Did they learn anything from Caroline?

Three and a half years ago I wrote about “a modern tragedy”, one that shouldn’t have happened. I’m talking about the death of Caroline Flack, who was found dead in her Stoke Newington flat just over a month after she had been charged by police with assaulting her tennis player boyfriend. 

She had committed suicide, a horrendous outcome from a truly sorry story, in which heavy-handed processing by the Crown Prosecution Service, coupled with intense media scrutiny and even more intense social media commentary appeared to compel the 40-year-old - who’d been struggling with mental health issues for several years, despite portraying herself as a bubbly, fun public persona had already been suffering from mental health issues - to kill herself. As I wrote, “Fans blame the press. The press blames social media. Social media blames the press. Everyone is blaming everyone else for Caroline Flack’s suicide. It’s an unholy mess.”

Fast-forward to last Friday, and The Sun’s publication of a story about an unnamed BBC presenter allegedly paying a young individual tens of thousands of pounds for explicit photos over the course of three years, starting when they were just 17. And so began a five-day media firestorm, plunging the BBC into crisis, and launching a frenzy of speculation as to who the “well-known” presenter was. Day-after-day The Sun doubled-down on the story, with other media outlets - including the BBC itself - echoing the reporting with their own. Despite other things going on the world the BBC presenter story led TV news bulletins and dominated front pages. Rishi Sunak couldn’t even fly off to the NATO summit in Vilnius without being asked for his six cents’ worth. The story was, according to Alastair Campbell, what happens when “media culture loses any sense of perspective about a story”. “We have to get a grip on our sense of perspective when these things happen,” he told the BBC itself, pointing out that the frenzied saturation coverage had managed (perhaps conveniently) to obliterate other big stories such as the NATO summit and Boris Johnson's apparent lack of producing his WhatsApp messages by Monday’s deadline for the Covid inquiry.

On Saturday The Sun published further allegations, opening up the BBC’s complaints procedure to scrutiny. By Sunday, the still-unnamed male presenter was reported by the corporation as being suspended while it worked “as quickly as possible to establish the facts in order to properly inform appropriate next steps.” In the meantime, high profile male BBC presenters had to fight a rearguard action of their own to dismiss speculation that the presenter was one of them. One presenter went out of his way to post on both Twitter and Threads that he wouldn’t be appearing on air the next day because he was “looking forward to taking annual leave”, a somewhat absurd statement to say “it’s not me”.

Three more days of speculation ensued, with The Sun and its rivals still not naming the presenter on the basis that they didn’t have any legal grounds to do. Even the young person at the centre of the original controversy said, in a letter to the BBC issued through lawyers, that nothing inappropriate or unlawful happened had happened the unnamed presenter, declaring The Sun’s story as “rubbish”, and even highlighting the fact that the paper hadn’t even acknowledged the individual’s denial on Friday night.

That, though, didn’t stem the media pile-on. By yesterday morning, Jeremy Vine - one of a number of people caught up in the speculation about the presenter’s identity - spoke on his Channel 5 programme that it was time  the presenter named himself in order to spare others from being falsely accused. ”I know the individual concerned,” Vine professed, before magnanimously adding: “I am very worried about his state of mind and what this is doing to him. I know his survival instinct has kicked in and I know he saw what happened to Phillip Schofield, but my God look at the damage to the BBC, look at the damage to his friends, to those falsely accused - and the longer he leaves it the worse it will be for him.”

And then, some hours after it was revealed that the police had decided that “no criminality was identified” out of The Sun’s lurid coverage, the pressure that had been building on the presenter and his family came to a head when Vicky Flind (producer of Robert Peston’s weekly political discussion show on ITV) named her husband - Huw Edwards - as the presenter (confirming what had been known amongst journalists as the media gossip network had done its worst, with less-than-disguised posts on social media). 

“As is well documented,” Flind wrote in a statement, “[Huw] has been treated for severe depression in recent years. The events of the last few days have greatly worsened matters, he has suffered another serious episode and is now receiving in-patient hospital care where he’ll stay for the foreseeable future.” Let’s just linger on that last point for a second. Is it any wonder?

Earlier in the day, on The News Agents podcast, former BBC reporter Jon Sopel - a friend and colleague of Edward for over 30 years - told co-presenters and fellow BBC emigrés Emily Maitlis and Lewis Goodall that he disagreed with Vine’s view that the as-yet anonymous presenter should out himself: “I would say Jeremy is a friend of mine and I disagree with him on this,” Sopel said. “I think that whoever the presenter is needs to work it out himself. I cannot begin to imagine the sort of pressure, the sort of anguish, turmoil that is going on in his life. And just to hear from your colleagues, come on for the sake of me, can you out yourself please? I’m not sure that’s the best look.”

After Flind had released her statement, Sopel appeared on Andrew Marr’s show on LBC, making the very salient point that: “There was no criminality and if there was no criminality - which we have had confirmed by the Metropolitan Police - what are you left with?”. “Huw has talked in the past about his depression. The Sun initially made some very serious allegations on the Saturday morning: that he might have solicited photos from someone who was underage and had therefore committed a criminal offence.” “I did gasp when I saw the headline [on Saturday],” Sopel added. “I didn’t know who the presenter was but I thought ‘bloody hell this is serious’.” But, he said, after the story had been plastered across the next seven pages, “it was nothing”. “I don't know what went on at The Sun. But it just seemed to me that they had a slightly half-cooked story that they decided to go with. They went with the parents of a young man who was in turmoil and from a fractured family relationship. And they didn't even carry the denial from this kid, from this young man. It was nonsense.”

At the heart of this story are humans. Vulnerable humans. And victims, too - Edwards himself, his wife Vicky and their five children, the family caught up in the original story, other people who’ve come forward to make claims about Edwards’ behaviour. Was The Sun wrong to run the story in the first place? Possibly, possibly not. It will use the morally ambiguous argument that running the original story was ‘in the public interest’. But stringing it out for five days while not naming the presenter and therefore putting itself into legal jeopardy merely added the pressure on Edwards himself. If The Sun was so sure of its story, why didn’t it name Edwards when it clearly knew his identity? It begs the question - what was its intention.

This brings us to the BBC. In essence, this story isn’t about the BBC. It was, in Jon Sopel’s words to Andrew Marr,  “Someone who had a probably rather complicated personal life, who was wrestling with certain issues,” and who wouldn’t have been the first to do be in that situation. “Huw has talked in the past about his depression,” Sopel continued. ”The Sun initially made some very serious allegations on the Saturday morning, that he, you know, might have solicited photos from someone who was underage, and therefore had committed a criminal offence. And that seems to have gone away completely, given what the Met has said this evening. And so you're thinking, well what is this all been about?”.

This, inevitably, leads to the conclusion that The Sun - whose proprietor has a known ideological dislike of the BBC - were handed a golden, cynical opportunity to use Edwards’ apparent indiscretions as a means of damaging the corporation’s reputation. There is certainly a suspicion that every headline opportunity the newspaper (and its rivals) had to tag the BBC, it did.

“I don't know what went on at The Sun,” Sopel told Andrew Marr. “But it just seemed to me that they had a slightly half-cooked story that they decided to go with. They went with the parents of a young man who was in turmoil and from a fractured family relationship. And they didn't even carry the denial from this kid, from this young man. It was nonsense.”

In fairness, though, the BBC does appear to have a lot to explain itself of how it handled the original complaint, raised with it in May after the family of the young adult in the initial story had flagged it in April to South Wales Police, who deemed the allegations not worthy of criminal investigation. It took from 18 May, when a family member went to a BBC building to make a complaint about “the behaviour of a BBC presenter” until last Thursday, 6 July, when The Sun raised with the BBC press offer that there were allegations about Edwards. 

Here’s where the BBC itself has ended up doing The Sun’s job for it. Although a specialist BBC investigations team had instigated an enquiry into the claims made in May, new allegations appeared over the weekend that were different to those initially investigated. Under it’s “neither fear nor favour” editorial ethic, the BBC itself started reporting extensively on the story, leading news bulletins with it, and even pumping out breaking news alerts received on mobile phones about one of its own. This has been met with incredulity by Jon Sopel: “I think the BBC is a complicated beast and it would be lovely to think of it as a streamlined organisation where one bit knows what the other is doing. But the BBC is a series of completely uncoordinated limbs”. On the one hand, he said, BBC Director-General Tim Davie was claiming that its internal investigation was put on hold while the police decided whether there was anything to investigate (or not), while at the same time “BBC News is carrying out investigations and produces a report at 4 o'clock in the afternoon saying he had spoke to someone, and aggressive tones, or used swear words. I just thought: ’Hang on, does one know what the other is doing?’. I think the worst thing the BBC could be seen as being is the provisional wing of The Sun newspaper.”

My issue here with this debate is that it becomes something of a self-serving media ‘bubble’ story. In the days and weeks ahead, fingers of blame will continue to be pointed at the various actors in the media coverage. Questions will be rightly asked about many aspects of the BBC’s handling of a human resources issue, but also about The Sun’s motives, and the motives of newspapers with similar interests and their role in the pile-on. What’s not clear is what happens with the figures at the very heart of the story - the victims. Edwards himself is one of the BBC’s highest paid presenters (according to the BBC Annual Report, published on Tuesday as the furore was growing louder), but also one of its most respected, not only as one of the presenter of the 10 O’Clock News but lead anchor on state occasions. 

Should Edwards’ “rather complicated personal life”, to quote Jon Sopel, preclude him resuming his roles? And what about the young adult - now aged 20 - whose alleged receipt of £35,000 for explicit pictures at the request of the person we now know to be Edwards do next? If, as has been reported, this as-yet unidentified person has a crack cocaine addiction, you would hope that they can get the help they need. I don’t doubt, either, that their family - who raised the complaint in the first place - will be going through purgatory over the way the story has evolved (and I’m deliberately avoiding being judgemental about their circumstances or motivation for raising the complaint to begin with, even if their child has dismissed The Sun’s story as “rubbish”).

The bottom line is that, unless we see evidence to the contrary, what has been extensively and intensively reported on over the last five or six days amounts to little more than one adult’s complicated private life being made public. And he is now in hospital being treated for an acute mental health condition. Perhaps the media didn’t learn anything from Caroline Flack. Compassion, for a start.

Clarkson!

Picture: Amazon

Sometimes in the culture wars, events contrive to create the perfect storm. In the case of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex - Harry and Meghan, to you and me - the storm is a permanent state of enragement, much like that giant red cyclone near the equator of Jupiter.

For one newspaper in particular - obviously, the Daily Mail - it is ever-present. On any given day there are four or five stories about Harry, or Meghan, or both. At the height of the furore over Harry’s memoir Spare, you’d be lucky to find coverage of anything else. In recent days, though, the Mail’s apparent obsession with the Sussexes has died down to just four or five new stories a day. That, though, is still tempered by an injection of beatific pieces about Harry’s brother and sister-in-law, the Prince and Princess of Wales. It has been a prominent feature of the British media's editorial polarity that picture stories of the ever-smiling Catherine, her heir-to-the-throne husband and their adorable children get prominence in contrast to the prevailingly negative coverage of Harry and Meghan. Don’t tell me there isn’t an agenda going on there…

Back in December, before Spare came out, and in the wake of the royal couple’s exorcising Netflix series, Jeremy Clarkson stuck his size 14s in by writing a wholly offensive column for The Sun in which he suggested that Meghan should be paraded naked through the streets of Britain while having excrement flung at her by the public. He wasn't, to the best of anyone's knowledge, being literal, but in that oh-so Clarksonesque way, it was a clumsy reference to a scene from Game Of Thrones with which to emphasise the “hate” - his word – he had for the duchess “on a cellular level”. To hammer home his disdain, Clarkson placed the duchess above Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon and even serial killer Rose West. Needless to say, the shit-slinging idea went down well with people on Twitter called “Daz” or “Barry” who suffix their handles with Cross of St. George flags, and whose timelines are regularly peppered with sentiment supportive of topics such as Brexit, defunding the BBC and bringing back Boris. Basically, anything starting with the letter b. 

This is the Clarkson fan base: ‘real blokes’ who like cars, football and probably still bemoan the disappearance of The Sun’s Page Three “stunnah”, which was, of course, always only “a bit of fun” and in no way a daily dose of sexist titillation (with the emphasis on “tit” – phwoar!). These are the self-styled anti-woke warriors, who feed - and feed off - the Daily Mail’s constant chuntering about anything remotely liberal, contriving a culture war angle out of anything. So, far from merely tolerating his occasional sexism and casual racism on Top Gear, Clarkson’s core demographic have fully bought into his reactionary schtick. Which means the egregious column he wrote in December was probably regarded by most of his following as grist to the mill.

Not so, everyone else. Within a matter of days the column had attracted a record 25,000 complaints to the press regulator Ipso. As a pile-on ensued, an apparently chastened Clarkson tweeted: “Oh dear. I’ve rather put my foot in it. In a column I wrote about Meghan, I made a clumsy reference to a scene in Game Of Thrones and this has gone down badly with a great many people. I’m horrified to have caused so much hurt and I shall be more careful in future.” 

It wasn’t enough. Even to his daughter Emily. “My views are and have always been clear when it comes to misogyny, bullying and the treatment of women by the media,” she wrote in an Instagram post. “I want to make it very clear that I stand against everything that my dad wrote about Meghan Markle and I remain standing in support of those that are targeted with online hatred.”

The broad view agreed. Clarkson senior had been deeply misogynist. Questions were asked of the editorial governance at The Sun to have allowed the column to have run in the first place, with former Sun editor Neil Wallis calling it a “dreadful failure of editing.” Immediately, questions arose as to the reputational damage Clarkson had done to the broadcasters who employ him, although while Kevin Lygo, ITV’s media and entertainment boss, described the column as “awful”, he said there were no plans to replace him as presenter of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?. Amazon, which has paid Clarkson several millions to front the son-of-Top Gear, The Grand Tour, and the reality series Clarkson’s Farm, was less ambiguous. Described by Clarkson himself as “incandescent” over The Sun piece, the streaming service was reported by entertainment industry trade rag Variety as “cutting their ties” with the controversial presenter. This, in turn, set off the likes of the Daily Mail and its readers who predictably accused those offended by Clarkson of ‘cancelling’ the 62-year-old manchild. Except that he hasn’t, yet.

In fact, the Variety story said that it was only “likely” that Amazon would part ways with Clarkson, and following “the conclusion of existing agreements.” Those include one more series of The Grand Tour and two of Clarkson’s Farm. That will mean Clarkson remains onscreen with Amazon for at least the next two years. But, as we know with the tabloids’ obsession with woke-bashing, don’t let such practicalities get in the way of a good story.

Amazon has remained quiet on Clarkson’s future, although a “senior figure” connected with the company told the Telegraph that such talk of the presenter being cancelled because of his column in The Sun was “nonsense”. Another pointed out that Clarkson’s brand of gobshite controversy was hardly in the same league of offence-causing as some of the books Amazon sells, like Mein Kampf, or documentary series on Prime about serial killers. Actually, the storm only emboldens Clarkson’s brand. Ever since he started using strained metaphors in the ‘old’ Top Gear about cars “snapping knicker elastic”, he knowingly self-cultivated an image of being television’s actual Alan B’Stard, who comes out with mildly reactionary things just to get a rise. Boo!

It worked. Top Gear 2.0, with Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May, became a juvenile version of Last Of The Summer Wine, pushing the tolerance envelope with obviously scripted routines that portrayed the trio as a group of overgrown schoolboys, rather than middle-aged motoring journalists. That was until the “slope” reference in a film the trio made in Thailand which was, we were assured, a statement about a camera angle. I don’t think the Thai gentleman in shot would have been amusedThe last straw, for the BBC, at least, came with Clarkson being sacked for punching a Top Gear producer while on location after being told that the crew’s hotel couldn’t prepare a late night steak for him.

Picture: Amazon

Thus, Amazon spent £160 million on luring Clarkson & Co over to Prime to develop The Grand Tour which was, blatantly, Top Gear 2.5. Same presenters, same schtick, same demographic. Except – and this gets to the bottom of Amazon’s possible tie-cutting - the blokeish Clarkson/May/Hammond humour is intrinsically British and, even then, quite narrow. The Telegraph revealed this week that Prime has around 200 million viewers worldwide, with three-quarters of them in America. In Britain, where The Grand Tour and Clarkson’s Farm will more or less exclusively resonate, Amazon can only command 12 million subscribers. All of a sudden, £160 million seems an awful lot of money. As the GT trio found with old-TG, their form of irony doesn’t always work in America. Clarkson’s Farm, too, is probably regarded as parochial (even though it is, actually, genuinely entertaining), but US ratings for it have been particularly poor. And with any poorly performing TV property, if it doesn’t rate, it gets the chop.

The beginning-of-the end for Clarkson on Amazon is, then, pure coincidence. But that won’t keep him out of the headlines. Last week it was revealed that he e-mailed Prince Harry on Christmas Day to apologise for his Sun column, saying that his language had been “disgraceful” and he was “profoundly sorry”. A spokesperson for Harry and Meghan were less than impressed: “While a new public apology has been issued today by Mr. Clarkson, what remains to be addressed is his long-standing pattern of writing articles that spread hate rhetoric, dangerous conspiracy theories and misogyny. Unless each of his other pieces were also written ‘in a hurry’ [as he apparently stated] it is clear that this is not an isolated incident shared in haste, but rather a series of articles shared in hate.”

Clarkson has, of course, not been cancelled. He will continue presenting Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? on ITV - for now - though the network has not confirmed anything more than another series. The Sun still employs him, though his columns have been conspicuously absent, and he still has a weekly appearance in The Sunday Times. So, no, the enfante terrible hasn’t succumbed to the tofu-eating wokerati. But maybe a period of abstinence - not just by Clarkson but the rest of the reactionary commentariat constantly searching for a new club to break over Harry and Meghan’s heads - might do us all some good.

Queasy like Sunday morning

Not being equipped with the brain cells for it, I rarely stray into politics on either this blog or social media. Actually, my intellectual heft - or lack of it - doesn’t really come into it: such is the No Man’s Land of embittered trench warfare these days that it’s rarely worth the blood pressure spikes expressing an opinion on anything. But the matter of Matt Hancock’s office indiscretion has left me properly batey, and on many levels.

Firstly, I get it that someone’s private life should be just that, private, and it doesn’t matter what moralistic view you take on the now-former Health Secretary’s affair with Gina Coladangelo, essentially wrecking two families and destroying two marriages in the process. But, as has been frequently stated over the last 48 hours, in times of crisis, we look to leadership, especially when that leadership is setting the rules about what we can and cannot do. So when that same leadership breaks those rules - and flagrantly so - we’ve got a perfect right as villagers to come out shouting, brandishing our pitchforks in a bloodthirsty manner.

I’ve not lost a close relative to Covid-19, but my girlfriend has - her stepfather, who lived with her mother in Spain, enjoying their retirement in a warmer clime. When his death came, only two members of the extended family could fly out to the funeral (which we attended via Zoom). To date, my partner hasn’t been able to hug or even be in the same country as her widowed mother. These are the sacrifices we’ve all been forced to endure over the last 15 months. The same sacrifices that meant I had to stand on my own 91-year-old mother’s doorstep for months on end, waving at her from two metres like friends separated by the Berlin Wall. 

So forgive me for getting all preachy about it, but Hancock, in snogging his mistress in the office as if sneaking off from the Christmas party for hanky-panky over the photocopier, deserves no sympathy or given a bye on the basis that ‘humans are humans’. I get it. Times of crisis, and the proximity that comes from spending long working days together, followed by the “who fancies a quick drink over the road” will lead to office romances. It has happened to me and it may well have happened to you. The difference is that in my case, we were both single at the time and, secondly, not responsible for imposing the most stringent restrictions on social engagement since The Blitz. And therein lies the crux of our ire over Hancock, who was unable to keep it in his pants while telling every else to.

I’ve always found Hancock a politician - amongst many - who seemed rather too pleased with himself. When Theresa May appointed him Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport in 2018, he took it upon himself to demonstrate tech savviness by launching his own smartphone app. “Hi - I’m Matt Hancock and welcome to my app,” he trilled on the opening screen, before inviting users to enter an apparently un-needed tool to showcase what the politician was getting up to, in his professional life, of course. “A chance to find out what's going on, both in my role as MP for West Suffolk and as culture secretary, and most importantly it’s a chance for you to tell me what you think, and to engage with others on issues that matter to you.” Perhaps, now, we know too much.

Just a few months after being appointed to the culture brief, the 39-year-old Hancock was made health secretary, a role which, when May herself resigned, gave him the ambition for even higher office, unsuccessfully contending the Tory leadership that put in power Boris Johnson who, as we all know, has had a problem with marital fidelity all of his own. It could, then, be said that Hancock was in the right place at the wrong time when the pandemic erupted. And, as the many wartime analogies have compared, there are few rulebooks that can be followed in times of real national crisis. But if there’s one thing that has run through Hancock’s political career - and the app episode exemplified - it’s breathtaking hubris. 

On Friday, after The Sun had broken its front page story of Hancock’s “steamy clinch” with Ms. Coladangelo, the line being put out was that his priority was driving the rollout of the coronavirus vaccine and getting the country back to normality. This was the same line that Hancock brazenly used to deflect attention when Dominic Cummings’ explosive spleen-venting during the Commons Health Select Committee revealed accusations of “15 or 20 occasions” when “Hancock” (always just that) should have been sacked for failures in the early weeks of the crisis. When Cummings published the infamous WhatsApp screenshot of Johnson apparently calling his health secretary “fucking hopeless”, Hancock continued to style it out with his insistence that he has the country to save.

Even yesterday, in his resignation video, Hancock chose to spend more time alluding to the great work of the department he ran, than apologising to his wife for the humiliation he had caused her. Body language experts have noted how his lengthy tribute to the NHS seemed more to do with reinforcing his political credentials for a future comeback than acknowledgement of what he’d done. “There is still an air of arrogance in his words, though, as he tells us ‘This is why I’ve got to resign’,” said social behaviourist Judi James, pointing out that he appeared to be “steering us to what he sees as the sole problem in his behaviour, rather than addressing what the public might see as a matter of disapproval.”

There was something somewhat crooked about the way Hancock had, last year, set a seemingly impossible target of achieving 100,000 daily Covid-19 tests by the end of April, which he apparently did before the number plunged dramatically again soon after. It was one of the charges laid at Hancock during Cummings’ explosive testimony. “In my opinion he should’ve been fired for that thing alone, and that itself meant the whole of April was hugely disrupted by different parts of Whitehall fundamentally trying to operate in different ways completely, because Hancock wanted to be able to go on TV and say ‘look at me and my 100k target’.” The veracity of all of Cummings’ claims remain to be fully verified, but the accusations over PPE procurement, care homes and even, today in the Sunday Times, allegations that Hancock used his private e-mail account for official government business in breach of strict transparency rules, all start pointing to a “narcissistic and slippery health secretary”, as one source described him to the same newspaper’s Tim Shipman.

No doubt, as with all the political turbulence surrounding Boris Johnson’s government in recent weeks - notably his own travails involving wallpaper and his now-wife’s influence - much of this chatter about Hancock’s conduct will get brushed off by the spin machine as Westminster “rough-and-tumble”. It has, though, become far too easy to just dismiss sleaze as of interest only to the wonks who report on such stuff from within the SW1 bubble. Johnson himself was said to be reluctant to sack Hancock on Friday, and even in accepting his health secretary’s resignation yesterday he gave a glowing endorsement of the minister’s achievements, concluding: “Your contribution to public service is far from over,” depressingly hinting at some sort of return - the equivalent of saying “lay low for 12 months, son, we’ll come and get you when this is all over”. 

Johnson doesn’t do sackings, largely because he abhors being told what to do by the very press he, as a former journalist, was once a part of. Another theory is that Boris has assembled such a lightweight Cabinet that any changes are an admission of his own failure of leadership. With such anaemic opposition at the moment, Johnson can probably afford to let Hancock’s departure go without too much exposure, especially while he still has inadequates like Gavin Williamson, Priti Patel and Grant Shapps on his front bench to act as lightning conductors. The problem for Johnson is that each episode that he manages to brush off - as Hancock had done - as Westminster life erodes from within. The wisdom is that Johnson’s premiership is somewhat Teflon-coated because of the vaccine rollout, but there are signs of exasperation within his own party that the gaffes and own goals are, like coastal erosion, gradual and mostly invisible, but could prove problematic down the line. On Friday, Johnson was backing Hancock, saying that his health secretary had apologised and that the matter was then “closed”. Yesterday, however, that support started to disappear from within the cabinet and the parliamentary Conservative party, in a manner that didn’t even occur when Cummings himself scored an enormous reputational own goal for the coronavirus response by driving his family to Barnard Castle to ‘test his eyesight’.

Friday’s front-page splash by The Sun detailing Hancock’s extra-marital relationship with the now famous “Hands. Face. Arse.” CCTV image couldn’t have had worse - or better - timing, depending on your point of view. A story breaking like that on a Friday leaves the weekend open for it to deepen, and thus it did, with the Sunday papers today diving queasily into forensic detail of Hancock’s relationship with Coladangelo, not only examining the legalities of their encounters during lockdown, but even on just how long the relationship had been going no for, how she became a director on the Department of Health & Social Care’s board, how she was sponsored for a House of Commons security pass, and even the fact her brother’s company enjoys a lucrative contract as a supplier of services to the NHS. Coming on top of other allegations about Hancock’s matey network - fellow horse racing enthusiast Dido Harding being put in charge of the patchy £37 million Test & Trace programme, for example - it all points to a ministerial culture lacking rigour and due process. In his blog testimonies, Cummings has accused government departments of using such oversight to thwart efforts to secure things like PPE at speed. He hasn’t held back in his disdain for Hancock, either. This all might seem like more of that rough and tumble, but somewhere in the midst of the syrupy mire is a country starting to lose patience. Matt Hancock would do himself, and the country, a massive favour by disappearing from public view for a very long time. Perhaps apologising to his wife would be a start…

Stay classy, TV newsland

I remember, distinctly, the scene, 32 years ago, in the Sky TV press office in Osterley. It was late afternoon and Sky’s five channels were due to go on air at 6pm. We kept reminding ourselves that no-one had ever launched as many TV channels at the same time (this was February 1989 - until Channel 4’s arrival in 1982 the UK only had had only three terrestrial offerings). Sky News would be the first “live” channel on Sky with in-vision presenters. Everyone was nervous. Sky’s HQ - three converted industrial units on what was still a muddy site, underneath the Heathrow flight path - was still being constructed around us, which meant that the inaugural news bulletin, presented by Penny Smith and Alastair Yates, had to be fed through an outside broadcast link in the car park connected to a facility in central London. Anything could have gone wrong. Thankfully, it didn’t.

The parallels were there this last Sunday when upstart GB News launched at 8pm with a monologue from Andrew Neil (who was Sky’s executive chairman in 1989), promising “to do news differently”. As the newcomer’s chairman, Neil - who still has the huge-shouldered, hunched gate he had when I encountered him in the Osterley boardroom - promised: “We are committed to covering the people’s agenda, not the media’s agenda.” This, as has been well documented, is GB News’s PR schtick: to draw in the anti-woke brigade and satiate their belief that the BBC and, indeed, Sky News, are now portals for left-wing liberal thinking, and give them a voice (the fact that we’ve had a right-of-centre Conservative government for over ten years, which has delivered Brexit, doesn’t seem to have sunk in amongst those breathlessly endorsing GB News in comments beneath the Mail’s various puff pieces on the channel).

Like Sky, though, the build-up to GB News launching was coloured by a media narrative similar to that we endured in the latter half of 1988 as we worked towards launch day. Being a then-Rupert Murdoch-owned channel, the tone had been somewhere between cynical and hostile, such was the proprietorial tribalism amongst the UK’s various media corporations. As a cousin of News International - home, then, to The Sun, News Of The World, Today, The Times and Sunday Times - Sky News was envisaged as “The Sun on TV”, somewhere between the tabloid’s cor-blimey popularism and a Thatcherist political bent. We were even known as “Tits at Teatime” in rival newsrooms (when Channel 4’s Drop The Dead Donkey appeared, there were eerie similarities - even the desk phones and vending machine in the fictional GlobeLink newsroom were identical, which suggested some well-placed research).

So, despite the political colour that was part of the chatter before GB News’a launch on Sunday, we should, I suppose, give it a chance. It’s opening night technical hitches (Neil’s monologue looking like it had been lit by candle, Scottish academic Neil Oliver’s microphone not working, and so on), may have given it the air of satirical pisstakes, but these were teething problems that could have happened to anyone. As Hugo Rifkind writes in The Times today, the media should give their new competitor some slack, given the rate of attrition that the journalism profession has experienced in the online age: “Any journalists resenting the expansion of their own industry probably ought to be in a different one,” he commented. 

There is a notion, in the old days of printed newspapers, that when you launch a new product - be it a brand new paper or a redesigned one - you do so with a scoop. To some extent, it’s a marketing hook to put you on the map. After a while, everyone - broadsheet or tabloid - soon levels out, covering more or less the same stories in their own particular style. It is, actually, quite a skill to write for a tabloid: trying to cram into 250 words for The Sun what you’d have more than a thousand to make use of in a broadsheet. I can speak from experience, it’s more challenging than you’d think. I’ve also worked with journalists of all creeds, and regardless of their publications’ political orientation, all work to the same objectives. It would, though be horrendously naive to think that all journalism is objective and without nuance. Which is why GB News is, to me at least, a curious experiment. Its debut-edition scoop is to declare a culture war and somewhat cynically tap into the same opposition to political correctness that has Piers Morgan railing about Harry and Meghan’s apparent snowflakery, and ends with footballers being booed for taking the knee at Wembley. There was just a little dog whistle about Neil’s opening: “We are proud to be British. The clue is in the name,” he intoned (and from someone who spends much of his time living on the Côte d'Azur…).

GB News knows full well what it’s doing (and the number of endorsements from people with “defund the BBC” in their social media profiles speaks volumes). Certainly, opening night excitement - even with the Euros on - buoyed the channel’s numbers, with 336,000 viewers tuning in to watch Neil’s opening statement, according to TV industry magazine Broadcast. Sky, by comparison, had just 46,000 viewers, but 8pm on a Sunday night was never going to be a big battleground for eyeballs amongst channels not predisposed for mass viewing. Time will tell whether GB News will genuinely prove the challenger it pretends to be. There’s no doubt that it has attracted a strong calibre of presenters to its line-up, poaching the likes of Simon McCoy from the BBC News channel and former ITN anchor Alastair Stewart to a roster of experienced journalists, including several from Sky News itself. What this says about them, politically, is a matter for debate, and the channel’s editorial content so far hasn’t shown any great surprises, with Nigel Farage and Priti Patel amongst its early interviewees.

It certainly is trying to do things differently. Television news in America, for example, is a largely homogeneous experience: drop into any TV ‘market’ (i.e. a city or large town), and you will see an identical format: a male and female anchoring partnership, a chipper sports presenter and a mildly amusing weather presenter. Yes, Anchorman. Unlike America, however, television news here does vary, thankfully, and GB News takes its place in a landscape where, say, the BBC’s 10 O’Clock News and ITV’s News At Ten do have distinct stylistic differences. Whether they have any editorial differences is a matter of personal opinion. One thing, though, is that I’ve never had any quarrel with the political orientation of any of the mainstream channels’s news output. That, I know, might inflame those who cast the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg, ITV’s Robert Peston or Sky’s Beth Rigby as lefty activists - all three regularly get pelted from both sides, leading to the maxim that they must be doing something right if that is the case.

GB News has opted for something else, editorially, and subtly alternative with its look and feel. It’s breakfast show looks like ITV’s GMB but in a studio painted on a limited budget; it’s mid-morning show could be coming from the comfy sofas in the office canteen. And, two full days in, it was still suffering from sound problems - this morning, I had to have the TV volume turned up to 70 just hear anything Colin Brazier, as he sat on the couch wearing an open-necked blue shirt as if we’d caught him during his coffee break, rather than a news bulletin. I’d ask whether this consciously casual approach is what the occasional viewer actually wants, given that rolling news channels are mostly watched by people dipping in to see what’s going on in the world. 

GB News believes that it is resetting the way news is presented, arguing - not too discreetly - that existing platforms talk down to viewers. I’m not so sure that’s the case, but again, GB has found its schtick. If you believe that the BBC, ITV and Sky talk down to you, then you’ll find news presented by someone hanging out in the canteen works for you, although no one ever complained about John Craven’s jumpers on Newsround lacking gravitas (though in fairness, his demographic was somewhat different to Kenneth Kendall’s on the Nine O’Clock News).

Anchorman: staying classy in San Diego

Rolling news channels have always found their strength during times of crisis. Only saddos like me have them on constantly in the background while they work during normal times. For the most part, as the description provides, they are repetitive, especially on mundane news days. But it’s when the news hots up, and situations become dynamic, that a news operation is fully tested. Before Sky had even launched, it covered the Lockerbie disaster as part of its trial operation, making the industry sit up and notice as word got around the media village that the channel wasn’t, after all, going to be a televisual version of its print cousin. Live reporting from ‘hot’ news stories - be they wars, disasters or political eruptions - are the mark of a news broadcaster, and its reporting (and production) talent. It’s why the publicity biographies of many news anchors are such colourful affairs, proudly claiming to have been on air during moments of global notoriety. I once had to deal with the fallout of two Sky presenters having a punch-up in the Osterley corridor following an ego spat that began with both claiming to be on air at the moment Nelson Mandela walked free from Robben Island Prison. I swear to this day that someone involved in Anchorman must have heard about it, given that it escalated into a war of attrition that ended with the pair “rolling” down a corridor, not unlike Alan Bates and Oliver Reed in Women In Love (though, thankfully, fully clothed). 

GB News will want to avoid any such chicanery, as it seriously dents a channel’s reputation and detracts from the core mission of delivering news as authoritatively as possible. That is when it will truly be worth considering. For now, we can chatter about the gimmicks, the Wokewatch on-air clickbait, and controversialists like Dan Wootton or Michele Dewberry mixing it up for kicks (Sky’s early days had a confrontational debate show featuring Norman Tebbit and Labour MP Austin Mitchell), However, it is when sharp, analytic journalism is required that any news organisation comes into its own. Anyone can read wire copy of what has happened, but it’s a whole different matter being able to objectively explain why it has happened.

In its charter (no doubt, an Ofcom-mandated requirement), there is no mention of GB News’s headline-grabbing intentions. Actually, it’s a pretty standard declaration, pledging to stand for journalistic independence, a fact-based approach but also respect for opinions and freedom of expression. It’s focus is, notably, the UK (the clue is in the name, as Neil stated) and what is “good and bad – it’s about covering what is going on, not just what is going wrong.” That might be a pointed statement about pepping up our lives with feel goodery, but sadly, news doesn’t arbitrate that way. It’ll be interesting how long GB News can remain so differentiated.

Now 96 families know they're not walking alone

In the 27 years and 11 days since the Hillsborough tragedy, we have frequently heard or read the refrain "no one should die because they went to a football match". But on the day that a jury has delivered justice to the families of the 96 who died in Sheffield, by declaring their deaths unlawful, we should also put football into some context.

In England on April 15, 1989, football was somewhat in the social doghouse. To be a fan was to have pariah status in some circles. English clubs and their supporters were in the midst of a five-year ban from European competition after hooliganism had reached its nadir at the Heysel Stadium in Brussels on May 29, 1985, when 39 Italian fans died and 600 were injured as a result of fighting between Liverpool and Juventus supporters. Two weeks prior to that ugly encounter, 56 people died and at least 265 were injured when fire swept through Bradford City's antiquated Valley Parade stadium.

But, with the Premier League and its Sky money not heralding a gentrification of English football's elite for another three years to come, Hillsborough ensured that the sport continued to be supported without the fanfare and wall-to-wall attention it gets today. Amongst metropolitan circles to declare interest or even an opinion on the game would result in looks at social occasions akin to announcing a penchant for bestiality with zoo animals.

Hillsborough darkened the sport's already dimmest days and, that the tragedy should have involved Liverpool fans again brought a further cruel twist to the reputation of the city and the club. On the day of the disaster more than 24,000 supporters travelled from Merseyside for the FA Cup semi-final between the Reds and Nottingham Forest at Hillsborough, Sheffield Wednesday's ground. They had been assigned to the North and West stands, but in the build-up, a large number of Liverpool fans were already crowding before the turnstiles of the Leppings Lane end of the ground. To relieve the pressure, an exit gate - C - was opened a few minutes before the scheduled kick-off time, but all this did was filter 2,000 spectators into fenced-in pens that were already bulging, resulting in a severe crush...and the deaths of 96 people. The youngest was just 10, the oldest, 67. Many had died horribly from compression asphyxia, an agonizing death (essentially how a boa constrictor kills its prey).

In the aftermath, blame was placed squarely on the behaviour of the fans themselves. As with Heysel, and indeed all the other shameful moments of English football support, it was assumed that this was a terrible event with the sport's neanderthal element at its root. This was seized upon by the police and the establishment, who appeared in collusion to besmirch the Liverpool supporters with lies to protect their own standing. Sir Bernard Ingham, then Margaret Thatcher’s press secretary, accused the fans of being "tanked up yobs". Today, he refused to apologise for the slur. The Sun newspaper compounded things by publishing lurid claims about the fans, rendering the paper persona non grata to this day on Merseyside.

Despite this, the families of the 96 men, women and children have fought a tireless battle in the intervening years to win back the reputations of their loved ones and, moreover, for the police who were supposedly in control of Hillsborough to be brought to account for their apparent negligence. Not all police officers at Hillsborough that day were culpable: most joined the effort to get victims to safety, with advertising hoardings famously used as makeshift stretchers. But the evidence and statements that have appeared throughout the inquest, one of the longest in British legal history, have made for grim testament of the conduct of the senior commanders on duty at Hillsborough and even of the culture within the South Yorkshire police authority in a decade that also saw it accused of heavy-handed tactics during the 1984 miners' strike.

Today, after hearing from more than 500 witnesses, reading 4,000 pages of documents. watching countless hours of video evidence and almost three months of deliberation, a jury has found the police commander at Hillsborough on the day, Chief Superintendant David Duckenfield "responsible for manslaughter by gross negligence". During the inquest, Duckenfield’s barrister, John Beggs QC, had pushed the prevailing police view of Liverpool fans being drunk and uncompliant with police instructions as the crush worsened at the Leppings Lane End. Survivors countered this, giving evidence that there hadn't any misbehaviour and that a lack of coherent police planning had led to the chaos that ensued. Overall, the jury concluded a catalogue of errors - a lack of police planning, control and communication, the inadequacies of the stadium itself, delays in the emergency response, poor signage and information on match tickets, and even a lack of response by Sheffield Wednesday officials in delaying kick-off of the cup tie. Of 14 questions the jury was asked to consider, all but one received a 'yes' - the one  'no' being in response to a question about whether the supporters' behaviour "caused or contributed to the dangerous situation at the Leppings Lane turnstiles".

There will, no doubt, be renewed vigour to bring those responsible to account for their negligence. Perhaps the police on duty on April 15, 1989 - all no doubt now enjoying comfortable retirement, generous pensions and preferred parking at the local golf club - will be pursued with the same zeal that miscreant celebrities have been by Operation Yewtree. For the record, the current chief constable of South Yorkshire Police, David Crompton, said the force "unequivocally" accepted the findings, and admitted that it had "failed the victims and failed their families".

Personally, I see no benefit in a witchhunt. The families, hopefully can now seek closure and vindication, rather than the prolonged pain of further legal proceedings. The one frustration is that they've had to endure 27 years of agony that could have been avoided a long time ago by a simple admission of failure. If there is a legacy of Hillsborough - and wisdom after the event - our sports stadia and the organisation around football matches improved beyond all recognition. Lord Justice Taylor's report saw to that, heralding in more expensive but safer all-seat venues, with changes to matchday policing at grounds. In the process, it also brought about a change in the clientele profile.

But for me the most important outcome of today's verdict is the full exoneration of Liverpool fans. Football has had a lot to answer for, and even today, it would be naive in the extreme to think that hooliganism has gone away. I, like the fans of most teams remain party to the tribalism that, to some extent, drives the game. As I am with Manchester United, Spurs and Arsenal, I'm programmed to dislike Liverpool out of a decades-long on-the-pitch rivalry. But no amount of dislike could wish for the events of 27 years ago. None.

No amount of retroactive investigation and, potentially, arrests will bring back the 96, either. All we can hope is that the reputations of those fans and, indeed, the city of Liverpool have been restored by the verdict, and the victims' families can, 27 years on, finally enjoy peace and dignity.