that gagging orders encourage a lack of responsibility, and serve only the rich (poor folks can’t afford them – they simply take the consequences – be they divorce, or having their clothes burnt) it’s the fact that there was a heinous ‘legal’ stage in between child murders and the current obscene exploitation of laws about privacy by the Carter Rucks of this world.

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For the last fifteen or more years, the employees and failing management of child welfare departments up and down the land have been hiding behind ridiculously draconian injunctions. These have covered up everything from judicial paedophilia to psychiatric money-motivated scams and systemic social services sexual abuse of the most abhorrent kind. I didn’t want to get dragged into this nasty demi-monde: some of the victims of abuse are themselves unbalanced – or at times incoherent fantasists. But once you’ve been close to a genuine case, the repulsion drags you back in – if only to stop it happening to some other poor wretch.

During their time as, respectively, Ministers for Women and Children, those champions of social justice Harriet Harman and Ed Balls did sweet diddly-squat to right the appalling wrongs being wrought by the Secret Family Courts in which most of the actions occurred. The proceedings often took place in a suspicious rush, and to the bewilderment of those parents who were about to have their lives turned upside down by them.

In Harman’s case, her dereliction was compounded by the fact that she had some involvement in the drafting of a major cause of such mediaeval Star Chamber processes. Unbelievably, this was the Human Rights Act (HRA) of 1998.

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Having returned to Office after twenty years in the political wilderness, New Labour was puffed up with hubris about its Human Rights Act. In 1999, centrally-involved Home Office Minister Paul Boateng said:

“[Under the Act] it will be unlawful for any public authority to act in ways which are inconsistent with the Convention rights. The Act does not define “public authority” but this will include central government, local authorities, and courts and tribunals. People whose Convention rights are breached by a public authority will be able to sue them in the courts and seek a remedy – including damages if appropriate….”

I do not know of a single instance of this taking place. Boateng continued:

“The Act will definitely affect the way we make decisions involving children. Look at Article 8, which guarantees the right to respect for private and family life. Any decisions concerning children will have to take account of this right. A court making a residence order in favour of one parent will need to take account of the right to a family life for the child, and for both parents…..”

Seen in the light of later abuses of single-mother rights, this reads like a dick joke at a funeral.

Although one of the original drafters of the HRA, Jack Straw has at least had the decency in the decade or more since its passage to accept that it is badly flawed. In 2008, Straw said, “What we want to do is generate a debate about whether there should be a declaration of responsibilities and rights which grow together, the kind of rights we are owed and the rights which we owe, in a single document”. What Mr Straw meant was that the Act was far too much about freedom to (aka license) when it was supposed to be about the ordinary person’s freedom from the sub-species Homo tabloidus yelling into their letter boxes (or hacking their phones) a week after their kids had been murdered by killers entirely missed by ever-vigilant social workers.

As ever with Black Jack, politics got in the way to stop any further action. But not a peep was heard from Harman. Having promised in 2006 to increase media  access to the Secret Family Courts, in 2009 she declared the Labour legislative programme ‘too crowded’ to allow for this.

In doing so, Harriet Harman laid herself open to some pretty unpleasant accusations.

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Harman was a newly qualified solicitor in 1978 when she became legal officer for the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL).  The Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) had been affiliated to the NCCL for about four years. PIE’s members openly argued for the abolition of the age of consent. It is perhaps not surprising that, finding herself in this environment, Harman argued for the age of consent to be lowered to 14, and the decriminalisation of incest.

When the Protection of Children Bill was put before Parliament in order to tighten the laws on child pornography by banning indecent images of under-16s, Harman was at the forefront of the NCCL response.  Signed by Harriett Harman in April 1978, the NCCL’s formal response to the Government proposals to reform sex laws argued that,

“…childhood sexual experiences, willingly engaged in, with an adult result in no identifiable damage…Although this harm may be of a somewhat speculative nature, where participation falls short of physical assault, it is none-the-less justifiable to restrain activities by photographers which involve placing children under the age of 14 (or, arguably, 16) in sexual situations. We suggest that the term ‘indecent’ be qualified as follows: – A photograph or film shall not for this purpose be considered indecent (a) by reason only that the model is in a state of undress (whether complete or partial); (b) unless it is proved or is to be inferred from the photograph or film that the making of the photograph or film might reasonably be expected to have caused the model physical harm or pronounced psychological or emotional disorder.”

Harriet Harman in 2011 with friend and Southwark Labour campaigner John Friary – arrested in February on suspicion of grooming under-age girls for sex.

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While others seek for signs of some odd sexual dimension to Ms Harman herself in this past history, I don’t. The problem remains that she is an extreme sex and gender reformer who, like her great-uncle Lord Longford, never gives any thought to the consequences. Or as otherwise liberal bisexual actor Rupert Everett once said of Harriet, “She is just another f**king New Labour idiot”. Worse still, even when faced with adverse consequences, she refuses to budge.

Ever since its passage – in contrast to her colleague Straw – Harman has been implacably opposed to changes to the Human Rights Act. And in fairness, it as to be pointed out that only last year Nick Clegg said in the Commons that people would “tamper with the Human Rights Act at their peril”.

Yet it is perfectly clear that most recent super-injunctions have been based on the following word for word Article 8 in the Act:

(1) Everyone has the right to privacy for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence. (2) There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.

There are two very obvious points to make about the above. The first is that there are so many caveats to these ‘rights’, like much of the old Weimar Republic’s legislation, at the very least they are create a gap just waiting for any Nazi coach and horses to blast a way through it. Such is the result when politicians are given access to the drafting of citizen safeguards: controlling by instinct and training, they cannot bear to give any real freedoms out at all.

Second – and this is the acid test – look at some of the abuses that have occurred despite the words ‘Everyone has the right to privacy for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence’. Words like Hackgate spring to mind. And what of the phrase ‘There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right’ in the light of Secret Family Courts and ‘legalised’ child napping? Above all, the exploitation of the Act’s wording by those of dubious morals, execrable ethics and great power has been shocking to behold.

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For once, the Conservative Party was right in 1998: it opposed the Human Rights Act, a stand that allowed the Left to depict the Tories as a sulphurous collection of wicked hobgoblins. But that was the pre-Cameroon Conservative Party. In August 2007 and again in February 2009, Cameron pledged to repeal the Act. That, in turn, was before Nick Clegg started to champion it.

Now Coalition Dave is reduced to ‘expressing doubts’ about recent super-injunction judgments, and waffling about a Bill of Rights to replace the Act. Worryingly, however, he has quite brazenly said that he thinks a family ‘leg up’ in getting on career-wise is OK by him. He would say that, given his mother-in-law got him a first job at Carlton TV. So much for meritocracy.

I accept as much as the next person that Coalition government requires compromise. But there is a difference between compromising, and being compromised. On the subject of citizen rights and responsibilities (otherwise known as liberty) equality before the law, judicial separation from politics, and meritocracy in health and career, I stand for no compromise: these are the only absolutes I recognise for what constitutes civilisation. All this needs to be written down and enshrined not in a Bill of Rights – for such things are seen to apply to the citizenry, with an exemption for their governments – but in a Constitution just as binding on the lawmakers as those being asked to obey such laws.

Master of the Rolls Lord Neuberger is currently carrying out a review of the rights and wrongs of the use of super-injunctions. The report, due next month, could lead to a change in the law.

The Americans began with ‘No taxation without representation’. A new beginning for Britain should be ‘No exemption from deserved illumination’.

INVESTMENT ANALYSIS: Nothing is sacred…..except gold.

The baseline assumption of corporate finance that US Treasury debt is ‘risk-free’ has been questioned by S&P. ‘As safe as houses’ is about to be shattered in the UK. Artificial stock market levels could be massively corrected by rising bond yields. In this context, it is hardly surprising that gold has pierced the $1500 ceiling.

People have been asking me from time to time this year whether I regret not taking advantage of the Stock Market’s ‘return to growth’. I tell them no, for three reasons. First, having bought a fair amount of gold, we’ve now doubled our money. I don’t know of any stock market that’s done that. Second, the stock market remains a huge gamble, and winning or losing that bet is now entirely about choosing the right time to get out. There will come a point later this year or perhaps early next when investors will have to sell shares that nobody wants to buy. With gold, you can be certain that – for eighteen months at least – people will be clamouring to buy it. (Real live bullion is selling  at a 15-20% premium over the ‘advertised’ tracker price).

It’s the third reason that most people can’t get their heads round. I tell them that the rise in the ‘value’ of their stocks is illusory, because the spending power of their currency has been eroded. This is a national as well as a personal problem for the Brits, in that the driving force behind such inflation as we have at the moment is largely to do with the expense of importing raw materials and energy. But a pretty large proportion of holidaymakers these days go to Europe – or on long-haul to Australia, South Africa, Canada and so forth. Looking at the £ against the euro since 2006, the exchange rate has slumped from 1.50 to 1.13 – a drop of around 35% in the value of Sterling. Over that time, the £ has halved against the Aussie dollar.

Not only is our spending power being reduced, our capital wealth is about to be hammered as never before. The housing market lost all its value gains of 2010 in the first quarter of 2011. And Jeremy Warner’s comprehensive piece in the Telegraph earlier this week admirably described the real world outside the London Bubble – one in which some northern areas of the country have seen prices drop 60%.

Put those two things together and the picture is far from pretty: for a lot of our citizens, their cash is worth 35% less, and the house 40-50% less. Their private pensions have woefully underperformed, and this – coupled with the Government’s idiot new scheme to reduce the amount we can withdraw from them each year – means that available pension spending power has halved. Housing has, in my view, a good 30% further to fall in the Midlands and South, given the lack of mortgage availability and falling real wages.

But people say to me, “Yes – but you’ll have to convert the gold one day too”. I answer that the same rule of desirability applies: property is an asset with falling value, and even that won’t be realised during 2012 without a long wait and a big price cut. Gold, on the other hand, has much further to climb yet….and is the ultimate collateral for borrowing. A world in which one’s investments and properties are plunging in value is something few people have experienced: in that context, the price of gold could go berserk. Then it too would be a bubble: but if by then you’ve already used it as an asset against which to borrow, that needn’t matter….especially as the value of what one has borrowed will fall in the medium term.

Why borrow, then? Well at my age, I won’t – probably: nothing is definite any more. But were I 43 not 63, I’d buy ‘brown infill’ land – lots of it. This I would see as the ultimate hedge. If the all-out banks going bust and Treasuries unable to bail them out domesday happens, land with water underneath it and good soil on it ensures survival and retained value. And if everyone in the G20 simply winds the inflation/deflationometer and currency variation back to nought (a far more likely scenario in my view) then it is suddenly viable and valuable  building land again.

All the assumptions about falling British individual wealth assume, of course, that the FTSE will keep steady at or above the 5800 mark. Goldman Sachs in particular thinks it will rise another 15% before ‘topping out’ as they put it. ‘Choking’ is another word one could use. Whether it maintains growth or not (and personally I doubt it) gold’s growth will easily outstrip it – on the basis of two big and inevitable future events: the collapse of a 16-nation euro, and the continuing slide in the dollar.

Are there other reasons I think the stock markets will plunge? Yes, lots….in a rational world. This year so far and last, the Dow has been pumped up by QE2. But with their currency on the slide bigtime, the Americans too will soon realise they need something offering more than stocks as an investment to maintain purchasing power. Some will turn to gold, some to oil. However, since S&P’s downgrade of the US outlook last Monday, the writing really is on the wall for Wall Street.

US big business is turning in some stunning results and paying good dividends. But these again are based on cheap money being hoarded and invested – not just on sales and margins. As the wealth spouts upwards and the jobless accept lower wages, mass purchasing power must fall off….as will the tax take for Washington. So the outlook for the economy and the debt will worsen, not improve. S&P got multiply shot up as the messenger, but its view of American debt and economic potential is spot on: stocks are as much about future potential as past performance.

So you’re a US investor, and you have a choice: to stay with a high stock market offering a lousy outlook – or to invest in an American debt where you can earn more from a desperately strapped Government. The long-predicted exit from the stock market and into Fed bonds then looks like a certainty to me.

Earlier this year, I wrote about the magic 5% figure on 30-year Treasuries. The current yield has fallen back slightly to 4.46% – and the renowned Texas-based independent modelling outfit FFC has this falling back to 4.18 during the year. I distrust models, and always will. I also think this forecast owes more to past data and wish-fulfilment than what is really likely to happen. It is based on a ‘normalisation’ of the American economy over time: not factored in are the S&P downgrade, the bunfight between Congress and Obama, and what Ben Bernanke has to say on the 22nd June. New economic experiences always destroy the validity of models.

I haven’t changed my outlook at all. If anything, recent events have firmed it up. Rising Asian and European interest rates have pinned Ben into a corner, and this plus downgrades will force the US to pay more to borrow. Long Treasury rates will inevitably rise beyond the psychological 5%, and the rush to get out of stocks will become a stampede.

The UK will be different, I suspect – but no better. Our cost of borrowing will also rise, but so too will concern about the parlous state of our finances. At some point, the bond market trade-off between risk and yield becomes critical: investors will back off completely one day. While the EU can still talk a good game about guaranteeing investor funds centrally (although there is more talk of haircuts) a guarantee from the UK Treasury is no longer much of a guarantee.

S&P only downgraded the US outlook. It remains to be seen what they’ll say, in due course, about us. Although everyone seems to have forgotten this, our own outlook was downgraded nearly two years ago.  But then Dave and his white knights charged to the rescue, achieving….nothing. One of the biggest reasons the Osborne programme of ‘cuts’ has proved to be blunt is the spiralling cost of being in the EU – with whom Britain’s trade gap widened yet again last month. All this makes one wonder how long the credit-rating agencies will give Blighty the benefit of the doubt.

When I first raised the question of Britain’s debt credibility in 2006, I got a shoal of emails (nby didn’t have a comment thread) wittering on about the long-term nature of gilt debt, and how my scenario of banking collapse was a fantasy. Things have moved on a tad since then: no matter how long term debts are, they have to be serviced. In this sense, the difference between us and Greece is merely one of degree. We have a poor economic output, an unbalanced economy, falling tax incomes and banks only partially repaired…with a Treasury not capable of doing Bailout II. I will leave the final word to the yesterday’s FT:

‘At some point, bond markets will turn. When markets turn they can do so quickly. Sadly, the chances of S&P nudging the politicians into action before the markets torpedo them do not look good.’