Behind the Hancock story… total bollocks: Oakeshott says she had it first; Newton claims The Sun’s a softie now
Behind the Hancock story… total bollocks: Oakeshott says she had it first; Newton claims The Sun’s a softie now
Unbelievable claims from unbearable people.
A week on from Matt Hancock crashing his career, marriage, and the already tattered remains of his reputation, The Sun is doing a victory lap and the reliably odious Isabel Oakeshott has inserted herself into the story with all the grace of a dysmorphic Great Dane that thinks it’s a lap dog.
The Sun’s Editor-in-chief, Victoria Newton, started her run around the touchline with a piece for The New Statesman. There are many laughable moments in the article, which comes with a headline promising to explain ‘How the Sun got its Matt Hancock scoop’ but obviously does nothing of the sort, but I’ll focus on the one most likely to make drink shoot out of your nose:
Credulity shatters entirely when you reach the part in which Newton talks without a trace of irony or self-awareness about the powerful moral purpose of the Murdoch machine. She writes:
It’s our job at the Sun to hold the powerful to account without fear or favour, and we’ll carry on doing so. Despite the interruption of England vs Germany, I sense this story isn’t going to go away for Hancock or the government any time soon.
This is the same Sun that wrote up the Prime Minister’s recent wedding like it was Hello! for uglier people, including stories bylined to the bride’s ex-boyfriend, and greeted the appointment of the new Health Secretary, Sajid Javid, with a level of fannish enthusiasm that would make even a BTS stan blush.
The Sun “holds the powerful to account” only when it suits its current purposes and the interests of its proprietor Rupert Murdoch. Its output is entirely dictated by fear and favour; the fear of what Murdoch will think and the state of fear it wants to keep its readers in, along with an ever-present awareness of the favours that it has done and when it intends to call them in.
The British tabloids — The Sun chief among them — are a protection racket. They demand the acquiescence of celebrities and politicians alike with their agendas, campaigns, and concerns. If a high-profile figure gets in line, praises the paper, mugs for the camera, and makes themselves available for ‘revealing’ interviews about their personal pain, they’re much more likely to get an easy ride.
When News UK recently settled a legal claim against The Sun from former Lib Dem MP Sir Simon Hughes over the illegal acquisition of data, including phone hacking, the paper’s tactics were put in the spotlight again. In 2006, after gaining access to Hughes’ phone records, The Sun blackmailed him into cooperating on a story that outed him. It was just 15 years ago and the headline read A second Limp-Dem confesses: I’m Gay Too.
Speaking outside court after the settlement was announced, Hughes said he believed that knowledge of how his private information was obtained went to the very top, including Rebekah Brooks, now News UK’s CEO but Sun editor in 2006:
It went to the top in the Sun — senior editorial people, senior people at the top were clearly involved… we have not named names, but it is clear from all that I have seen that it went to the top of The Sun. I think I will have to leave you to draw your own conclusions from that.
Newton’s line on ‘her’ Sun is that it’s a very different place to the Brooks-era. But while the face in the editor’s chair changes, The Sun — which Murdoch was literally hands-on in creating back in 1969 when he dragged the tabloid version from the twitching corpse of its broadsheet predecessor — is always a mouthpiece for its proprietor, a reflection of his obsessions, anger, and power.
In her New Statesman piece, Newton makes a big play of how the paper ‘did the right thing’ with the Hancock ‘scoop’, talking to lawyers and really thinking deeply about the implications. It’s total theatre. She writes:
Some may have expected a pun headline on page one – a joke about sex from the best headline writers in the world. But we agreed this wasn’t an old fashioned “kiss and tell” from a bygone era. This was a serious piece of responsible journalism about a cabinet minister potentially breaking the law, and behaving with extraordinary hypocrisy. We splashed the story, using some of the video grabs on pages one, two, three, four and five.
The article and the chosen venue for its dissemination are about positioning The Sun as both as powerful as it ever was — undermined by its News UK’s recent decision to write the paper’s value down to zero — while simultaneously trying to launder its reputation. But the first big story of the Newton-era was the outing of Phillip Schofield.
While Schofield said that he made the decision to come out, it’s clear that The Sun forced his hand. As Byline Investigates reported shortly after the story broke, Newton and Dan Wootton — the worst man in British media — told Schofield that they had the story and ‘encouraged’ him to cooperate.
Schofield only made a choice in so far as he decided not to take legal options that were available to him to fight The Sun’s story and opted instead to ‘have his say’ in the pages of a paper that would have monstered him if he had not.
In this week’s edition of Radio 4’s Media Show, Newton — who used to edit The Sun’s Bizarre showbiz column, boasts that she has “brilliant relationships with many celebrities and their agents.” The Schofield story seemed to be evidence of the ‘brilliance’ of those relationships as the newly-installed Sun editor negotiated the deal with the TV presenter’s agents James Grant Management that got her the ‘scoop’ and him some far gentler coverage.
Newton’s appearance on the Media Show, presented this week by Clive Myrie, was another part of her Hancock story victory lap. It was a soapy tit wank of an interview in which Myrie failed to subject Newton and fellow guests Evening Standard editor Emily Sheffield and Daily Mail deputy editor Tobyn Andreae to even a micron of pressure.
The chummy backslapping was bad enough, but it got much worse when Myrie — ignoring the settlement of the Hughes case just 21 days before — asserted confidently that “the phone-hacking scandal was nothing to do with you [Newton], nothing to do with The Sun, it was the News of the World and that is defunct…” The Simon Hughes settlement made it clear that it was not just The News of the World which had been involved in the use of illegally acquired data.
The Hughes case is the first time — but is unlikely to be the last — that News UK settled a phone-hacking case related only to The Sun. The company had argued previously that the toxicity had been confined to The News of the World; an argument as ludicrous as suggesting that urine never reaches the deep end if you pee in the shallows at the local authority pool.
Ducking and weaving even the most soft-ball questions from Myrie about how The Sun got the Hancock scoop, Newton said The Sun has “moved on” and is “a hugely compliant company” with “checks and balances in place”. Incredibly, Myrie and his other guests managed not to burst out laughing as she delivered her pious script.
Allegations that Newton was involved in phone hacking during her time at both The Sun and The Daily Mail — derived from many stories that contain references to phone calls and suspiciously high levels of private information — have appeared during several legal cases. Newton has denied and continues to deny vehemently that she was ever used illegal practices to secure stories.
Later in the Media Show discussion, Myrie asked Andreae about The Daily Mail’s notorious Enemies of the People front page. The Mail man suggested that his paper under Geordie Greig would probably not run a similar headline again:
I suspect not every editor makes their own judgments. And of course, it’s always great to be wise with hindsight; would Paul Dacre use the same headline again? I can’t speak for him. He was a tremendously gifted editor from whom I learned an awful lot. But it’s a fast paced newsroom. Sometimes mistakes do get made. I can’t promise they won’t ever get made again.
But there was no question to Newton about James Slack, the man who wrote the story underneath the Enemies… headline, who after spending time as the Prime Minister’s Official spokesperson and Comms Director is now her deputy.
The only slip that Newton made was calling the source “he” and squirming when Myrie asked what the whistleblower had been paid. She wouldn’t say the paper hadn’t paid for the material, saying instead that she couldn't comment in order to protect her source. I fell off my chair laughing again when she claimed she’d go to jail rather than reveal the name. We’ll see…
Sheffield also benefitted from selective questioning on Myrie’s part. He didn’t ask any follow-up questions after she batted away his suggestion that the Evening Standard is a Tory-supporting paper. Sheffield is former Prime Minister and finance dunce David Cameron’s sister-in-law and succeeded former Chancellor and job collector George Osborne.
It seems clear that Newton, Sheffield, and Andreae agreed to appear on The Media Show because certain topics were off-the-table. They were able to witter on about standards, principles, and ‘digital change’ as if no one knows what the Standard, Mail and Sun do day in day out. Listening was like tuning in to an alternate reality where tabloids are squeaky clean watchdogs of moral probity and only ever publish in the public interest rather than because salacious things are what the public is interested in.
Over in The Spectator, Isabel Oakeshott was also reporting from an alternate reality — the one where she considers herself as a respectable journalist rather than a muck scrabbling, pig’s head fucker fabricating, chancer who notoriously burned a source so badly that they went to prison. Under the headline How I missed the Matt Hancock story, she ‘revealed’, like the most unconvincing member of the world’s worst amdram group, that:
I have let myself down. I let others down too, and I’m sorry. Not because, Matt Hancock-style, I breached social distancing guidelines with a steamy office affair — but because I missed the scoop. I was sent a compromising picture of the then health secretary and his mistress almost a week before the Sun newspaper sensationally revealed their relationship — and I did not believe it was him.
Having made this ‘confession’, she switched back into her usual boasting:
Over the years, my scoops have led variously to the jailing of a cabinet minister (Chris Huhne); the resignation of the UK’s ambassador to Washington (Sir Kim Darroch); awkward ‘questions to answer’ for William Hague (after I revealed the married former Tory party leader was sharing a hotel bedroom with a young male aide); the embarrassment of Prince Andrew, when I obtained a cache of his emails; and yes, that notorious story about a prime minister and a pig. (Say what you like, but only the shock departure of teen heartthrob Zayn Malik from the band One Direction attracted more tweets and memes that year.)
Notice she doesn’t mention that her source in the Huhne case — Vicky Pryce — was also jailed after Oakeshott and her editor at The Sunday Times, John Witherow, gave her up. See also how she skips over the fact that the “notorious story about a prime minister and a pig” wasn’t true by saying, “Look! Lots of people tweeted about the entertaining lie I told.”
After claiming that she received an image from the Hancock CCTV footage ahead of The Sun from an “important contact” but didn’t believe it was really him, Oakeshott concludes:
So mea culpa. Like Hancock, I’m an idiot. My contact, an anti-establishment figure with a dim view of politicians in general and a particular disdain for the architects of the lockdown policy, would have relished his part in exposing Hancock’s hypocrisy. I let him down. And I’m left hungrier than ever for the next political scalp. This was the one that got away. Note to other politicians with skeletons: the next one won’t slip through my grasp.
Her own current squeeze, former Brexit Party man Richard Tice, fits that description quite well — especially given other reports talking of “lockdown sceptics” as the middlemen for the Sun’s ‘whistleblower’ — but it took a further story in The Daily Mail for things to make sense. That article, bylined to no less than four Mail staffers, says:
The leak of CCTV footage exposing Matt Hancock’s affair could have been part of a politically motivated plot to oust him spearheaded by a ‘highly successful' businessman and anti-lockdown campaigner who was angry about his handling of the pandemic, it emerged today.
In a dramatic twist, it was claimed that an entrepreneur had allegedly offered the compromising images to prominent political journalist Isabel Oakeshott because he 'relished his part in exposing Hancock’s hypocrisy’ - five days before they were published.
… Miss Oakeshott is in a relationship with Richard Tice, a founder of the Leave Means Leave campaign. There is no suggestion of any wrongdoing by Mr Tice, who leads Reform UK, a party that campaigns to restore pre-Covid freedoms.
He revealed last night he had examined the clip after Miss Oakeshott passed it to him but he believed it was ‘doctored’.
Mr Tice said: ‘The footage was doctored, there is no question. If you look closely you see a pair of hands when he is not touching her. It’s not his hands.
‘We saw that and thought something is not right. The footage came to Isabel and we both agreed it wasn’t right. The affair is clearly right but there is something not right about that footage.’
How sweet of Tice to give Oakeshott an excuse for why she didn’t pursue the story properly if she did, indeed, get hold of it first. But who is the mysterious entrepreneur who sounds an awful lot like Tice in a very silly moustache and comedy top hat? We’ll probably never know.
Despite claims in The Times that the investigation into the leaked Hancock footage should “take 10 minutes”, I suspect it will, in fact, take months and come to the conclusion that “a big boy did it and ran away”.
It’s not in the government’s interest to clash with Rupert Murdoch and The Sun, and leaks with Oakeshott even tangentially involved tend to go unsolved. While a man — thought to be a civil servant at the Department of International Trade — was arrested in October last year, 15 months after the leak of diplomatic cables to Oakeshott via a Brexit Party activist, the truth in that affair remains elusive.
The embarrassment of the Hancock story has been followed by a different kind of clown show. The Sun gets to pretend it’s a crusader for morality and Oakeshott manages to somehow make a story she categorically failed to break all about her. Journalism is the only profession in the world where someone can be lauded for receiving then printing dubiously acquired information and someone else can get a whole article about how they nearly did that but didn’t.
As that sage for the ages, Les McQueen (formerly of Crème Brûlée), famously and concisely put it: “It’s a shit business.”
Read more: Narcissistic Journalism Disorder: Isabel Oakeshott shows how to make the story all about you... by Greg D. Smith