The Slog is made uneasy by the BBC man’s Leveson evidence
I had a strong sense of deja-vu when Andrew Marr was giving his Leveson evidence this week. He was asked about the ‘ethics’ involved in asking Gordon Brown about his alleged pill usage in November 2009. As veterans at this site know, I broke that story in October 2009.
But the content of the questions – and his answers – left me with a sense of unease. Because neither the questions nor his answers addressed the real issues of that shameful episode.
So now, sit back and read my version.
In mid 2004, a Treasury contact (a client in a previous life) first alerted me to the fact that then Chancellor Gordon Brown had “a few personality issues”. I sort of logged this away, but then in 2005 an MP chum expressed the same view, adding “He is in a very dark place”. Oddly enough, the exact same phrase was used by another source two years later.
During that crucial period in 2005, Gordon Brown confirmed to Clare Short that he believed Blair would never give him the crown. She too was convinced that, at the time, the then Chancellor was clinically depressed.
Early in 2008, I was abroad and at a drinks do with some of the great and not so good….when one of them – an inebriated mandarin – kept insisting to me and a friend that Brown “has become addicted to daft fad diets”. A distant advertising contact had told me similar things shortly before this incident. When Shir Humphwee told me the main must-not-have parts of the diet, I realised instantly that the by then PM was almost certainly taking MAOI anti-depressants. I know this because I’m a depressive too – and used to take them. They’re ghastly things that contraindicate with almost every known medication….but they truly were effective with the sort of insistent depression I had at the time – as, I kept being told, did the man running Britain.
The main forbidden foods – Chianti wine, most pulses, cheese, and overripe avacados – were so familiar to me, it seemed undeniable (in the context of consistent verbal testimony) that the PM was a sufferer from otherwise intractable depression. (Bear in mind here, SSRIs had almost completely taken over from MAOIs by this time: the use of such an old drug would’ve represented a truly desperate move by any physician).
By this time blogging regularly through my then site notbornyesterday.org, I became intrigued by the case – and began to tap friends in the medical profession. What I next found – quite by chance, and in extraordinary circumstances – was that Brown was also having major sight problems. The No 10 press office adamantly denied this, but I had trust in the source. And by then I had another MP (this time a Tory) saying it was well-known among Camerlot that Brown was “badly holed and therefore a sitting target”.
Finally, I tapped back into my Treasury friend, who confirmed that GB was “close to being out of control”. By this time, press reports were beginning to recount his phone-throwing antics, as well as serial secretarial abuse. So I put up a blogpost mentioning three things: (1) I suspected he was taking MAOIS (2) I suspected he was losing his sight (3) his condition was an open secret among the seniors of Whitehall and Westminster. (4) Camerlot was conniving in the conspiracy of silence, because it suited them to be bombing a torpedoed battleship.
Immediately, the story was picked up by prominent blogger Anna Raccoon, after which Guido featured it. Sadly, Fawkes did so in a way I found repulsive – ‘Brown bonkers’ – when my story had been about why it was dangerous to have a PM suffering from eyesight failure and acute depression.
What happened next took me completely by surprise. From 300 hits a day, my Blogger stats shot up to 20,000. I tuned into a news bulletin the following day to hear Mandelson describing me as ‘a well known Far Right blogger’, and then two nights later listened as Ben Bradshaw on Question Time referred to me as “an extremist political liar”.
The furthest right my Party membership has ever reached is the SDP in the 1980s.
Channel Four interviewed me the following day, and then wrote a piece saying I ‘admitted’ I had no proof. I had never once said I had proof: but the ‘conclusion’ was yet another smear designed to impugn motive and suggest inaccuracy. The station printed nothing about the rest of the corrobatory evidence – and neither did the New York Times, which simply ran a story suggesting the whole thing was ‘a wild guess’.
Up until then, I had blogged regularly in the Guardian’s Comment is Free area. Suddenly, I was no longer allowed that freedom. And my Guardian membership profile told me my commenting ‘privileges’ has been removed. They have never been restored. Such is the nature of a free press on the ‘democratic’ Left. (And, I suspect, the power of Mandelson’s influence therein).
The following weekend, Andrew Marr had Brown on his Sunday show. I was in France at the time, and wasn’t going to watch it. But a BBC source rang me to suggest I should. I was on the point of switching it off when Marr suddenly asked the PM whether he took “prescription painkillers to get through the day”.
Now during this whole episode, the only medication that had ever been mentioned or quoted was anti-depressants; indeed, most press reports had specified MAOIs. Yet out of left-field blue sky, Marr chose to specifically refer to prescription painkillers. Brown took this opportunity to deny it (in doing so he was telling the truth) and as a result, it became a non-story.
I emailed Marr three times to ask why he had asked that particular question. I never received a reply. But I did get a phone call from my BBC contact saying, “I’m afraid you’ve learned a lesson today – the use of media aperture to kill a story you don’t like”.
That is the main issue about this story in the context of press standards and ethics, and it always was: but the Leveson Enquiry missed it completely. Certainly, it irked me to watch Andrew Marr being asked by Leveson about whether it was “right and proper” to ask such a personal question. It seemed to me twice removed from the real significance of that question: it is surely right to ask whether a sick man should continue in such a job – as it equally was when Antony Eden took amphetamines throughout the Suez crisis; and it is surely suspicious when a major BBC presenter kills a story by asking a question that seems to have come out of his head – rather than consistent suspicions expressed by much of the political class.
If he didn’t mean to kill it, all I require from Andrew Marr is that he should write to me, and explain his surreal choice of question.
But in the meantime, it leaves one wondering whether Leveson is getting anywhere near the real issues of media behaviour in the UK. I very much doubt it, to be honest: because the real issues concern ownership, spiking, censorship, half-truths and the worst kind of pernicious falsehood on all sides.
We now have a different Government in power, and so unsurprisingly The Slog has stopped being neo-Nazi to New Labour, and morphed into extreme-anti-capitalist radical lunatic fringe to the Dark Kinghts of Camerlot. The Americans call this ‘framing’. I don’t see much evidence that persistent and blatant bias is even on the radar at Leveson. Plus ca change – but it should be.
Postscript: The revelations about Brown’s eyesight proved to be entirely correct. Downing Street never denied the MAOIs story. In the end, the smears forced me to rebrand as The Slog. I am still here. New Labour isn’t. Hopefully, Camerlot will soon be gone too.
The Slog 