Like many of my colleagues in the media, I’m shocked by the News of the World phone-hacking scandal. As the list of those targeted by the newspaper grows longer and longer, my sense of outrage deepens. What were the papers’ executives thinking? Did it not even occur to them to tap my phone?
OK, OK, I’m not an A-lister. I’m not even on the B-list. My status hovers somewhere between C-list and D-list (on a good day). But if you look at the people queuing up to sue the paper, some of them are below even me in the celebrity pecking order.
George Galloway I can understand. He was the leader of a political party at the time, even if he isn’t now. And Bob Crow I can forgive. After all, he’s a communist thug bent on the destruction of the British way of life. But Leslie Ash? Her great claim to fame was playing one of the dolly birds in Men Behaving Badly and that hasn’t been on telly since 1998. If the News of the Screws is going to be so indiscriminate in its choice of targets, couldn’t it include me?
In truth, I’m not the least bit disappointed that my phone wasn’t tapped by the Screws — no tabloid would ever cast its net that widely — but I bet some people are. I’m not just thinking about the compensation cheque. Being included on the list of people whose phone was hacked by the News of the World is an unofficial status indicator, like being asked to go on Desert Island Discs or appear in Who’s Who. It’s the contemporary equivalent of being invited to Caroline Astor’s annual ball in Gilded Age New York, when the group of invitees were known as ‘the 400’ because her ballroom could only accommodate 400 people.
A few years ago, when I was living in New York, I stepped out with a socialite who had a stalker. She made all the usual noises about how ghastly this was — ‘I feel like he’s watching me all the time’ — but I couldn’t help noticing how often she brought it up. To add to my suspicions, I never actually saw him. He had always just disappeared round a corner.
Then, about three months into our relationship, her mother acquired a stalker of her own. This produced an incredulous reaction in her daughter — ‘She’s just copying me!’ — which added to my doubts. It was clear that stalkers had become that season’s must-have fashion accessory, the equivalent of a small dog or a newborn baby.
It occurred to me that there might be some money in this. I could start a company called Stalkers-R-Us. There was certainly no shortage of freelance journalists willing to follow middle-aged women around the Upper East Side for a few hundred dollars a week. But in the end someone pointed out it was too similar to another company that already existed. For a fee, it could arrange for a team of photographers to chase after you for the night, pretending to ‘pap’ you as you escorted your date into a restaurant.
When minor celebrities bleat about tabloid intrusion it’s often just a way of trying to big themselves up. Secretly, they love it. I lived in LA for a time and befriended a paparazzo. I asked him how it was that he and his colleagues seemed to know exactly where celebrities would be on any given evening. He told me that nine times out of ten their managers tipped him off. They wanted their clients to be in the papers and when those same clients pulled their jackets over their heads to avoid being photographed it was just an elaborate charade.
The most heinous example of this tabloid collusion I’ve ever come across was when a friend of mine became briefly involved with a D-list pin-up girl. About three months after they’d broken up, she asked to meet him in a public place because she had something to tell him. Sure enough, she was pregnant with his child. Just as he was digesting this news, he noticed a photographer stationed in a car across the street. She’d evidently tipped him off because she knew that the story of her pregnancy would be given greater prominence in the tabloids if there was an accompanying picture of her standing next to the baby’s father. If it hadn’t been for that, she probably never would have told him.
Toby Young is associate editor of The Spectator
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