Things are speeded up these days, there is no time to wait. Everything is hurried along to fit our frenetic lives, our shorter attention span, our impatience with the world. You remember poor Jade Goody, the coarse-natured and half-witted ‘reality’ TV star who presented, as the medical people put it, during an episode of the programme Big Brother? No sooner had you heard of her than she was in disgrace for being racist. No sooner was she in disgrace for being racist than she had contracted cancer. No sooner had she contracted cancer than she was dead. No sooner had she died of cancer than she was forgotten. An entire life telescoped into a few years, the frantic tempo kept up to retain our interest, until she’d been used up and then suddenly just vanished, like a downmarket bar of soap, one of those oval-shaped pink things smelling of synthetic violets you get in old-fashioned guest houses on the south coast.
For Jade Goody even her tumour seemed to be exhorted to speed up a bit, perhaps to fit in with the schedules; come on, tumour, we know you’re established but this is TV, dearie, we’ve had the chemo, now we want something new — what are you going to do next? We need action and drama. It is probably true that only idiots took an interest in this benighted woman, but we kid ourselves if we think things are different at the posh end of the market, at the serious end.
In February 2010 — about a year after Jade Goody died — the leader of the Conservative party, David Cameron, made a speech in which he demanded more openness in government, less intimation of corruption. The quote was, if I remember, that there should be an end to ‘money buying influence’. Two and a half months later, a matter of days after the general election, a duo of successful British businessmen find themselves gladly, if inexplicably, awarded honours by the state, having been nominated for this by David Cameron. One of them was a chap called Dolar Popat, a self-made millionaire, who had donated £200,000 to the Conservative party. The other was Simon Wolfson, who donated £300,000 to the Conservative party. He ran the clothing firm Next plc — which is a coincidence, because his dad had run it too. Imagine that. What’s the likelihood, etc. No more money buying influence, then.
That was a couple of weeks after the election, a couple of weeks after the public decided, once again, they’d had enough of that thing called sleaze. When I say that things speed up, that time has become compressed, I mean that it seemed to take almost a year, rather than just two weeks, for the previous administration to be fingered by the sleaze police, after having assured the public that they were sick of sleaze. This was the Bernie Ecclestone affair and the sudden realisation that our new government was likely to twist the rules ever so slightly when faced with a very rich and generous and rather odd-looking dwarf. Hell, at least we had to wait a year for that, more or less.
Just two weeks for the ennoblement of donors and only three months for trouble to erupt with that epitome of New Labour chicanery, the spin doctor. You remember Alastair Campbell, don’t you? Come on; tall, handsome, barking mad, shouted a lot, supported Burnley FC. You remember him. Gone now, mercifully.
Andy Coulson is the former editor of the News of the World who was appointed as Cameron’s spin doctor before the party leader said all that stuff about openness and transparency and decency in government, all that hand-wringing, all those pledges to clean up politics. Coulson was appointed before all that. He had resigned from his newspaper because a former employee of his, the royal correspondent Clive Goodman, had been sentenced to prison for having illegally hacked into the telephones of people. Andy, the editor of the paper, claimed that he knew nothing of these methods. Now subsequent information has come to light via the New York Times that thousands of phones were hacked into while Coulson was editor of the News of the World and, allegedly, according to another former employee, Coulson himself had either demanded or intimated that his staff should indeed pursue this illegal course of action.
The Metropolitan Police may or may not reopen the case against Mr Coulson; the relevant House of Commons select committees may or may not demand that they do so. But these offices — the police, the House of Commons — are simply a manifestation of our wish that things should be above board and legal and decent. They are a sort of prayer that they should be so. I suspect that it will not be proved in a court of law that Mr Coulson knew about these phone hackings; I am not sure that there is very much will on the part of the Old Bill to pursue the case, for a start.
And so the judgment is left to you. First, do you think Coulson was aware that his staff hacked the phones of thousands of people? If you think he wasn’t aware, either because you’re a nice person who wishes to believe the best of people, or you’re a Conservative activist, what do you think Mr Coulson was doing while editor of the News of the World? What was the role of this remote and ineffectual Don? And do you suspect that David Cameron didn’t give a monkey’s one way or the other whether Mr Coulson had given leave to his employees to hack, or known about this hacking, when he employed him, shortly before making speeches about openness and transparency in government and the need to clean out the Augean Stables etc? What do you think, leaving aside for a moment your political affiliations? It seems pretty clear to me, just four months after the election. How speeded up we are these days.
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