Press Complaints complains
Sir: Reluctant though I am to point out inaccuracies in Rod Liddle’s work, I would like to correct some of his suggestions about the Press Complaints Commission (Liddle Britain, 22 May). Mr Liddle claims that Paul Dacre is ‘Chairman of the Press Complaints Commission’s Editorial Code of Practice’. Incorrect. In common with most self-regulatory systems, the newspaper and magazine industry’s code is written by a committee of industry experts following public consultation. The editors’ code of Practice Committee, of which Paul Dacre is Chairman, is entirely separate from the PCC (which independently enforces the Code).
Liddle says that the PCC ‘almost never acts against tabloids’. Untrue. The PCC acts against all publications that subscribe to the system of press regulation and breach the Code. The merest glance at our website reveals many cases of the PCC criticising tabloid editors or requiring them to publish apologies.
Finally, he says that the PCC recently ruled against him for ‘not contravening Article 1 of their code of conduct, but for writing something with which they disagreed’. For the avoidance of doubt, the PCC ruled against him for breaching Clause 1 (Accuracy) of his own industry’s Code of Practice, because he made a factual claim he could not substantiate. The editor accepted this decision (because it was the right one).
Stephen Abell
Director, Press Complaints Commission,
London EC1
A mixed message
Sir: Your leading article of 15 May praised Mr Cameron, ‘whose sound judgment and versatility has been demonstrated in these extraordinary few days’. A little further on it observed that ‘a purely Tory government should have been easily achievable… Mr Cameron’s campaign underestimated the appeal of proper Conservative ambitions… The Big Society message served to confuse and alienate the electorate… The same is, alas, true of the four-month Tory campaign…’. Is this an example of coalition journalism in the editorial office?
Lord Tebbit
London SW1
Out-of-date libel laws
Sir: This week Lord Lester will present a private members’ bill at the House of Lords to reform our antiquated defamation laws. This bill is long overdue — since 1938, commissions, reviews, working groups and select committees have recognised that our libel laws inhibit freedom of expression but little has been done to address the problem. The Libel Reform Campaign, made up of our three organisations, has been making the case for widespread reform and 50,000 people, including many Spectator readers, have signed our online petition at www.libelreform.org and written to their MPs. Recent cases such as the science writer Simon Singh’s (who won his case, but will never recover all his costs) illustrate why reform is so necessary.
Jonathan Heawood
Director, English PEN
John Kampfner
CEO, Index on Censorship
Tracey Brown
Managing Director, Sense About Science
Old boys’ styles
Sir: Perhaps for Toby Young’s generation the divide between the Old Westminster and the Old Etonian can be carefully discerned by the former’s attempting to be normal and the latter’s aloof nature (Status anxiety, 22 May), but at my college the OW seeks to make his fortune being a rock star and the OE talks with a bizarre hybrid accent apparently resulting from a gap year in New Zealand. That said, you can hear his native tongue on the phone to Mother.
Oscar Harry
Cambridge
Nom de guerre
Sir: ‘Briefly I had decided that the limericks themselves must also be wholly the work of [Robert] Conquest,’ Francis King writes in his review of A Garden of Erses (Books, 22 May), ‘until I came on one by one of the best and most prolific of all exponents of the genre, Victor Gray (b. 1917). Clearly, then, Conquest, though himself a talented writer of limericks, was not the sole begetter…’.
George Robert Acworth Conquest (b. 1917) has a surname synonymous with Victory. Write ‘G.R.A. Victory’, promote the first six letters of the surname to the front and Bob’s your Uncle Victor.
Francis Wheen
Pleshey, Essex
Me and Ben Kingsley
Sir: How honoured Sir Ben Kingsley must be to know that his acting skills have won the admiration of one Tanya Gold (‘I never talk to anybody’, 22 May). Particularly when she is such an important person that she feels it necessary to refer to herself no fewer than 31 times in the course of an interview with the Oscar-winning star. Next time, perhaps you could arrange for him to interview her?
Michael Henderson
London W13
Vanishing settees
Sir: P.G. Wodehouse is not the only well-known author to have referred to ‘settee’ (Letters, 22 May). In Chapter 1 of Casino Royale and elsewhere in his early James Bond novels, Ian Fleming refers to this item of furniture, although by 1960 (‘Quantum of Solace’) he had adopted ‘sofa’. Settee was also acceptable to Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene. My impression is that the word was used among Fleming’s (and my parents’) generation until the late 1950s, when sofa, so to speak, stepped in.
It is interesting the way these things change for no clear reason. I have a feeling that the war had a lot to do with it. Before the war and to an extent after it, many people (Fleming again) referred to ‘luncheon’ — and when exactly did ‘dinner’ become ‘supper’? Perhaps it always was.
David Salter
Richmond, Surrey
Love for Taki
Sir: Jeremy Clarke’s paean to Taki in last week’s Spectator was long overdue. Every week, like a schoolboy reading a comic, I turn first to the section of the Spectator I like the most. That section is the column penned by the poor little Greek boy. His Takiness seems to be the only man alive who gives not a fig for public opinion or sensibilities, a man who says it as he sees it, the only man who understands the words ‘freedom of expression’, while he is assailed from all sides by the thought police. Taki’s tactless, devil-may-care and wildly amusing prose keeps me sane.
James Butterwick
London W6
Merge the Milibands
Sir: Surely in this age of X Factor politics we should be referring to the Miliband brothers, David and Edward, as Dedward.
Graham Mogford
Wolverhampton
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