Enemies of the party people
James Slack lets the revolving door hit him on the arse on the way out. The Sun tries to do a "Mariah" and Piers Morgan clams up.
“I don’t know her.”
When Mariah Carey delivered those four words on July 9 2001, responding to a German reporter’s question about Jennifer Lopez, an iconic piece of shade was born. 15 years later, she assured TMZ: “I still don’t know her.”
In Saturday’s edition of The Sun, political editor and ex-boyfriend of the Prime Minister’s current wife Harry Cole delivered an even less convincing “I don’t know her”: A frontpage story on the latest development in the partygate affair that contrived to bury the fact that James Slack (the Prime Minister’s former Director of Communications) is also James Slack (Deputy Editor of The Sun).
Beneath the headline Sorry Ma’am and with a subhead that attempted to tie Number 10’s apology1 to the Queen for parties on the eve of Prince Phillip’s funeral to the ongoing Prince Andrew story, Cole wrote:
The bashes were held to mark the departure of the PM’s communications chief James Slack and, separately, one of the PM’s vanity photographers.
The latter party ended up in the Downing Street garden. One person present went to a nearby Co-op to fill a suitcase with bottles of wine.
Those details appeared on page 4 of the printed edition, with the fact that Slack left Downing Street to become The Sun’s Deputy Editor — a post he still holds — buried in the penultimate paragraph of the story. The online version does not mention Slack’s current employer at all.
When The Sun broke the Matt Hancock affair story that led to the then-Health Secretary’s resignation — two months after Slack took up his role there — the paper’s editor, Victoria Newton, wrote in The New Statesman:
It’s our job at the Sun to hold the powerful to account without fear or favour, and we’ll carry on doing so.
If that were the case, James Slack would have been sacked on Friday or given the opportunity to sack himself with a face-saving resignation. But there is plenty of fear and a lot of favours being done at the newspaper.
Jim Waterson, The Guardian’s Media Editor, reported on Friday that:
…. after issuing his apology, Slack was said to be at work in the Sun’s office in News UK in central London. Colleagues claim that other members of the Sun’s management team were only informed about their deputy editor’s Downing Street leaving party when contacted by the Daily Telegraph on Thursday afternoon. His future now potentially depends on the outcome of Gray’s investigation into No 10 parties during lockdown.
While I’m sure that’s what sources in the Sun newsroom told Waterson, I don’t believe it for a second. If Newton didn’t ask Slack — who was employed by Downing Street until March 2021 — what he knew about the goings-on there once The Mirror and ITV News had been leaked the material that kicked off partygate in December, she should resign too.
Private Eye has reported extensively on News UK’s own lockdown rule-breaking party in December 2020, an event that was confirmed by News UK’s assurance (repeated by Victoria Newton in a December 2021 BBC News Channel) that an investigation was conducted and “appropriate action was taken”. The company declines to say what the investigation concluded or who was subject to “action”.
According to Private Eye:
Senior executives carted booze and food into the office at the end of the day — exactly as in Downing Street. Just as in Downing Street, senior members of staff (such as Managing Editor, Victoria Watson, and Head of Content, Steve Kennedy) were present and enthusiastically involved in the revelries.
The identities of the “very senior staff” who were engaged in what The Sun itself would no doubt call “romps” during the December 2020 party, including — per the Eye — “one in the ladies toilets and the other in a glass-walled meeting room in full sight of colleagues” have yet to be revealed.
They’re not likely to be either given that senior executives issued stern warnings to staff that their prospects for advancement would be severely curtailed should further details emerge. Private Eye also reported that the corporate line was that “so long as comment was limited to the pages of the Eye and gossip mailout Popbitch, no further disciplinary action was necessary.”
Still, makes a suitcase full of booze and someone breaking Wilf Johnson’s swing sound positively tame, doesn’t it?
James Slack was recruited back into Fleet Street because he had been inside Johnson’s administration. He has spent the thick end of two months sitting on details that implicate him in a story that The Sun was already dragging its feet reporting, in part because Murdoch is still weighing up who to support as the successor to the gabbling Gorg currently self-isolating from criticism and partly because its own party people faced embarrassment.
Former Sun editor David Yelland — who called it “a great job to have done but not a great job to be doing.” — tweeted:
James Slack needs to clarify or resign as Deputy Editor of The Sun. How on Earth can he have kept this out of the paper?
Who else attended his leaving do in Downing Street and kept quiet? How many editors? How many in the Lobby?
… and followed up by saying:
James Slack currently remains as Deputy Editor of The Sun even though he has now apologised for attending a party that (he now admits) should not have happened. But he knew all along the PM was lying and did not tell his readers. This is scandalous.
… and then decided to really stretch credulity:
We need a full list of attendees. I think this is as close to corruption as I have seen in the national newspaper business, which has always been a Street of Shame — always red in tooth and claw — but never corrupt.
Tell that to the family of Daniel Morgan or the recipients of over £1 billion in settlements paid out to victims of phone hacking. Either Yelland was the most naive man in the media or he wore very effective blinkers throughout his career.
In another tweet, Yelland — the sweet summer child — wondered:
… how The Sun will report that a serving Prime Minister has had to apologise to the Queen over a leaving party for its own Deputy Editor without explaining why he didn’t mention it to the readers before…
The answer, as we’ve seen, is by burying it, reporting the story a day after the rest of the papers then hiding the most incriminating details at the bottom of one page and across from another where it dragged out a tenuous tale of Keir Starmer consuming a beer during a dinner break in a meeting.
That same story — ginned up by The Sun in May 2021 — was resurrected for The Daily Mail’s splash — more of a splat really — on Saturday (Starmer The Covid Party Hyprocite). Ted Verity once again proved himself the British media’s greatest example of nominative non-determinism.
Slack, of course, is a former Political Editor of The Daily Mail and penned the notorious November 2016 front page Enemies of the people under the approving eye of Paul Dacre. Cue the cries of “journalists don’t write the headlines”, but it’s suggested that Slack did come up with that one and it was enthusiastically nodded through by Dacre.
Like The Sun, The Daily Mail kept its connection with Slack until the very end of its story, burying it in a buffet of other partygate coverage, across from a full page on its lukewarm reheating of the 8-month-old Starmer story.
Another former Sun editor, the professionally-odious Kelvin MacKenzie, wrote:
Made me laugh that The Sun carried the James Slack party storm but failed to mention he is now the paper’s deputy editor having been hired by CEO Rebekah Brooks as a safe pair of hands because editor Victoria Newton is considered politically hopeless. Good hire!
Like Yelland, MacKenzie has more axes to grind than a lazy medieval armourer — particularly since he was sacked from his Sun column in 2017 — and looking to him for lessons in journalistic ethics is like asking Josef Fritzel for tips on basement conversions.
But it’s worth reading the words of one of the devil’s former deputies if only because he knows exactly how the boiler’s stoked. He wrote last week:
If you’re wondering why the increasingly odd Sun couldn’t find space on page one for Boris’s Partygate you might look at the paper’s Deputy Editor James Slack who in 2020 had been comms boss at No.10 and had attended the party. That’s how it works.
He returned to the topic a few days later, saying:
Be fascinated to know how many editorials condemning Boris’s Partygate James Slack had either written or approved in his role as Sun Deputy without revealing he was up to his neck in No.10 shenanigans. With that kind of cunning, he should follow Brooks as the next CEO.
Permanently excommunicated from the News Corp fold and marinating in the sharp sauce of his own bitterness, MacKenzie is willing to state “that’s how it works”. Piers Morgan — the man MacKenzie brought to The Sun in 1988 — is not. On the BBC’s Sunday Morning with Sophie Raworth, Morgan began his appearance on the paper review by observing:
There’s a common theme with all of the people in the news, whether it’s Novak Djokovic, who’s just been told he’s going to be deported for breaking all sorts of rules, you have Boris Johnson who doesn’t believe the rules apply to him, you have Prince Andrew who doesn’t believe the rules apply to him, Prince Harry has popped his head up from California, again wanting to have his royal cake and eat it. So there’s a common theme of people in powerful positions who basically want to have one rule for them and one rule for the rest of us…
The emetic “Morgan as moral titan” act continued as the recently-signed Sun columnist delivered a long monologue on Partygate. It spluttered out when Rawroth asked Morgan about Slack:
Morgan: [Boris Johnson] might be safe but he’s completely damaged, rather like a ship that’s been holed…
Raworth: Can I just ask you, Piers, about James Slack — it was his leaving do on the night before the Duke of Edinburgh’s funeral. He was working in Downing Street at the time, head of communications there, he’s now gone to The Sun, he obviously knew exactly what was going on, we’ve only just found out about it — you work for The Sun now — is that partly why The Sun is not covering…
Morgan: I don’t know… they have been covering these stories…
Raworth: Perhaps not as prominently as other newspapers.
Morgan: Well, look, you’d have to ask The Sun about that. I’ve just joined as a columnist. What I would say is, he’s come and very emphatically in a statement said it shouldn’t have happened. He’s been very contrite about that and that’s the right thing to do. And there will be lots of staffers who will be feeling that way but the rot comes from the top…
Curiously, Morgan wasn’t making that “rot comes from the top” argument during the Leveson Inquiry, nor during the City Slickers scandal where he allowed his staff to take the fall. Morgan continued his history of cowardice this morning. He began the paper review by asking if he “was allowed to have an opinion” then couldn’t find one when Slack came up.
Morgan’s answer on Slack shows how performative his indignation is and why his £50 million three-year deal is not for “telling it like it is” but saying it as Murdoch wants. He screams about double standards then immediately finds an exception for his employer.
Piers Morgan’s outrage is only ever ersatz, the product of a tabloid talent for chasing the public mood while pretending to be leading it. His job is to pretend to be one of “us” when he is always one of “them”.
If you find yourself saying some variation of “oh god, I agree with Piers Morgan”, you need to follow it by immediately asking “But why is he taking that line?” and remembering who is paying him for it.
Whether it’s James Forsyth continuing to write analysis for The Spectator and The Times on Boris Johnson’s future without the necessary conflict of interest statement (“He threw my wife Allegra Stratton under the bus and Rishi Sunak, his potential successor, is my lifelong best friend.”), The Spectator still having Mary Wakefield’s fictionalised account of her husband Dominic Cummings’ Covid experience in its archives uncorrected, or Slack keeping schtum on what he knew about Partygate, the press always makes exceptions for itself.
They’re inside the tent, pissing out and assuring us it’s raining.
The story inaccurately claimed that Johnson himself said sorry to the monarch.