Was it in the public interest to stitch up Lord Triesman?

No, says Rod Liddle, in fact it was against it — but you won’t see the Press Complaints Commission punishing the Mail on Sunday for breaching its own code

You know as soon as you see the posed photograph of some sweetly smiling young and hitherto unknown bint on the front page of your morning newspaper that somewhere a man, probably a famous and powerful man, is in the doghouse. Stitched up by the papers, having been dragged towards his doom by the relentless, exhausting power of his own gonads. I say stitched up by the papers, but most of the time we can be more specific than that; it will almost certainly be a newspaper of which the editor-in-chief is also the chairman of the Press Complaints Commission’s Editorial Code of Practice, i.e. Paul Dacre.

The latest chap to be stitched up is Lord Triesman, who was until a few days ago both the boss of the Football Association and the man leading our bid to host the 2018 World Cup. The interesting thing about this story is that people cannot decide which is the more unspeakably ghastly, morally — the porky ginger slapper in question, called Melissa Jacobs, or the Mail on Sunday. I have to say, I find it too close to call; clearly they deserve each other. Jacobs, supposedly a ‘friend’ and former colleague of Triesman, who may or may not have had some sort of quasi-sexual relationship with him, hawked her story around the newspapers through an intermediary — henceforth known as Max Clifford — and found an eager supplicant in the Mail on Sunday. She agreed, or perhaps she suggested, that she should be wired up for sound and have dinner with her old friend and pump him for anything confidential she could think of, then spill it to the paper for £75,000, along with a bunch of affectionate text messages from the married 66-year-old administrator.