Nick Cohen: Writing from London

From the Australian
By Nick Cohen

EARLIER this month a small and sinister act of intimidation took place in central London. Tony Blair was due to sign copies of his autobiography at the Waterstone’s bookstore in Piccadilly. In the normal way of things, readers would have shaken his hand and bought an autographed copy to show their friends. Blair’s readers could not meet him, however. Fear of violence stopped the book-reading public going to a shop to meet the man many of them had helped elect as prime minister.

The rigged debate.

Debates are between people with opposing views. If they’re not, we call them love ins. A favourite tactic of Radio 4 is to set up what seems to the casual listener to be a debate, but which is in reality a sham argument. Listen to how the Today programme rigs this supposed debate about Kenneth Clarke’s plans to reduce the prison population. (Scroll down to 0732.)

“Justice Secretary Ken Clarke has signalled that significant changes are ahead in the criminal justice system. Two criminal justice experts from each side of the Atlantic – filmmaker Roger Graef and the Harvard professor of Criminology Christopher Stone, discuss some of the possible changes that could be made.” It’s a debate in which no one disagrees.
Carry on reading

‘ve a piece in the Observer about the shocking treatment of Paul Chambers. To summarise, the 27-year-old worked for a car parts company in Yorkshire. He and a woman from Northern Ireland started to follow each other on Twitter. He liked her tweets and she liked his and boy met girl in a London pub. They got on as well in person as they did in cyberspace. To the delight of their followers, Paul announced he would be flying from Robin Hood airport in Doncaster to Northern Ireland to meet her for a date.

In January, he saw a newsflash that snow had closed the airport. “Crap! Robin Hood Airport is closed,” he tweeted to his friends. “You’ve got a week… otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!”

He wasn’t a terrorist nor was he making a bomb hoax call in cyberspace. As I say,

People joke like this all the time. When they say in a bar: “I’ll strangle my boyfriend if he hasn’t done the washing up” or post on Facebook: “I’ll murder my boss if he makes me work late”, it does not mean that the bodies of boyfriends and bosses will soon be filling morgues.

You know the difference between making a joke and announcing a murder, I’m sure. Apparently the forces of law and order do not.

A plain-clothes detective from South Yorkshire Police arrived at Chambers’s work. Instead of quietly pointing out that it was best not to joke about blowing up airports, he arrested him under antiterrorist legislation. A posse of four more antiterrorist officers was waiting in reception.

What is so startling is that all down the line public officials know that this was just a guy who wants to see his girl making a weak joke.
Carry on reading

From the Observer
Writing sometime around the 10th century BC, the furious author of Psalm 14 thundered against those who say there is no God. “They are corrupt, they have done abominable works, there is none that doeth good.” If the denunciations of wicked atheists coming from today’s apologists for religion are any guide, the spirit of Iron Age Israel is abroad in 21st-century Britain.

Carry on reading

What broadsheet journalists think about the phone hacking scandal is clear enough. Read my newspaper, the Observer, the Guardian or the New York Times and you will see that we believe that the News of the World has been engaged in widespread criminality, which a scared Scotland Yard has failed to investigate properly. (For an explanation of why it is criminal read this piece by the campaigning solicitor David Allen Green, who to my mind is one of the best bloggers in Britain.) The conviction of Clive Goodman, the News of the World’s Royal Correspondent, and Glen Mulcaire, the private investigator, who hacked messages for him, ought to be the start of a longer criminal process. Thousands of people’s phones were hacked, we suspect, and Andy Coulson, the News of the World’s editor, and now aide to that nice David Cameron, knew what was going on.

Now, Coulson must have known what Goodman was doing because he signed off the expenses. (If he did not, then he was a remarkably stupid editor.) But finding out what his former colleagues think of him is a hard task.

The pack has a code of silence. “We may work for rival papers but we will never dish the dirt on each other.” I remember on a job in Ireland meeting the gang and being told bluntly and repeatedly that what happens on tour stays on tour. Telltales from snobbish liberal broadsheets were not welcome.

I asked one of the best tabloid hacks I know what he thought of the Netgate scandal Speaking on condition of anonymity he replied.

Carry on reading

A quibbling critic ought to pick the BBC’s Sherlock apart. Admirers of Arthur Conan Doyle would expect nothing less than a fanatical concentration on minute flaws, after all. “The little things are infinitely the most important,” says Holmes in A Case of Identity. His 21st-century successor accepted loose ends and unexplained solutions with a nonchalance the master would never have tolerated.

In the opening episode, a taxi-driver forced his victims to choose from two pills — one deadly, one safe. Holmes never explained why the victim always picked the fatal poison and the driver always swallowed the harmless pill. In the final programme, Moriarty set Holmes multiple challenges and storylines careered across the screen with dizzying speed. Holmes tried to save pensioners and children from being turned into human bombs, unmask an art fraud, stop an insurance swindle, find stolen government secrets and solve an old case of a murdered teenage swimmer. Television’s fear of allowing a plot the time to develop was on display once again. The action had to be relentless to stop the feckless viewer reaching for the remote.

Yet quibblers must learn to sit back and take in the show on occasion if we are not to turn into lawyers.

Carry on reading