Letters | 23 July 2011

Spectator readers respond to recent articles

Selective indignation

Sir: People are — quite correctly — very offended by the phone-hacking antics of the News of the World journalists and editors. But did any of these (now) horrendously affronted guardians of the rights of individual privacy give the slightest damn when similarly disgusting reporters were so gleefully reporting the (hacked) private conversations of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker-Bowles?

No sensible person condones the actions of the News of the World, or of its editors and journalists. But I, for one, do not find their actions nearly as sickening as the revoltingly selective indignation with which we are now being so continuously bombarded.

Colin Brown
Natal, South Africa


In praise of loyalty

Sir: When Jack Profumo resigned his seat in March 1963, having admitted lying to Parliament, Iain Macleod, then leader of the Commons, amid public and press hysteria quite as overblown as is manifest today, said: ‘Jack Profumo was a friend of mine, is a friend of mine and will continue to be a friend of mine.’

I have always thought standing by friends no matter what is rare — especially in politics — and David Cameron rises in my estimation for standing by Andy Coulson.

Tom Benyon
Bladon, Oxon


End of the World

Sir: How right Charles Moore is in his remarks on the demise of the News of the World (The Spectator’s Notes, 16 July). Long ago my grandfather told me he believed it would only be possible to describe England as a civilised country when the readers of the Spectator out-numbered those of that scurrilous paper. Now that day has come.

Ronald Forrest
Lower Milton, Wells, Somerset


Sir: Was Charles Moore employing an irony too subtle for my poor intelligence to comprehend in his column this week? For three paragraphs he rightly excoriates the News of the World for being the grubby, prurient, shameless rag it was and not the fearless campaigner for truth that some sentimental obituarists claim it to have been.