The scorpion’s ‘scoop’

Do not be confused: The Telegraph's 'Lockdown Files' are not journalism; Isabel Oakeshott is not a journalist.

Previously: Hancocked

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In theory, ‘journalists’¹ should care deeply about words; in practice, many treat meaning with the same contempt they offer such trifling concepts as facts and nuance. In today’s Telegraph, numerous words, including the common terms “leaked” and “investigation”, get roughed up real nice by that publication’s gang of goons. Matt Hancock’s ghostwriter, Isabel Oakeshott, becomes Matt Hancock’s deeply self-interested Deep Throat².

The early 20th-century fable ‘The Frog and the Scorpion’ has been referenced by a lot of people since Oakeshott’s ‘revelations’ dropped last night. In it, a deal between a scorpion and a frog to cross a river together — the scorpion says it will not sting the frog — ends with both drowning when the fatal strike inevitably arrives. In the pair’s dying moments, the scorpion explains: “I am sorry, but I couldn’t resist the urge. It’s in my nature.”

The problem is that while Oakeshott shares the scorpion’s duplicitous nature, she doesn’t share its fate. In this modern retelling, froggy Hancock is left waving — is that a Newcastle shirt he should have auctioned off for charity he’s using? — but not yet quite drowning in the river, while venomous Isabel reaches the riverbank owned by the sadly still surviving Barclay brother and is rewarded.

It is unquestionably hilarious that Hancock — who, to continue the animal fable analogy, is like a particularly dim labrador crossed with a very greedy goat — put his trust in Oakeshott, handing over 100,000+ messages to her. Oakeshott is notoriously untrustworthy; she gave up a source — Vicky Pryce — to the police and Pryce ended up serving nine weeks in prison as a result.

Oakeshott framed herself as the victim in a piece for The Sunday Times News Review (“Vicky Pryce double-crossed me”) and wrote:

The Sunday Times put up a vigorous fight in court. But eventually, we were forced by the judge to give up the correspondence, along with copies of our written agreement with Vicky.

It was not remotely ‘vigorous’ enough; were Oakeshott truly a journalist and not a grubby gossip sifter and venal self-publicist, she would have gone to jail herself before she named a source. There are plenty of examples of hacks who have stuck to that deal in the past³.

Oakeshott was the co-writer of Call Me Dave (2015), the David Cameron biography that alleged the former Prime Minister, while he was a student, placed his dick in the mouth of a dead pig’s head. It’s a funny story and resulted in one of the best-ever days on Twitter but the ‘Hameron’ affair was based on spurious claims from a single source. In the book, Oakeshott and Lord Ashcroft — the billionaire with a big collection of axes to grind — wrote:

Perhaps it is a case of mistaken identity. Yet it is an elaborate story for an otherwise credible figure to invent. 

In September 2015, before the book was published but after the ‘Piggate’ story had been publicised by a Mail on Sunday syndication, Oakeshott appeared on Channel 4 News and said:

We couldn't get to the bottom of that source's allegations ... So we merely reported the account that the source gave us ... We don't say whether we believe it to be true. 

By the time she appeared at the Cheltenham Literature Festival in October 2015, she had evolved the line to say the source “could have been slightly deranged” and hand-waved away criticism by grumbling that “there [was] no need for the burden of proof on a colourful anecdote where we’re quite upfront about our own reservations about whether to take it seriously”.

All Oakeshott productions should come with an “allegedly based on a true story” disclaimer. And it’s not just the Pryce affair and Piggate that prove that; in 2018, it emerged that Oakeshott had kept a cache of Arron Banks’ emails — acquired when she ghostwrote the book The Bad Boys of Brexit — which showed he had secretly been in regular contact with Russian officials from 2015 to 2017.

Oakeshott had been planning to drop the emails to promote her next book with Ashcroft (White Flag? An Examination of the UK's Defence Capability) but she discovered — via a pre-publication email sent to Banks — The Observer⁴ had also acquired a copy of his emails. First, she accused the paper of hacking her then she agreed to collaborate with it, playing for time while she worked on a spoiler with her former employers at The Sunday Times.

In 2019, Oakeshott published a story on the British Ambassador in Washington’s confidential and critical memos about Donald Trump. The story was that they had been acquired by a 19-year-old Brexit fan — and “digital strategist” for the Brexit Party, led by Oakeshott’s partner Richard Tice — called Stephen Edington who then put them in her hands.

The original Mail story carried Oakeshott’s byline but Edington went unnamed, he claimed to avoid “the possible controversy” over his Brexit Party role. He went on to write his plausibility-stretching story for the Mail on Sunday:

I am sorry to disappoint the conspiracy theorists but this was not a Brexiteer plot to topple Sir Kim, nor was it some devilish scheme to torpedo the independence of the Civil Service by installing a political appointee in Washington. Instead, it was simply an honest journalistic endeavour.

Edington has gone on to ply his “honest journalistic endeavours” at The Sun and latterly The Daily Telegraph. [incredulous canned laughter here]

All of this recent history — coupled with Oakeshott’s avowed membership of the ‘lockdown sceptic’ fringe where Toby Young plays mirthless jester — hammers home the chronic stupidity of Hancock’s decision to ‘collaborate’ with her on The Pandemic Diaries.

Hancock's Barf Hour

The former I’m A Celebrity… contestant/ex-Health Secretary’s allies — his girlfriend/advisor Gina Coladangelo and Hancock himself in a series of increasingly unbelievable disguises (what if Mexican bandito Hancock?) — accuse Oakeshott of breaching a non-disclosure agreement (NDA). But NDAs are hard to enforce and any document would likely be undermined by his own decision to share other people’s private conversations and privileged work discussions with several third parties including Oakeshott.

Following the publication of The Pandemic Diaries, Oakeshott wrote a feature for The Spectator, headlined The truth about Matt Hancock. She claimed:

Journalists don’t only interrogate people they agree with. Quite the reverse. I wanted to get to the truth. What better way to find out what really happened – who said what to whom; the driving force and thinking behind key policies and decisions; who (if anyone) dissented; and how they were crushed – than to align myself with the key player? I might not get the whole truth and nothing but the truth, but I’d certainly get a good dollop of it, and a keen sense of anything murky requiring further investigation.

In the event, Hancock shared far more than I could ever have imagined. I have viewed thousands and thousands of sensitive government communications relating to the pandemic, a fascinating and very illuminating exercise. I was not paid a penny for this work, but the time I spent on the project – almost a year – was richly rewarding in other ways.

Now we know what the real reward was: A fee and attendant attention from a blockbuster Daily Telegraph story and the cache of messages required to ‘earn’ it. The first set of ‘leaks’ published by the paper make the spin being applied evident, as does the title for the series; this is “The Lockdown Files” because the aim is to ‘prove’ that lockdown was not necessary. Inconvenient facts are already being ignored, elided, or distorted in the ‘investigation’.

Boris Johnson — The Telegraph’s once and future columnist — is being framed as a frustrated hero. A story headlined Boris Johnson proposed giving over-65s choice on Covid shielding and bylined to The Lockdown Files Team as many of the reports are, can be seen quite differently. The WhatsApp exchange central to that story begins with Johnson sending the Chief Medical Officer, Chris Whitty, a Spectator article advocating herd immunity.

Matt Hancock/Boris Johnson/Chris Whitty/ The Daily Telegraph (I guess)

In a later conversation, Johnson fixated on an FT article. Rather than being about the Prime Minister’s attitude to shielding or otherwise, the story gives further credence to the claims of Dominic Cummings, among others, that Johnson was “almost as comfortable with living in chaos as Floyd Mayweather but [panicked] all day about the media”.

‘The Lockdown Files Team’ sets up George Osborne, the former Chancellor turned Evening Standard editor during the Covid wars, as a sassy Mean Girl straight-talker with a report headlined George Osborne told Hancock bluntly - 'No one thinks testing is going well, Matt', but other messages demonstrate why Osborne should never have been near an editor’s chair.

Hancock was Osborne’s chief of staff in a past life; Osborne is godfather to Hancock’s third child. Those messages show a mentor and friend putting the front page of the newspaper he edits — owned by Evgeny Lebedev, a man who’d be ennobled on Boris Johnson’s say-so just months later — at the disposal of a government minister. That Osborne actually dedicated the splash to Boris Johnson’s unborn child and relegated Hancock to an anchor strip on the front page doesn’t make it much better.

The publication of that particular conversation has provoked a lot of fake surprise/ unforgivable naivety from hacks. Ben Kentish, LBC’s Westminster Editor, tweeted a screenshot and wrote:

What you see here is the then Health Secretary, in the middle of a global pandemic, asking a newspaper editor who happens to be his former boss for a favourable front page to help him meet an arbitrary target, and the newspaper editor responding: “Yes of course.” Lost for words. 

Since Ben is “lost for words”, let me offer him two: Well, duh. If that feels a bit stingy, here are a few more:

Kentish works for LBC; his colleague Tom Swarbrick was Theresa May’s Head of Broadcast before he joined the station; LBC gives paid shows to politicians who are still in the House of Commons, an open strategy of bribery and influence peddling by its parent company Global; and Rachel Johnson, the sister of one of the innumerate stars of this cache of WhatsApp messages, also has a show.

Still, Kentish is far from the only person working in journalism who is pretending to be confused about what it is, how it works, and who benefits from it. Kate Andrews, the former right-wing think-tank functionary turned ‘Economics Editor’ at The Spectator, hailed her Telegraph colleagues last night…

Thanks to some remarkable reporting from The Telegraph and Isabel Oakeshott we are going to learn in the coming days whether Europe’s longest lockdown was the result of scientific evidence,m politics, or the ego of a few MPs. 

I, for one, can’t wait to find out. 

… while Bev Turner of GB News, another ‘lockdown sceptic’ (I think that’s a requirement for an onscreen role at GBeebies), boasted:

I have an exclusive interview with Richard Tice, partner of writer Isabel Oakeshott, whose release of Hancock’s 100k texts is pure dynamite in The Daily Telegraph right now.  

Both Andrews and Turner are a lot more revealing there than they intended to be. Andrews knows the conclusion The Telegraph will come to before it’s even completed the illusion and Turner lets on just how involved Tice is once again in this whole enterprise. It’s not journalism, it’s a political stunt by one right-wing cabal against another (which remains in government).

Curiously, messages that show how much influence anti-vaxxer and ‘Covid sceptic’ pressure groups have had on papers like… oh, The Daily Telegraph have not got much coverage.

On the Today programme this morning, Chris Mason compared ‘The Lockdown Files’ with a previous Telegraph blockbuster: The MPs’ Expenses Scandal. But there are big differences. The expenses story was based on genuinely leaked material while Oakeshott’s ‘revelations’ were given to her with the understanding that they would be used for a specific project.

Of course, Hancock was an idiot to give Oakeshott the material and there is value in the messages being made public but The Telegraph is releasing them tactically, partially, and making sure that readers can only engage with them in the contexts it sets. Had it committed to publishing its stories and making the raw material accessible in a searchable format for readers, it might have a better case of claiming pure public interest.

Hancock is in ‘the worst person in the world has a good point’ territory when his ‘spokesperson’ (Hancock in a really natty hat) says:

It is outrageous that this distorted account of the pandemic is being pushed with partial leaks, spun to fit an anti-lockdown agenda… 

You’d have to be more baffled by the world than Robert Peston to not see that is exactly what the Telegraph is engaged in. As I was writing this edition, a new set of stories dropped on the Telegraph site focused on schools.

News UK, the owner of TalkTV, where Oakeshott is a presenter, must be utterly delighted that these messages have been sold to the Telegraph and not The Times. Her Twitter bio references her TalkTV show and the banner pictures her with other hosts including Piers Morgan. For how much longer?

Oakeshott and the Telegraph are out to exploit the grief of the bereaved and the anger of all of us. This is not ‘journalism’ but deception with a file structure; a propaganda piece propped up the hollow shell of The Daily Telegraph, occupied now by far-right termites. ‘The Lockdown Files’ will present a lot of material but you can’t expect the truth, only the ‘truth’ with Telegraph branding and an accompanying op-ed column.

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Thanks to DKD for reading the draft today.

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1. Those inverted commas are load-bearing.

2. Deep Throat was Woodward and Bernstein’s pseudonymous secret informant during their investigation into the Watergate scandal (the original -gate). It took 31 years for him to be unmasked as former FBI Associate Director, Mark Felt, and Woodward & Bernstein did not burn their source. Isabel Oakeshott unveiled herself as the Telegraph’s source on the front page today.

3. And other notorious examples of burned sources, including this one by The Guardian.

4. This week, Banks had one of his challenges to a failed libel action against Observer writer Carole Cadwalladr upheld but two others dismissed.