If you need anything to read this week, don’t stick around here. Nick Davies for, as they say, the win. Follow the links – it gets better. There’s much more detail here. This is a truly amazing story of crypto-politics, journalism, police corruption, and general depravity. Do you prefer the police/Murdoch spy who went to jail for planting cocaine on a woman involved in a divorce case before being accused of killing his business partner with an axe, or the bent copper who investigated the axe case and then took the victim’s job, who was later convicted of being an Internet paedophile? Take your pick – as they may not have said to the victim…
And wouldn’t you love to have been a fly on the wall when David Cameron and Nick Clegg were briefed about the whole rotten pile when they decided to hire Andy Coulson, who, it turns out, gave coke guy his job back after he got out of jail? The sad thing is that I can imagine Clegg lapping it up. If this is what Vince means when he talks about the compromises of power, I must be in line for real power…
But it’s wider than that. There’s something appallingly telling about the culture of the whole thing. Morgan’s body was found with two packets of crisps in his hands. Crisps. The case eventually fell apart because enormous piles of police documents kept either disappearing, as happened in the original 1987 investigation after kiddy fiddler guy got his hands on them, or else re-appearing at inconvenient moments, very much like the contents of Glenn Mulcaire’s desk. The Daily Mirror hired some of the same people to investigate the finances of the Bank of England’s court of governors. Sleazy left-wing tabloid journalism is clearly not the same thing as the right-wing kind, although you wonder if anyone read the story that resulted. Which, I suppose, amounts to the same thing.
Someone should make a movie out of this, but they probably won’t.