Dacregate: where are the men from the Mail when you need them?
Day Seven, Dacregate. It won’t go away.
But first let me declare an interest. As many will know I contributed myself from time to time to the Mail on Sunday wrting about foreign news, Syria, Afghanistan and so forth. It’s a useful way to reach a different audience than the one associated with Channel 4 News.
It won’t go away because my cat could organise a better PR strategy than the continuing Associated Newspapers Let’s All Commit Corporate Suicide approach to things. And my cat’s particularly dim, with almost no corporate PR experience.
Both editors of the main titles are unable to go to their homes in London because of the presence of cameras. Both are on the run, in that sense. And why? It’s not as if they’ve commited any criminal offences.
One – the Mail on Sunday’s Geordie Greig – has fulsomely apologised. The other, Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre, has partially apologised.
But when your two main men are on the run, the one thing you do not do is put up a few sherpas in the hope that you deflect attention away from the men at the top. The men who give the orders. The men who run things.
The hapless City editor of the Mail, Alex Brummer, just the latest head on the plate presented today by Associated Newspapers to try to deflect attention away from his bosses in this bonkers “oh-please-can-we make-it -all stop-now?” strategy.
It’s not working. This is day seven, I remind you. It’ll be a week old in a few hours..
Everything the company does merely deepens the hole it’s already dug. Take Lord Rothermere’s private apology to Ed Miliband. All that’s done is increased Labour’s anger. And why? Because he managed to re-apologise for things his editors had already apologised for (infiltrating the private memorial, the use of certain photographs in the Daily Mail etc) and yet managing not to apologise for Ed Miliband’s basic beef – saying his dad hated Britain when he fought for Britain. “The lie” as Ed Miliband has repeatedly called it.
In short it’s a mess, a worse mess today than it was yesterday. The semi-apologies, full apologies and no apologies at all for the real offence from proprietor and editors. Key men unable to go home. Staff apparently saying if only they’d just put a question mark on the headline saying Ralph Miliband hated Britain.
Try phoning the papers for a comment and nobody knows who to put you through to or what to say. Yesterday it took them seven hours to issue a statement which turned out to be the statement they’d issued eight hours previously. Panic and chaos are what is being communicated outside Northcliffe House – regardless of whether it is calmness and efficiency personified within.
At dawn outside Geordie Greig’s recently converted five-floor west London mansion, a thud as the papers were delivered in the dark this morning.
“Yes, ” said a neighbour, “the oligarch’s palace is almost completed.
“He spent five years buying out the neighbouring flats in the building and still hasn’t moved in full-time.”
The papers were eventually rescued from the drizzle by a man who appeared to be a decorator perhaps, not by a man who appeared to be the editor of a Sunday newspaper in crisis.
The suspending of two journalists appears to be the search for scapegoats in many eyes. Certainly in Ed Miliband’s eyes when he says Rothermere needs to look into the whole culture of ethics at the paper and that it’s not about individual editors features editors or reporters.
Reporter Jo Knowsley, who was at the Miliband private gathering (uninvited), gamely tweeting that she is determined not to disappear and defending her own personal working ethics as she has every right to do.
Rothermere is apparently promising an investigation, but this appears to miss the Miliband point by a mile. Because it seems to be investigating what happened and why and from who on the gatecrashing of the private memorial. It does not seem to be the wholesale examination of ethics and working practices that Ed Miliband wants.
Perhaps Associated Newspapers are right in that regard. Do we really want our papers examining their collective navels just because they have upset a politician and apologised for so long? It is easy in some quarters to hate and pour scorn on the Mail titles precisely because of their own loud styles of hate and scorn. But we should tread carefully in that regard.
Clearly, obviously, the quickest way for Associated Newspapers to move on and – as Geordie Greig said last night – they are keen to move on, is for editors Greig and Dacre to put their story out in their own words and drop this absurd tabloid machismo that one never gives interviews.
That was the style of one Rebekah Brooks and one News International and one News of the World. She’s gone, the company name’s gone. The paper’s gone. It’s a well-tried, well tested and obviously flawed strategy.
Time to talk please, Paul and Geordie.
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