At the End of the Day

This is a short piece tonight, because it doesn’t take long to say this.

I understand from various media mates (and two reputable sites – one UK, one US) that Amy Winehouse ‘was considering adoption during the week before she died’.

Was she, I wonder, considering adoption of a new lifestyle devoid of long and gruelling tours regularly interspersed with massive drug intakes as offered by her ever-helpful management? Or was it small, defenceless children she had in mind?

The saddest thing about this news snippet is that the reptiles who surrounded this fragile woman allowed her for even one second to believe that there was a social services department  anywhere on the planet outside Zimbabwe likely to allow her to adopt so much as a gerbil.

And the clincher would surely have been that Amy was sexually straight. So not even Haringey would’ve considered her.

This is indeed a mad, mad, mad, mad, mad, mad world. She is well out of it.

 

Is Piers Morgan turning Hackgate into Hackmate?

Morgan with ‘old mucker’ Macca

Already suspected of hacking the phones of ‘friends’ Paul McCartney and Amanda Holden, Piers Morgan looks set to be sued by Nancy Dell’Olio

It emerged this morning BST that Nancy Dell’Olio, the wife of Britain’s former England soccer boss Sven Goran Erriksson, has spoken to Operation Weeting police officers of her “strong suspicion” that her phone was hacked by ‘friend’ Piers Morgan while he was editor of the Mirror tabloid newspaper some years ago.

Ms Dell’Olio has told UK gossip journalist Mandrake that she is considering legal action against Morgan. It seems that the hacking took place at a time when Morgan’s newspaper was ‘singularly well-informed about her movements’.

Dell’Olio, who is a lawyer by profession, thus probably knows what she’s on about. Although Morgan continues to deny that he was ever involved in phone-hacking, Dell’Olio says, “Something fishy was going on. I would, for instance, leave a message for Sven suggesting dinner – and then, when I arrived at the restaurant, I’d find a Mirror photographer waiting.”

Of course, the embarrassment facing most of the Moron’s alleged victims is that they’re supposed to be his friends.  Nancy herself admits,”I know Piers socially – I was at Celia’s [Mrs Arse] book launch – so it’s all a bit awkward.” But not so awkward, it seems, that she won’t go ahead if she can nail the Romping one.

Meanwhile, attention is turning away from the self-incrimination evident throughout both of Arse Rim Pong’s narcissistic ‘books’, and towards the Grime Parson’s Facebook page. Most hacks are increasingly of the opinion that it’s much quicker and easier to simply go to the site, trawl through his ‘mates’, and then ask them if the lovely Piers ever listened in on their messages.

The major difference between Piers Morgan and his partner in crime Andy Coulson is that whereas Coulson resigned twice because of things he knew nothing about, Morgan the Pirate was fired once for something he thought he knew all about – the Iraq War – but clearly didn’t. He will soon be fired again, this time because he thought he knew how to tough it out with denials, but actually didn’t.

Follow the full saga of The End of the Piers Show here.

ON THE 200th DAY OF HACKGATE, IT’S THE POLS AND THE MEDIA WHO ‘DON’T GET IT’

Dear old pals about to break the Broadcasting Act

‘Get Cameron’ is the aim of those who don’t ‘get’ Hackgate

“He doesn’t get it. He just doesn’t get it, does he? He still doesn’t get it. Members of this House can see quite clearly that the Prime Minister simply doesn’t get it”.

Yes thank you there, Ed, very good. Let’s hope your nose job at least cures the irritating part of your speech patterns, even if it can’t do anything about that OCD cross you bear. But please, do us all favour can you, and unbrief all the other Labour robots on the subject of endless repetition about “not getting it”?

Because it could so easily blow up in your face – and destroy the nose job (done privately for £1300 Ithangyoo) which has caused such widespread snoring among your audience to date.

Ed Miliband himself didn’t get it until just a few short weeks ago. Or rather, he did get it – ‘Crikey Tom, have you read this? It could sink all of us. Are you sure I should be meeting this Rupert bloke?’ – and that’s why he waited fully five months after the Newscorp solids began flying before making David Cameron squirm. And of course, most of the offences, about which we read day in day out now, took place during Blair and Brown’s watch. Just look at all the pictures with Andy Hayman at Blair’s side. Or shots of Brown boozing with Morgan…while they both plotted how to script a PPB – and then disguise it as a chat show interview.

But there I go you see, being partisan again. Why do I feel the need to? The answer is because, in the last fortnight Hackgate has moved on from being about righting a wrong, to being just more of the same old Left versus Right. For months, Tom Watson and Chris Bryant (both Labour MPs) ploughed a lonely trough while their leader Ed Miliband gave them the “You hit him and I’ll hold your coat” speech. When it became clear that Newscorp was irretrievably mired – and only then – did the Liebour Ladyship join the fray. So it’s no coincidence that, since the day it did, the agenda of Get Murdoch changed to Get the Tories.

The words ‘Tom Baldwin’ do not appear in any of the Guardian’s Hackgate stories this week – I know, I’ve done the Thesaurus check and a full search. But they do mention people apologising to Piers Morgan. Rather a lot, actually. As long as Alan Rusbridger sees a possibility of the Mirror’s demise as a result of what’s now emerging, that’s going to be Big G’s tack – until such time as the volume of grime at MGN becomes so apparent, they have to tag along grudgingly. (For the Guardian now, read the Barclay brothers’ Telegraph Group until two months ago: they’re all as bad as each other).

Tom Watson has yet to utter the phrase “Mirror Group Newspapers”. Unless my memory’s defective, he hasn’t mentioned Piers Morgan in a single tweet. He just wanted to get James Murdoch back to the Star Chamber, and wind up the Met to start an email-blagging Unit. He is absolutely right to have done both those things. But why hasn’t he asked for Piers Morgan, Sly Bailey and the folks at Vodafone to attend the CM&S committee? Ah well, you see, um….that could rebound on us, hmm?

To its eternal credit, the Independent is living up to its name by bashing away at the rotting door that was once Piers Morgan. James Hanning and Matt Chorley have a piece today gently pointing out that Piers Morgan stole took possession of letters in turn stolen from James Hewitt, the former lover of Saint Diana. I’d imagine the libel laws have stopped them from spelling this one out more, but the same duo are still also hammering into Newscorp with an equally revealing piece  helping the confused reader understand how Harbottle & Lewis’s ‘opinion’ on Murdoch’s 200 Royal emails was just another Wapping Lie.

But aside from the Indie, the rest of the mainstream media are reverting to role: “Seefingizzlike, what we do, right, is, er, cover up the nasties on our side, and invent new ones to chuck at the uvva lot, right?”

Something tells me that Chris Bryant probably won’t do this – as the impression I have of this chap is that he is a gent, and thus very happy to wave the watered crucifix at every Devil he encounters, regardless of Party. But like David Davies on the Tory benches, he is a notable exception to the general rule.

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What the politico-media axis don’t get about Hackgate is that the curtain is about to come down on their cosy game of back scratching and stabbing. And they don’t get that Hackgate is the worst symptom yet of a knackered culture, the knackering of which is largely down to their polemically blind and cynically tactical can-kicking in the past.

That process became critical with MPs’ expenses. It gained further traction via the disgusting, childish and devious way MPs then dealt with it. That in turn was followed by the realisation that David Cameron would do anything to let Rupert Murdoch and his vile empire take over from the BBC. (I deplore the BBC too, but my motto remains ‘Anyone but Newscorp’). When this too was amplified by the depraved actions of senior Newscorp personnel – all either employed by or close friends of Camerlot – the PM waited until the very last second before, under extreme duress, reversing his decision to let the odious Jeremy Hunt just get on with business.

In this, he was no different to Blair and his Iraq War/EU policies being directly driven by Murdoch – a fact loudly reported by the good TV works of another Hackgate hero from No Side, Peter Oborne. But the pols are still arguing for cheap political gain.

What’s about to happen is a broadening of Hackgate into fuller diagnosis of yet another cultural descent into the slime: the growth in, and active commercial encouragement of, the Personal-Information-Instant-Fame Business; and the erosion of business, media and political ethics in exploiting (rather than tackling) such an appalling malaise.

All the bread, circuses and bollocks surrounding the activities of phonecos and what they get up to may still come out. All the fakery beyond Piers and Gordon’s televised (and scripted) love-in during May 2010 will also go under the spotlight. Some of the as yet unreported nastiness of Simon Cowell and all his ghastly works will emerge during the public garrotting of Piers Morgan. Facebook’s darker side should emerge, as will that of Google, in their remorseless search to know everything about everybody…..by making them feel more famous and important than they could ever be in reality.

Reality is once again the key word here. The lesson to be learned from Hackgate – and for that matter the Strauss-Kahn affair – is actually a very simple one: our Anglo-American culture has become addicted to fakery. Election to public office has become about making things look other than they are. So too has populist television and biased media reporting.

The bottom line is that millions of citizens think they are important enough to be famous, and in this they merely reflect the over-inflated egos of those who are. The drive of everyone to achieve some kind of public profile has not only distracted both the leaders and the led from the real cultural and economic issues we face: it has invited Big Brother into all our phones, computers and homes by the front door.

Over in the States we see intransigent, media-addicted Congressmen refusing to budge from their impasse with a President who was elected by that same addiction. So too, in the UK, do we see the opportunists scrambling to gain a few feet of ground on their way to be first over the cliff.

I have for many years now said that opportunists are people who always miss the real opportunity. Blair demonstrated this rule admirable after his 1997 landslide, and our Establishment leaders have done it again on Hackgate: faced with the chance to raise themselves at last in our estimations, they have descended into the cess pit of advantage the second it became available.

This is why it isn’t just David Cameron who “doesn’t get it”. None of them do.

At the End of the Day

Louise Mensch, squabbling Congresses, and the rise of extremism

I note that Guido Fawkes is championing Louise Mensch as a brave defender of our freedoms. If you go to the MP’s twitter thread, you’ll also note that other boobies are showering her with praise. She’s clearly enjoying the fan mail.

Ms Mensch’s bravery so far in the Hackgate saga can be summarised as follows: she made two accusations under the safe umbrella of Parliamentary privilege; they were both wrong; her consequent apology to Piers Morgan has given him an annoying reprieve; and she fobbed off an alleged blackmailer by admitting to the accusations anyway.

I want if I may to focus for a para on the last of these courageous acts. First off, none of the accusations were serious. Dancing with some obscure personage while inebriated isn’t a capital offence yet. Second, there is no address on the ‘blackmail’ letter. It has no printed letterheading. It is amateurish in the extreme. My suspicion is that it is at best a prank, and at worst a fake. The latter alternative would beg the question, ‘Who faked it and why?’ Either way, in dismissing it, Louise Mensch has shown all the bravery of a battle-dress squaddie swatting a fly.

Over in the US, the Democrats blame the Republicans, and the Republicans blame the Democrats. The Left tars the Right with risking higher interest rates that will wipe out what the Americans call their middle class; the Right says debt reduction has to start somewhere – and only by sticking to its guns can that start right now.

Back over here again, Hackgate is quickly degenerating into a purely Party political issue. After a week in which the only thing the Guardian has highlighted about Piers Morgan is Louise Mensch’s apology to him, we now look forward to another week in which Tom Watson is hungry for new scalps….provided they don’t work for left-wing newspapers. Tom is a good bloke with a dry sense of humour, and a penetrating style of interrogation. But he doesn’t want to investigate either Tom Baldwin’s exceedingly murky past – or the incompetently corrupt Mirror Group management under which (it is now clear) Piers Morgan got up to lots of things on a par with his close mates Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson of News International.

What do all these apparently random news developments have in common?

Quite a few things actually, but above all:

1. Blind partisanship and hypocrisy.

2. Showboating and grandstanding.

3. Scant regard for the ramifications for the ordinary citizen.

4. No interest at all in arriving at an objective truth.

“Ah yes,” we all observe, nodding with more than a hint of tiredness at the end of the day, “That’s politicians for you”.

For Western political ‘leaders’ in 2011 – be they Italian, Australian, German, British or American – the missing ingredient is easy to summarise: honesty about reality. They are, all of them, like fee-seeking consultants arguing the case for medicatory or surgical intervention, while the patient dies of a congenital condition.

I call again and again for Accountable Leadership and Radical Reality. But what we get is unaccountable blame-storming and backwards-looking fantasy.

Now there is a lot more to my thesis tonight than rhetoric. My original discipline was political history, and since 2006 I have been using the Weimar Republic analogy. That is, I have been saying for five years that despised, democratically elected buffoons can be very quickly replaced by authoritarian leaders. In 2006, I was dismissed as an alarmist crank – but not today.

Consider the parallels with 1930: a global economic mess, a widely distrusted political class, minorities offering an outlet for anger, and a media set continuing to behave in a manner so irresponsible, it almost seems to be begging for neo-authoritarian regulation.

Take dear old Boris ‘Harmless Really’ Johnson. He started off calling Hackgate ‘a load of left-wing bollocks’, but now his enormous weight has been added to the already creaking anti-media bandwagon. As a rabble-rouser, he has the capacity to lay into Islamics and Bankers in one fell swoop. Thus, his appeal can be both National (Muslims) and Socialist (Bankers). Even worse, both of those groups has behaved in a staggeringly insensitive manner.

National. Socialist. Nazional Sozialismus. Nazi.

Don’t get me wrong: nobody is more critical of the Matthew Goodwin-to-Peter Hain axis of invented ‘Nazi’ enemies than I. But BoJo could do all the things he needs to do to take charge in Britain – the ambition to do which obviously consumes him – and look nothing like Hitler or his SA, SS or any other parts of the 1930s paraphernalia. History won’t repeat – there will be no torchlit rallies and jackbooted goose-stepping – but as Twain remarked, history rhymes.

Or take dear old Harriet ‘Obviously Bonkers’ Harman. She has an even more clever rhyming strategy…..a limp-wristed, spineless pillock as the front-man for her own brand of fascist correctness. In fact, she can do exactly what Josef Djugashvili did: demonise both police and right-wing press as the allies of greedy bankers; and put forward the case for a Caring (Nanny) EU State as the antidote to globalist free-market Friedmanite drivel. Again, all of her potential targets currently display the sensitivity of a Chinese policeman in Tibet.

Socialism in One Country (1931) followed by repelling the foreign Nazi hordes (1941). Stalinism.

It really doesn’t matter whether you’re replacing a corrupt and weak democratic regime or a smug, insouciant Tsarist State. When nobody in authority displays the slightest sign of having an answer to the problems faced by that society – beyond taking a bribe – then the door is wide-open to the opportunist power freaks. Add to this a general populace in the UK sinfully ignorant of history’s lessons (and woefully fed bread-and-circus dumbness) and you arrive at Plato’s greatest nightmare: the uninformed, distracted electorate.

We already display in Britain (and the US for that matter) all the signs of an extreme culture that cannot compromise about anything, preferring instead to stick with dated beliefs based on bad science. Examples of this are as eclectic as, on the one hand, a free-market model insisting that everyone must look after themselves – a thought in complete denial of the certainty of becoming old and frail; or the insistence by media contractors that lasting talent can emerge from risible talent shows that are nothing but a vehicle for the cruel egotism of people like Simon Cowell and Piers Morgan – an idea unable to grasp that no great star today graduated from this school for scoundrels.

The growing awareness that tabloid ‘concern’ and television ‘reality’ are both of entirely bogus manufacture is a healthy sign. But the revelation that Westminster is devoid of ideas, research, ethics and solutions is, while welcome, an incredibly dangerous threat to our liberties. We no longer have an erudite electorate capable of understanding either the importance or responsibilities of liberal democracy. Given the careering truck of global fiscal disaster heading our way, the chances of that liberal democratic ideal surviving look depressingly slim.

I’m sure Louise Mensch is a well-meaning person. Unfortunately, she personifies what’s wrong with the people who stand for election in our country: that is, Ms Mensch is a half-baked, badly-briefed lightweight more interested in her own media profile than effective governance. Her interventions are nothing more than spanners thrown in the works of cultural management.

Such are the people swept away by revolutions than could never happen here.

HACKGATE DAY 199: HOW THE AUTHORITIES WERE WARNED ABOUT HACKING DANGER IN 1999

Steve Nott

Concerned salesman went to Mirror….but Piers Morgan’s paper behaved suspiciously, did nothing

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Vodafone blithely gave out information about how to hack to anyone who asked, claimed on radio there was ‘no risk’

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How Steve Nott’s account suggests that TV news media might also have used hacking

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Has he unearthed a broader security conspiracy?

Slog comment threader Steve Nott has revealed how he went to the police, the newspapers and other key institutions in 1999. He devoted a year thereafter to warning anyone who’d listen about how easy it was to hack a mobile phone. The cynicism of the tabloids in the way they handled his campaign is exactly what you’d expect….and Morgan’s Mirror was the worst of the lot. It was not until July 18th this year that Operation Weeting finally interviewed Mr Nott for three hours. He is to be called by the Leveson Inquiry.

In late 1998, salesman Steve Nott lost his mobile phone network coverage, and rang Vodafone from a service station – to ask how he could access his message. Vodafone told him exactly how – without making any checks – and helpfully added that Steve could use this to get into anyone’s mobile at any time. Says Nott:

“I was gobsmacked that it was so easy to be able to do this, and spent the next couple of months having fun and games with my mates phones, work colleagues phones and so on. I realised that this issue of easily being able to intercept voicemail, change welcome greetings, delete messages and change the voicemail PIN was too serious to play about with and decided to make some noise about the risks to National Security I’d stumbled across.”

The response wherever he went was an unhelpful yawn. “I called Vodafone and told them of my worry. They weren’t helpful. I called them on various occasions explaining my concerns and still no joy.” In fact, the situation was serious because none of Vodafone’s handbooks told phone users how to protect themselves by using their own secret pin to block unauthorised entry to messages.

Steve in turn got nowhere when he spoke to Orange about it. Imagine that. So he decided that, in this our country with a free press, he’d go to the media about it. His first stop was The Mirror….edited at that time by Piers Morgan. Steve again:

“I was in London and made a phone call to the Daily Mirror and explained to them I had a story. They were very interested and after giving them the instructions to ‘hack’ into the voicemails they said it’s possibly going to be one of the biggest stories that decade and would make front page and couldn’t believe how easy it was to do and the fact that nobody knew about it. They said they were going to try it out for themselves and see how it all works. I called the Daily Mirror a few times and they kept saying they were working on it and to be patient as it was going to be a massive story.  Twelve days went by, still waiting for front page headlines as promised, I rang them up and they said they weren’t interested anymore. I was amazed, one minute, massive news story promises and excitement then ‘nothing’.”

It’s highly probable that Steve had given the Mirror a rather ‘good’ idea. Or it could be that the story (having reached Piers Morgan, as it inevitably would do) was squashed. If it was, then you don’t have to be a genius to work out why: either Morgan was already using the scam….or he’d seen it’s potential.

Then in June 1999, Steve took the story to News International’s head of Consumer Affairs, Paul Crosbie.

” Paul asked me to demonstrate how anyone’s voicemail system was accessed,” says Nott, “and called some colleagues in the office, asked them to not answer the next call so I could call them and show him. Paul Crosbie explained to me that it was a massive story and thanked me for coming to see him and expect the story to be in the paper within 48 hours on the front page. He said I was going to be a public hero because of the risk to National Security which I had brought to the media’s attention. Guess what…..no news story, not a dickie bird. I couldn’t get hold of Paul Crosbie again after the first meeting.”

If the saga had only gone this far, Steven Nott’s well-documented account would be further damning evidence of how both NI and MGN grabbed an idea and used it or nefarious ends. But for me, the real tragedy – the real scandal – in his story is that none of the institutions supposed to protect the citizen gave a monkey’s as Steve’s one man campaign sought to alert someone in authority.

He called the Security Services, who thanked him for the information…and did nothing. He spoke to New Scotland Yard, and also wrote them a detailed letter explaining his findings. The Yard didn’t reply.

He wrote to the DTI, and never received a reply. He then contacted the BBC, who at last showed some interest. Steve was interviewed by Radio 5 Live, the show airing on October 22nd 1999. It was presented by Adam Kirtley. Steve remembers:

“During the programme, Vodafone’s Mike Caldwell said he didn’t know why I was making such a fuss, as it never has and never would cause a problem.”

Then something happened that should set every nose in Fleet Street twitching. Steve Nott continues:

“I also spoke to Chris Choi from ITN and he was very excited about the implications and massive security flaw. I had an ITN newscrew at my house the same day and was filmed in my back garden about the story. Chris Choi said it was going to be breaking headlines. Guess what…..nothing happened. No broadcast, nothing.”

You can read the full, fascinating story of Steven Nott’s fight against disgraceful Establishment apathy (or – see below – something worse) by going to his website Hackergate. This has only been up and running for a few days, but has already attracted great interest. If nothing else, the site contains a host of chaaracters and evidence offering both Sue Akers and Lord Leveson lots of other names to put on the grilling list. Paul Crosbie, I would think, has some explaining to do: likewise Piers Morgan and Chris Choi.

UPDATE 11th January 2012: I have been in communication with Paul Crosbie, and I am satisfied that any malign role on his part is unfortunately exaggerated in this piece – for which I unreservedly apologise. I’m sorry if this retraction appears to have been displayed on P. 56 among the postal bargain ads: perhaps this is something we can all work together to change in the near future.

But returning to the wider issue of the authorities doing nothing, was it just apathy….or something more sinister?

I have blogged for years on the subject of how most ISPs and phonecos are allowed to behave like pirates and avoid legal regulation with any teeth because the police and security services need them. The one big nuisance for our interior security Ministries about Hackgate is that it has made public something they’ve probably been doing with impunity for twenty years or more, going back to the dawn of mobiles.

It seems very odd indeed that for most of those years, the biggest mobile operator in the UK, Vodafone, produced no details about personal security protection in their manuals….and then blatantly tried to downplay the danger on national BBC Radio. Were they asked to leave out these details by more shadowy characters? Was the unwillingness of either tabloid or ITN to run the story as much a case of being warned off by the security services?

Nobody should regard those questions as wild, paranoid conspiracy theory. All the ISPs now have GCHQ monitoring software installed that covers every email written in, and received by, Britain. We know from our unhappy time under the Home Secretaryship of Jacqui Smith that she blithely gave these and more powers to GCHQ – whose demands to monitor the ‘danger’ posed by a tiny minority of militants has given them carte blanche to watch, listen to and transcribe every human contact we have with one another in the UK. We also know that Ms Smith lied to Parliament about having cancelled a ‘test’ programme of monitoring that would’ve cost a staggering £13 billion. The test went on secretly to become the real thing – and the £13 billion was duly spent.

One suspects that this won’t come under Lord Leveson’s remit. But it ought to.

At the End of the Day

Although today isn’t going to figure in my Top 100 at the Gates of wherever I wind up, it has been one of the best ever examples of the old Buddhist adage, ‘Good will always come from bad’. Having had my Gmail account blagged, most of my contacts got a semi-literate email suggesting I’d been mugged at knifepoint in Madrid. It was, of course, a scam organised by mysterious Masonic supporters of Piers Morgan, and also a naked attempt to get money out of my friends and fans.

To say it messed up my day would be something of an understatement. I went round in the usual circles with Google, who were about as useful and effective as a colander in an Atlantic storm. Every Help message, Chat Room and Emergency thingy I went to promised THIS will work, but none of it did.

But the pleasing result was that mates from around the world emailed, texted and phoned. They offered everything from sarcasm, irony, and genuine sympathy at my plight. Quite a few asked what I’d been doing in Madrid, and had I tried the British Consulate for help. But the bottom line was lots of fun conversations with folks I hadn’t heard from in a while.

Another good result was that my post about it at The Slog got nearly 1,000 hits. The vast majority were David Icke apostles suggesting I learn Venusian, but hey – it’s all good for the stats.

Before the problem emerged, however, I had been John of Greengages. My elder daughter is addicted to greengage jam, and as she’ll be here in a couple of weeks, I was collecting the fruit on a near-industrial scale. It’s by far the easiest jam to make (because it tastes great almost no matter what you do) but the hardest to make set (because it requires little or no sugar). So the trick is to pick them on the early side, and then add special jam-setting sugar.

As for the mirabelles, there are now so many that I’ve been reduced to inventing a new harvesting method: shaken and stirred. You lay a waterproof outside tablecloth on the ground, and shake the branches. That’s it. We have two enormous buckets in the cellar containing air-tight bin bags – covered in wall-bricks to stop nosey wildlife getting in – and they’re crammed with ripe mirabelles. I reckon the only practical way to use them up is going to be fermentation and then bottling. Alcohol is filthy stuff, but needs must.

Tomorrow will be mainly prunes. You can dry, salt, cook-and-freeze, jam, or make liqueur from prunes. The last of these requires patience and rough Armagnac, but it’s a wonderfully forgettable experience when you drink it, in that it produces a trance-like state few other chemical equations can. The hangover the following day, however, is unforgettable.

All Sloggers please note

Slog’s email blagged: update

I now can’t get into my existing Gmail account at all. And all my send addresses of subscribers are in there. And you can’t transfer gmail addresses at one Google account to another. And there is no live/contact address for free gmail help.

It isn’t an ordinary hacking: these comedians have changed all my settings, passwords, security codes, security questions and email recovery address. It looks like an attempt to make it very difficult to get in, or at data. It’ll be at least 24 hours before Gmail sort it.

In an emergency or with a story, you can now reach me on sloggers.roost@gmail.com. But I can’t send to my list from there (see above) so you won’t get email alerts from me for at least 24 hours.

In the meantime, you’ve probably received at least one sort of scam email using my Gmail address. Ignore it, and preferably don’t open it.

Sorry about this.

The Slog

HACKGATE DAY 198: Does Piers long for those days when he really was The Insider?

Morgan’s narrow escape from insider trading charges is yet another cloud from his dubious past

It occurred to me last night that there are millions of Americans who don’t know anything like as much about Romping Arse Piers Morgan as we unlucky souls over here do. So as The Slog gets 15% of its readership from the US of A, this article is primarily targeted towards those folks. However, there may also be lots of you in the UK who, either through memory loss or being incredibly young, may not know the full story of those clouds forever hanging over Arse Rim Pong.

The irony of the title of Morgan’s first book is that, at one point in 2005, he was very much accused of being an insider. James Hipwell (the man who last week told the Independent that the idea of Morgan having “never knowingly published a story based on phone-hacking” was “inconceivable”) has been made to look ‘dodgy’ as a witness is his former employer’s tweets – the very same Piers Morgan. This is because in 2006, the whistleblower Hipwell was convicted of tipping shares in his Mirror column, while also buying them. (The offences occurred in 2000, for which Hipwell was fired).

As usual, however, Moron’s stance on this is very misleading. And tends to leave his own role in the scandal out.

For when he was Mirror editor, Piers Morgan “encouraged” his City columnists to buy and sell shares themselves, James Hipwell claimed in court at the time.  The share tipster said he had been “very open” about his own share dealings and that no one at the paper had ever suggested he was doing anything wrong. Asked under oath whether Mr Morgan knew what he was doing, Mr Hipwell replied: “Yes, he did. I made no secret that was what I did, I was encouraged to do so.” In fact, Hipwell told the jury that his former editor Morgan had used the analogy of someone who had “never been in a car trying to teach someone else to drive” as his rationale for why the paper’s City tipsters should trade in shares themselves.

When the MGN high-ups found out what was going on, Hipwell was given the boot: but as you’d expect of the MGN management, the police were not called in. More grubby stuff  then came to light. Morgan was dragged into the scandal because he had bought £20,000 of shares in Viglen, a technology company owned by Sir Alan Sugar, one day before it was tipped by the Hipwell column. His shares doubled in value when the company announced it was moving to set up an internet business. Morgan insisted that this – let’s not beat about the bush here – insider trading – was “a coincidence”. As a defence, it’s right up there with Newscorp phones accidentally going off in pockets 37 times….and then accessing celeb voicemails. But astonishingly, an internal MGN ‘inquiry’ cleared Morgan of any wrong doing.

The Daily Mirror was then quite rightly accused of a harbouring a “cavalier culture” by the Press Complaints Commission, following which CNN host Piers Morgan, upright defender of his innocence against the groundless attacks of lying smearers, was forced to apologise.

What I’d like Piers to do now is tell us all this:

1. If he was innocent, why did he apologise to the PCC?

2. Did he ever contest Hipwell’s evidence? I can’t find anything saying he did: but if he didn’t, why not?

3. How come – as with the now arrested and charged Andy Coulson – everyone saw and heard Piers doing one thing, but he and he alone insists another thing happened…or it’s all made up? He serenaded the Mirror newsroom using facts that could only have come from hacking Paul McCartney’s phone. He was Mirror editor when Amanda Holden was tipped off that her phone was being hacked by the Mirror. He paced up and down the newsroom 24/7, avidly looking at everyone’s activities and stories; hacking was rife at the time, but he didn’t see any of it, and he definitely never used any of it. But on Radio 4 two years ago, he said he did.

Morgan’s encouragement of James Hipwell led to him going to jail. But Piers never lifted a finger to help him, even though (if the allegations was true) he was insider trading more criminally than Hipwell. Somehow, he wriggled away from an insider trading charge….yet now rips Hipwell as ‘a jailbird’.

Such a lovely bloke, eh? You know, sometimes you can pinpoint an arsehole by his actions and statements. And quite often, by the company he keeps. This is Piers with one of his great buddies only a few years back:

Yes, it’s the utterly depraved former Newscorp CEO Rebekah Brooks. Yesterday here in the UK, it emerged that Brooks had given a mobile phone to the mother of murdered kiddy Sarah Payne “as a gift”….and then hacked it. You think she can’t go any lower than that? Wait until the civil cases start coming through before Justice Vos: the evidence of her direct use of, and commissioning of, phone-hack stings is enormous and damning.

But there’s more than guilt by association involved in my bringing this to your attention, oh American cousins and favourite allies: for when Piers was editor of The News of the World in the 1990s, a young cub reporter was his assistant for much of the time, and talks fondly of all the tricks learned at Morgan’s knee. Her name? Why, none other than Rebekah Brooks.

CNN beware: if you want a piece of devious low-life anchoring your CNN chat slot, then give Piers your unwavering support. Morgan can smear his critics as liars, drunks, druggies and jailbirds,  but he can’t smear The Slog or Private Eye….neither of whom he has tweeted against.

The reason is simple: we’re telling the truth, and he knows it. Piers Morgan is toast, trust me: half a dozen entirely respectable journalists are, as I speak, following up leads on Piers’ use of illegality to get tabloid stories. They’re finding more and more formerly scared folks now happy to talk. The Lord Leveson Press Inquiry starts very soon, and the Chairman has made clear his determination to find every hacker in town. There is no way Piers Morgan can come out of that squeaky clean – or anything like it.

You read it here first.

Follow the full story at The End of the Piers Show

Footnote: UK blogger Guido Fawkes continues to ignore The Slog’s exclusive on Amanda Holden’s phone being hacked during Piers Moron’s watch as Mirror editor. One wonders why.

At the End of the Day

The perspective offered by assaults on the senses

I have never seen nature’s fecundity at quite the level of excess we have in Lot et Garonne at the moment. The damsons are are as sweet as blueberrries. The mirabelles have a perfect pink blush, the greengages fall apart in one’s hands, releasing the most amazing scent and flavour. We have pears at least five weeks ahead of themselves, cooking apples about to go rotten on the branch unless we pick and freeze them, and young prunes not yet too sweet…so you can pretend they’re Victoria plums.

Our two terriers are into everything that drops to the garden floor. But as soft fruit has stones (and they eat the whole thing) defaecation on their part becomes a painful process. The resultant residue is an odd mix of crunch and squelch. Sorry: bit too much detail there.

I was mowing the lower field this afternoon, and the house martins were once again ‘beating me up’. For those readers born after 1960, this phrase is used in the World War 2 sense of spitfire pilots larking about by flying at hedge-level in order to frighten folks. In fact, the martins are just playing: they duck and dive around the tractor-mower and just above my head, their speed and grace a constant amazement to me, a mere earth-bound hominid. I’m sure like me you’ve dreamt at times of being able to fly, the most liberating thing about the dream being that it is so easy to fly once you know how. The terrible disappointment of waking up to find the secret has vanished is as bad as it gets.

Most of the hedgerow on two sides of our land is sloe bush, and in our early years down here the collection of these for making sloe gin became something of a tradition. I have to say, it’s one I’ve grown out of: the resultant liqueur is powerful and a perfect pousse-cafe, but  one winds up with so much of it, the only solution is to damage a thousand livers with gifts. This is something about which I feel increasingly guilty. But the rest of the hedge is ash, and therein lies a short story.

We bought the house in 1998. To mark the borders of its terrain, the previous owners had planted ash trees at rather too regular intervals. Ash trees in south-west France are a bit like sycamores in the UK: something of a weed. In fact, they’re much prettier than sycamore trees, but they do grow like topsy. So over the years, we’ve thinned them out. It has become something of a hobby of mine – rather than kill the tree stumps – to trail the shoots from them horizontally to form a live hedge. This drives Jan mad, as she sees it as the creation of constant work to hack it all back regularly – and further evidence of my borderline compulsive condition.

Be that as it may, there is something intensely satisfying about, year by year, yard by yard, joining up the stumps to make a hedge which, in the end, has wound up looking rather smart. Even if I do say so myself.

The evening light tonight was staggering. Dark orange, enough to highlight red leaves in some of the bushes we have – and yet soft enough to make every white look pink, and tinge the blue patches in the sky with flecks of green. As the light faded, a dark grey cloud above the sunflowers was made to seem almost royal blue. I take pictures of such things, but no photograph can reproduce the effect on the human eye of watching such a display, having used the brain behind that eye to appreciate it on myriad levels.

This is the sort of end to a day that makes a nonsense of fame, wealth, chat shows, tabloid editorship, financial news and television. The sort of gentle dusk that enables even the amoral lies of contemporary culture to seem not just unimportant, but even bearable. We are a very self-important species having only an ephemeral effect on the planet, an orbiting sphere of far greater moment than us. For we are but creatures programmed to find all these colours, fruits, birds and climatic effects pleasing. The effects themselves are something vastly superior to anything we will ever be.

OPINION: The world is an economic crock likely to lead to an isolated Britain….

…so please can we have some imagination applied to foreign policy?

I understand that global economic crises and US debt stand-offs are bringing improved News Station ratings in their wake. If so, it represents the only good piece of business news anywhere on the planet at the moment.

We in the UK have a faint, comparative glimmer, because our borrowing costs have fallen below those of the US for the first time in 15 months. But this is only because we are on the way to default, whereas they’re into the final furlong. The markets foolishly continue to worry that the Congress v White House Daily Show is for real, although I can’t imagine why. Of course, now and then in even the smartest circus, performers do fall off the high wire. But such accidents are rare.

Credit Suisse, meanwhile, has had a few accidents along the way, and thus parted company with 2000 people. I knew the number from insiders beforehand; what I didn’t know was just how badly sales and trades had slumped – by the best part of three fifths. Credit Suisse has been heavily involved in the Greek can-kicking contest, and was one of the first to spot that Italy was a key debt guarantor for the Athenians. Just to reassure everyone, Italy’s borrowing costs spiked today at a sale of 10-year bonds: the Italians sold €2.7bn worth of  securities at 5.77% – compared with 4.94% a month ago. That’s one giant leap – but not for mankind.

The situation in Europe remains an unfixable mess in its current form. In my estimation, the private sector contribution to the latest Greek rescue package is probably only about 40% of the level it should be – and even getting that out of the banks was like pulling teeth. We are all now paying the price for their selfishness, because although Greece’s repayment rate and debt total have been reduced, by 2012 its public debt will still be around 170% of GDP. Consequently, the markets are paranoid, and yields are dangerously high. I see that Deutsche Bank is blithely saying ‘all’ the Greeks need to do is have five surpluses of around 5% a year from 2015-20. What DB didn’t bring to the party was any ideas about how their economy would grow in order to do this if the country stays in the euro.

Personally, I don’t trust the banks to even get their hair cut to the extent they’re promising. They remain the spivs and dissemblers they’ve always been – and bank accounting is the most surreal (as in open to every trick in the book) of any business with which I’ve ever worked. To count obviously bad debts as assets is, let’s face it, a truly Swiftian idea. So probably, Barcap is right to be saying Greece won’t make it. I mean that in the sense that it will be proved right with little or no risk to its reputation. For a commonsense northerner like me, it’s glaringly obvious Greece will default: it won’t make the asset sales targets it needs, and it won’t make the growth targets either.

The ratings agencies agree with The Slog – not a position I’m that happy with, because on the whole they’re just as mad as the lenders and borrowers they monitor. However, there is no point in shooting the messenger, and one or two players in this mess are in touch with reality: German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble admitted yesterday, in a circular to his Christian Democratic Party colleagues, that ‘the euro-zone debt crisis isn’t over, and that more discipline is needed’. Er ist eine gute Eier, Herr Schäuble.

It’s highly likely, I think, that by the time Spain and Italy finally go west, there’ll be little or no money left in the EFSF anyway – for Greece, or indeed anyone. I did find the brazen way the self-congratulatory EU onanists said Portugal and Ireland would have to whistle for any help last Thursday made me more angry than any other single statement since this Babel called the EU first began to spout tripe about the ‘need’ for a currency union. I wonder what the hawks in Dublin and the London Treasury made of it. But increasingly, I wonder over and over what Wee Georgie & the Camerlots think about anything.

For the life of me, I still can’t see the upside of Coalition trade policy. I also can’t decide whether Camerlot’s big three plus Head Boffin Oliver Letwin are being incredibly clever, or just catatonically incapable of action. As a nation, we have always played much too fair with Abroad, and my gut tells me we are doing it again. British foreign policy at the moment is not so much perfidious as perfunctory.

I understand perfectly well that the Cameroons believe they are helpless to act against the Franco-German stitch-up. The problem is, their judgement is way off, and lacks both imagination and ruthlessness. This is the time for a major throw of the dice. But fifteen months in, William Hague seems incapable of throwing a party, let alone craps.

The Germans are sick to death of the French; they don’t trust them, and they’re tired of them taking the p*ss on everything from stats reporting and the CAP to their self-aggrandizing definition of growth. I have it on the highest authority that they don’t believe the French inflation figures (nobody in France does either); but the average German businessman does tend to say that in Britain, if nothing else, we are at least trying to get our credit-obsessed lifestyle under control…and we are straight.

Merkel herself is frosty towards the UK, but she isn’t representative of thinking Germans. If Britain plunged in now and got alongside the Bundesrepublik, the Irish and the Dutch in a constructive way, we could come out of this as a major-power trading bloc on a par with China…and cooperating with it in a complementary way. The one thing the Americans and the French have in common is a willingness to dump on the Brits. But as always, the dunderheads at the Foreign Office are incapable of seeing that.

I think the best of Anglo-Saxon, Celtic and Eastern Europe have similar cultural approaches to commerce. We might well wind up sharing a currency, but we wouldn’t be a bureaucracy-strangled Mark II EU. The ClubMeds and France can revert to cheaper currencies and keep their nicer pace of life…where they’d be happier anyway. The most important task of all for everyone, of course, would be to turn Belgium into a frites theme park, and send Mr Van Rompuy on a nice long holiday somewhere. I’m told St Helena is very nice.

This sort of internationally patronising, broad brush-stroke trade vision makes a welcome change from explaining to Piers Moron the difference between ‘did’ and didn’t’. But it does have a serious objective: Britain and its potential trading partners need a very big idea to survive a eurozone implosion, an American default and a Chinese recession within one similar time frame. I see little sign of it emanating anywhere from Westminster at the moment…..and none whatsoever of it emerging from Downing Street.

HACKGATE DAY 197: FEAR & LOATHING INSIDE MIRROR GROUP

MGN’s Bailey….”ooooooooo, not us hoffissah“

The Slog reveals why Morgan’s survival is about a lot more than his CNN salary

The grisly demise of the News of the World came as a welcome bonus to MGN, the owners of the Mirror and People titles: it plonked £35M worth of advertising into the tabloid sector. But boy, do they need it. And it could all go the same way as the Screws…if the rising tide of allegations against Piers Morgan stick….as of course, they will.

Sharp eyes have noticed the distinct lack of enthusiasm over at the Guardianista for MGN bashing: a sure sign that Russ Burnt-Bridges is concerned about a Leftist paper getting deeper into financial trouble. While Big G’s Hackgate section is full of tittle-tattle anti-Newscorp stuff this morning, there’s so far been but one entry on Morgan – and nothing about Mirror Group’s risible complaint to the Parliamentarians. This denied all the allegations, the company insisting that “our journalists work within the criminal law and the PCC [Press Complaints Commission] code of conduct.” Bollocks they do: these clowns never learn when the game’s up.

But there are still a lot of fine journalists and decent people in Mirror Group. And lucky for us, one of them is talking to The Slog:

“They [MGN management] are sh***ing themselves,” said the informant, “Running around looking terrified, hoping they can shore up the dam. Once the truth gets out, they’re f**ked….and they know it”.

Let’s examine this allegation from a business and management talent point of view.

Like most of the Fleet Street albatrosses, Mirror Group somehow managed to be asleep when the internet happened. This has created a parlous financial situation upon which even the Guardian (and lots of other titles) commented recently.

A lot of the angst relates to CEO Sly Bailey’s huge salary. Shareholders want her to cut that pay in half, from £750,000 to £375,000. Last year – for some reason – Bailey trousered a £1.7m total package. Since 2004, it’s also worth noting that the workforce has halved, while MGN’s operating profit has fallen by fully two-thirds. But being a greedy senior executive, Sly Bailey didn’t feel it pertinent to take note of those changed circumstances….at least, not when it came to her own wedge.

Anyway, Ms Bailey has been the CEO for some years, so the greed and the profit drought all took place on her watch. She is thus well-placed to adopt the Murdoch stance (once the CM&S committee eventually drag her in for a chat) when it comes to phone-hacking, viz, I’m just a fat cat without the faintest notion what the Bejesus hacks are getting up to on any of my papers, but we have the highest standards etc etc.

If the CEO doesn’t inspire shedloads of confidence, not much will be forthcoming from the Chairman, Sir Ian Gibson. Sir Ian’s main claim to fame is that, while a non-Exec director keeping an experienced old eye on events at Northern Rock under Adam Applecart, the institution suffered the first bank run for nearly 200 years….and cost the UK taxpayer a cool £80 billion in write-offs and guarantees.

Sir Ian’s testimony to the Treasury Select Committee about this in 2007 was enlightening to say the least. This was just after the management had squeaked “Help!” to Chancellor Darling, but before the entire extent of Page One stupidity was laid bare. Herewith Gibson’s opening summary of the Northern Rock Board’s performance:

“As you all know, we can only deal with the world as we know it. We dealt pretty well with the world as we knew it; and the world has changed.”

No doubt the Sioux Indians’ Chief took a similar view when the Paleface’s Iron Horse came galumphing into their lives, and the new-fangled spitting-stick technology was shown to work better than bows and arrows. He wasn’t called Sitting Bull for nothing.

After a pretty fierce grilling, Sir Ian Gibson is recorded as having partaken in this frank exchange:

“Q743 Chairman: Sir Ian, finally, do you think relations between the Board and the shareholders of Northern Rock were sufficiently transparent?

Sir Ian Gibson: I think they were, yes. In fact, to pick up a series of questions asked earlier, over the years Northern Rock’s overall approach has been to be extremely transparent about the simplicity and straightforwardness of its model because that has enabled it to disclose the quality of its book and therefore attract reasonably priced credit. That has continued too with its shareholders.”

Yes indeed, the model was one of such simplicity, it was based on interest rates going down, but never ever going up again. The shareholders I interviewed at the time did not seem to have the same clear grasp of what Applegarth and his fellow muppets were at.

On the basis of these pen portraits, incompetent insouciance seems a reasonably sound assumption to adopt in relation to what MGN’s leaders will now do. The tone of their letter to the CM&S sums this up quite well I think: Sky News gloatingly reported that MGN’s Bailey had warned MPs against ‘repeating “erroneous and inaccurate” comments implying that the tabloids were implicated in the phone-hacking scandal that has engulfed the rival group, News International.’ My understanding as of yesterday is that John Whittingdale saw this as an irritating case of protesting too much. Sly Bailey could also do with boning up on Parliamentary privilege: even loose cannons like Louise Mensch can repeat accusations inside Westminster until the hackers emerge from Pentonville – there’s nothing Bailey or anyone else can do about it.

Word reaches me that the Grime Parson himself is concerned about the cowboy outfit who once employed him – and their ability – or lack of it – to face out the pressure. Piers and Sly didn’t get on (she thought he was too pro-Union) and so she was delighted at the opportunity to fire his Romping Arse once he’d made a complete Horlicks of an Iraq War hoax in May 2004. This may well be reflected in the desperate tone of Morgan’s last tweet before retiring to his bed last night:

“I’ll be making no further comment on #Hackgate. But important for everyone to know who these lying smearers are.” !!

Overuse of screamers there, Piers – and ‘smearing liars’ would’ve been better English. However, what’s interesting is that, thus far, old Arse Rim Pong has called many people nasty fat fibbers. But not Private Eye, or The Slog.

What could this mean? I think we should be told.

Get the full strength of this Morganatic farce at The End of the Piers Show.

NEXT UP: THE HIPWELL TRIAL OF 2005 – WHAT LIGHT DID IT SHOW PIERS MORGAN IN?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Miliband nose-job: beyond the spin

Mr Miliband recently shown promoting a newspaper he despises

Op aims to stop audiences snoring during his speeches

If ever there was a load of old bollocks, it was the press release covering the ‘reason’ for Ed Miliband’s nose operation yesterday: to help with his ‘sleep apnea’ problem. The real issue being addressed is that when he speaks, Ed thunds like heeth got a gubshield up hith nothe, and vugh thound iwwtateththethe the cwap out of  evvvywun.

But very few people realise that the operation was booked months ago with another aim in mind: to reshape the conk in order that he might more easily insert it up the Dirty Digger’s bumhole.

Although that is no longer necessary now that Ed the Brave has discovered Mr Murdoch to be the Devil’s Spawn, the op will go ahead in order to help Mr Miliband smell trouble more easily. Said his media advisor, illegitimate Roop-son Tom Baldrick, “I had to move Heaven and Earth to get Ed an audience with Sir Rupert, and foolishly he was all for it. It’s tough working for a bloke with no sense of smell”.

Among other things Ed has yet to smell is the plot against his supine leadership, a rat (take your pick), when Labour-supporting Piers Morgan’s goose is cooking nicely, and when the Wapping Liars are using him for publicity purposes.

Replying to criticism of his voice, Mr Miliband observed, “Lithen, Labuh ith yoour voith in hard timeth”.

Related: Ed Miliband’s 90th minute conversion to Murdoch-bashing.